Percy POV

I blinked as slowly what she was saying sunk in.

"He… but you said…"

"Yeah I know what I said," She snapped, "I lied." Her eyes returned to the disgusting zombie head at her feet. I almost barfed when she reached out and touched it's hair. Yuck!

"Why would you lie to me, Annabeth?" I asked solemnly.

"It was none of your business! But it doesn't matter now, does it? He's dead!" She shouted through tears.

"He was dead before, too!"

"I could have saved him before!"

"Yeah? And what would have happened to the two of us if you did? Would you have left me for him?" She didn't answer that one, and that hurt.

"It doesn't matter! He's dead now!" She cried angrily, "I don't believe you, Percy! You killed an innocent person!" I shook with frustration and anger.

"He was about to kill you! Couldn't you see that? He was going to bite you, and eat you! I saved your life!" I turned around to the silent group in the back of the bus, "You all saw! Annabeth would be dead if I hadn't done what I had!" Everyone nodded silently. Everyone but Jason, that is. Jason stepped out of the crowd and towards Annabeth. She was shaking over Luke's dead body. Jason set a steady hand on her shoulder. A tear slid down his cheek.

"Percy's right, Annabeth." She didn't move for a second.

"I want to bury him." She whispered quietly.

I knew I shouldn't be this jealous of a dead guy, but I was. I saved her life and she's too focused on her long-dead ex boyfriend to even realize that. A burst of anger grew in my stomach.

"If some of us don't leave now, then we'll never make it back before nightfall." I said in a hard voice, "I'm going ahead to get the gas, anyone who wants to stay here and bury that," I spit, "then go ahead. We'll meet you back there." Annabeth's shoulders tensed. She straightened up and cracked her neck. There was a dangerous calm look in her eyes as she took a step up so that we were face to face. Her fist came up and hit the side of my jaw.

"His name is Luke." She said coldly. I glared at her, rubbed my jaw, and brushed past her. All of the guys followed me except Jason, who stayed behind with Piper, Hazel, and Annabeth. Just before I jumped out of the bus, I turned around.

"Annabeth?" She glared at me, "We're through. Have a nice life with your dead boyfriend." I said in a hard voice. I left before she could say anything back.

"Dude, I'm sorry." Leo said, patting my shoulder as we walked to the station, "That was harsh." I shrugged.

"You know what? I'm almost glad she's gone." Frank cocked his head in confusion.

"What do you mean?" He asked. I kicked a rock out of my way.

"She was controlling, and temperamental. It's always her way or the highway." I ranted, "And she was so focused on finishing that cure that we never even saw each other." The words were just coming out now, I wasn't sure if I meant it or not.

"And she always had to win. If she didn't, then she'd pretend to be all nice about it, but she'd be pouting later on!" I turned to look at the two of them, "The other night, when the power went out, I told her I loved her. You know what happened? She looked scared." Frank's eyes widened, and Leo gasped.

"Really? But you guys seem so…"

"She pulled herself together after a few minutes and everything was fine. But I didn't understand why she seemed so nervous about me saying it. Now I get it." I said bitterly.

They nodded sadly.

"I can't believe I didn't see it before! She always acted weird whenever Luke was mentioned before! She always looked guilty, I thought it was because he was dead and she wasn't, but now I get it! She was in love with him! And she was dating me! Ugh." I groaned and kicked the rock so hard it smashed a window, "Why didn't she just tell me in the first place?! I wouldn't have been mad!" Frank raised his eyebrows.

"You would have been just a little jealous if she told you that she was still in love with him." Well… yeah. But what guy wouldn't?

"It would have been better than having her lie to me for so long." I grumbled.

"We never would have found out if I had just gotten up and hidden in the back." Leo said guiltily. I punched his arm.

"No, I'm glad you did. Better I found out now." Well sort of. Frank sighed.

"You know, Perce? I think that you should just forgive and forget." He said, "Annabeth made a mistake."

"Yeah, but then she got mad at me for saving her from him. That's still an issue." He nodded.

"True, true. But can you really blame her? I mean, if you'd killed a Zombie Hazel I'd be pretty ticked. I wouldn't even be thinking straight."

"But imagine Hazel has an ex who's a zombie, right? Well what if he comes after her and she's not moving. Would you save her, or let her die?" I asked.

"Save her, of course."

"And if she yelled at you for saving her?" Frank winced.

"I see your point." I nodded. Leo picked at his nails.

"But now things will be all awkward at home," Leo said thoughtfully, "We used to be a well-oiled machine, and now we'll be like… an un-oiled machine. All the issues between you and Annabeth will make the rest of us uncomfortable, and then we won't be able to focus so well. It'll be dangerous." Leo had a point.

"We'll be just fine," I replied stubbornly, "but there's absolutely no way I'm taking her back. Even if she begs."

Annabeth POV

"Bye Luke," I whispered. I pat the freshly dug ground one more time, and then turned around to catch up with the others. We'd just finished burying him, and were heading home.

"You ok, Annabeth?" Jason asked. His voice was thick, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. Piper held his hand and frowned. The one thing she absolutely could not stand was when Jason was upset.

I shook my head, "I just can't believe Percy did that." I choked. Hazel bit her lip and looked away. Piper mirrored the expression, and Jason stayed silent, "But then again, there are a lot of things about Percy that are just… ugh." Anger boiled up, and spilled out of my mouth.

"He's so oblivious! All. The. Time. How could anyone be that stupid?!" I ranted, "And he's in constant need of attention. All this time I've been spending trying to save the world, and he just wants me to be a girlfriend. Well you know what? I'm a little bit busy trying to revive the human race!" I couldn't stop now, "And the drool, ew!" I shook my head, "I can't believe I put up with him for so long." We'd been together for a few weeks, maybe even a month. I didn't keep track of the days much.

But Annabeth, he did just save your life." Hazel said quietly, "Even you have to admit that you couldn't have hurt Luke, and that fact's what could have gotten you bit." Hazel was right, but I was too stubborn.

"We could have locked him in the bus, we could have run, we could have done something other than kill him." I insisted. A voice at the back of my mind kept saying You're wrong! Hazel's right! But I didn't listen to it.

"Let's just say that you did bring Luke back," Jason said, "What would you have done?" I shook my head.

"I honestly don't know." I glanced at him, "But now Luke's gone, Percy's angry, I'm angry, and it's over. That's just that."

We returned home around six or so. Thalia nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw that it was only the four of us.

"Don't worry, they're fine." Probably, "Come upstairs, we need to talk." She took a sidelong look at Nico, than nodded. We hiked up the stairs to go find Grover and Juniper, leaving Jason and Piper in the lobby.

"Annabeth! Hazel!" Daisy shouted, and jumped over to hug us. She'd recently learned how to pronounce my name without a lisp, "Where's Percy?" She asked innocently. I got down on my knees so that we were eye-level.

"He'll be here later," I said softly, "Go play so that I can talk to Mommy, ok?" She smiled, kissed my cheek, and returned to whatever strange game she'd come up with.

"Annabeth? Is everything ok?" Juniper asked. She wiped her hands with a towel and then led us to the living room. I sighed. Hazel and I took turns explaining what had happened to Thalia, Nico, Juniper, and Grover eventually. He walked in around the time we talked about Luke breaking into the bus.

"Oh my god, is everyone ok? Where's Percy?" Percy this, Percy that.

"He's fine," I said, almost angry, "The zombie was my old boyfriend, Luke." Juniper's eyes widened, and Thalia yelped. I had told Juniper the truth about Luke a little while ago. The guilt had been eating me alive. Apparently Thalia had told Nico and Juniper had told Grover, because neither of them looked surprised.

"What happened?" Thalia asked. I shook my head.

"Percy… he's gone. For good." Thalia whimpered, and turned, burying her face in Nico's shoulder. He held her tightly, not caring that Juniper and Grover were staring.

"Then me and him got into a fight, and we broke up." I finished, "They went ahead for gas while we buried Luke, they should be here in an hour or more." Juniper looked at my sympathetically.

"Oh sweetie," She firmly grasped my hand, "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be. It's about time." I said coldly. She pursed her lips, but didn't argue with me.

The guys got home a while later with the gasoline. Frank gave it to me as Percy disappeared into the pool. With that cheerful hello, I returned to my room to work.

Knock, knock.

"Can we come in?" Juniper asked, her head peering around the doorway. I waved her inside. She stepped around the door, and closed it tightly behind her.

"What's up?" I asked, barely looking up from my work. She rubbed her hands together and sat down across from me.

"I wanted to talk about Percy." She admitted. I bit my lip.

"There's nothing to talk about. It's over, and to be quite frank I don't want him back." Lies, all lies! Juniper twiddled her thumbs.

"There aren't that many options, you know. After Percy, Leo's the only single boy left around here." I shrugged.

"I like being on my own." My pants should be lit by now…

"The world's lonely enough as it is." She said. I still didn't look up, "Annabeth. Look at me." She commanded in her motherly tone. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Juniper was older than the rest of us, until she used the mom voice on you. I looked up to meet her eyes.

"Juniper please…" I whispered. She held up her hand to silence me.

"You and Percy have something very special." She said, "Don't let him go."

"But Juniper, he killed Luke." My voice cracked. Juniper placed her gentle hands on mine.

"If Percy's mom had come on that bus, and he didn't fight her, if he just stood there staring at her as she came towards him ready to kill… would you have just stood by and let him die?" She asked, "No matter how much you love someone, there comes a point when you just have to let them go. If Beckendorf had realized that, then he would be alive. That point hasn't come for you and Percy." She patted my hand and stood up, "Make the right choice, Annabeth." She whispered, and then left.

In my heart, I still didn't believe that the point had come for Luke and me. I still could have saved him. If Percy's mom had been there, well then we could have found a way to save her. He did not have to die.

At least, that's what I told myself.

Percy POV

"Come on, Perce. Just go talk to her." Grover whined. I punched the bag again.

"No. She made her choice, I made mine." Punch.

"Both of you were angry, and not in your right mind." Jason said. I stopped the bag and turned to face them. Jason was lying down on the mats where we fought each other, Nico lazily walked on the treadmill and Grover stood against the wall, staring at me.

"Look, she's still hung up on Luke, and I killed him for good. That's all there is to it." The guys sighed. I'd been telling them for almost three days now that it was over. We needed to get out and stop thinking about this, "Come on." I started walking towards the door.

"Where are you going?" Nico asked. I didn't bother looking over my shoulder.

"The library a few blocks away. It's been awhile since we've done a killing raid." None of us ventured too close to the library. We hadn't seen too many corpses walking around near there… "seen" being the operative word. It was extremely big, and there were a lot of places for a zombie to hide in there. Grover gulped.

"That's not a good idea, Percy. You're not in your right mind and one of us well get hurt." Sometimes when he was having a panic attack, Grover's voice would get pretty high to a point where he sounded like a goat bleating.

"You don't have to come with us, G-man. We'd understand." Grover was really the only one of us with a serious tie to this place. Sure, Jason had Piper, but Grover had Daisy. He shuddered and shook his head.

"No, I'm coming with you. I can be your sense of reason." I punched his shoulder playfully, and grabbed my sword.

"After you, guys."

Once Grover kissed Daisy and Juniper goodbye, we were on the road once again. Jason and Grover walked behind Nico and me. They were whispering, and I could pretty much guess about what.

"What are you doing, Percy?" Nico asked. I shrugged.

"What do you mean?" He raised an eyebrow.

"I mean that you're being a moron, and that's coming from me." He said, "Going on a suicide mission isn't going to get Annabeth back."

"I don't want Annabeth back," Well, not really… sort of….well maybe… "I want to see some heads roll." Nico rolled his eyes.

"Sure, Perce."

"I'm serious." I swung my sword through the air, "What's the point of all this work on the cure if we never get it to work? We'll see a lot more progress if we just kill as many zombies as we can, teach our kids to kill zombies, and eventually the zombies will go extinct. It will take some time, but it's much easier, and it could very well be faster."

"You've gone nuts, Percy." Nico said, "All of those zombies were people once. Living, breathing people. I'm all for hacking them up if it means I get to live to see another day, but just killing them?"

"Better them than us." I said. Nico sighed, but didn't say anything else.

We jumped up the steps to the big, brick building that once was the library.

"Do me a favor? If you see any kids books that Daisy might like, pick it up. We're teaching her to read, and old newspaper clippings aren't the easiest." Grover said. We all nodded and stepped inside.

The stench hit us like a wall of rotted skin, blood, and five year old garbage.

"Oh yuck! Bleh, I'm gonna be sick!" Grover shook his head and stuck out his tongue like a dog. I stepped in and took a look around us. We had stepped into a large room filled with bookcases. Above us was a glass skylight, and a balcony surrounded the top level, giving us a small view of the second floor.

"I don't think anyone's been in here since the epidemic." Jason said, examining the doors, "These doors are still clear on the inside."

"Well good, that means that there might not be too many zombies in here." I said, "Split up. Nico, you and me. Jason, take Grover up to the second level and do some searching. Pick up anything good you see, and meet back here in twenty minutes." I ordered. They nodded and disappeared up the staircase.

"Let's go look in the back offices." I said to Nico. He followed me through the twisting staircases, every now and then picking up a book or pen and stuffing it in his backpack.

In the back were three doors; one of them was for the librarian, one was used as a workers lounge, and the other was for visiting business people to use. Nico kicked in the door of the librarian's office. Just as I'd suspected, it was empty.

"I don't blame her," He said, lifting a picture of an old woman up from the desk, "I wouldn't want to stay in this place either. It's too big to be safe, and all the bookcases are too easy to hide behind." We went around, picking up some office supplies, tissue boxes, just basic stuff. It was my turn to kick in a door, so I kicked at the worker's lounge.

Inside were a few scattered tables, some overturned chairs, a refrigerator and some cabinets.

Oh, and two zombies.

They both sat at one of the tables. Cobwebs were attached to them, as though they hadn't even moved all these years. Maybe they hadn't.

When Nico and I walked in, their heads creaked to turn and look at us. One of them was strangely dressed as a hippie girl with a tie-dye dress and a lot of beads around her neck. Her hair (what was left of it) was black and greasy. Her eyes looked like two milky white orbs. A weird hissing sound came out of her mouth.

"Does it… does it smell like snakes in here?" Nico asked, lifting his nose to the air. It did… that's weird.

It wasn't hard to take care of the two zombies quickly and silently. There were only two of them, and they were stuck to the chairs by the mass amount of webs around them.

"We should probably warn Grover and Jason. If these two stuck around, who knows who else did?" Nico nodded.

When we walked out of the lounge, we passed the other door to get to the stairs and a banging sound came from behind it. Lots of groaning, lots of scratching.

"Maybe we should just leave the door closed." Nico said, "I mean, eventually they'll rot into nothing, right?" I was reluctant. Even leaving some alive was a danger to us. I grunted and banged my fist on the wall.

"Fine. Let's go find Jason and Grover." I muttered.

"AAHHH!" A scream echoed through the room from somewhere above us.

"I think I found them," Nico squeaked. We both looked up to see Jason and Grover running from a mob of the dead around the balcony. Jason grabbed the stair-railing and slid down it. Grover jumped, but his foot got grabbed by one of the corpses.

"Help!" He yelled. Grover swung his bat and miraculously hit the head of the flesh-eater just before she took a chunk out of his arm. He kicked out and managed to hold them back as the three of us ran towards him.

"Hang on, Grover!" We yelled. He hit his bat onto the head of one of the zombies. It growled and grabbed his ankle. He kicked out, hitting it on the nose. The force propelled his body backwards, sending him down the stairs just as we reached the bottom of them. Grover screamed, and tumbled down. There was a crunch, and he fell in a heap at our feet.

"I don't think they've figured out that they can use stairs yet," Jason said, looking up at the angry zombies, "We need to get out of here."

"Fooood," Grover moaned.

"He's not walking anywhere," I said, trying hard not to look at his twisted ankle, "Everyone grab him and get out!" Jason lifted him at the knees while me and Nico took his arms. Just as the first zombie took a step down the stairs, we shut the library doors behind us.

"FOOOOODD!" Grover groaned as we shoved into the base. Annabeth and Hazel were on guard duty.

"What happened?!" Hazel asked, her voice going up five octaves higher.

"We went out on a raid, and Grover broke his ankle." Nico explained, "No one's bitten."

"When did you go out on a raid?" Annabeth demanded, "We thought that you were in the training room!"

"Well we weren't," I said angrily, "Now help us get Grover upstairs." It was easier to lift him up with two more people. In no time we were at Juniper's suite.

"Grover!" She shouted and rushed over to us as we laid him down on the couch.

"He'll be ok, don't worry." Annabeth said gently, then she turned to glare at me, "Care to explain what happened?" She snapped. I opened my mouth, but Nico beat me to the punch.

"We went on a raid at the library down the street and got attacked." She raised an eyebrow.

"And who's idea was it to go on a raid without telling anyone?" They didn't hesitate to point at me.

"Thanks guys." I grumbled. Annabeth grabbed my arm and dragged me a few feet away.

"What the hell were you thinking?" She spit, "You could have gotten Grover killed!"

"Well I'm so sorry I wanted to get rid of some of those flesh-eaters before they found their way over here!" I hissed angrily. We tried to keep it down so that we didn't disturb Grover, but I'm sure it wasn't too hard to hear us. She rolled her eyes.

"I'm not even going to point out how stupid you sound right now." She growled and shoved past me to tend to Grover. I walked behind her to look at the old guy.

His eyes had opened, and he was talking to Juniper as she wrapped his ankle in an old towel, to set the bones right.

"I found a book for Daisy," He said hoarsely, "It's in my bag." She smiled, and bent over to kiss his cheek.

"That's very sweet of you, she'll love it." She said lovingly. Grover sighed and leaned his head back.

"Percy?" He asked. I looked at him, "I don't think I can go on raids anymore," He admitted, "I need to stay here, with Daisy and Juniper." I nodded in understanding.

"Don't worry about it, G-man."