Two years ago, in the dark of night, there was one.
No one knows where it came from, or how it came to be, but it was there, milky-eyed and possessed by mindless hunger, milling around the haunts of the living like just a sad drunk with nowhere to be. Then from one came two, four, eight. And by the time the pale light of dawn broke over the horizon there had been a small mob of them. Rioters, the news reports had called them. Something one could change channels from and forget about too easily. But long after TVs were switched off they were still out there and they were spreading, spilling out every which way from distant cities and trickling into small towns and neighbourhoods. Into yours. Until one morning you woke up and the TV had gone dead and they were there, clawing and thumping at your door and their rotting faces smearing the windows, things once your neighbours, your friends. Things destroying everything you knew and loved, tearing bloody chunks out of screaming brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Cursing them with a bite or a scratch that’d slowly turn them against you.
So many of them had strained their ears for word of a cure, for a quick fix, told themselves that surely the government had an answer. Surely God, if no one else. But they waited and waited and no medicine came, no men rolling in in tanks and clearly delineated quarantine zones and ration distribution. No miracles. God left them to their fate. And as time wore on, days bleeding into weeks that bled into months, that desperate hope they clung onto was leeched out of them little by little until most of them were hollowed out and hadn’t the energy left to pour into keeping dreams of lost causes alive, their needs and priorities shifting towards more important things. They needed food and water. Needed rags to staunch oozing wounds and meds to fight infections and dullen pain. They needed the strength to find the will and a reason to keep forging onwards. Dealing with the fallout of a disaster they might never learn the cause of was their reality now.
Well, it was, before Panem.
Luke studies Ellis carefully as the man bends to set the knife down in an unexpected show of vulnerability, eyes trained on his hands. But they don't reach under his jacket for something unseen and Luke realizes that there's an incredible amount of faith being placed in him here. The same Ellis seems to place in the existence of a cure and in the officials who have promised it. And sometimes that faith is rewarded.
"You'd best hold onto that knife," Luke shifts his weight. "'cause there's more than jus' Tributes you're gonna have to worry about."
no subject
No one knows where it came from, or how it came to be, but it was there, milky-eyed and possessed by mindless hunger, milling around the haunts of the living like just a sad drunk with nowhere to be. Then from one came two, four, eight. And by the time the pale light of dawn broke over the horizon there had been a small mob of them. Rioters, the news reports had called them. Something one could change channels from and forget about too easily. But long after TVs were switched off they were still out there and they were spreading, spilling out every which way from distant cities and trickling into small towns and neighbourhoods. Into yours. Until one morning you woke up and the TV had gone dead and they were there, clawing and thumping at your door and their rotting faces smearing the windows, things once your neighbours, your friends. Things destroying everything you knew and loved, tearing bloody chunks out of screaming brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Cursing them with a bite or a scratch that’d slowly turn them against you.
So many of them had strained their ears for word of a cure, for a quick fix, told themselves that surely the government had an answer. Surely God, if no one else. But they waited and waited and no medicine came, no men rolling in in tanks and clearly delineated quarantine zones and ration distribution. No miracles. God left them to their fate. And as time wore on, days bleeding into weeks that bled into months, that desperate hope they clung onto was leeched out of them little by little until most of them were hollowed out and hadn’t the energy left to pour into keeping dreams of lost causes alive, their needs and priorities shifting towards more important things. They needed food and water. Needed rags to staunch oozing wounds and meds to fight infections and dullen pain. They needed the strength to find the will and a reason to keep forging onwards. Dealing with the fallout of a disaster they might never learn the cause of was their reality now.
Well, it was, before Panem.
Luke studies Ellis carefully as the man bends to set the knife down in an unexpected show of vulnerability, eyes trained on his hands. But they don't reach under his jacket for something unseen and Luke realizes that there's an incredible amount of faith being placed in him here. The same Ellis seems to place in the existence of a cure and in the officials who have promised it. And sometimes that faith is rewarded.
"You'd best hold onto that knife," Luke shifts his weight. "'cause there's more than jus' Tributes you're gonna have to worry about."