Book 1 by The Hunger Games

Author:The Hunger Games
Language: eng
Format: mobi
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Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I enter a nightmare from which I wake repeatedly only

to find a greater terror awaiting me. All the things I

dread most, all the things I dread for others manifest

in such vivid detail I can’t help but believe they’re

real. Each time I wake, I think, At last, this is over,

but it isn’t. It’s only the beginning of a new chapter of

torture. How many ways do I watch Prim die? Relive

my father’s last moments? Feel my own body ripped

apart? This is the nature of the tracker jacker venom,

so carefully created to target the place where fear lives

in your brain.

When I finally do come to my senses, I lie still, waiting

for the next onslaught of imagery. But eventually I

accept that the poison must have finally worked its

way out of my system, leaving my body wracked and

feeble. I’m still lying on my side, locked in the fetal

position. I lift a hand to my eyes to find them sound,

untouched by ants that never existed. Simply

stretching out my limbs requires an enormous effort.

So many parts of me hurt, it doesn’t seem worthwhile

taking inventory of them. Very, very slowly I manage

to sit up. I’m in a shallow hole, not filled with the

humming orange bubbles of my hallucination but

with old, dead leaves. My clothing’s damp, but I don’t

know whether pond water, dew, rain, or sweat is the

cause. For a long time, all I can do is take tiny sips

from my bottle and watch a beetle crawl up the side of

a honeysuckle bush.

How long have I been out? It was morning when I lost

reason. Now it’s afternoon. But the stiffness in my

joints suggests more than a day has passed, even two

possibly. If so, I’ll have no way of knowing which

tributes survived that tracker jacker attack. Not

186 | P a g e

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

Glimmer or the girl from District 4. But there was the

boy from District 1, both tributes from District 2, and

Peeta. Did they die from the stings? Certainly if they

lived, their last days must have been as horrid as my

own. And what about Rue? She’s so small, it wouldn’t

take much venom to do her in. But then again ... the

tracker jackers would’ve had to catch her, and she

had a good head start.

A foul, rotten taste pervades my mouth, and the water

has little effect on it. I drag myself over to the

honeysuckle bush and pluck a flower. I gently pull

the stamen through the blossom and set the drop of

nectar on my tongue. The sweetness spreads through

my mouth, down my throat, warming my veins with

memories of summer, and my home woods and Gale’s

presence beside me. For some reason, our discussion

from that last morning comes back to me.

“We could do it, you know.”

“What?”

“Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You

and I, we could make it.”

And suddenly, I’m not thinking of Gale but of Peeta

and ... Peeta! He saved my life! I think. Because by

the time we met up, I couldn’t tell what was real and

what the tracker jacker venom had caused me to

imagine. But if he

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