I’m Not Sorry for This Fanfic of Gale Leading the Escape From District 12

The crowd glittered under the light of the broadcast as she drew back the bow. Sudden daylight bloomed in the square, and then blackness. The crowd and Peacekeepers stalled before one another, hanging together in the moment before the orders came down.

“You did it, Catnip,” Gale muttered to himself, his voice breaking on her name, pulling Prim and three of the neighbor’s kids from the square and backing into an alley.

“This is it, this is what we practiced,” he told the group, shunting them into the dark. “GO GO GO.” They branched out and each ran a sweep through their designated zones, moving in unison toward the border like embers along a fuse.

Prim was yelling, “What did she do, what did she just do?” into the void as she ran. She felt the warmth of Gale’s hand on her back, rushing her forward, and searched for focus. Her footfalls hardened beneath her. She bore on at full speed, tasting the blood of lactic acid in her throat. That was when the gunfire started back in the square.

They swung right into a dead end, then slipped into a space just wide enough for a man to fit through around the wall, and out the other side. Mrs. Everdeen was there waiting with Posy and Gale’s mother, and was dressed for a hunt. It was as if her auxiliary power had switched on, she greeted them with hard eyes and took off smoothly and powerfully with her daughter, tracing the steps away from their home in District 12 as if she had imagined doing it a thousand times already.

The sirens were wailing across District 12, bouncing from hill to hill out into the nothingness beyond. Gale’s group dovetailed with three others led by miners, and one led by Gale’s brother, Vick. Gale spoke fast and low, “The sirens are their last attempt to round us up, but you can bet the hovercrafts are on the way to clear every last cobweb out of here. Fence is too risky, I say we go underground.”

It was a question, but they responded to it with the coordinated actions of soldiers answering their commander, sprinting in lines of two toward the Hob. Gale had his crossbow, but they otherwise ran with the sprinter cadence of people who have nothing, light and armorless.

In the cross-hatches of the Capitol sirens, the tweets of whistles caught like burrs, vibrating in low patches across the District, collecting those who had made it out of the square; those who had allowed the possibility of annihilation to unfold in their minds before it played out; those who had watched with hiccuping souls as Katniss loaded her bow, knowing it had all led to this moment, to the Everdeen girl letting fly. They moved on the winds of whistles over the bodies of the fallen, toward the border, away.

Romulus Thread issued the order in between dry, crisp heartbeats. Within minutes, the square was carpeted in the bodies of mountainfolk, a lake of crumpled browns and reds the Peacekeepers sailed over. That was Phase One. It would be the only phase where he had to endure screaming.

The first few crews had already climbed down into the tunnel under Greasy Mae’s stall when Gale realized he was missing. Rory.

Lone bursts of gunfire were going off periodically through the village now, short staccato bursts like a woodpecker drilling into a tree before silence again. Phase Two.

Seven of Gale’s crews had moved through and down into the earth, but twenty or so were still missing. They could have gone for the fence, he just didn’t know. It sounded like much of the gunfire had come from out that way. Gale glanced up at the wooden beams overhead. The Hob looked at once like the scaffolding that propped up the tunnels deep inside the Seam, and a pile of kindling, waiting to crackle under a mighty bonfire. There were no whistles now, only the low rumble in the distance that sent squirrels spiraling into hollows and drove deer down into the thickets of the valleys. They would be here soon.

Gale’s heart glowed, the heartbeats blending together as his mind raced, mapping everything out. Katniss. A hollow in the middle of his gut. Vick, doing his best to be brave for his crew and make Gale proud. Rory. The same black eyes as Gale, the same rounded chest, but a softness to his face that telegraphed every wish and worry. Rory, who had shredded his name into dozens of pieces for the Reaping in exchange for a spare basket of tesserae for his family. Rory. Where was Rory? A shot of pain illuminated from his chest down his arm.

“Rendezvous Lake!” he shouted down the hole, then took off back toward the Victor’s Village, his jacket flapping under this arms as he ran. At that instant, the first bomb fell.

Daylight again as the Justice building rose up in the air in one piece, then crumpled to the ground like a pinata, spilling confetti down the alleys that connected, and scattering dust over the dead. A boom a split-second later that rumbled through his body like a wave. He ran on without hearing. The gardens by the Victor’s Village stood quiet and manicured, thrumming with displaced air. Peacekeepers marched out the far end without urgency. Their job was done. His hunter’s eye caught a flicker as a Camillea twitched in the twilight. The outline of a spine bent low to the ground. Rory.

He reached his brother, frozen with his hands in the dirt.

“The Mellarks.” Rory began. It played out across his face like tree shadows bowing under a heavy gust. No one to bring with them. Peeta, lost to the arena. His family, wiped away. Their entire history liquefied as each bomb turned the last remnants of their community into sand. “We bring 12 with us.” Gale told his brother, and they moved on in the direction of the troops.

By now, the Peacekeepers would have the fence blocked off; soon they would find the tunnel.

Gale and Rory sprinted through the flaming rubble, the only living things coursing though the quarry of death, pushing through a hailstorm of shrapnel and bone with arms over their faces, breathing through their sleeves. Near the edge of the Hob, Gale saw Thread, surveying. He loaded a single arrow into his crossbow and fired it to the left of the head Peacekeeper, where it glanced off a minion’s helmet. He had Thread’s full attention. The Peacekeepers lifted their weapons as he and Rory ran into the void and leaped into the tunnel. They had given stragglers as long as they could—they would be the last.

Peacekeepers streamed into the Hob after them, and Rory clambered down the tunnel. When the first of the soldiers dropped into the hole, Gale struck the match. A tiny flame stirred in the tunnel, starting along its path, then he turned the corner and shouted “NOW!”

If the Peacekeepers realized, they didn’t show panic. The boom went up and rock hammered down, pelting their suits, trapping them like Quartz in a seam, glittering shells buried in a thick, ashy granite, closing the tunnel forever.

***

Prim climbed up in the still of the woods where an owl warbled overhead. The first of the survivors assembled with a light rustle, in disbelief. Finding themselves beyond for the first time, they looked up at a sky unpolluted by search lights. The Milky Way streaked overhead, tracing their exodus.

Her mother brushed her hand against a tree trunk. “Here, it’s a signpost,” she said, feeling the grooves of a bird carved into the soft wood. “This way.” If she thought of her daughter, she didn’t show it.

They fanned out, moving from post to post, led out into the wild by Gale’s invisible hand. They dropped low into a gully, then started up a steep ridge, reaching a clearing that revealed the smoky glow of home.

A few had made it under the fence before the Capitol sent out a pulse that stopped the heart of everything within ten feet of its net. Birds had fallen out of the air. The rest came through the underground.

The front pack were over a second summit when the hovercrafts passed off to the west, returning to the Capitol, Phase Three complete. Gale’s mother fussed her daughter along, Posy’s olive skin pale and clammy in the moonlight, her legs weak from years of sickness. Women ushered along their elders, men toted children on their backs. The young helped those with gunshots over fallen tree trunks and under branches.