The giants disintegrated in twin columns of flame – a sure sign they were monsters, all right. Monsters don’t die. They just dissipate into smoke and dust, which saves heroes a lot of trouble cleaning up after a fight.
‘My brothers!’ Joe Bob the Cannibal wailed. He flexed his muscles and his Babycakes tattoo rippled. ‘You will pay for their destruction!’
‘Tyson!’ I said. ‘Look out!’
Another comet hurtled towards us. Tyson just had time to swat it aside. It flew straight over Coach Nunley’s head and landed in the stands with a huge KA-BOOM!
Kids were running around screaming, trying to avoid the sizzling craters in the floor. Others were banging on the door, calling for help. Sloan himself stood petrified in the middle of the court, watching in disbelief as balls of death flew around him.
Coach Nunley still wasn’t seeing anything. He tapped his hearing aid like the explosions were giving him interference, but he kept his eyes on his magazine.
Surely the whole school could hear the noise. The headmaster, the police, somebody would come help us.
‘Victory will be ours!’ roared Joe Bob the Cannibal. ‘We will feast on your bones!’
I wanted to tell him he was taking the dodgeball game way too seriously, but before I could, he hefted another ball. The other three giants followed his lead.
I knew we were dead. Tyson couldn’t deflect all those balls at once. His hands had to be seriously burned from blocking the first volley. Without my sword …
I had a crazy idea.
I ran towards the locker room.
‘Move!’ I told my teammates. ‘Away from the door.’
Explosions behind me. Tyson had batted two of the balls back towards their owners and blasted them to ashes.
That left two giants still standing.
A third ball hurtled straight at me. I forced myself to wait – one Mississippi, two Mississippi – then dived aside as the fiery sphere demolished the locker room door.
Now, I figured that the built-up gas in most boys’ locker rooms was enough to cause an explosion, so I wasn’t surprised when the flaming dodgeball ignited a huge WHOOOOOOOM!
The wall blew apart. Locker doors, socks, athletic supports and other various nasty personal belongings rained all over the gym.
I turned just in time to see Tyson punch Skull Eater in the face. The giant crumpled. But the last giant, Joe Bob, had wisely held on to his own ball, waiting for an opportunity. He threw just as Tyson was turning to face him.
‘No!’ I yelled.
The ball caught Tyson square in the chest. He slid the length of the court and slammed into the back wall, which cracked and partially crumbled on top of him, making a hole right onto Church Street. I didn’t see how Tyson could still be alive, but he only looked dazed. The bronze ball was smoking at his feet. Tyson tried to pick it up, but he fell back, stunned, into a pile of cinder blocks.
‘Well!’ Joe Bob gloated. ‘I’m the last one standing! I’ll have enough meat to bring Babycakes a doggy bag!’
He picked up another ball and aimed it at Tyson.
‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘It’s me you want!’
The giant grinned. ‘You wish to die first, young hero?’
I had to do something. Riptide had to be around here somewhere.
Then I spotted my jeans in a smoking heap of clothes right by the giant’s feet. If I could only get there … I knew it was hopeless, but I charged.
The giant laughed. ‘My lunch approaches.’ He raised his arm to throw. I braced myself to die.
Suddenly the giant’s body went rigid. His expression changed from gloating to surprise. Right where his belly button should’ve been, his T-shirt ripped open and he grew something like a horn – no, not a horn – the glowing tip of a blade.
The ball dropped out of his hand. The monster stared down at the knife that had just run him through from behind.
He muttered, ‘Ow,’ and burst into a cloud of green flame, which I figured was going to make Babycakes pretty upset.
Standing in the smoke was my friend Annabeth. Her face was grimy and scratched. She had a ragged backpack slung over her shoulder, her baseball cap tucked in her pocket, a bronze knife in her hand, and a wild look in her storm-grey eyes, like she’d just been chased a thousand miles by ghosts.
Matt Sloan, who’d been standing there dumbfounded the whole time, finally came to his senses. He blinked at Annabeth, as if he dimly recognized her from my notebook picture. ‘That’s the girl … That’s the girl –’
Annabeth punched him in the nose and knocked him flat. ‘And you’, she told him, ‘lay off my friend.’
The gym was in flames. Kids were still running around screaming. I heard sirens wailing and a garbled voice over the intercom. Through the glass windows of the exit doors, I could see the headmaster, Mr Bonsai, wrestling with the lock, a crowd of teachers piling up behind him.
‘Annabeth…’ I stammered. ‘How did you … how long have you…’
‘Pretty much all morning.’ She sheathed her bronze knife. ‘I’ve been trying to find a good time to talk to you, but you were never alone.’
‘The shadow I saw this morning – that was –’ My face felt hot. ‘Oh my gods, you were looking in my bedroom window?’
‘There’s no time to explain!’ she snapped, though she looked a little red-faced herself. ‘I just didn’t want to –’
‘There!’ a woman screamed. The doors burst open and the adults came pouring in.
‘Meet me outside,’ Annabeth told me. ‘And him.’ She pointed to Tyson, who was still sitting dazed against the wall. Annabeth gave him a look of distaste that I didn’t quite understand. ‘You’d better bring him.’
‘What?’
‘No time!’ she said. ‘Hurry!’
She put on her Yankees baseball cap, which was a magic gift from her mom, and instantly vanished.
That left me standing alone in the middle of the burning gymnasium when the headmaster came charging in with half the faculty and a couple of police officers.
‘Percy Jackson?’ Mr Bonsai said. ‘What … how…’
Over by the broken wall, Tyson groaned and stood up from the pile of cinder blocks. ‘Head hurts.’
Matt Sloan was coming around, too. He focused on me with a look of terror. ‘Percy did it, Mr Bonsai! He set the whole building on fire. Coach Nunley will tell you! He saw it all!’
Coach Nunley had been dutifully reading his magazine, but just my luck – he chose that moment to look up when Sloan said his name. ‘Eh? Yeah. Mm-hmm.’
The other adults turned towards me. I knew they would never believe me, even if I could tell them the truth.
I grabbed Riptide out of my ruined jeans, told Tyson, ‘Come on!’ and jumped through the gaping hole in the side of the building.
3 We Hail the Taxi of Eternal Torment
Annabeth was waiting for us in an alley down Church Street. She pulled Tyson and me off the sidewalk just as a fire truck screamed past, heading for Meriwether Prep.
‘Where’d you find him?’ she demanded, pointing at Tyson.
Now, under different circumstances, I would’ve been really happy to see her. We’d made our peace last summer, despite the fact that her mom was Athena and didn’t get along with my dad. I’d missed Annabeth probably more than I wanted to admit.
But I’d just been attacked by cannibal giants, Tyson had saved my life three or four times, and all Annabeth could do was glare at him like he was the problem.
‘He’s my friend,’ I told her.
‘Is he homeless?’
‘What does that have to do with anything? He can hear you, you know. Why don’t you ask him?’
She looked surprised. ‘He can talk?’
‘I talk,’ Tyson admitted. ‘You are pretty.’
‘Ah! Gross!’ Annabeth stepped away from him.
I couldn’t believe she was being so rude. I examined Tyson’s hands, which I was sure must’ve been badly scorched by the fl
aming dodgeballs, but they looked fine – grimy and scarred, with dirty fingernails the size of potato chips – but they always looked like that. ‘Tyson,’ I said in disbelief. ‘Your hands aren’t even burned.’
‘Of course not,’ Annabeth muttered. ‘I’m surprised the Laistrygonians had the guts to attack you with him around.’
Tyson seemed fascinated by Annabeth’s blonde hair. He tried to touch it, but she smacked his hand away.
‘Annabeth,’ I said, ‘what are you talking about? Laistry-what?’
‘Laistrygonians. The monsters in the gym. They’re a race of giant cannibals who live in the far north. Odysseus ran into them once, but I’ve never seen them as far south as New York before.’
‘Laistry – I can’t even say that. What would you call them in English?’
She thought about it for a moment. ‘Canadians,’ she decided. ‘Now come on, we have to get out of here.’
‘The police’ll be after me.’
‘That’s the least of our problems,’ she said. ‘Have you been having the dreams?’
‘The dreams … about Grover?’
Her face turned pale. ‘Grover? No, what about Grover?’
I told her my dream. ‘Why? What were you dreaming about?’
Her eyes looked stormy, like her mind was racing a million miles an hour.
‘Camp,’ she said at last. ‘Big trouble at camp.’
‘My mom was saying the same thing! But what kind of trouble?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Something’s wrong. We have to get there right away. Monsters have been chasing me all the way from Virginia, trying to stop me. Have you had a lot of attacks?’
I shook my head. ‘None all year … until today.’
‘None? But how…’ Her eyes drifted to Tyson. ‘Oh.’
‘What do mean, “oh”?’
Tyson raised his hand like he was still in class. ‘Canadians in the gym called Percy something … Son of the Sea God?’
Annabeth and I exchanged looks.
I didn’t know how I could explain, but I figured Tyson deserved the truth after almost getting killed.
‘Big guy,’ I said, ‘you ever hear those old stories about the Greek gods? Like Zeus, Poseidon, Athena –’
‘Yes,’ Tyson said.
‘Well … those gods are still alive. They kind of follow Western Civilization around, living in the strongest countries, so like now they’re in the U.S. And sometimes they have kids with mortals. Kids called half-bloods.’
‘Yes,’ Tyson said, like he was still waiting for me to get to the point.
‘Uh, well, Annabeth and I are half-bloods,’ I said. ‘We’re like … heroes-in-training. And whenever monsters pick up our scent, they attack us. That’s what those giants were in the gym. Monsters.’
‘Yes.’
I stared at him. He didn’t seem surprised or confused by what I was telling him, which surprised and confused me. ‘So … you believe me?’
Tyson nodded. ‘But you are … Son of the Sea God?’
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘My dad is Poseidon.’
Tyson frowned. Now he looked confused. ‘But then…’
A siren wailed. A police car raced past our alley.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Annabeth said. ‘We’ll talk in the taxi.’
‘A taxi all the way to camp?’ I said. ‘You know how much money –’
‘Trust me.’
I hesitated. ‘What about Tyson?’
I imagined escorting my giant friend into Camp Half-Blood. If he freaked out on a regular playground with regular bullies, how would he act at a training camp for demigods? On the other hand, the cops would be looking for us.
‘We can’t just leave him,’ I decided. ‘He’ll be in trouble, too.’
‘Yeah.’ Annabeth looked grim. ‘We definitely need to take him. Now come on.’
I didn’t like the way she said that, as if Tyson were a big disease we needed to get to the hospital, but I followed her down the alley. Together the three of us sneaked through the side streets of downtown while a huge column of smoke billowed up behind us from my school gymnasium.
‘Here.’ Annabeth stopped us on the corner of Thomas and Trimble. She fished around in her backpack. ‘I hope I have one left.’
She looked even worse than I’d realized at first. Her chin was cut. Twigs and grass were tangled in her ponytail, as if she’d slept several nights in the open. The slashes on the hems of her jeans looked suspiciously like claw marks.
‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.
All around us, sirens wailed. I figured it wouldn’t be long before more cops cruised by, looking for juvenile delinquent gym-bombers. No doubt Matt Sloan had given them a statement by now. He’d probably twisted the story around so that Tyson and I were the bloodthirsty cannibals.
‘Found one. Thank the gods.’ Annabeth pulled out a gold coin that I recognized as a drachma, the currency of Mount Olympus. It had Zeus’s likeness stamped on one side and the Empire State Building on the other.
‘Annabeth,’ I said, ‘New York taxi drivers won’t take that.’
‘Anakoche’ she shouted in Ancient Greek. ‘Harma epitribeios!’
As usual, the moment she spoke in the language of Olympus, I somehow understood it. She’d said, Stop, Chariot of Damnation!
That didn’t exactly make me feel real excited about whatever her plan was.
She threw her coin into the street, but instead of clattering on the tarmac, the drachma sank right through and disappeared.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, just where the coin had fallen, the tarmac darkened. It melted into a rectangular pool about the size of a parking space – bubbling red liquid like blood. Then a car erupted from the ooze.
It was a taxi, all right, but, unlike every other taxi in New York, it wasn’t yellow. It was smoky grey. I mean it looked like it was woven out of smoke, like you could walk right through it. There were words printed on the door – something like GYAR SSIRES – but my dyslexia made it hard for me to decipher what it said.
The passenger window rolled down, and an old woman stuck her head out. She had a mop of grizzled hair covering her eyes, and she spoke in a weird mumbling way, like she’d just had a shot of Novocain. ‘Passage? Passage?’
‘Three to Camp Half-Blood,’ Annabeth said. She opened the cab’s back door and waved at me to get in, like this was all completely normal.
‘Ach!’ the old woman screeched. ‘We don’t take his kind!’
She pointed a bony finger at Tyson.
What was it? Pick-on-Big-and-Ugly-Kids Day?
‘Extra pay,’ Annabeth promised. ‘Three more drachmas on arrival.’
‘Done!’ the woman screamed.
Reluctantly I got in the cab. Tyson squeezed in the middle. Annabeth crawled in last.
The interior was also smoky grey, but it felt solid enough. The seat was cracked and lumpy – no different than most taxis. There was no Plexiglas screen separating us from the old lady driving … Wait a minute. There wasn’t just one old lady. There were three, all crammed in the front seat, each with stringy hair covering her eyes, bony hands and a charcoal-coloured sackcloth dress.
The one driving said, ‘Long Island! Out-of-metro fare bonus! Ha!’
She floored the accelerator, and my head slammed against the backrest. A pre-recorded voice came on over the speaker: Hi, this is Ganymede, cup-bearer to Zeus, and when I’m out buying wine for the Lord of the Skies, I always buckle up!
I looked down and found a large black chain instead of a seat belt. I decided I wasn’t that desperate … yet.
The cab sped around the corner of West Broadway, and the grey lady sitting in the middle screeched, ‘Look out! Go left!’
‘Well, if you’d give me the eye, Tempest, I could see that!’ the driver complained.
Wait a minute. Give her the eye?
I didn’t have time to ask questions because the driver swerved to avoid an
oncoming delivery truck, ran over the kerb with a jaw-rattling thump, and flew into the next block.
‘Wasp!’ the third lady said to the driver. ‘Give me the girl’s coin! I want to bite it.’
‘You bit it last time, Anger!’ said the driver, whose name must’ve been Wasp. ‘It’s my turn!’
‘Is not!’ yelled the one called Anger.
The middle one, Tempest, screamed, ‘Red light!’
‘Brake!’ yelled Anger.
Instead, Wasp floored the accelerator and rode up on the kerb, screeching around another corner, and knocking over a newspaper box. She left my stomach somewhere back on Broome Street.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘But … can you see?’
‘No!’ screamed Wasp from behind the wheel.
‘No!’ screamed Tempest from the middle.
‘Of course!’ screamed Anger by the shotgun window.
I looked at Annabeth. ‘They’re blind?’
‘Not completely,’ Annabeth said. ‘They have an eye.’
‘One eye?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Each?’
‘No. One eye total.’
Next to me, Tyson groaned and grabbed the seat. ‘Not feeling so good.’
‘Oh, man,’ I said, because I’d seen Tyson get carsick on school field trips and it was not something you wanted to be within fifteen metres of. ‘Hang in there, big guy. Anybody got a garbage bag or something?’
The three grey ladies were too busy squabbling to pay me any attention. I looked over at Annabeth, who was hanging on for dear life, and I gave her a why-did-you-do-this-to-me look.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘Grey Sisters Taxi is the fastest way to camp.’
‘Then why didn’t you take it from Virginia?’
‘That’s outside their service area,’ she said, like that should be obvious. ‘They only serve Greater New York and surrounding communities.’
‘We’ve had famous people in this cab!’ Anger exclaimed. ‘Jason! You remember him?’