I am really excited about this story. A Percy Jackson/The Walking Dead crossover. There certainly aren't many of these out there and it is kind of difficult when Percy with his powers could probably decimate hundreds or thousands of walkers at a time. So, we shall see what happens with that.
This will be a story that intersects with Telltale's The Walking Dead Season One, and at a later point will also be influenced by characters and scenes from both the comics and the TV Show. This is a fanfiction and I can write whatever I want. So, I'm going too. I hope you enjoy the story, please don't be a dick if you review. Truly, there's no point in doing so. However, I would appreciate reviews that are excited about the story and criticism, when constructive is always welcome. The more reviews the more that I will want to continue writing the story. Just a forewarning, this story is rated M for a reason. It will be violent, gore, dark and have sexual themes and similar situations in that are displayed in the comics but not so much in the game or show. You were warned.
Guardian
Chapter 1
Meeting Clementine
When Percy's eyes snapped open, he was in a drastically different place than he was before. He had remembered going to his cabin the night before, then nothing. He was instantly on guard, he shoved his hand into his pocket and started panicking when he felt that his trusty sword Riptide was no longer there.
He looked around at his surroundings and grimaced, he was in a bedroom, laying on a bed. Whose? He wasn't entirely sure, but that wasn't the scary part. There was a large splatter of blood that covered the wall near the door. The windows were oddly boarded up, but haphazardly. The shoddy job wouldn't have been able to keep anything out. Streams of light poured in through, illuminating the room.
He rose as silently as he could, wincing as the bed creaked and groaned after losing his weight. Looking down at himself he could see he was still wearing his Camp Half-Blood shirt. Except the words had completely faded away, he was also in a pair of jeans and his shoes were still on.
How in the Hades had he gotten here? He thought furiously as he tried to wrack his brain, to try and remember something. But he couldn't, the last thing he remembered was going to bed. Something had taken him, and judging by the amount of blood on the wall, it wasn't friendly. But why was he unharmed? He wondered briefly.
Percy turned and took in every feature of the room, other than the blood and boarded window it looked like any random bedroom in any random house. Perhaps a bit more dirty, but nothing out of the ordinary. Something felt off, he felt weird himself but he pushed the thought aside for now.
His eyes caught the tiniest glimmer of bronze illuminated light, as if the sun was bouncing off of something. As quietly as he could, he crept toward the other side of the bed, hoping that if someone was out there. They didn't know he was awake.
But if someone was there, why wasn't he tied up?
He got to the other side of the bed and his eyes widened. A sense of foreboding bubbled within him as he stared at the bronze blade laying there.
It was Riptide, but why wasn't it in pen form? His brain started to hurt as he reached down and scooped his blade off the ground. He felt reassured at the perfectly balanced weapon in his hands, but was still concerned at the fact that it wasn't in his pocket. He searched his pockets again for the cap to the blade but couldn't find it. This was weird, he thought to himself. Guess he was carrying it for now.
Walking to the door of the bedroom, he cautiously pushed it open. Gritting his teeth as the door made a squeaking sound from the hinges. He cautiously stepped outside the room and crept down the hallway, not bothering to check the couple of closed doors he passed silently.
He peered around the corner into what should have been the family room and nearly vomited at the sight, he gagged in shock and raised his left hand to cover his nose as a putrid rotting smell hit him.
What the Hades? He whimpered in his head as he stepped around the corner. It looked like a family, or what had been one. The middle aged man was holding a pistol in his right, his brain matter was splattered against the wall. His wife and son a mere few feet away, both had a single bullet hole in their forehead.
Murder, suicide? He gagged, he needed to find a phone to call the police he thought for a second before he really observed them. Noticing that their flesh was rotting away already, as if they had been here for a couple days at least, and was that a bite mark on the wife's arm? He wondered sickly.
How had no one found them? His stomach churned and he nearly threw up again. He sprinted by them and walked out the door that hadn't even been fully closed. Quickly becoming startled by what he saw, a pileup of cars, twisted metal and debris. A huge accident that was blocking most of the road.
Percy frowned as he observed around, seeing several houses that looked like they had been hit with vandalism or something. Windows shattered and broken, wood again haphazardly thrown up in front of it. Front doors that were ripped off their hinges.
There seemed to be absolutely no one around, what had happened here? He wondered. It was like a ghost town.
Not only that, but once more Percy saw a startling amount of blood everywhere. Splattered across the cars, the fronts of homes, on doors and windows. As if everyone had been slaughtered, a huge sense of danger flowed through his veins and he readied Riptide as he cautiously walked into the street. He saw another body, this one face down and their skin drastically more decayed than the family in the house. Their right arm had multiple bite wounds that didn't look like any animal or monster that Percy had ever seen.
He quietly approached the body, ignoring the rotting smell as best as he could.
What on Earth had happened here? He prayed silently to his father for an answer. While expecting no response, he was surprised that it felt cold. Almost as if he weren't there at all, all the times praying to his father than had never happened before. It always felt warm, as if he were actually listening.
He stepped past the body and saw someone walking, slightly hunched over on the other side of the wreckage of cars. Relief flooded him.
"Hey." He called out, stepping between the debris and accident to get closer.
His blood froze when the person turned around to look at him, or at least what looked like a person. Their body was rotted and horrifying, their eyes a dull yellow. It looked like a dead person walking. It groaned and moaned as it started limping its way toward him, albeit slowly.
His instincts screamed at him that he was in immense danger, but this was a person after all, right? The rotting flesh and the smell of a corpse made Percy think otherwise. He backed up, horrified and frozen in fear and shock, his body stopped as it hit a car. The creature lurched forward and tried to grab him.
Instinctively he lashed out with Riptide, driving it through the center of its chest with a sickening squelch. Dark blood splattered out and Percy fully expected it to dissolve into golden dust. It had to be a monster, right?
What he wasn't expecting was for it to keep writhing and wriggling toward him. Its arms were still trying to grab him, almost as if it hadn't felt the sword go through it at all. He grimaced and watched as he saw the rotting mouth with disgusting teeth. It was making jawing sounds, its teeth cracking against each other. Almost like it was trying to bite him.
Percy wanted to scream, he was terrified and really confused. He pulled Riptide free, and brought his blade up. Avoiding the hands trying to grab him, with reluctance he swiped his blade across the neck of the monster. Cutting its head straight off.
He sighed in relief as he looked at the dark blood staining his bronze blade. His eyebrows furrowed, no monster he had ever killed before had ever bled. Did he just kill a person? He thought in horror, albeit a dead looking person?
His relief vanished as the head started wiggling, its teeth still snapping together like a hungry piranha. It was still alive. He thought in shock, he wanted to curl up, throw up and just shrivel. He had no idea where he was, and he was being attacked by a dead person.
On instinct he took Riptide and drove it through the head and into the brain. It stopped moving completely. Hmmm, he thought curiously. It only died after he hit the brain, that was weird. But, he had faced a weird monster like that before. After all, he had to hit all three of Geryon's hearts simultaneously to kill him before.
But why hadn't the body exploded into golden dust? Another sense of foreboding took over him as he looked further out down the neighborhood to see multiple more similar creatures limping toward him. It was clear that there were a lot of them, and he could hear their groans all the way from here.
His eyes widened and he turned and ran through wrought iron gates that squeaked dangerously. He silently crept into the backyard after closing the gates behind him. There was a wooden fence around the entire property, of a rather large house with yellow siding. The house in question had a set of stairs leading to a wrap around deck.
He frowned and crept further in the backyard so he couldn't be spotted from the road. His eyes found a glass sliding door that led to the inside of the house just up the stairs. He observed the rest of the yard, noting the tree house in the lone tree. He couldn't see inside of it but saw the wooden rungs bolted into the tree. That might be a safeplace to hide for a moment if he needed to, he thought momentarily as his eyebrows furrowed as he spotted the tea set just in front of the ladder on the ground.
That's weird. He thought to himself as he gripped Riptide tighter unconsciously. He could hear the groans getting closer and hoped that they hadn't seen him run back here. When suddenly he flinched as he heard gunshots ring out from a distance. What was going on? He wondered desperately. He crouched down and peered around the corner to see several dozen creatures similar to the one he had just killed, all rotting but walking corpses. They had stopped in their tracks at the sounds of the gunshots. Before they all turned around and walked toward where the shots had come from.
"So they're attracted to noise," Percy whispered quietly to himself. His gaze turned back toward the tree house, before he crept up the stairs of the house. He peered in through the glass sliding door and nervously bit his lip.
The entire place was a wreck, furniture was thrown around. There was blood pooled on the floor entering the kitchen directly to the right and some on the wall behind it as well. The TV was on, but on a blue screen that was casting an eerie glow on the house. None of the lights were on and it was slightly dark in there. He didn't see anything moving around, and he needed to catch his bearings.
Staying out in the open was a sure way to get attacked again. Percy didn't want that, especially as the weird feeling that was filling his entire body kept coursing through him. He felt off, not like his normal self. His muscles hurt, almost like he was weaker than normal. He ignored it before he opened the door and stepped inside. He closed it as a precaution behind him as he observed the room.
It looked even worse than he thought, and that was saying something. His stomach rumbled and he turned toward the bowl of fruit on the table, reaching out before he scowled.
"Fake." He muttered. Before stepping deeper into the house, he found nothing by the turned over table and the living room. His eyes looked dangerously at the large bookshelf that blocked the stairs to the upper floors. Whoever was here, was probably in more danger than he was.
He noticed the phone stand that was similar to the one his mom had flashing red before it beeped loudly. So loud it caused him to jump.
Out of curiosity he walked over and punched the button. The screen flashed with a red digital three before it played in a male voice.
"Three new messages. Message one. Left at 5:43 PM."
It paused for a moment before a woman's voice began speaking. He wasn't sure why he was listening to their messages, but he had a strange feeling that he needed too.
"Hey, Sandra, this is Diana. We're still in Savannah. Ed had a little incident with some crazy guy near the hotel, so we had to get him back to the ER and have it checked out. Anyway, he's not feeling well enough to drive back tonight, so we're staying an extra day. Thanks so much for looking after Clementine, and I promise we'll be back in time before your spring break!"
The woman gave a little chuckle before the message faded away. Percy frowned, and it seemed like there should be at least two people in this house, Sandra the babysitter and the girl she was watching named Clementine. Where were they? He wondered briefly as he thought over the message. Perhaps Sandra left for her spring break? And he only knew of one Savannah, located in Georgia, near the Atlantic. Is that the city they were talking about, and was he in Georgia? This Diana had made it seem like it wasn't that far of a trip. How could he have possibly gotten all the way to Georgia? It was impossible he reassured himself as his breathing quickened with worry. He wondered before the recording system continued with a male automated voice.
"Message two. Left at 11:19 PM."
The woman's voice began, and she sounded a lot more worried and panicked this time around than last. Clearly something had happened between the first message and this one. His skin was tingling as he became worried. He wasn't sure what was happening but it was obviously bad, and it wasn't just in this random town that things were happening this way.
"Oh, my God, finally! I don't know if you tried to reach us; all the calls are getting dropped. They're not letting us leave and aren't telling us anything about Atlanta. Please, please, just leave the city and take Clementine with you back to Marietta. I've got to get back to the hospital. Please let me know that you're safe."
Maybe they had left after all, but they obviously hadn't seen the messages. They were new, according to the device. Although Percy was definitely not an expert with electronics, they usually caused him more trouble than they were worth.
"Message three. Left at 6:51 AM."
The woman's voice appeared again, but this time, she was clearly scared and crying.
"Clementine? Baby, if you can hear this, call the police. That's 9-1-1. We love you...we love you...we love y–"
The recording message beeped as if cut off and a cold fist gripped Percy's heart at the pure anguish in the woman's tone. Percy knew deep down that Clementine's parents were most likely dead. Which also meant, the walking corpses he had seen were probably everywhere as well. He picked up the picture next to the recording system and frowned, it looked like a loving and happy family.
He sighed, whatever was happening was terrifying and had already caused a lot of people pain and anguish. If this girl was still alive, her parents were more than likely already dead. He set it down as he heard a crackle come from the kitchen.
"Daddy?"
A little girl's voice emanated from the kitchen. He frowned, there was no way anyone was in there. He avoided the pool of blood and quickly opened the drawers in the kitchen. In the last drawer he saw a walkie-talkie.
He picked it up, pressing the button on the side, he cautiously whispered out. "Hello?" He said questioningly, the voice had to have come from the walkie-talkie. It was the only way, unless the girl was somehow hiding in the stove. Which Percy doubted.
The little girl's voice responded immediately.
"You have to be quiet." He had figured that but was reassured to be told by someone, even if that someone was a little girl.
"I'm not a monster." He reassured her quietly, although why he felt the need to say that was completely beyond him.
"Good." The girl squeaked back and Percy crept through the house, looking for any sign of a little girl. His confusion was paramount as he didn't see her anywhere. Maybe she was upstairs? He wondered briefly.
He had a feeling that this was the Clementine they were talking about on the voicemails but he wanted to be sure.
"What's your name?" He asked quietly, trying to be a calming presence for the young girl. Percy knew that if he was a young boy and all of this was happening around him, and his mom was gone, he would have been terrified.
"I'm Clementine. This is my house." Percy smiled at her voice, she didn't sound particularly frightened. The little girl was clearly made of sterner stuff. He was also a little smug that he was right. So the little girl was here, where was Sandra, the babysitter? He wondered momentarily.
"Hi Clementine, I'm Percy." He entered the kitchen and stared out the window into the backyard before realization dawned on him. She was probably in the treehouse.
"Are you safe?" He asked as the girl didn't respond.
"I'm outside in my treehouse." She said, confirming Percy's suspicions. "They can't get in."
"That's smart." Percy praised.
"See?" He looked out the window as the door to the treehouse pushed open revealing a little girl. In her hand was the other walkie-talkie.
"Can you see me? I can see you through the window." She said before waving, Percy smiled at her before waving back gently. He was about to ask her where her babysitter was when the girl shrieked in fright, causing him to jump in surprise and the door to the treehouse shut quickly.
He heard the groan right behind him and he spun around quickly, but another one of the dead things was on top of him. This time a girl, potentially the babysitter Sarah. He tried to cut through the girl's head with Riptide but she was too close. Pushing him against the counter, he snarled and shoved as hard as he could. Throwing the girl off of him before he backed away from the walking corpse.
He lost his balance and slipped in the pool of blood that he had momentarily forgotten. His head hit the counter and his vision blurred as he gasped. Ugh, he groaned as it crawled toward him. It grabbed his ankle but he kicked it in the face and it released him as he quickly stumbled to his feet.
Before it could do anything else, he drove Riptide straight through the poor girl's skull. A splatter of dark blood once more sprayed the air, thankfully missing him. The creature stopped moving immediately as he pulled the blade free. He grimaced again as he thought that he just killed a young girl. But pushed the thought aside, clearly it was trying to hurt him. He had merely defended himself.
He made a face as he noticed his shirt and pants covered in blood from the pool he had slipped in. He rubbed his head as he turned toward the glass door to see the little girl shaking, and holding a hammer.
She was about to open the door but Percy rushed to it, he didn't really want to have the young girl see her babysitter's head cut open. He put Riptide through one of his belt loops and opened the door, the girl backed away from him. Her body trembling as Percy took note of her.
She was young, maybe around eight. Small, almost half his own size. She had poofy and curly brunette hair that was tucked into a baseball cap. On the front of the hat was an italic letter D. She wore a white flowy tank top with a long sleeved yellow striped shirt underneath and she was wearing black tights. She was scrawny, and looked to be a mix of African-American and Asian descent. Her amber eyes were large and wide as she looked at him.
"Did you kill it?" She asked, her voice gentle and soft. Percy's heart clenched. A girl this young should not be experiencing these types of things.
"Something else did." He said, trying to assure her that Percy didn't randomly just kill her babysitter. His nerves were on fire and his body was tingling. Just being by those corpses frightened him more than facing Kronos himself for some reason. Perhaps it was because on a level he was familiar with the Titan, and this was something completely different. He wasn't sure.
She nodded at him. "I heard her scream two nights ago. Maybe one of the monsters got her?"
"Two nights ago?" Percy said in disbelief as he kneeled down to look the little girl in her eyes. Had he been lying in that bed for more than two days, or had he just appeared there? He was really confused. Putting aside his confusion for a moment he looked at Clementine closely, she had stopped shaking and was merely looking at him with her wide amber eyes.
"You've been all by yourself through this?" He asked, impressed, for at least two days she had been up in her treehouse holding out as dead people wandered about. This girl could give most adults a run for their money with her bravery.
"Yeah, I want my parents to come home now." She said quietly. Percy could understand that, there was nothing better in his personal opinion than getting a hug from his mother. Unfortunately, he felt immensely sad as he kind of figured that her parents were more than likely dead. Although he was definitely was not going to straight up just tell her that.
"I think that might be a little while." He said gently and she looked at him, a large frown on her face and her eyes watering with unshed tears.
"Oh." Percy felt for her, he was currently thinking about his own family and friends. What had happened to them, was the dead walking around by them as well? It was just horrifying to think about. His mom and Annabeth… He tried to push them out of his mind right now, he had bigger things to worry about. Like keeping this little girl safe.
He put a hand on her shoulder, and she instinctively leaned into his touch. "It's okay, I'll look after you until we find your parents." He said.
She blinked at him owlishly for a moment. "Promise?" She asked and he smiled.
"I promise." She smiled at him.
"What should we do now?" Percy touched his chin in thought.
"We need to find someplace safe nearby, before it gets dark." She nodded at him and he stood. Without a word she sidled up next to him and slid her hand into his. He squeezed it softly to reassure the young girl when he suddenly heard a groan.
Without thinking he pushed Clementine behind him and turned toward the noise to see an African-American man vault over the fence, falling roughly onto the ground. He pulled out his sword but froze as he could hear a lot of intense groaning and moaning from the other side of the fence. The fence shook and wobbled as multiple things pounded against it.
He stayed quiet, knowing that the sound would only make more of them come. The man hadn't even seen the two of them standing there. His back was facing them and he was pushing himself away from the fence. Suddenly, more gunshots rang out in the distance and the pounding against the fence ceased. The man continued staring at the fence as the moaning and groaning vanished and the dead moved on.
The man pushed himself to his feet and turned around, before jumping back at the sight of them. Percy held his blade loosely at his side, he wasn't particularly wary of the man. But he wouldn't hesitate to protect Clementine if he needed to.
"Easy there." Percy said quietly as the guy raised his hands. He took note, the guy was about as tall as him. Perhaps a little bit skinnier than he was, wearing a blue long sleeve button up. His sleeves were rolled up revealing a white undershirt. He wore brown pants, his right leg right above his knee had a nasty gash, blood covering his pant leg. The man was breathing heavily as his brown eyes darted between Percy and Clementine.
"Who are you?" Percy demanded. Still slightly wary of the stranger, although his instincts were telling him that the man before him genuinely meant neither of the two of them were in harm.
"My name is Lee." The stranger now identified as Lee said. "I'm not going to hurt either of you." He promised. "I'm not one of them."
Percy smirked wryly. "I can see that. What happened to your leg?" He asked curiously, gesturing to it.
"Car accident." He said quickly, Percy felt slightly uneasy at the response. Something told him that Lee wasn't telling him the whole story. "What are your names?" He asked.
"I'm Percy, this is Clementine." The little girl was tucked behind his leg, but she peeked out and gave Lee a gentle wave. Percy smiled at the sight, he turned back to see Lee had a smile on his face as well as he waved back to her.
The expression immediately put him at ease and Percy could tell that Lee wasn't a bad man. He only hoped together they could figure out what was going on.