Hell is Real

Chapter 5

Leo woke up, took a shower, the same water over his tired bones. The water was murky, the water wasn't clean.

The grease didn't come off, this time.

He walked to school, tried walking through town. He still passed those mills, still heard the noises, still smelled the smell. His eyes sparked with the desire to work there, his hands ached for more grease.

He didn't remind himself that they had been closed.

After the mills, he looked back as if he longed for them, longed to see them again. They weren't in sight.

When he couldn't hear the mills, he heard Them, the sounds that came sometimes when you were alone. Their screeches, Their cries. They looked like birds.

He hoped they were birds.

The school was always the same. Beaten down walls, graffiti filled bathrooms, the smell of textbooks heavy in the air. He got to first period to find that it hadn't changed, but it had. A third of his class was missing, but nobody questioned why. The teacher didn't do roll call.

Percy Jackson sat beside him. The boy who smelled the lake. The boy that had been pulled from the lake before. If asked, he never remembered. He was never the same.

To his right, Nico di Angelo sat with his dead and cold, his eyes that once held so much light. He had been a happy boy, had been the happiest in the town. Then they found him. They found him in those mines up north, found him staring at that trickle of water down the wall.

He had changed, more than Percy. He didn't remember his childhood.

Leo looked to the front, looked to the teacher. The teacher, heavy with a burden unknown. His tired eyes screamed to be listened, screamed to warn his students. He wanted them to live, he wanted them not to disappear.

Nobody listened.