[91st] The Reaping - District 8

You enter the mouth of a great snake. The railway underpass is total darkness, it's shape and edges flashing for the briefest of seconds as a halogen light struggles to cling to life. You begin your journey down the endless tunnel, your footsteps casting a lonely echo. A great rumbling overhead shakes the walls and scatters droplets of condensation that rested on ceiling. It does not startle you - the locomotive is on time, as it is every night, heading for it's midnight cargo drop-off.

The large canvas duffel bag is starting to wear on your shoulder, the strap rubbing raw against your collarbone, but you do not grimace nor groan, you just frown, and persevere.

You reach the sewer outlet, it's metal rim glistens wet. These old systems, neglected and poorly designed, are prone to flooding in the spring, their infrastructure are a mish-mash of different ideas from long-dead engineers. Your free hand grasps the grate and tugs it open.

Below, the rushing of water can be heard at a great force. The rain is running through the pipes, adrenaline shot through the veins of District Eight. Only during a downpour like this are the sewers ever cleaned out - the factories and industries get all the mayoral budget, there's no margin for clean water and working plumbing.

You open the bag and take out a severed hand, frozen solid, cold to the touch, and drop it into the water. You watch it be whisked away in a half-second, and then take out another block of ice, tinted with a red pink colouring - it could be part of an abdomen, you're not sure. In it goes with a splash.

Your face is a resting, content smile, and your eyes are cigarette burns glowing in the amber light. This is work you have done for years, it's all you know. But your routine is soon coming to an end - this is the last of them. There are no more frozen back at the butchery. No one comes anymore. Whispers carried on the wind, so light and quiet but all so damaging. When you are done disposing of this one, there will be no more bodies. The job will be done.

You're sad about that, but you're still smiling.

When you are finished, you return home the same way you came, letting the rainfall wash you clean.

It is morning, and you're now in an empty place full of people. Empty of noise, of soul, of hope. It's a truly bleak mass of bodies, all breathing anxiously, a tide of woe on the beach of their mercy.

You are here in body but not in spirit. You're thinking back to the tunnel, wondering if that man had a family, if he knew how his little life would come to an end when he walked into the butchers that day, if he's even missed at all. You like to imagine all the lives you've changed, maybe for the better, probably for the worse. And no one even knows your name.

The possibility of it being called out isn't even entertained by your distracted mind, which lingers on the empty butcher shop, the cryogenic lab that now lies dormant beneath it, and your equally barren future.

Until it is called.

And now you're walking down another long, dark path, only this one has no clear end, and you're being put in front of all those people and now they see you. A cold, dark relief washes over them as they see a girl being offered to die in place of them.

But you're not afraid. A faint smile returns to your face, the corners of your mouth twitching.

The job's not done, it's just changed.