Tiffany Hanson, A Percy Jackson Fan Fiction

Chapter 16

It didn't take long for a news crew to arrive. Police too, firemen, medics, everything you'd expect at a scene like this. The group that had seen the explosion first-hand had grown to at least three times its size, and and a police line had been set up. People were talking, but I wasn't hearing them. I don't think Annabeth or Grover were taking anything in either.

I jolted myself back into rational senses and turned to Annabeth and Grover. "He's the son of the Sea God." I said quietly. "He's probably alive."

"He fell over six hundred feet!" Grover exclaimed.

"I think he's gone Tif." Annabeth said quietly. She was shaking.

I looked at both of them sadly. "C'mon." I grabbed Grovers arm and Annabeths hand and started to push my way through the crowd. "Percy!" I yelled, and the other two followed my lead.

We were only searching for a couple of minutes when Grover suddenly yelled "Perrr-cy!" and sped away from Annabeth and I, then tackled someone in a bear hug. Annabeth and I glanced at each other, then ran over as well.

"...you'd gone to Hades the hard way!" he was saying when Annabeth and I got there.

"We can't leave you along for five minutes! What happened?" Annabeth demanded. She was trying to look angry, but I could tell that she was quite relieved, just like me.

"I sort of fell." He said, slightly ashamed.

"Percy! Six hundred and thirty feet?"

"Not to be realistic or anything," I said, "but you should be dead. Normally when you fall six hundred feet, you die. Even if you are a demi-god."

"Gangway!" A cop yelled behind us, and two paramedics raced by, with a woman attached to a stretcher. She seemed to be totally freaking out. I recognized it as shock. "And then there was this huge dog," she was saying, "this huge fire-breathing Chihuahua-"

"Okay, ma'am." said the paramedic. "Just calm down. Your family is fine. The medication is starting to kick in."

I scoffed. Medication. She didn't need medication, she needed sleep.

"I'm not crazy!" she yelled. "This boy jumped out of the hole and the monster disappeared." Then she saw Percy. "There he is! That's the boy!"

He pulled Annabeth and Grover in front of him, and I started to clear a path through the crowd.

"What's going on." Annabeth demanded. "Was she talking about the Chihuahua in the elevator?"

He told us everything that had happened, the Chihuahua actually being a Chimera, and the woman being Echidna, the mother of monsters. How he jumped out of the hole made in the side (un-nessecarily), and how when he landed in the river, he got a message from a woman in said river, summoning him to Santa Monic on his fathers orders.

"Whoa." said Grover, and that pretty much summed it up. I'd almost never heard such a feat coming from such a new demi-god. "We've got to get you to Santa Monica! You can't ignore a summons form your dad."

Before Annabeth or I could say anything else, we passed a reporter talking into a camera. "Percy Jackson." he said. "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 authorities for a serious New Jersey bus accident three days ago. And the boy is believed to be travelling west. For our viewers at home, here is a photo of Percy Jackson."

We snuck around the news van and slipped into an alley.

"First things first." said Grover. "We've got to get out of town!"

He was right, so we headed off to the Amtrack station. It was a miracle we didn't get seen, someone must have been helping us. Demi-gods don't have miracles. The train itself was just about to leave for Denver when we arrived. We had ran almost the whole way, and the seat on the train were strangely comfortable for trains seats.