Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.
Strange things indeed. A dead man calling out. His ghost. No, Lenore Dove said it was a bird. Birds. Jabberjays. The failed mutts let loose to die in District 12. But they defied the Capitol’s sentence of extinction by fathering a new species, mockingjays, before they vanished. Is that what makes the song dangerous? Immortalizing those wayward mutts in a song?
Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where I told you to run, so we’d both be free?
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.
Or is it the Capitol hanging someone who was likely a rebel? That’s who died in the hanging tree. I know this tree, it’s real, my pa pointed it out to me. We have metal gallows in District 12 now, courtesy of the Capitol, but back in the day, many a rebel died swinging from its branches.
Are you, are you
Coming to the tree?
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.
Maybe Lenore Dove and I will hang together. Could be easier to find her then, in that next world of hers.
That’s as close to comfort as I can get.
We travel through the day, far into the night. Once in a while, there’s a stop somewhere to fuel up. Every few hours, rolls and milk are delivered, although I haven’t touched a mouthful. My gut aches and the hard floor digs into my unpadded bones. When I manage to doze, dead tributes pay calls. They seem to want me to do something, but it’s unclear what that is. The strangest visit involves Louella and Lou Lou, dressed in identical outfits, sitting across the table from me while I peel and eat a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. “Which of us is which?” they ask me. But the Capitol has won. I can’t tell them apart.
I jerk awake to find the train has pulled into the District 12 station. I am home. The Peacekeepers come in, remove my shackles, and lead me to the exit. The door opens.
“Get out,” says one.
Full of trepidation, I step out onto an empty platform, gritty with coal dust. No one waits for me. No one expects me. It’s still dark out and the station clock reads 5 a.m. The Peacekeepers carelessly shove the coffins out after me, damaging a few boards. The train pulls away, leaving me entirely alone except for my fellow tributes. I walk over to them, lay a hand on the nearest coffin. Screwed into the lid’s a metal nameplate, not unlike the ones at Plutarch’s house, the ones on the berms in the arena. I touch the inscription.
Louella McCoy.
The smell of death rises through the cracked wood. I turn and propel my stiff body down the platform.
The station’s quiet as a tomb. Strange, even for the hour. Perhaps it’s early on a Sunday, the one day the mines shut down. With all the drugs, I have no idea what the date is. Didn’t think to ask. We must be into August. I push through the heavy glass door, gulping in the night air, warm and moist and laced with coal dust, and for the first time I allow myself to believe that I have really come home.
My heart skips a few beats and, fool that I am, tendrils of hope force their way up through the dirt of my despair. Could it be that within the hour, I might feel Ma’s arms around me, ruffle Sid’s hair, strip off Great-Uncle Silius’s dead man’s clothes, and pull on a pair of flour sack shorts? Could Lenore Dove be freed? Are the sweet moments of my previous life, always taken for granted before the Games, once more in reach? Can there be happiness again for a miserable wretch like myself?
As I walk through the lonely streets toward the Seam, I pinch myself to rule out this being a dream. Silly, since I’ve no shortage of pain. It’s just that I was never supposed to return here, arena plot or no. The idea that I might have triumphed in a double Hunger Games strains belief. But those are my feet, clad in pointed patent leather shoes, kicking up the cinders on the way to my house. My pace quickens. If it is a dream, I want to sustain it until I get to see my family one more time.
I take the glow up ahead for the sunrise, until I realize it’s too local, too bright. A whiff of smoke drifts through the heavy, humid air. Fire. But not coal fire. I break into the closest thing I can manage to a run. Withered muscles, screaming scars, swollen feet reduce my efforts to a wild hobble. Maybe I am wrong. Any house can catch fire. What with rusted stoves and unwatched hobs. Maybe it’s not mine.
I know it’s mine.
Now I can hear the voices, shouting for water, a woman wailing. As I round the bend, it comes into view, fully ablaze against the still-dark sky.
“Ma?” I cry. “Sid?”
I bust through the bucket line, fed by three neighbors’ pumps in addition to our own, those slow spurts of water, those pathetic splashes against the inferno. People draw away, startled, frightened by my appearance. Unprepared for the wild-eyed scarecrow in Capitol evening wear.
“Ma! Sid!” I grab the nearest person, one of the Chance girls, no more than eight. “Where are they? Where’s my family?” Terrified, she points at the burning house.
Ma and Sid are being burned alive.
My feet dance side to side for a few seconds, looking for a break in the wall of flame, before I charge straight into the inferno. “Ma!”
As I reach the doorway, a beam crashes down and I reflexively jump back in a shower of sparks. Temporarily blinded, I make for the house again, when I’m yanked backward. My patent leather shoes with their slick soles betray me as I’m dragged into the yard and pinned to the ground. With one man on every limb and Burdock on my chest, all I can do is holler. “Let me up! Let me loose, you -“
Burdock’s hand clamps over my mouth. “It’s too late, Haymitch. We tried. It’s too late.”
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.