A/N: I do not own the Percy Jackson series Kane Chronicles or The Stand Cut or Uncut version. I have however posted 'The Tales of...' series. This story takes place after The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy but before the events of Trials of Apollo. Before reading this I suggest to read if you haven't yet:

The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Early Adventures
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Lightning Thief
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sea of Monsters
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Titan's Curse
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Magical Labyrinth
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Stolen Chariot
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sword of Hades
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Bronze Dragon
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Last Olympian
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Staff of Hermes
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Quest for Buford
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Son of Sobek
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Staff of Serapis
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy

Also I'm going to let this out. On rough decisions based on what I know from The Stand, any mystical creatures Monsters, and automatons that are usually associated which characters from The Tales of and/or Percy Jackson won't be in this story

Also there's no character list for the stand, but if I had too pick two from the book it be Stu Redman and Fran Goldsmith as a pairing, and if I was allowed to add a fifth character to show, it would be of course Mother Abigail.

Car Crashes Into Some Pumps

Things were great for Annabeth and Percy. It looked like they were finally going to get some time to be just senior high school students. That was until one night they fell asleep and the next day woke up to be in a different place. Nothing new as Hera once kidnapped Percy in his sleep. But as they found out they not only were in a different world, but somehow back in time to the 1990s. They were still in the United States but were in Arnette Texas.

After staying around as visitors, they manage to get jobs volunteering at a gas station called Hapcomb and even stayed with the owner Hap and his wife. It was volunteer though as Hap didn't have the money to pay them. Like most businesses Hapcomb was near broke in money as Arnette turned out to be a dying town. Even the two factories in town, the paper factory and calculator factory was affected by it. The Paper Factory had shut down where as the calculator factory was ailing.

Annabeth and Percy slowly got along with Hap's usual customers: Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago; Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman: who both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week; and Victor Palfrey: a retired old man that smoked stinking home rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford. None of them knew Annabeth and Percy were from different time ahead of them, and that's how they want it.

One night the five of them were hanging out with Hap, Annabeth, and Percy. Annabeth worked the cash register as Percy helped with stock as Hap had his usual arguments with Vic.

"Now what I say is this," Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. "They just gotta say screw this inflation s-. Screw this national debt s-. We got the presses and we got the paper. We're gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation."

Vic rolled another of his cigarettes. He was a machinist until 1984, and was the only one present besides Annabeth with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap's most obvious d- statements, and he did indeed pointed it out: "That wouldn't get us nowhere. If they do that, it'll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he'd put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size."

"Germany tried that too after World War I to pay off it's debt," Annabeth pointed out, "All they did was make their economy worse."

"That's right. Money is just paper." Vic said.

"I know some people don't agree with you," Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. "I owe these people. And they're starting to get pretty itchy about it. Percy, you agree with me don't you?"

"I got to go with Annabeth on this one," Percy said, which wasn't uncommon. Whether Hap was right or wrong Percy took Annabeth's side, mostly because he knew she would get him back later if he didn't. Still, Hap kept both of them because they work for free, and Annabeth was really good in helping with bills and cash register. She'd be better if she had Daedalus' laptop, but that along with Percy's pet hellhound Mrs. O'Leary and their pet Saber Tooth Spactus Kitten Small Bob was left behind in the other world. Still when Annabeth show her thanks in front of the men, they often get groans but hidden smiles.

Stuart Redman, who was perhaps the quietest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.

His mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn't burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, then at the stockyard in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty back-breaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.

Watching Percy carrying in boxes of stock reminded Stu of the way his hand hands had bled at first from pulling endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn't been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn't asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.

Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died from pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best… but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.

In high school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. "You play," she said. "If you got a ticket out of here, it's football, Stuart. You play. Remember Eddie Warfield." Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family even poorer than Stu's own, had covered himself with glory as a quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers, mostly as a second-string quarterback but on several memorable occasions as the starter. Eddie now owned a string of fast-food restaurants across the West and Southwest, and in Arnette he was an enduring figure of myth. In Arnette, when you said "success," you meant Eddie Warfield.

Stu was no quarterback, and he was no Eddie Warfield. But it did seem to him as he began his junior year in high school that there was at least a fighting chance for him to get a small athletic scholarship… and then there were work-study programs, and the school guidance counselor had told him about the NDEA loan program.

Then his mother had gotten sick, had become unable to work. It was cancer. Two months before he graduated from high school, she had died, leaving Stu with his brother Bryce to support. Stu had turned down the athletic scholarship and had gone to work in the calculator factory. And final it was Bryce, three years' Stu's junior, who had made it out. He was now in Minnesota, a systems analyst for IBM. He didn't write often, and the last time he had seen Bryce was at the funeral, after Stu's wife had died—died of the same sort of cancer that had killed his mother. He thought that Bryce might have his own guilt to carry…and that Bryce might be a little ashamed of the fact that his brother had turned into just another good boy in a dying Texas town, spending his days doing time in the calculator plant, and his nights either down at Hap's or over at the Indian Head drinking Lone Star beer.

The marriage had been the best time, and it had only lasted eighteen months. The womb of his young wife had borne a single dark and malignant child. That had been four years ago. Since, he had thought of leaving Arnette, searching for something better, but small-town inertia held him—the low siren song of familiar places and familiar faces. He was well liked in Arnette, and Vic Palfrey had once paid him the ultimate compliment of calling him "Old Time Tough."

At least watching Annabeth and Percy time to time had seem to bring hope to Stu to finding love again. The couple seem to have that affect on anyone that sees them together. Even Norm, who had a struggling marriage with his wife with him being out of a job seem to have a second wind of love after spending time with them.

As Vic and Hap chewed it out, there was still a little dusk left in the sky, but the land was in shadow. Cars didn't go by on 93 much now, which was one reason that Hap had so many unpaid bills. But there was a car coming now, Stu saw.

It was still a quarter of a mile distant, the day's last light putting a dusty shine on what little chrome was left to it. Stu's eyes were sharp, and he made it as a very old Chevrolet, maybe a '75. A Chevy, no lights on, doing no more than fifteen miles an hour, weaving all over the road. No one had seen it yet but him.

"Now let's say you got a mortgage payment on this station," Vic was saying, "and let's say it's fifty dollars a month."

"It's a h- lot more than that."

"Well, for the sake of the argument, let's say fifty. And let's say the Federals went ahead and printed you a whole carload of money. Well then those bank people would turn around and want a hundred and fifty. You'd be just as poorly off."

"That's right," Henry Carmichael added.

"Henry, I would stay quiet if I were you," Percy said.

In the short amount of time Percy knew Henry, he learned that Henry had a habit of taking Cokes out of the machine without paying the deposit. What more, Hap knew about it too. So siding against Hap would be a bad idea on Henry's part.

"That ain't necessarily how it would be," Hap said weightily from the depths of his ninth-grade education. He went on to explain why.

Stu tuned out Hap's voice, knowing all too well about the pinch things were, and watched the Chevy pitch and yaw its way on up the road. The way it was going Stu didn't think it was going to make it much farther. It crossed the white line and its lefthand tires spumed up dust from the left shoulder. Now it lurched back, held its own lane briefly, then nearly pitch off into the ditch. Then, as if the driver had picked out the big lighted Texaco station sign as a beacon, it arrowed toward the tarmac like a projectile whose velocity is very nearly spent.

At this point, even Percy could hear the worn-out thump of its engine now, catching the attention of his ADHD mind, as the steady gurgle-and wheeze of a dying carb and a loose set of valves. Percy look out just as the car missed the lower entrance and bumped over the curb. The fluorescent bars over the pumps were reflecting off the Chevy's dirt streaked windshield so it was hard to see what was inside, but Stu and Percy made out a vague shape of the driver roll loosely with the bump. The car showed no sign of slowing from its relentless fifteen.

"So I say with more money in circulation you'd be—"

"Better turn off your pumps, Hap," Stu said mildly.

"The pumps? What?"

Norm Bruett had turned to look out the window. "Christ on a pony," he said.

Being closer to the switches than Stu, Percy flicked off all eight switches to the pumps, four in each hand, just as the Chevy hit the gas pumps on the upper island and sheared them off.

It plowed into them with a slowness that seemed implacable and somehow grand. The Chevy just kept coming at a steady fifteen or so, taillights never flashing once, like the pace car in the Tournament of Roses parade. The undercarriage screeched over the concrete island, and when the wheels hit it, everyone saw the driver's head swing limply and strike the windshield, starring the glass.

The Chevy jumped like an old dog that had been kicked, and plowed away the hi-test pump. It snapped off and rolled away, spilling a few dribbles of gas. The nozzle came unhooked and lay glittering under the fluorescents.

They all saw the sparks produce by the Chevy exhaust pipe grating across the cement. Percy reached for his watch as Hap, who had seen a gas station explosion in Mexico, instinctively shielded his eyes as both expected a fireball. Instead, the Chevy's rear end flirted around and fell off the pump island on the station side. The front end smashed into the low lead pump, knocking it off with a hollow bang.

Almost deliberately, the Chevrolet finished its 360-degree turn, hitting the island again, broadside this time. The rear end popped up on the island and knocked the regular gas pump asprawl. And there the Chevy came to a rest, trailing its rusty exhaust pipe behind it. It had destroyed all three of the gas pumps on that island nearest the highway. The motor continued to run choppily for a few second and then quit. The silence was so loud it was alarming.

After a few minutes, Annabeth said, "I don't think it'll explode. I believe we're safe."

"Holy moly," Tommy Wannamaker said breathlessly.

Hap got up and his shoulder bumped the map case, scattering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona every which way. Hap felt a cautious sort of jubilation. His pumps were insured, and the insurance was paid up even before he hired Annabeth. His wife Mary had harped on the insurance ahead of everything.

"Guy must have been pretty drunk," Norm said.

"I don't think so. I seen drunk drivers, and the driver wasn't acting like a drunk driver," Percy said.

"I seen his taillights," Tommy said, his voice high with excitement. "They never flashed once. Holy moly! If he'd been doing sixty we'd all be dead now."

"I think Percy's right, that man wasn't drunk if he wasn't going really fast," Annabeth said, "He might have lost control or something."

"We better go out and help," Stu said.

They hurried out of the office, Hap Tommy and Norm first, and Stu, Vic, Percy and Annabeth bringing up the rear. Hap, Tommy and Norm reached the car together. They could smell gas and hear the slow clocklike tick of the Chevy's cooling engine. Hap opened the driver's side door and the man behind the wheel spilled out like an old laundry sack.

"G-," Norm Bruet shouted, almost screamed. He turned away, clutch his ample belly, and was sick. It wasn't the man who had fallen out (Hap had caught him neatly before he could thump to the pavement) but the smell that was issuing from the car, a sick stench compounded of blood, fecal matter, vomit, and human decay. It was a ghastly rich sick-dead smell.

A moment later Hap turned away, dragging the driver by the armpits. Tommy hastily grabbed the dragging feet and he and Hap carried him into the office. In the glow of the overhead fluorescents their faces were cheesy-looking and revolted. Hap had forgotten about his insurance money.

The others looked into the car, and then Henry turned away, one hand over his mouth, little finger sticking off like a man who had just raised his wineglass to make a toast. He trotted to the north end of the station's lot and let his supper come up.

Vic, Stu, Annabeth and Percy looked into the car. Annabeth gasped and turned to Percy for comfort which he gave her girlfriend. Annabeth normally was strong and can handle seeing dead bodies. Heck both fought in the Second Titan War and Second Giant War, and seen plenty of gruesome deaths caused by monsters and even seen their surgent brother sacrificed himself to keep the Titan lord Kronos from reforming, and both been in Tartarus and even the premedial god of the pit in his new physical form and only survived because of the sacrifice of a their titan friend and the Giant bane of Ares. Heck, Percy even met the Greek god of Death Thanos, who seem to love give upsetting kind of jabs at those who either came close to death or knew someone close that died, in Alaska. But what they saw in the car was a whole different level of upsetting.

On the passenger side was a young woman, her shift dress hiked up high on her thighs. Leaning against her was a boy or girl, about three years old. They were both dead. Their necks had swelled up like inner tubes and the flesh there was a purple-black color, like a bruise. The flesh was puffed up under their eyes, too. They look, Vic later said, like those baseball players who put lampblack under their eyes to cut the glare. Their eyes bulged sightlessly. The woman was holding the child's hand. Thick mucus had run from their noses and was now clotted there. Flies buzzed around them, lighting in the mucus, crawling in and out of their open mouths. Stu himself had been in the war, mortal wars of course, but still seen plenty of casualties, but he had never seen anything so terribly pitiful as this. His eyes were constantly drawn back to those linked hands.

Lord Apollo, what kind of virus did these people get? Percy prayed, thinking of Apollo, god of plagues, as even if the mucus wasn't the biggest indicator Percy got a strong sense that it was some kind of disease that killed the mother and child.

Stu and Vic backed away together looked blankly at each other. Percy and Annabeth, who manage to calm down, follow their example. Then the four of them turned to the station. They could see Hap, jawing frantically into the pay phone. Norm was walking toward the station behind them, throwing glances at the wreck over his shoulder. The Chevy's driver side door stood sadly open. There was a pair of baby shoes dangling from the rear-view mirror.

Henry was standing by the door, rubbing his mouth with a dirty handkerchief. "Jesus, Stu," he said unhappily, and Stu nodded.

Hap hang up the phone. The Chevy's driver was lying on the floor. "Ambulance will be here in ten minutes. Do you figure they're—?" He jerked his thumb at the Chevy.

"They're dead, okay." Vic nodded. His lined face was yellow-pale, and he was sprinkling tobacco all over the floor as he tried to make one of his s-smelling cigarettes. "They're the two deadest people I've ever seen. He looked at Percy Annabeth and Stu who nodded. Stu put his hands in his pockets. He had the butterflies.

The man on the floor moaned thickly in his throat and everyone turned to look down at him. After a moment, it became obvious that the man was speaking or trying very hard to speak, Hap knelt beside him as Percy rushed to get some water.

Whatever had been wrong with the woman and child in the car was also wrong with this man. His nose was running freely, and his respiration had a peculiar undersea sound, a churning from somewhere inside his chest. The flesh beneath his eyes was puffing, not black yet, but a bruised purple. His neck looked too thick, and the flesh had pushed up in a column to give him two extra chins. He was running a high fever; being close to him was like squatting on the edge of an open barbecue pit where good coals had been laid.

Percy came back with the water, unknownst to everyone but Annabeth later that he actually got it out of his thermos that was encoated with fossilize sea shells inside so Percy could summon water when needed but the man just pushed it out of the way, spilling it.

"The dog," he muttered. "Did you put him out?"

"Mister," Hap said, shaking him gently. "I called the ambulance. You're going to be all right."

"Clock went red," the man on the floor grunted, and then began to cough racking chain like explosions that sent heavy mucus spraying from his mouth in long ropy platters. Hap leaned back grimacing.

"Annabeth, help me out," Percy said remembering the first aid training they had in Camp Half-Blood.

Annabeth knelt down and helped Percy roll the man over on his abdomen. Percy lightly smacked the man in the back several times to get whatever was in the man's lungs out.

Sure enough the man gave one big cough and a pool of mucus formed under him. Annabeth and Percy rolled the guy back over, but on the clean floor as the man was breathing unevenly again. His eyes blinked slowly and he looked at the group gathered around him.

"Where's…this?"

"Arnette," Hap said. "Bill Hapscomb's Texaco. You crashed out some of my pumps." And then hastily, he added: "That's okay. They was insured."

The man on the floor tried to sit up and was unable without Percy's and Annabeth's help. He put his hand on Hap's arhm.

"My wife…my little girl…"

Annabeth and Percy grimaced, thinking back to the bodies in the car.

"They're fine," Hap said, grinning a foolish dog grin.

"Seems like I'm awful sick," the man said. Breath came in and out of him in a thick, soft roar. "They were sick, too. Since we got up two days ago. Salt Lake City…" His eyes flickered closed. "Sick…guess we didn't move quick enough after all…"

Percy and Annabeth looked at each other in shock. They knew where Salt Lake City was—a city in Utah next to a salt water lake hence it's name—because they been there. Heck, they along with Percy's distant nephew Frank Zhang had battle out with Tar monsters while they were trying to get roofing tar. They also know Salt Lake City was further west from Texas.

Just where did this guy come from, both wondered. And what kind of quest are we stuck with?

Far off but getting closer, they could hear the whoop of the Arnette Volunteer Ambulance.

"Man," Tommy Wannamaker said. "Oh man."

The sick man's eyes open again, and now they were filled with an intense, sharp concern. He struggled in Percy's and Annabeth's arms as if he wanted to sit up even more even though he already was sitting up. Sweat ran down his face. He grabbed Hap.

"Are Sally and Baby LaVon all right?" he demanded. Spittle flew from his lips and now even Hap could feel the man's burning heat radiating outward. This man was so sick he was half crazy and stank of an old dog blanket that haven't been washed.

Percy nearly froze hearing the man say Sally, as that was the name of his mother. Percy shook it off reminding himself she was in another world, hopefully safe with his step-father Paul waiting on the birth of his unborn sibling.

"They're all right," Hap insisted, a little frantically. "You just…lay down and take it easy, okay?"

Annabeth and Percy helped the man back to the floor. His breathing was rougher now until they rolled him on his side, which seem to ease the respiration to a trifle. "I felt good until last night," he said. "Coughing, but all right. Woke up with it in the night. Didn't get away quick enough. Is Baby LaVon okay?"

The last trailed off into something not even Percy and Annabeth could make out. The ambulance siren warbled closer and closer. Stu went over to the window to watch for it. The others remained circled around the man on the floor as Percy and Annabeth got up.

"What's he got, Vic. Any idea?" Hap asked.

Vic shook his head. "Dunno."

"He mention being at Salt Lake City. That's in Utah," Percy said.

"Did anyone check the plates to see what state he was from?" Annabeth asked.

"That car's got a California plate." Norm Bruett said. "Might have been something they ate. They was probably eatin at a lot of roadside stands, you know. Maybe they got a poison hamburger. It happens."

The ambulance pulled in and skirted the wreck Chevy to stop between it and the station door. The red lights on top made crazy sweeping circles. It was full dark now.

"Gimme your hand and I'll pull you outta there!" the man on the floor cried suddenly, and then was silent.

"Food poisoning," Vic said. "Yeah, that could be. I hope so, because—"

"Because what?" Henry asked.

"Because otherwise it might be something catching," Vic looked at them with troubled eyes. I seen cholera back in 1958, down near Nogales, and it look something like this."

Dear Apollo, what have we found ourselves dealing with? Annabeth thought.

Percy did a silent nature spirit three claw hand swipe across his chest, which the men mistaken as just Percy making a cross sign (it is similar, just Percy's is older).

Three men came in, wheeling a stretcher. "Hap," one of them said. "You're lucky you didn't get your scraggy a- blown to kingdom come. This guy, huh?"

They broke apart and let them through—Billy Verecker, Monty Sullivan, Carlos Ortega, men all but Percy and Annabeth knew.

"There's two folks in that car," Hap said, drawing Monty aside. "Woman and a little girl. Both dead."

"Holy crow! You sure?"

"Yeah. This guy, he don't know. You going to take him to Braintree?"

"I guess," Monty looked at him bewildered. "What do I do with the two in the car? I don't know how to handle this, Hap."

"Stu can call State Patrol, and Annabeth and Percy can stay and help out. You mind if I ride with you?"

"H- no."

They got the man onto the stretcher, and while they ran him out, Hap went over to Stu. "I'm gonna ride into Braintreee with that guy. Would you call the State Patrol?"

"Sure."

"And Mary, too. Call and tell her what happened."

"Okay."

"Annabeth, Percy, mind the gas station until I get back or closing time. Stu will take you both home," Hap said.

Both nodded as Hap trotted out to the Ambulance and climbed in. Billy Verecker shut the doors behind him and then called the other two. They had been staring into the wrecked Chevy with dread fascination.

A few moments later the ambulance pulled out, sirens warbling, red domelight pulsing blood-shadows across the gas station's tarmac. Stu went to the phone and put a quarter in.

"Well this is some mess we got ourselves into," Percy said. "Annabeth, do you think this has something to do with why we're here?"

"I don't know, Percy," Annabeth said as her face turned into one of frustration she gets when she doesn't know something. "But I wouldn't be surprise if it is."

…

The man from the Chevy died twenty miles from the hospital. He drew one final bubbling gasp, let it out, hitched in a smaller one, and just quit.

Hap got the man's wallet out of his hip pocket and looked at it. There were seventeen dollars in cash. A California driver's license identified him as Charles D. Campion. There was an army card, and pictures of his wife and daughter encased in plastic. Hap didn't want to look at the pictures.

He stuffed the wallet back into the dead man's pocket and told Carlos to turn off the siren. It was ten after nine.