The Helm of Darkness - A Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief Fanfiction

12 - Seaweed Brain Meets Barnacle Beard for the First Time

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. Chiron had told me that long ago. As usual, I didn't appreciate his wisdom until much later.

According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake.

This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror.

Poor little Percy Jackson wasn't an international criminal after all. The Crazy Kidnapper had been following Maliha Al-Hasan (who apparently wasn't a terrorist and didn't have connections to Hamas, I.S.I.S or Al-Qaeda) since a year ago where he murdered Aiden Davies and attempted to murder several English police officers. The two caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus-"Why didn't I remember him before?"). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could've done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson and Maliha Al-Hasan (I was beginning to like this kid) had each stolen a gun from their captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson, Maliha Al-Hasan and their two friends were safely in police custody.

The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn't hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.

"All I want," Percy said, choking back his tears, "is to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me a delinquent punk, I knew ... somehow ... we would be okay. And I know he'll want to reward each and every person in this beautiful city of Los Angeles with a free major appliance from his store. Here's the phone number."

The police and reporters were so moved that they passed around the hat and raised money for three tickets on the next plane to New York. I knew there was no choice but to fly. I hoped Zeus would cut me some slack, considering the circumstances. But it was still hard to force myself on board the flight. Border Patrol was hell, when the guy looked at my passport and realised I was Palestinian, and I had a Muslim name I had to go through the metal detector three times, sit in interrogation for twenty minutes and overall I got 'randomly searched' twice.

If it wasn't for the mist I'd have been busted.

Take off was a nightmare. Every spot of turbulence was scarier than a Greek monster. I didn't unclench my hands from the armrests until we touched down safely at La Guardia. The local press was waiting for us outside security, but we managed to evade them thanks to Annabeth, who lured them away in her invisible Yankees cap, shouting, "They're over by the frozen yogurt! Come on!" then re-joined us at baggage claim.

We split up at the taxi stand. Percy told Annabeth and Grover to get back to Half-Blood Hill and let Chiron know what had happened. They protested, and it was hard to let them go after all we'd been through, but I knew we had to do this last part of the quest by ourselves. If things went wrong, if the gods didn't believe me ... I wanted Annabeth and Grover to survive to tell Chiron the truth.

Percy and I hopped in a taxi and headed into Manhattan. Thirty minutes later, we walked into the lobby of the Empire State Building. We must have looked like homeless kids, with our tattered clothes and scraped-up faces. I hadn't slept in at least twenty-four hours.