Mahlon McCreary

## Childhood

Everyone knew the McCrearys were cursed – with bad blood, bad tempers, bad endings. Mahlon remembered Pa saying it wasn’t always like that, but it didn’t matter. It was that way now, and there was nothing to be done for it.

The McCrearys were as old as the dogwoods, with bark twice as thick. They used to work in the coal mines, and then the Hob, and then nowhere at all. With idle hands, they became the devil’s playthings, and Mahlon grew up against a backdrop of poverty-fueled desperation and despair. He wasn’t even a bad kid, in the beginning, but when you’re told you’re something long enough, *when it’s beaten into you*, it starts to stick – starts to feel like a well-worn jacket, threadbare denim fitting perfectly to form.

He started smoking young, and drinking younger — and when he did show up to school, he always caused a scene. Mahlon knew he was owed nothing, so he took *everything*, desperate for the attention.

He initiated most of the trouble kids in Twelve could manage, and most of the violence too – claiming a back section of the woods as his stomping grounds where Peacekeepers rarely did rounds. Around Twelve, he sometimes cracked jokes, sometimes punches. It all worked, in a way. He polarized the world around him into friends and enemies, with no appreciation or consideration for a gray between. And while this crassness and cruelty earned him plenty of ire, it also afforded him a tight circle – and kept the McCreary name out of people’s mouths, or it at least made them think twice before speaking openly.

After all, there was plenty to talk about.

A family tree of fuck-ups before him, Mahlon McCreary Sr. had been in and out of jail his whole life. When he wasn’t sleeping it off in a cell, he was doing the same shit that would land him back there in a few month’s time. Virginia McCreary bore the brunt of it, and Mahlon swore he could tell how soon Pa was going back to jail by how banged up she looked that day. In Mahlon’s early teens, Virgie once ended up with two broken ribs and a fractured collarbone – and the first vial of morphling appeared. If he’d known then what he knew now, he’d have dumped it outright, but hindsight was always clear.

He was a child, barely old enough to make sense of the world, when he had to become their sole provider. No one would employ the McCreary’s – they knew better than to let them close – so he lived largely off what little the land could provide. He set traps and hunted for meat, fur, and hide. He tilled barren earth for meager produce, which rarely grew in the ashen soot. He stitched their clothing, and patched their wounds, and stole from others who were even minutely better-off. Sometimes, he thought it would be better if Virgie died. If Pa never came home. Fewer mouths to feed. Fewer humans to bruise. He grew bent and broken, a cruel and seering thing – capable of such harshness that he saw less of himself in the mirror every day, and more of his father. It made him sick.

## Reaping & 111th Biannual Hunger Games

Mahlon never understood how someone could cause so much harm and still evoke some sense of righteous justice – and then, on the cusp of adulthood, he was Reaped. No one batted an eye at his selection, not even Virgie, who’d been so subdued by morphling that she didn’t realize he’d been called. Mahlon knew it was the curse. It had come for him; there was no sense in fighting it. Twelve was a better place with him gone – safer too. But even the devil craves life, and as the arena approached, Mahlon fashioned himself into a monster capable of the atrocities it would take to emerge alive. In his private training session, he killed, gutted the dummy, and skinned it for its hide, describing in graphic detail how he planned to murder and repurpose each of the 23 tributes in time. It was so disturbing, so detailed and sincere, that he’d watched one Gamemaker turn in disgust, and he knew it was possible: the chance to survive.

They’d awoken in an arena that was barely 12ft by 12ft. It was a cement room, no windows, a hole in the ground. A platform moved through it, piled high with weapons, food, medicine, supplies. Mahlon had watched it lower down, had stared in confusion at the only other tribute there – his own district partner, as it settled on the ground. They were structured according to district first – One at the top, Twelve at the bottom. By the time it reached the bottom, there were only a few items left: a pocket knife, a roll of gauze, a bruised apple, a bottle of salve. They were instructed to select one item each. Any more, any cheating, and they’d be killed on the spot, thanks to the trackers that had been embedded in the tops of their spines. They’d sat across from each other, backs pressed to parallel walls, the whole night, in a stand-off…until they’d been put to sleep by the arena’s gas.

Mahlon awoke in what felt like the same room, but the hole was now on the ceiling and floor. He was higher up in the structure, with a new cellmate – the girl from Two. He recognized her as having earned the same training score, and he understood that they were being matched based on some series of metrics, some combination that changed each night until someone won. They preyed on alliances and dynamics, pairing lovers and enemies together until one of them died. Mahlon knew no one had to die each time, but it was better if they did. Fewer future swaps to survive.

In the finale, there were only two left, but they’d been dropped in separate rooms. They’d been made to find each other, Mahlon understood. But as the platform lowered or rose to each floor, a new horror awaited – the mangled, revived bodies of tributes from before, traps triggered by movement or body heat and sound, and finally each other where they met on the middle floor. Mahlon had kept the pocket knife from that first night, and he did as he promised: gutted and bled the other tribute dry.

## Post-Victory

In the end, he embarked on his victory tour. The last stop was Twelve – a grand return home. But no one was waiting, no one was left to. Virgie had overdosed, died the day before he’d won. And his father was gone – maybe to rot in a Capitol prison, maybe into the Wilds and beyond. Mahlon was the only McCreary left standing, and he wasn’t sure if he’d fulfilled the curse or merely managed to get by this time. Now, he returns to the Capitol each cycle to coach the next batch on how to die. It doesn’t matter; it never would. He only cares to fuel old fires and to spark new ones. Mahlon wants the world to burn, until it all looks like the hell he’s come to know.