فصل 02

Headless guys and gals

Not loving the Midwest vibe

Oh, look—a cheese ghost

GEE, APOLLO, you may be thinking, why didn’t you simply pull out your bow and shoot her? Or charm her with a song from your combat ukulele?

True, I had both those items slung across my back along with my quiver. Sadly, even the best demigod weapons require something called maintenance. My children Kayla and Austin had explained this to me before I left Camp Half-Blood. I couldn’t just pull my bow and quiver out of thin air as I used to when I was a god. I could no longer wish my ukulele into my hands and expect it to be perfectly in tune.

My weapons and my musical instrument were carefully wrapped in blankets. Otherwise flying through the wet winter skies would’ve warped the bow, ruined the arrows, and played Hades with the strings of my ukulele. To get them out now would require several minutes that I did not have.

Also, I doubted they would do me much good against blemmyae.

I hadn’t dealt with their kind since the time of Julius Caesar, and I would’ve been happy to go another two thousand years without seeing one.

How could a god of poetry and music be effective against a species whose ears were wedged under their armpits? Nor did the blemmyae fear or respect archery. They were sturdy melee fighters with thick skin. They were even resistant to most forms of disease, which meant they never called on me for medical help nor feared my plague arrows. Worst of all, they were humorless and unimaginative. They had no interest in the future, so they saw no use for Oracles or prophecies.

In short, you could not create a race less sympathetic to an attractive, multitalented god like me. (And believe me, Ares had tried. Those eighteenth-century Hessian mercenaries he cooked up? Ugh. George Washington and I had the worst time with them.)

“Leo,” I said, “activate the dragon.”

“I just put him into sleep cycle.”

“Hurry!”

Leo fumbled with the suitcase’s buttons. Nothing happened. “I told you, man. Even if Festus weren’t malfunctioning, he’s really hard to wake up once he’s asleep.”

Wonderful, I thought. Calypso hunched over her broken hand, muttering Minoan obscenities. Leo shivered in his underwear. And I…well, I was Lester. On top of all that, instead of facing our enemies with a large fire-breathing automaton, we would now have to face them with a barely portable piece of metal luggage.

I wheeled on the blemmyae. “BEGONE, foul Nanette!” I tried to muster my old godly wrath voice. “Lay hands upon my divine person again and you shall be DESTROYED!”

Back when I was a god, that threat would have been enough to make entire armies wet their camouflage pants. Nanette just blinked her cow-brown eyes.

“Don’t fuss, now,” she said. Her lips were grotesquely hypnotic, like watching a surgical incision being used as a puppet. “Besides, dearie, you’re not a god anymore.”

Why did people have to keep reminding me of that?

More locals converged on our position. Two police officers trotted down the steps of the statehouse. At the corner of Senate Avenue, a trio of sanitation workers abandoned their garbage truck and lumbered over wielding large metal trash cans. From the other direction, a half dozen men in business suits tromped across the capitol lawn.

Leo cursed. “Is everybody in this town a metalhead? And I don’t mean the good kind of metalhead.”

“Relax, sweetie,” Nanette said. “Surrender and we won’t have to hurt you much. That’s the emperor’s job!”

Despite her broken hand, Calypso apparently didn’t feel like surrendering. With a defiant yell she charged Nanette again, this time launching a karate kick toward the blemmyae’s giant nose.

“Don’t!” I blurted out, too late.

As I mentioned, blemmyae are sturdy beings. They’re difficult to hurt and even more difficult to kill. Calypso’s foot connected with its target, and her ankle bent with a nasty pop. She collapsed, gurgling in pain.

“Cal!” Leo ran to her side. “Back off, chest-face!”

“Language, dear,” Nanette chided. “Now I’m afraid I’ll have to stomp on you.”

She raised one patent leather pump, but Leo was faster. He summoned a globe of fire and threw it like a baseball, hitting Nanette right between her huge chest-level eyes. Flames washed over her, setting her eyebrows and flowery dress ablaze.

As Nanette screamed and stumbled, Leo yelled, “Apollo, help me!”

I realized I’d been standing there, frozen in shock—which would’ve been fine if I’d been watching the scene unfold from the safety of my throne on Mount Olympus. Alas, I was very much down here in the trenches with the lesser beings. I helped get Calypso to her feet (her one good foot, at least). We slung her arms over our shoulders (with lots of screaming from Calypso when I accidentally grabbed her broken hand) and began hobbling away.

Thirty feet across the lawn, Leo suddenly stopped. “I forgot Festus!”

“Leave him,” I snapped.

“What?”

“We can’t manage him and Calypso! We’ll come back later. The blemmyae might just ignore him.”

“But if they figure out how to open him,” Leo fretted, “if they hurt him—”

“MARRRGGGGH!” Behind us, Nanette ripped off the shreds of her burning dress. From the waist down, shaggy blond fur covered her body, not unlike a satyr. Her eyebrows smoldered, but otherwise her face looked unhurt. She spat ashes from her mouth and glared in our direction. “That was not nice! GET THEM!”

The businessmen were almost on top of us, eliminating any hope that we could make it back to Festus without getting caught.

We chose the only heroic option available: we ran.

I hadn’t felt so encumbered since my three-legged death race with Meg McCaffrey back at Camp Half-Blood. Calypso tried to help, kicking along like a pogo stick between Leo and me, but whenever she jostled her broken foot or hand, she yelped and sagged against us.

“S-sorry, guys,” she muttered, her face beaded with sweat. “Guess I’m not meant to be a melee fighter.”

“Neither am I,” I admitted. “Perhaps Leo can hold them off while—”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Leo grumbled. “I’m just a repair guy who can throw the occasional fireball. Our fighter is stuck back there in suitcase mode.”

“Hobble faster,” I suggested.

We reached the street alive only because the blemmyae moved so slowly. I suppose I would, too, if I were balancing a fake metal head on my, er, head, but even without their disguises, the blemmyae were not as swift as they were strong. Their terrible depth perception made them walk with exaggerated caution, as if the ground were a multilayered hologram. If only we could out-hobble them…

“Good morning!” A police officer appeared on our right, his firearm drawn. “Halt or I will shoot! Thank you!”

Leo pulled a stoppered glass bottle from his tool belt. He tossed it at the officer’s feet and green flames exploded around him. The officer dropped his gun. He began tearing off his burning uniform, revealing a chest-face with shaggy pectoral eyebrows and a belly beard in need of a shave.

“Phew,” Leo said. “I was hoping he was a blemmyae. That was my only vial of Greek fire, guys. And I can’t keep summoning fireballs unless I want to pass out, so—”

“We need to find cover,” said Calypso.

Sensible advice, but cover did not seem to be an Indiana concept. The streets were wide and straight, the landscape flat, the crowds sparse, the sight lines endless.

We turned onto South Capitol. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the mob of smiling fake-headed locals gaining on us. A construction worker stopped to rip the fender off a Ford pickup, then rejoined the parade, his new chrome club slung over his shoulder.

Meanwhile, the regular mortals—at least, those who did not seem interested in killing us at the moment—went about their business, making phone calls, waiting at traffic lights, sipping coffee in nearby cafés, completely ignoring us. At one corner, sitting on a milk crate, a heavily blanketed homeless man asked me for change. I resisted the urge to tell him that change was coming up fast behind us, carrying assorted weapons.

My heart pounded. My legs shook. I hated having a mortal body. I experienced so many bothersome things, like fear, cold, nausea, and the impulse to whimper Please don’t kill me! If only Calypso hadn’t broken her ankle we might have moved faster, but we couldn’t very well leave her behind. Not that I particularly liked Calypso, mind you, but I’d already convinced Leo to abandon his dragon. I didn’t want to push my luck.

“There!” said the sorceress. She pointed with her chin to what looked like a service alley behind a hotel.

I shuddered, remembering my first day in New York as Lester Papadopoulos. “What if it’s a dead end? The last time I found myself in a dead-end alley, things did not go well.”

“Let’s try,” Leo said. “We might be able to hide in there, or…I dunno.”

I dunno sounded like a sketchy plan B, but I had nothing better to offer.

Good news: the alley was not a dead end. I could clearly see an exit at the far end of the block. Bad news: the loading bays along the back of the hotel were locked, giving us nowhere to hide, and the opposite wall of the alley was lined with Dumpsters. Oh, Dumpsters! How I hated them!

Leo sighed. “I guess we could jump in—”

“No!” I snapped. “Never again!”

We struggled through the alley as fast as we could. I tried to calm my nerves by silently composing a sonnet about various ways a wrathful god could destroy Dumpsters. I became so engrossed I didn’t notice what was in front of us until Calypso gasped.

Leo halted. “What the—? Hijo.”

The apparition glowed with a faint ginger light. He wore a traditional chiton, sandals, and a sheathed sword, like a Greek warrior in the prime of life…except for the fact that he had been decapitated. Unlike the blemmyae, however, this person obviously had once been human. Ethereal blood trickled from his severed neck, splattering his luminous orange tunic.

“It’s a cheese-colored ghost,” Leo said.

The spirit raised one hand, beckoning us forward.

Not being born a mortal, I had no particular fear of the dead. You’ve seen one tormented soul, you’ve seen them all. But something about this ghost unsettled me. He stirred a distant memory, a feeling of guilt from thousands of years ago….

Behind us, the voices of the blemmyae grew louder. I heard them calling out “Morning!” and “Excuse me!” and “Lovely day!” to their fellow Indianans.

“What do we do?” Calypso asked.

“Follow the ghost,” I said.

“What?” Leo yelped.

“We follow the cheese-colored ghost. As you’re always saying: Vaya con queso.”

“That was a joke, ese.”

The orange spirit beckoned again, then floated toward the end of the alley.

Behind us, a man’s voice shouted, “There you are! Lovely weather, isn’t it?”

I turned in time to see a truck fender spiraling toward us.

“Down!” I tackled Calypso and Leo, provoking more screams of agony from the sorceress. The truck fender sailed over our heads and slammed into a Dumpster, sending up a festive explosion of garbage confetti.

We struggled to our feet. Calypso was shivering, no longer complaining about the pain. I was fairly sure she was going into shock.

Leo pulled a staple gun from his tool belt. “You guys go ahead. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”

“What are you going to do?” I demanded. “Sort and collate them?”

“I’m going to throw things at them!” Leo snapped. “Unless you’ve got a better idea?”

“B-both of you stop,” Calypso stammered. “We d-don’t leave anyone behind. Now walk. Left, right, left, right.”

We emerged from the alley into a wide-open circular plaza. Oh, why couldn’t Indianans build a proper city with narrow, twisting streets, plenty of dark corners, and perhaps some conveniently placed bombproof bunkers?

In the middle of a ring-shaped drive stood a fountain surrounded by dormant flower beds. To the north rose the twin towers of another hotel. To the south loomed an older, grander building of redbrick and granite—perhaps a Victorian-era train station. On one side of the edifice, a clock tower soared roughly two hundred feet into the sky. Above the main entrance, under a marble archway, a colossal rose window gleamed in a frame of green copper, like a stained-glass version of the dartboard we used for our weekly game night on Mount Olympus.

That thought made me heartsick with nostalgia. I would’ve given anything to be back home for game night, even if it meant listening to Athena gloat about her Scrabble scores.

I scanned the plaza. Our ghostly guide seemed to have disappeared.

Why had he brought us here? Should we try the hotel? The train station?

Those questions became moot when the blemmyae surrounded us.

The mob burst out of the alley behind us. A police car swerved into the roundabout next to the train station. A bulldozer pulled into the hotel’s driveway, the operator waving and calling out cheerfully, “Hello! I’m going to bulldoze you!”

All exits from the plaza were quickly blocked.

A line of sweat freeze-dried against my neck. An annoying whine filled my ears, which I realized was my own subvocalized whimpering of Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.

I won’t die here, I promised myself. I’m much too important to bite it in Indiana.

But my trembling legs and chattering teeth seemed to disagree.

“Who has an idea?” I asked my compatriots. “Please, any brilliant idea.”

Calypso looked like her most brilliant idea at the moment was trying not to throw up. Leo hefted his staple gun, which didn’t seem to frighten the blemmyae.

From the midst of the mob, our old friend Nanette emerged, her chest-face grinning. Her patent leather pumps clashed terribly with her blond leg fur. “Gosh darn it, dears, you’ve made me a bit miffed.”

She grabbed the nearest street sign and single-handedly ripped it out of the ground. “Now, please hold still, won’t you? I’m just going to smash your heads with this.”