Hell is Real

Chapter 16

They walk, they smell soot and ash, they smell dirt and plants. After a couple hours, they think that maybe they should have stayed home. Maybe they had been in Heaven, maybe this was Hell.

Once they did, they saw shore. They ran, ran and found that they were back where they started. The lake wasn't frozen, summer was light in the air.

Summer was light until it got too thick to breathe. Foggy piers. Something large and unknown washing up onto shore. The end of the beach disappearing into the storm. The unknowns disappeared into it with one last tide of gray.

Percy asked them. By June, nobody remembered their trip. Nobody remembered... Nobody remembered...

Summer was too thick to breathe, was too heavy to stand up in. Shoes wash up with the tide every few days or so. They thought a landfill was eroding somewhere at first, maybe kids are getting more careless of the cost of nikes, then some emerged with a foot still in them, detached at the ankle. Those bones are weak, Nico insisted, and the current will break them right off the body. Even if you divide the number of shoes by two, that's still a lot of bodies.

After a week of this came more. The water is thick and briney. There is a strange smell and they start to notice pieces of flesh mixed among the seaweed and driftwood. The heat amplifies the smell. By mid-July, Percy couldn't stand to go to the lake anymore. No one could, even the fishermen. What they called fish stayed in the markets.

Piper's dad had a car that they'd take on long drives around the town when the heat became unbearable and the cornfields became deadly. One house they drive by always smells of smoke and looks quaint through the trees. In the summer it's a bonfire and in the fall it is burning leaves. The air is clouded with it. You see the burning in the woods. What is burning? Why is it always burning? They wonder if they need help.

They drive and drive, sometimes to a party full of ashen faces that hold back dead souls. Summer nights are full of bonfires and laughing and even though the fire is blazing, the light of it doesn't reach very far. Shouldn't it reach further? Shouldn't you be able to see everyone's faces clearly? They haven't had anything to drink. The fire doesn't feel warm at all.

Percy gets home and goes to his room but can't sleep. He hears screams in the heavy heat of summer nights. He has a memory of being told that it was just the wind, but he doesn't believe so. There hasn't been wind in months.

Once he finally falls asleep he dreams of the lake and can smell what kept him away. He wakes up vomiting brine and seaweed.