JACK THE RIPPER

25- Death by a Thousand Cuts

This I recognised her instantly. It was the girl from District Nine, her brunette curls were the most noticeable thing when the tribute parade was happening. She was friends with Axel, the boy I had murdered in cold blood yesterday morning when I plunged the axe into his forehead and watched his bleed to death as I and Saron both ran the hell away.

I knew her name. her name was Gavon, I knew that she was indeed somewhat afraid of me because of the power I had possessed. She had been watching us, she had watched me kill the mutts, had watched me fend for ourselves in the middle of nowhere.

And now she was above my tent.

She was skilled with that goddamn bayonet that she had in her hand when she striked the bayonet directly down and into the fort. She nearly hit my head with it. trying to pierce my goddamn skull.

"What the fuck?!" I screamed, the three of us scrambling out of the fort. She had a bloodied look in her eye, she had a cracked mouth and her arm looked like it was fractured or broken.

"You killed Axel!" Gavon screams out, I know she is enraged and the look in her eyes is one of hunger and murder. I place my hand in front of Hollie and Saron.

"He tried to kill my friend!" I point to Saron, who nods his head feebly.

"I don't care. You killed the only person in this arena who cared about me!" Gavon cries out. "Now, you're going to get what's coming to you"

Physically, the girl has a better build than I do. she grabs me by the scuff of my neck and holds the bayonet to my throat, she is blinded by rage and anger that I know she is one step away from cutting my throat into what seems like oblivion. I can only try and scream. She has it pointed to Hollie and Saron at the minute.

"One wrong move and I kill your little mentor" Gavon holds the bayonet closely to my throat, I can feel the blade beginning to sink in if I am not careful with how my movements are. "Alright? you two little brats are next. I should have killed you the second I saw you at the cornucopia?"

"Well why didn't you?" I manage to croak out. Gavon looks down at me.

"it was two versus one. I couldn't kill you" She snaps at me, then she holds the knife outwards and directly towards Saron. "When you had a whole axe and hunting knives. Plus, your leg wasn't injured."

That's when Hollie's little voice pipes up. "Yeah but our legs aren't injured"

Hollie grabs the hunting knife from her pocket and shoots it directly into Gavon's leg. She cries out in pain and releases me from her grasp, I fall down onto the thick mud beneath me and I gasp for air, feeling my lungs are working again. Saron picks me up, my leg is still brutally mutilated right now from the mutt.

Gavon is on the floor, the knife jammed into her thigh. She is roaring and screaming in pain as the knife begins to dig into her calf. She hits her head on the thick mud that has grown to be rock solid. She is thumping around on the ground but gets up quicker than I expected. She grabs my leg as she thrusts me down onto the ground and I smack my head along with her.

She holds my life in her hands. She holds my throat in her fingertips as she sinks her nails into my vocal cords, I can barely breathe or speak as she holds my head onto the ground with brute force and I'm kicking and failing my only good leg in the air.

I feel something. I feel myself breathing again.

Gavon looks down at her chest, her hands are all of a sudden off of me. she looks down at the pool of blood forming in her pit of a stomach, the red blood soaking through her clothes and creating a pool beneath her. someone shot something through her, one of the hunting knives is carving through her entire body.

The hunting knife retracts and the cannon goes off. I scamper backwards to notice that Hollie has jammed my hunting knife into Gavon's chest. Hollie saved my life.

Gavon died on that floor. both Hollie and Saron cry in my arms. They pull me back over to the fort. They stitched up the wounds and the claws in my neck where Gavon had died.

"What do we do with the body?" Saron questioned, we looked out of the fort. Gavon's body was beginning to attract flies all of a sudden. They would attract mutts soon.

"I got an idea." My idea perked in my head. I'll thank the careers later.

I take the hunting knife, grab some of the rope and Gavon's body. Perfectly crafting my work is hard as I am still limping with the leaves covering it, it is still in agony, my leg that is. But I want them to know who the hell I am, I grab my hunting knife and jam it out of her leg. I tie the rope around the tree.

Gavon's body hangs in the tree, she looks like a scarecrow. I aim the hunting knife perfectly and it goes into her chest.

I had an idea.

When I was younger, my mother used to read to me different stories before the war on Panem, some of them were even before Panem was founded and the place we lived in was called North America. The sound of her voice used to soothe me and I could listen to her talk and sing to me for hours. She'd sing me old songs from before the war.

But I loved the horror stories she used to whisper late at night, it was just me and Lincoln then. we were hurdled up in the bed that we shared, Lincoln would be fast asleep as his mop of brunette hair would be over the pillow. My mother would read me to sleep, I loved all the horror stories that she would tell me, before Panem was Panem and these things called serial killers.

My favourite was the one about Jack the Ripper. He was a British serial killer, I didn't know what Britain was but apparently it was a country, like Panem was. There was this man and they never caught him, he was said to have killed over thirty women, or so they were called, prostitutes/sex workers in Britain.

I loved listening to the story, I had my theories about it. my mother didn't have much information on this man but she knew how much I loved hearing that story, I had a thing for morbid things like this, or like other serial killers from before the world was just Panem.

I grabbed the blood from Gavon's lifeless body.

The Work of Jack the Ripper.

That was gonna be my name. Not the Lost Girl. not Serabella Chambers.

And that's how Jack the Ripper was indeed born.