A/N: Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, as always! I'm so glad you guys like Three as much as I do! I was worried about adding an OC to this story, but I fell in love with Three too much to let him go! Anyway, there's an interesting twist in this chapter, so I hope you enjoy!

Rules of the Road Chapter 6

I take the wheel, since I haven't driven in a while. Hawthorne immediately falls asleep because he's been on watch far too long. Three, of course, passes out in the backity-back because that's just what he's good for. But Twelve stays awake, sitting next to Hawthorne in the back seat.

I snail us along for what seems like a really long time, and then I start to notice certain things. The landscape is definitely changing. There are no longer massive fields of grass for livestock. It's actually a lot hillier. And… if I'm not mistaken, there are mountains rising out of the mist in the distance.

"Twelve?" I ask quietly.

She picks her head up off Hawthorne's shoulder. "Yeah?"

"Mountains?" I ask, pointing ahead of us.

She leans forward so that she can see out the windshield, and she gets this surprised look on her face when she sees the peaks in the distance. It feels good to know that I'm not imagining things because that would just make this whole trip a million times worse.

"Gale," Twelve whispers, shaking Hawthorne's shoulders. "Gale, get up! I think we're in Two."

He jerks awake and follows Twelve's pointed finger out the windshield. His brow scrunches together in confusion.

"London must have moved us a long way," Twelve says.

"Must have," Hawthorne says slowly.

Unexpectedly, Twelve's face breaks into a grin. Almost immediately, Hawthorne smiles back, and I'm beginning to feel really left out again (like always, I guess). Well, not as left out as Three because he's still asleep (or unconscious) in the backity-back.

"What are you guys smiling about?" I ask. "This is massively concerning. I don't think I've ever really seen you both smile."

"One step closer to the Capitol," Twelve says. "Two more Districts. Two or three more days, and then we're there."

Good. Great. It's a fantastic thing that I still don't really know what's going on.

I haven't been driving for more than ten minutes when something else strange happens (why is it always me?). Luckily, Twelve and Hawthorne are still awake, though, so I'm not completely alone.

Across a clearing next to the road, there appear to be humans or zombies walking around.

"London, stop the car," Twelve says, looking curiously out at the figures.

They're walking rather humanly. Except one of them. He's walking with a slight limp.

"Are those… real, living, breathing people?" I ask. Lord knows we haven't seen one of them since we picked up Three.

"I think so," Hawthorne says. "Quick, let's drive off before we have to offer them help."

Twelve smacks Hawthorne's shoulder, even though it was obvious that he was just joking around. She leans further over him to watch the three living humans walking around by the edge of the forest.

The guy with the limp appears to be looking at us to. He shields his face from the sun and then waves his two companions forward. They start making their way across the clearing so that we can see them better.

The guy with the limp has blond hair. There's a man with him, holding an empty bottle. And then there's a girl with dark hair.

"Katniss…" Hawthorne says quietly.

"Oh my god," Twelve whispers. "Oh my god…"

I whip around in my seat just as Twelve throws herself over top of Hawthorne, wrenches the door open, and takes off running across the clearing.

"What's going on?" I ask Hawthorne quickly. "Who is that?"

His face dissolves into pain. "Katniss's fiancé."

Twelve throws her arms around the blond guy with the limp and almost knocks him over. But if you look up joy in the dictionary, the picture by the definition would be her fiancé's face when he realizes who's running at him. The thing that surprises me, though, is the fact that they don't kiss. They only hug.

Then, she moves to the older man- the one with the bottle. She throws her arms around him, too, and he grudgingly pats her back, looking vaguely pleased. The woman, though, she doesn't seem to know as well. Her fiancé appears to introduce them, but nothing wipes the grin off Twelve's face.

Within two minutes, Twelve is leading the group of three back to the car.

She opens the side door. "We don't really have enough seats, but we can move around. Three, get in the trunk."

Without question, he rolls straight over the back of his seat and lands with a thump in the trunk. "What about Jeffrey?" he asks, his voice muffled against the floor of the car.

Twelve sighs. "He can sit back there with you."

"Okay," Three says. "Jeffrey, move back here to the trunk. You heard Twelve! You can sit right here with me."

"Who's Jeffrey?" Twelve's fiancé asks in a whisper by her ear.

"Three's imaginary friend."

"Oh," he says uneasily.

There's a moment of silence as Twelve ponders the rest of the seats. Not like I care where I end up, anyway. I don't know any of these people, and no one has said their names, so…

"Gale, would you mind taking the wheel from London?" Twelve asks, as though this whole thing hasn't wounded him beyond explanation.

"Of course not," he says with a slight sarcastic undertone.

I take this to mean I'm moving to the back, so I slide out my door, letting Hawthorne take my seat, and crawl back in through the side door. "I'll just head right to the back," I say without Twelve even telling me. That's just how appreciated I know I am.

"Johanna, you can take shotgun, and Haymitch, you can sit in the back with London," Twelve says. "Peeta and I will sit in the middle."

I cling to the names, forcing myself to remember them. No one offers me any substitute nicknames, so I'll finally be able to refer to people by their actual names. Peeta is Twelve's fiancé. Johanna is the dark haired woman. Haymitch is the older man with the bottle.

Haymitch crawls to the back and sits down next to me. An empty beer bottle tumbles out of his shirt and lands in my lap as he finagles himself into the seat. I must make a priceless shocked face because he immediately starts to laugh evilly at my expense.

I let the bottle roll to the floor by my feet, looking down into my lap. I already don't like this Haymitch guy.

Hawthorne starts up the car without warning and starts driving off at a reckless pace.

Twelve starts up a long conversation in which she describes the whole process involved with how we got here. She starts out talking about parts I didn't know about. About how Hawthorne and Twelve were hunting illegally in the forests outside the electrified fence when the zombie outbreak in District 12 occurred. Upon their return, the place was already basically ravaged. They returned to the forest to get their weapons and helped the remaining survivors fight the zombies down. Days later, Hawthorne and Twelve decided to leave the District to kill the president, so they stole a car and disappeared.

At that point, Peeta speaks up. "But how do you plan on getting to Snow? If you're right when you say the Capitol is zombie-free, Snow won't be unguarded."

Twelve pauses. "I hadn't thought that far ahead. We're taking it step by step."

"Obviously," Haymitch bites sarcastically.

Twelve whips around and sends him a pointed glare. "Don't make me regret letting you in the car," she says.

He holds up his hands in surrender, but I can tell he meant what he said. Maybe he's just a genuinely mean spirited person, like Draco and the rest of Slytherin house. My mind starts to drift back to Hogwarts as the awkward silence settles around me. I hope that Slytherin was completely ravaged by the zombie-apocalypse.

"I don't care what the other two say," Johanna announces from the front seat, "but I'll help you hunt down Snow and rip him into a million pieces even though you don't have a plan."

Twelve gets this fiery glint in her eyes that shows me just how much she wants this evil president guy dead. The only thing I have to say is: he can't be any worse than Voldemort. Come to think of it, I wonder what happened to Voldemort. Is he a zombie? Doubtful. Will he find me here in this strange world of Panem? I hope not.

"Of course we'll come with you," Peeta says, grabbing Twelve's hand.

"Yeah, I guess I'm in," Haymitch says gruffly from next to me. He takes a swig from a flask that he had hidden in his pocket.

Twelve smiles at her friends and then turns her gaze to the driver's seat, where I think she's looking for Hawthorne's support. But he determinedly keeps his eyes on the road, burning in a silent fury of his own. She swallows, letting a bit of hurt show in her eyes, and looks down at her lap.

Not another word is said.

I think that the Panem-family has forgotten that Three and I exist. Especially Three since he's still asleep/not breathing in the trunk. I don't even bother to check on him because I'm too busy watching everyone else and waiting in vain for someone to acknowledge my existence.

Well, Haymitch passes out on my shoulder once, but I don't think that counts.

So I decide to content myself with people-watching. They're at least interesting subjects. Haymitch, I determine, is a drunk, who seems to have an endless supply of alcohol on hand. He spends his time drinking and falling asleep in a cyclical fashion. He proves to be uninteresting, so I turn my watching elsewhere.

Despite the fact that they're engaged, Twelve and Peeta appear to have a few- ok, a lot- of awkward holes in their relationship. Despite the fact that she was so incredibly happy to see her fiancé, Twelve seems reluctant to act closer to Peeta now that we're all in the same car. For example, a little while ago, when she got tired, it took a lot of time to decide to slide across the seat to sit next to Peeta. And even then, I swear she looked up to the front to see if Hawthorne was watching before she put her head down on Peeta's shoulder. And then, when Peeta went to kiss her head, she shrunk away, tensing up.

Odd.

Since Haymitch is asleep on me again and Twelve and Peeta have finally drifted off, I look up at the front seat. First of all, it's obvious that Johanna and Hawthorne don't know each other. I don't know much else about Johanna, considering she's also asleep against the window. That leaves me and Hawthorne. He's still stewing in his silent anger, muscles tensed. For some reason, I don't think he should be driving when he's this angry, but he hasn't done anything dangerous yet. Besides, I don't even think he's that angry. He's more hurt.

His eyes flit up to the rearview mirror, and he looks at Twelve and Peeta, pain showing in his eyes. Immediately, he looks back at the road.

Odd, indeed.

A few hours later, I decide it's been way too quiet in the trunk, so I shove Haymitch off me and look over the back of my seat.

Three is sprawled out across exactly half the trunk, face down. He's obviously trying to leave room for Jeffrey, but that doesn't matter. I poke his back and whisper, "Three?"

He doesn't respond, but he's breathing, so I shrug and let it be.

Hawthorne stops the car a little while later. Without looking back at me, he says, "London, take the wheel."

I'm pretty eager to get out of my current position, so I crawl over the seats in front of me and plop down in the driver's seat.

"When we get through the mountains, we'll be in District One," Hawthorne says almost emotionlessly as he sits down in my vacated seat. "Wake us up if you manage it."

"Okay," I respond.

Hawthorne crosses his arms and leans against the window, shutting his eyes.

Anyway, pretty soon, we're rumbling towards the mountains, and I'm the only person in the car that's awake. Therefore, I have to come up with a solution to the problem of getting through these mountains by myself.

I have to Bombarda several gates, checkpoints, and rock piles to manage it, but somehow, the next thing I know, we're on the other side of the mountain range. It's all sort of a blur until I put the car in park. I'm not even sure how much time it took. All I know is my wand arm is sore, the front of the car is covered in dirt, and Twelve has fallen forward into Peeta's lap.

I turn around in my seat. "Everyone, we're in District One!" I say loudly. The whole car shows a variety of panicked reactions. Johanna grabs her knife, Twelve jumps out of Peeta's lap, Peeta grabs Twelve's arm, Haymitch rolls distantly out of his drunken slumber, and Three jumps to his feet (and knocks himself out by hitting his head really hard on the roof of the car, but that's not a strange occurrence, so I barely even pay attention). Hawthorne alone remains collected, considering he was the one that told me to wake him up when I got us over the mountains.

"Steady on, everyone," I say evenly. "Just wanted to let you know that we're in District One… and someone else needs to drive because getting us here took way too much energy."

"I'll drive," Twelve volunteers. She frees herself from Peeta's grasp and climbs towards the front seat.

I slide out the door and take her spot. Well, not her spot exactly. I'm sitting as far as I possibly can from Peeta, not practically in his lap.

Twelve starts the car and drives us off down the road. This place- District One- looks a lot nicer than 10 and 11. I mean, it actually sort of looks like home. The houses are bigger, nicer, grander. It's clean. It's not completely downtrodden. We aren't in a slum. It's pretty nice, considering all the places we've driven through.

"In less than a day, we'll be close enough to see the Capitol," Twelve comments, a fiery glint burning in her eyes again.

"And what exactly are we going to do once we're there?" Haymitch asks sarcastically from the back.

Twelve's knuckles tighten around the wheel, and she grits her teeth. "Like I said, I haven't really thought that far."

"Well, first off, we can't exactly just walk into the Capitol like this," Johanna cuts in. "We'll need to disguise ourselves. And as much as I don't want to have to do it, we're going to have to make ourselves look like Capitol idiots- pink hair and all."

That's kind of where they lose me. I have absolutely no idea what the people of the Capitol are like besides the fact that they're the most evil, loathsome people you will ever encounter.

"That's actually a really good idea, Johanna," Peeta says. "What if we stop somewhere at one of the bigger houses in District One and try to disguise ourselves. I mean, District One has always been favored by the Capitol, so there's a chance these people actually have nice things."

"Ah, nice things," Johanna says, reclining in her chair. "That'll be a change of pace."

That successfully cuts off conversation for a little while.

A/N: So what do you think? I knew that I wanted to bring Peeta into this story just to throw a wrench in things (my poor, poor Galeniss)! Besides that, I just really love Haymitch and Johanna, so they got dragged in, too! Drop me a review to let me know what you thought :D