Percy

So far, I'd made a list of all of our friends that we could contact.

Thalia was alive and well. She thought we were playing a practical joke until she found her next door neighbour outside and he tried to eat her. She went downstairs to Nico's apartment, where he was asleep and dragged him upstairs into her flat. Her mother was in California, her father was long gone, and her brother was missing. I felt sorry for Thals, she was incredibly over protective of her brother.

Grover was about to go outside before his girlfriend practically threw him against the wall and forced him to watch the TV. She'd dragged it out of the cupboard after she saw a squirrel being eaten my a zombie.

I went through my contacts, a lot of people weren't answering, and that worried me. Because most of them were what I'd call close friends.

"So, who have we got alive so far?" Piper asked and I looked at the list on my lap.

"Thalia, Nico, Grover and Juniper," I looked at Mclean, she frowned. "No more?"

"Nope, and no Jason," she rolled her eyes.

"You're a dork."

"Nerd,"

"Seaweed brain," I fell of the bed in surprise. Annabeth had come in the door, and decided to scare me. She was such a smart ass.

"Thanks for that, Annie," I rubbed the back of my head.

"You're welcome, Percy," she smirked at me a little bit and then looked at my list.

"Are these the people who are answering or not?"

"They're the ones who are answering." Annabeth frowned.

"Only a few of my friend's are answering too."

"Who?"

"Frank, Hazel and Leo," I scoffed.

"Great, No Clarisse? The one time in the world that the psycho bi- I mean girl would have been useful, and she's missing," Annabeth shrugged and dropped down onto my bed.

"I guess we'll just have to survive without her." Mclean looked back through her contact list. Obviously searching for anyone she missed.

Annabeth picked my phone up off the table and started fiddling with it.

"Hey, what're you doing?" I asked suspiciously.

"I'm switching your phone to vibrate now, with our luck, your phone'll go off in the middle of the night and wake up every zombie within hearing range." she rolled her eyes at me. and tossed me back my phone. "I've also changed my caller ID from 'Smart Ass' to 'Annabeth'." I gave her a small smirk, and she just scoffed and rolled her eyes again.

"Well, smart ass suits you better than Annabeth," I snickered.

"I'm not a smart ass!"

"Sure you aren't, you're an almighty wise one who knows so much more than me." I picked up one of the books and threw it at her.

"At least your speaking sensibly now," I couldn't think of a comeback off the top of my head so I just picked up one of the books off the bed and started reading.

Annabeth already had one in her hand, she started reading it as well.

"Uh, okay, I'm going to go and steal your computer, if you don't mind, Annabeth?"

"Go ahead," Annabeth frowned "It's on my desk, I think," Mclean walked out of the door, leaving me and Annabeth alone, in my room.

"Annabeth, on the way here, did you see any people?" I asked. Annabeth frowned at me and sat up.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, there were barley any people alive out there, in fact I didn't see any. No homeless people, no crazy people out screaming about the apocalypse, no people running home like we were. Where'd they all go? I mean, on those news reports, the people..., they couldn't have all been turned into zombies, could they?" Annabeth hesitated for a second.

"I don't know," she admitted.

"Well, I was thinking, what if it travels through the air?" she was completely silent as she stared down at the front cover of the book in her lap.

"I don't know, Percy, I'm just as confused as you are," That didn't really made me feel confident, I'd always relied on Annabeth to have the hard answers.

"Great to know." I muttered.

"Just keep reading, you moron.

Three hours later, I was half way through Max Brook's book, '*World War Z*' and I was getting more and more freaked out by the whole thing.

Did you know that some Zombies don't digest the flesh of their victims, they just keep eating and eating until their stomachs split open? Or that they use their moans to tell other Zombies where there's food so that they can swarm it? They don't need any kind of food to survive and if you were to chop a zombie in half, the top of the body would continue to go on living (if you can even call it living,) While the brain was intact, the zombie was still alive.

Annabeth had gone into her room to talk to Mclean, and they were discussing things like food supplies and safe houses. When I'd gone into check in on them, they were highlighting places on a big map of Manhattan that they thought would supply food, shelter or weapons.

Annabeth had told Mclean about how I'd used my skateboard as a sort of club, and she thought that it was a good idea.

Annabeth took her three antique-replica knives out of their box and offered one to Mclean, one to my Mum, and kept one for herself. She then pulled out her father's sword. It was another Greek antique-replica that looked brand new. It sparkled bronze in the light. I thanked her, and wondered if she knew that I'd been taught to fight with a sword.

By lunchtime, Annabeth had us on rations. I didn't complain. There was no point.

The girls had drawn up a chart of what was in the pantry and how long it'd be able to keep us healthy. They'd decided that it would last something like two weeks, if we were careful with out food consumption.

It was six in the evening when I had the idea to raid Gabe's fridge.

"We can go down there, take the keys from his body and take the food. He's not going to be needing it, he's..." I gave them a meaningful look. Piper and Annabeth still seemed unconvinced.

"Are we even sure if Gabe has any food? I mean, he's a grotty old man, for all we know he could live of rat's tails and dead spiders," Annabeth shuddered when Mclean mentioned the spiders. Annabeth hated spiders.

"He has food," my mother butted in. She was sitting on the other side of the room, With Kory's head in her lap. My little sister had drifted off an hour ago, and thankfully hadn't been woken up by my talking.

"How do you know, Mrs Jackson?" Mclean still calls my Mum Mrs Jackson, mostly out of habit than anything else. Even though technically, she's Mrs. Chase.

"Because I heard him going through the cupboards next door, and he tried to get me to go with him," My looked us all over.

"Do you think we should go and get it?" Mclean asked my mother.

"I think that all three of you are almost adults, and should start making decisions about how you'll survive Annabeth, your father is missing, your mother isn't answering her phone, and I won't be here forever. Piper, you're father was your only parent, and he died, and Percy, I'm your only family, and as I said, I won't be here forever. You're all almost adults, an that means that you're old enough to start looking after yourselves." My mother gave me a pointed look and gently moved Kory's head off of her lap.

"Uh, okay?" Mclean and Annabeth rolled their eyes at me.

"I think that we should go an get the food. Better now, before someone else can get at it," Annabeth looked at Mclean.

"What do you think?"

"I don't like it."

"Well, That's two votes yes, and one vote no, so I say that Percy and I take a couple of shopping bags downstairs and grab some stuff now." Annabeth stood up from the couch and looked at me expectantly. "C'mon, seaweed brain," she rolled her eyes.

"Coming." I followed Annabeth into the hall, she picked up her knife and I grabbed my skateboard.

"You're not going to use the sword?"

"To heavy,and I can't take my skateboard and the sword," I shrugged, and Annabeth nodded like I was making sense.

"You don't want to take a tank to fist fight," I didn't actually know what that meant, but I just agreed anyway.

Annabeth

I looked over at Percy, he seemed a little confused, and I decided to use less complex metaphors in the future.

"Let's go, Seaweed brain," I rolled my eyes at him. I'd changed shirts, because my other shirt had been covered in zombie guts, which was, quite frankly, gross.

I peeked outside the door, Gabe was still crumpled on the ground. I wasn't sure if he was dead or knocked out. I hoped it was the second. I didn't know how well Percy would cope with killing a person that he knew. No matter how much he'd wanted to batter Gabe to death in the first place.

I searched through his grotty green jacket and pulled a set of keys out.

Frank was standing by the door, I'd almost forgotten about the dog, so I let him inside the apartment and he obediently went and sat next to Kory.

"Gabe's Apartment's in the basement, isn't it?" Percy whispered.

"Yeah," I shuddered. Basements. Spiders.

Great. Just Great.

Percy and I walked down the stairs quietly, but the noise still echoed around us like we were in some kind of cave.

"Do you think that there are any more zombies in the building?"

"Uh, probably," I admitted and I didn't think that it made him feel any better.

"Great, I'll be on the look out then," Percy walked down the stairs with his skateboard raised, ready to clobber anything even remotely zombie like.

I wouldn't normally even have admitted it to myself, but having Percy in front of me made he feel a little better about being out in the open. But as I said, I would never tell him that, his ego's already the size of a skyscraper, there's no reason to make it any bigger.

As we weaved down the stairs, I kept on glancing behind me just to check that there was nothing there. I was very, very nervous. Maybe I shouldn't have come out after all... No, I did the right thing. It would be unfair to make Mclean come out with Percy when she'd voted to stay inside.

And to be honest, who'd want to spend so much time with my step brother? I mean, the boy's the most annoying person known to man, except maybe for Callie, from school. The bitch ruined my best sketches.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs, we opened Gabe's apartment to find rubbish strewn all over a dirty grey carpet, dead roaches and flies were scattered in the corners and I saw more than a few spider's webs.

Ick.

Gabe's apartment smelt exactly like he did, of beer and sweat with an unpleasant whiff of urine.

I looked at Percy, I pointed to myself, and then at the kitchen, and then I pointed at him, and pointed to the dining room. I then put my finger over my lips. He nodded and I hoped that my rudimentary sign language had made it through that thick skull of his.

I crept into the kitchen, checking around for zombies as I did. There didn't seem to be any, so I walked over to the fridge and opened it up.

There were half a dozen boxes of beer at the bottom, and lump of mouldy bread in the top of the fridge, there was some milk in the door, but when I opened the door, I found that the milk was so old, that it'd turned to yogurt, and then the yogurt had turned into some kind of solid and there was now a miniature ecosystem inside it. I didn't bother smelling it, for all I knew, the plants inside it had evolved to produce chloroform or something.

I started searching through the cupboards, which all seemed to be empty. I was about to start going through the drawers when I heard a loud banging followed by lots of curses.

Obviously Percy didn't understand the simplest of signs.

I rushed into the dining room, the first thing that I noticed was the brightly coloured cans that were scattered all over the floor, the second thing that I saw was Percy doing some kind of demented rain dance, and then I noticed the zombie under the table that was currently trying to take a bit out of his legs.

I wasn't really thinking about how easy it would be for me to get killed, I just took one look at the wobbly legs of the thick, ancient table and the hairline crack that ran right through the middle, and jumped onto the table with all of my weight, sending half a dozen tins of skittering to the ground and splitting the table in half and crushing the grey skinned monster a tonne of oak wood.

"Thanks, Wise girl," Percy grinned at me and I arched my eyebrow.

"Wise girl?"

"Yeah, the owl, that you used to have on your T-shirt," he pointed to my chest and I looked down,

"What owl? There was never an owl on this shirt."

"Not on that one, The day that you first called me seaweed brain, I called you wise girl, because your t-shirt had owls on it."

"That was the best that you could come up with?" Percy just grinned at me and started loading the cans of food back onto the broken table. He pulled a few old plastic bags out of his pockets and started filling them up.

"I'll carry, you defend, okay?" He looked up at me like he expected me to be fine with that.

"Why, because you're a big strong boy?" I asked sarcastically.

"No, because you seem to be better at killing the unhappy undead than I am," He gestured to the now unanimated corpse that had been trying to kill him only a minute ago.

I paused for a moment, and now happy that I knew that Percy wasn't trying to be a knight in shining armour on his noble steed. I tried imagining Percy as a knight, but laughed the thought away in my mind. Knights were bound by things like codes of Chivalry and their sworn duty to protect their king, I would have thought that Percy was more pirate like than anything else. An Orlando Bloom style pirate, not the bloodthirsty murderers that actually roamed the Caribbean in the eighteenth century.

And with that thought, I started comparing Orlando to Percy, Orlando won, but only because Percy had really annoying smirk. It made me want to drag him into a room and beat it right off of his face. Snarky little as-.

"Uh, are we going to go, or do I have to stand here and wait for you to finish staring at the wall?" I looked up at Percy, who was standing next to me, he was looking at it with interest. Like he wanted to know why I'd been staring at it for so long.

"It's nothing important," I waved the incident away.

"Uh, kay, let's go," Percy started walking up stairs with me trailing along behind him.

We were half way up when Percy stopped.

"Hey," I touched his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"Annabeth? can you hear that?" Percy seemed terrified, the blood had drained from his face, and he felt tense.

"Hear what?" Percy frowned for a second and then started walking again.

"Nothing," he shrugged it off and we kept walking up the stairs. I followed him upwards, I wondered why he'd stopped, and if he had better hearing than I did and I was about to be swarmed by a thousand bloodthirsty zombies.

I hoped not, but I wasn't about to run the risk. So I made Percy walk faster and was even more careful than before.

When we got up to the apartment, we unloaded all of the food into the cupboards, Percy seemed a little off, He vanished into his room afterwards, saying that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. I didn't buy it at all.

I decided that I'd better go and check on him, just to make sure that he was okay, and not dying on the bedroom floor, when I knocked on the door, all that I heard was silence, which was a little weird, Percy was hardly ever silent, the boy had ADHD really badly,and it seemed strange that he hadn't said anything stupid before he went to bed, so I was starting to get a little concerned.

"Percy," I knocked again, I heard shuffling from inside and the door opened to reveal a very flustered looking Percy.

"Yeah?" he asked, I looked around his room through the crack in his door. Stuff was thrown everywhere, I wondered what was going on with him. Though, considering that today, we'd experienced the beginnings of a Zombie apocalypse. And yes, I'll admit that it was only the beginning. Zombies seemed to be everywhere, I'd been doing a little hacking and I'd logged into the city's CCTV Cameras and I'd seen hundreds of zombies just wandering around aimlessly.

"Are you feeling okay?"

"Uh," he looked at me like I'd gone insane. "Yeah, why wouldn't I be?" He frowned for a second, and then looked back at me. "Don't answer that question."

"Okay," we just sort of stood there and watched each other for a minute.

"Can I..." I gestured to his messy bed.

"No."

"Percy Jackson, I order you to let me in right now,"

"Oh." His brow creased, like he was trying to figure out if I could actually order him to do anything. But before he realised that I couldn't I pushed under his arm and into his messy room.

"I came to talk to you."

"About what?"

"About today, you know, in general" Percy shifted from foot to foot.

"I don't really want t-"

"Percy, there are zombies outside. This is no time to have an identity crisis,"

"I'm not having an identity crisis! I'm just..."

"Just what?"

"Just trying to get out of this conversation." I kicked his leg.

"Take this seriously, seaweed brain," Percy smiled a bit when I called him by his old nickname. I doubt that he'd been able to appreciate the sentimentality before when there was a chance that we'd be violently murdered at any second by a horde of old ladies and investment bankers.

"I'll try, Wise girl," I rolled my eyes, he was such a smart ass.

"Anyway, are you sure that you're okay with this whole thing?"

"Yeah, it's always been my dream to be ripped apart by zombies," I kicked him again.

"Ow! Quit it!"

"Only when you stop being a sarcastic idiot."

"Didn't you tell me once that I would ever stop being an idiot?"

"Fine, stop being sarcastic then," Percy grinned at me and dropped down onto his bed.

"Okay, I'll try, just for you,"

"Good, then," he had his arms folded behind his head. He looked completely comfortable, with his hands folded behind his head, and his legs crossed.

"So how do you really feel?"

"Like I'm in the middle of a zombie apocalypse," I was about to hit him again, but he grabbed my arm.

"You call that serious?"

"Yes, Annabeth, I'm being completely serious. I feel like I'm in the zombie apocalypse. I'm terrified, exhausted and worried. I'm terrified because I keep hearing them, moving about, moaning, and exhausted because I'm pretty sure that my adrenalin rush only wore off a few minutes ago, and I'm worried that if I ever go to my friend's apartments that I'm going to find them dead or zombified." Percy fell back against his pillows, I nodded blankly.

"Huh, I guess you are human after all."

"That's all that you have to say? I tell you about how this whole thing may turn me into a moron that sings nursery rhymes while skipping through the streets kissing zombies in the hope that they'll turn into magical prince, and that's all that you have to say?" I couldn't help but laugh at the thought of Percy in a frilly pink dress holding a fairy wand.

"And now you're laughing, thank you, Annabeth, this conversation has made me feel so much better." Percy crossed his arms over his chest and pouted.

"You're pouting."

"I am not!"

"You are, don't try to lie to me, Seaweed Brain."

"I don't pout, Wise girl, I'm nearly an adult."

"Physically, maybe, but mentally, of, well, you have the brain of a ten year old."

"My little sister's a ten year old genius, what d'ya say to that?"

"You must have traded brains at some point," he rolled his eyes.

"Thanks, It's always nice to know that you've got a little girl's brain. Shouldn't I have turned into a girl by now?"

"No, I think that your body would have continue to send out testosterone, not estrogen..." he gave me a blank look and I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

"Girl hormones and boy hormones."

"And what do they do?"

"You went to sex ed classes, didn't you?"

"No, I didn't, I skipped them,"

"Really? With your reputation?" I laughed. It was well know around school that Percy liked to sleep around.

"My reputation,?" Percy chuckled, like it was funny that he'd played with girl's emotions.

"Yeah, I heard that you once slept with four girls in one night? And then got into a fight with another guy over a fifth" Percy pushed himself up on his elbows and smirked at me.

"You shouldn't believe in rumours, Annabeth Chase, because they're hardly ever true,"

"Then what really happened?"

"I was taking these two girls to their friends because Drake and his friends were downstairs, and you know what happens to any poor drunk girl around them. And the 'fifth' girl was Thalia, she was as drunk as anything and Drake'd been making out with her on the couch."

"But there were supposed to be-"

"People exaggerate,"

"So how many girls have you actually slept with?"

"Three, both of my girlfriends and once with this girl that I met once at this Party..."

"Well, what d'you know, your not a complete ass after all," he grinned at me.

"Thanks, Chase, you'v really made my day,"

"You're Welcome. I should probably go to bed now," I stood up to leave but when I got to the door Percy called after me.

"Don't I get a kiss?" when I looked back at him, he was smirking like a cat.

"Only if you brush your teeth," Percy stopped, and nodded.

"I should, actually," he moved past me, and into our bathroom.

I rolled my eyes. Trust Percy to forget something so simple.

I went back to my bedroom and got changed into my pajamas. And then I pulled out a couple of the books that Percy had given me. I frowned when I realised that most of them were the ones that I had decided were useless. In fact, most of the useful ones were missing, I considered going looking, for them, but decided to do it the next day.

No use now.

I don't know when I fell asleep, but I do know that I woke up at four in the morning to Sally screaming.