Annabeth Chase and the Lightning Thief

Chapter 19 - Percy destroys more stuff

I tried to sneak onto the car as they passed, but the ranger locked it behind him, closing it off off the day. No one was going up or down.

Something must have happened. Had they forgotten Percy? I wracked my brains for a suitable reason, but nothing came to mind.

I had to get back to Grover. He would be stressing so much that he'd probably eaten his shoes by now.

Shoving through a crowd is hard enough, but doing it invisibly, that's a thousand times worse. People step in your path and don't make way or even apologise when they bump you. The only good part is when you bump someone, and they think it's someone else so you don't get bashed. Well, the other person that gets blamed does, but that's not my problem.

I made it back to Grover to find him munching nervously on the strap of his bag. When I whipped off my hat, he squealed like a baby goat and tripped over.

"Don't do that!" he bleated. "You know I can't hear you coming!"

"I can't find Percy," I told him fretfully. "Where could he be?"

"Do you think . . . he could . . . you know . . ."

"I hope not," I answered, refusing to even think about it. "That's a worst case scenario. No, he can't be dead. There's something we're not seeing."

I turned back to look at the Arch to see ambulances, fire engines, police and reporters arrive, zooming in with sirens wailing and cameras flashing. People clustered the area in front of us, so thick that you could barely see your own feet. We had to move away before we were trapped in the police perimeter.

"Go to the river!" I yelled at Grover, gesturing in case he couldn't hear me over the sirens, people and helicopters.

He nodded like he understood and we began to shuffle away, moving as quickly as we could go. We made it out of the press of people and were at a loss at what to do next. I was starting to dread that our biggest fears had come true. Percy was dead.

I was turning to tell Grover that we'd failed when I saw a familiar dark-haired kid moving through the crowd, keeping his head down and looking as shifty as you could get. Grover spotted him just after I did and let out a bleat of surprise and happiness.

"Perrr-cy!" he cried, grabbing the son of Poseidon. "We thought you'd gone to Hades the hard way!"

Percy looked relieved to see us and I almost lost my anger in seeing that he was alright.

"We can't leave you alone for five minutes!" I chided, only partly angry. "What happened?"

"I sort of fell," he said, looking embarrassed.

My eyes widened in shock. "Percy! Two hundred metres!"

A woman was rolled past us on a stretcher by some paramedics, the crowd parting to let her through.

"And then this huge dog, this huge fire-breathing Chihuahua -" she was saying before the paramedic cut her off.

"Okay ma'am, just calm down. Your family is fine. The medication is starting to kick in."

"I'm not crazy!" she shrieked, looking plenty crazy to me. "This boy jumped out of the hole and the monster disappeared. There he is! That's the boy!" she suddenly screamed, pointing at Percy.

He jerked and began wriggling his way through the crowd, away from the lady. My head was buzzing, questions wrestling inside.

"What's going on?" I demanded as he led us away. "Was she talking about the Chihuahua on the elevator?"

The story that Percy told us next made me seriously consider putting him in an asylum. Apparently, the woman called Echidna (a Greek monster, not the Australian animal, although she probably looked worse than one) had a pet Chihuahua/Chimera that breathed fire. It attacked Percy, Percy fought back, was dying, so he casually jumped off the Arch into the river, where it healed him. Oh, and he met a lady while under the water and chatted to her while we were fretting about his safety.

I was far from impressed but Grover looked amazed.

"Whoa," he said. "We've got to get you to Santa Monica! You can't just ignore a summons from your dad."

I opened my mouth to argue that we had more important things to be doing than family reunions when a nearby report cut me off.

"Percy Jackson," he declared, speaking into his microphone. "That's right, Dan. Channel Twelve has learned that the boy who may have caused this explosion fits the description of a young man wanted by the authorities for a serious New Jersey bus accident three days ago. And the boy is believed to be traveling west. For our viewers at home, here is a photo of Percy Jackson."

Oh Styx. This day just kept getting better.

"First things first," Percy hissed as we ducked away from the area and began running down an alley. "We've got to get out of town!"

We ran all the way to the Amtrak, although how we got back without being spotted is beyond me. Maybe we had a god helping us. With or without, we made it on before it pulled out for Denver.