Chapter 11: Supermom Gets Explosive
The crew brought out new rigging and had the sails back up in record time. We all knew the importance of getting moving again: while Airiana's monster would keep the Leviathan down for a bit but eventually the mythical pet of Poseidon would win out. And then it would return with a vengeance. We had to get to port before that.
Airiana never materialized from the girls' cabin and I wasn't foolish enough to go inside. After we had begun to move again, I migrated to the bow and stared out over the ocean. Airiana's response had dimmed the victory celebration for the whole crew, but it had hit me especially hard. I placed my chin in my hands and leaned against the rail.
A sailor walked up and asked how I was doing. He looked young, no more than 17. Even as a ghost he appeared tanned as if he'd been sailing around the equator for years. He wore a Navy uniform but not one that I recognized.
"I'll be fine," I said. "How are you holding up? Ever see anything like that?"
"I never believed in none of these tales," the ghost said. He had a distinct southern accent. "The Admiral used them to scare us. Said that the Kraken would come take us from our hammocks if we screwed up." He laughed. "As if that squid could get through the walls of an ironclad!"
"The Admiral?" I asked.
"That's what we called the Captain back in the war," he said. "Well, before he died that is."
"Sorry to hear that," I said.
The ghost shrugged. "We all did eventually," he said. "Y'all will too."
He smiled at me. I tried to smile back. "Thanks," I managed to say.
"We all here for you," he said, bowing slightly to me. He unfolded a well worn hat from his belt and put it on. I managed to see the Confederate flag emblem on it before he walked away.
I turned back out to sea even more depressed. A person walked up and stood next to me, a person that I noticed was alive. "The sea is calming," Kim said simply.
"Not calming enough today," I said simply.
She chuckled. "Yeah, I probably should apologize for that."
"Why?" I asked, turning to face her. She was gazing determinately out to sea, wearing Airiana's light jacket and black yoga pants. "It's not your fault."
She just kept gazing at the ocean, looking down at the waves hitting the bow. Finally I broke the silence. "You know, for the first fifteen years of my life, all I wanted was to be claimed. I thought that once I was claimed I could finally be my own person. I would cease to be the Great Percy Jackson's son. I'd get out from underneath his shadow. But none of that happened."
"Yes it did," Kim finally said, not lifting her gaze.
"No it didn't," I said. "All I am doing is following in his footsteps. His first quest was to rescue his mother from the Underworld; so was mine. His second quest was sailing on a ship full of cursed sailors toward the Sea of Monsters. And so is mine. Instead of getting out of his shadow, I'm just getting deeper into it."
"These sailors aren't cursed and we sailed around the Sea of Monsters," she said.
"The original entrance was in the Mediteranian," I said.
"And, like everything else, it moved," she said. "Besides, your father's shadow would mean saving the world," Kim said, finally lifting her gaze. "That's not all that bad." I smiled but said nothing. "Anyway, that's not how others see you at all."
"It's not?" I asked, despite myself.
She chuckled again. "You continue to amaze me with how ignorant you are. And I mean that in the nicest way possible."
"Thanks?" I said.
"You were the talk of the camp last summer," she said. "The son of the Great Percy Jackson who went to the Underworld to save his mother. And not only were you the first person ever to actually leave the Underworld with the person you went to get, not even your father managed that by the way, Hades personally drove her out for you on his chariot. The only times we didn't talk about you was when you walked into the room. Every girl wanted to date you. Every guy wanted to be you."
I was silent for quite a while and she let me soak that in. "You really are trying to get between Ariana and I aren't you?" I asked.
She returned her gaze to the water. "Children of Hekate are not exactly the most popular kids at camp," she said. "To be honest, we're not the most popular kids at anything."
"I noticed," I said. "You got pretty defensive about it at the school."
"Yeah," she said, getting embarrassed. "I was pretty defensive. Kelly got on my nerves pretty bad that day. And I was still pretty agitated when I was packing for the quest. I believed that if I could become your girlfriend I'd be popular for once. I was willing to do anything for that, no matter the cost. Airiana caught onto me pretty quick."
"She's oversensitive," I said.
"Maybe," Kim said. "But not in this case. Just look at what happened yesterday."
"What did happen yesterday?" I asked.
"You fell on me," Kim said. "Your hands wound up on my breasts. That's how Airiana found us after the fight, three seconds after she fell off the ship. She thought you were going to me only seconds after you thought she'd died. She got jealous and angry. I'm sorry."
"Your sorry because she overreacted?" I asked.
Kim shook her head. "She didn't overreact," she said. "I led your hands in place. She's angry at you for not seeing the obvious."
I spent the next several days avoiding both Airiana and Kim, but not so much to avoid noticing that Airiana had begun flirting with Laurant, the night watchman. The dead night watchman. That made me feel great.
I began to spend more and more of my free time in my hammock on the Birth Deck. Using some odd rope I'd found I would tie Sabertooth on a nearby post above my head in gladius mode and its light would let me read through the Ancient Religions of the World to the soothing sound of the ocean waves hitting the boat. Usually I fell asleep while reading. Some nights I just flipped through the pages looking at the pictures.
I had found the Leviathan in multiple chapters, but none of them provided a description on how to beat it. The chapter on Judaism, a latecomer for this book, mentioned that the Big G God will defeat it at the end times, which wasn't helpful. Leviathan, or a sea serpent, appeared in almost every middle eastern religion, with depictions that I can now attest were disturbingly accurate. Everyone required one of their gods to defeat the beast, usually the most powerful or head. And I knew I wasn't going to get Zeus' help, especially if he believed I was just going to try and overthrow him later. But everyone, from pre-Babylon to post-Rome, agreed on one thing: The Leviathan nested in the Mediterranean Sea. And we were sailing straight for it.
A sailor knocked on the railing at the top of the steps. His name was Zechariah Taylor. He was a young sailor, no more than 15, spoke with a British accent, and had visible scars on his arms from lacerations. He told me they were from shrapnel when his ship blew apart during the early stages of World War II. Like Captain Roberts and his chain, the scars had remained with him into the afterlife. He wore a common sailor's outfit, loose and so dirty I couldn't discern much of what was on it. His hat was cockeyed, but his smile never left his face. I guess after a century in the Fields of Asphodel, the U.S.S. Constitution was heaven. Because he had no wooden sailing ship experience, he was assigned the duty of cleaning the Birth Deck and we had become friends over the past few days. Now he knocked as a courtesy.
"Back to studying the books, I see, sir," he said, gently descending the steps and grabbing a deck scrubbing broom. Having water on the ground never seemed to be an issue in this deck.
"Well, the book's open," I said. "Studying doesn't really describe what I'm doing though. Just trying to figure out how to beat that dragon. How have you been?"
"Oh, you know, sir, same old stuff," he said, scrubbing the near side of the deck first. Sound echoed in the hull so it was easy to talk, but he liked to be close as much as possible. "And if you're looking for advice on that dragon, sir, I suggest praying. It's what all the old vets said to do if I ever saw it. Here, take my Rosary. Just in case, you know, sir?" He handed me a necklace made of a bunch of beads with a crucifix.
"I can't take this," I said.
"I've got more," he said. "Besides, I think you need it more than I do sir."
"You know you don't need to call me 'sir,'" I said, taking the necklace, though I wasn't sure what to do with it.
"I know that sir," he said, giving me a wink.
"Watch your head on that blade," I said as he scrubbed behind me.
"Or else it will kill me?" he asked. "That's already happened."
I laughed. "Well, at least the Germans won't get you this time," I said.
He silently walked into my line of sight and slowed his scrubbing. "Never said it was the Germans," he said.
"Well, I thought…well because of the…you said World War II right?" I asked.
"I was born in Wales," he said, stopping his scrubbing. "But I'm Irish by birth, Catholic by religion. I ran away from home when I was thirteen to fight in what I consider the first battles of World War II: the fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. My ship was destroyed off the northern coast by Franco's forces in early 1938. I was a bus boy in the kitchens."
"Why?" I asked. "Why did you run off to fight?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm Catholic," he said. "My priest said the Nationalists in Spain were killing bishops and other Catholics in the country. He asked for able-bodied men to go fight in defense of the church in Spain. I stowed away. They didn't turn me away when I got there."
"Did you think you would die?" I asked.
He laughed. "No," he said. "I thought I would save the world. I was going off on a grand adventure like David standing up to Goliath." He chuckled again. "I even bought a slingshot, just in case. It never crossed my mind that I would die; at least not until I got there. Once I saw the horrors of war first hand, I thought about it a lot. But my priest was right: Catholics would be purged from Franco's Spain. I had to do everything I could to prevent that."
"Zachariah, how did you die?" I asked. "If it's okay to ask," I hastened to qualify.
Zachariah smiled at me. "Of course it is okay," he said. "As you know, I was a bus boy on a Soviet Destroyer loaned to Spain for the war. I was washing the dishes when an explosion occurred in the Boiler Room directly below me. These scars indicate that some of the floor below me ripped me apart before the flames got me, but honestly, I don't really remember it at all."
"So was it the enemy?" I asked.
"In all probability," he said. "The boilers don't typically have an accident unless they're struck by a torpedo or a mine."
"I'm so sorry," I said because I knew nothing else to say.
He smiled again. "Do not be sorry for me," he said. "I didn't feel a thing. Be sorry for the guys who only were injured."
We stayed in silence for a couple of minutes before he wished me a good day and returned to his scrubbing. I sat in silence, gently turning the pages of my book without reading anything. I thought I was being so brave trying to save the world at the age of fifteen. But I had all this training and the blood and powers of a god. He had been two years younger, with no help, and an entire continent of enemies. I silently promised whoever cared that I would be as brave as Zachariah.
I gently reached up and untied Sabertooth, returning it to toothpick mode before pocketing it. Placing my hands under my head, I laid back on the hammock as Zachariah reached the front of the deck. Suddenly, I wondered what day it was. In the relative silence of the past few days, I wasn't sure anymore.
A second knock came from the top of the stairs and Kim's voice echoed through the deck. "Alex?" she said. "I thought you might like some food. It's been a day or so since we saw you up top.
A light flickered to life as Zachariah lit a lantern in the middle of the ship when I sat up. He returned to scrubbing the bow. I smiled to Kim, who was simultaneously holding what appeared to be a bowl of watery soup and dragging Airiana down the stair, and motioned for her to come toward me. That's all that was left of our food from Miami apparently: watery soup.
Suddenly an explosion ripped the deck apart. Zachariah was swallowed in a wave of fire and splinters. A blast of fiery wind slammed into me, spinning me in my hammock until the ends burned and I dropped to the floor. I struggled out of the hammock as the ship lurched toward port and the floor began to flood. I was almost out when a shriek tore through my bones. I managed to get up. The water was knee height and rising fast, sprinkled with planks from the ship. A massive, thirty-foot diameter hole was sinking into the ocean on the front, port of the deck. But the shriek came from where the girls had been standing to starboard.
The stairs they were standing on were dangling dangerously by a single side, the other one obliterated in the explosion. The girls were lying against the back wall. Airiana had blood trickling down the right side of her face and there were splinters hanging from her clothing in several spots, but she appeared to be relatively unharmed. She was crouching over a heavily breathing Kim who was slouching against the hull. A large piece of two-by-four was sticking out of her left arm. Airiana was tending to the injury as best she could, but the water had almost risen to the injury.
Kim screamed as the salt water reached the wound, and then stared directly into my eyes as if to say carry on. But I just stood there, staring at them as the ship lurched further and further toward the front. After everything we had done, this was how it was going to end. I couldn't believe it was going to end here, at the gates of Hercules; one of the tasks Hera gave to Hercules would be the end of Hera's child.
No. It was not going to end here. It couldn't. I couldn't let it end here. My stomach began to churn as if some god-like force was wringing it out and suddenly I knew what I had to do. I stretched my left hand out toward the massive hole in the ship and envisioned the planks returning to where they once were. Slowly but surely, the planks, pieces, and splinters began to move toward the hole, flying up into place like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Nails, bolts, and screws came out of the woodworks to hold things in place as the hole filled itself. Finally, a piece of the mast broke off and filled a single plank, with bolts quickly sliding in place and the hole was filled.
I lowered my arm and checked on Kim. Thankfully, the piece of wood in her arm was still there, the piece from the mast must have replaced it. All the first-aid training I got at camp reminded me to keep the large piece in the wound until we could get ambrosia in her system.
"I'm sorry, I just," I started.
"There'll be more," Airiana said, cutting me off abruptly. "I'll get a tourniquet in place. See if someone can do something about the other mines in the area."
"Okay," I said, summoning my energy reserves. I reached as high as I could and managed to get an undamaged rung on the steps.
"And Alex," Airiana said.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for saving us."
I nodded before ascending to the upper decks. The ghosts on the upper decks were frantically moving at a pace that was not humanly possible (but apparently para-humanly possible) trying to get things back in order. Most of the furniture had slid toward the bow as the ship was filling with water down below. I think some of them asked me what happened, but I was determined to get to the main deck and Captain Roberts. I managed to get the word "mine" out between breathes.
"What do we do?" I asked after I had calmed down.
"No clue," Roberts said. "I was swimming with the sharks long before mines were a twinkle in some guy's mind."
"We always used a minesweeper in the war," one of the sailors suggested. He was wearing a bleached Union Jack on his sleeve.
"Minesweeper?" Roberts asked.
The sailor shrugged. "Something that would destroy all the mines. The only ship that could attack them and still send her men home to mama."
Roberts said something else, but the sailor's words had tripped a switch in my mind. Suddenly a wave of emotions flooded my mind. I could feel the grief and despair of millions of mothers whose sons had died in the waters we were stranded on. I heard the moans of those children as they met their watery graves. And I felt the anger of the brothers, fathers, and especially the mothers, who sat powerlessly at home without so much as a wooden box for memories. And I felt the power of those emotions.
I walked slowly up to the bow of the ship and looked out over the water. The Mediterranean Sea, the sea that had claimed so many demigods stretched out in front of me. Empowered by the anger inside me, I stretched out my feelings and could feel the mines about a hundred yards in front of me; forming an explosive wall across the Straight of Gibraltar.
The anger overcame me. The gut-wrenching feeling of being run out returned. I let out a massive scream and raised my left hand in front of me. There was a bright golden glow around my arm, which told me this might actually work. I sent a request up to Hera for help and reached out in anger toward the mines. I let a sick smile form on my face as I slammed my fist shut. The entire line, nearly fifty of them, exploded in a cascading geyser-like eruption that sent a tidal wave just under the deck of the ship. Once I was sure all the mines were gone, I let my emotions go down a little.
And promptly passed out.