Chapter 13:I Plunge To My Death

Dear Journal,





We spent two days on the Amtrak train, heading west through the hills, over rivers, past amber waves of grain. It's good we weren't attacked once, but I didn't relax. I felt that we were being watched from above and maybe from below, that something was waiting for the right opportunity. I tried to keep a low profile because I was all over the front pages of newspapers. One newspaper had a picture of me, with a sword in my hands. I read the picture's caption beside it and it said, "Twelve year old Percy Jackson, wanted for questioning in the Long Island disappearance of his mother two weeks ago, is shown here fleeing from the bus where he accosted several elderly female passengers. The bus exploded on an east New Jersey roadside shortly after Jackson fled the scene. Based on eyewitness accounts, police believe the boy may be travelling with two teenage accomplices. His stepfather, Gabe Ugliano, has offered a cash reward for information leading to his capture." After I read this I was really worried that the Police might find me. "Don't worry, Mortal police could never find us." But she didn't look so sure of it.

The rest of the day I spent the whole time pacing the whole length of the train because I had a really hard time trying to sit down, or I just spent my time looking out the window. There were so many things that I saw when I looked out the window, once I spotted a family of centaurs galloping across a wheat field, bows at the ready, as they hunted for lunch. The little boy centaur, who looked like the size of a second grader on a pony, caught my eye and waved. I looked around the train, but nobody else had noticed the centaurs. Another time, toward evening, I saw something huge moving through the woods. I knew it was a lion moving through the woods, but lions don't live wild in America., and the animal was the size of a hummer. Our reward money for returning Gladiola was only enough to purchase tickets as far as Denver. We couldn't get a place to sleep in the sleeping car, so we just stayed in our seats and slept. Grover kept snoring and bleating and waking me up, he did this so many times that his fake foot fell off and we had to put it back before the other passengers noticed it. After me and Annabeth finished putting the fake leg back on she talked about her childhood and how she got into Camp Half-Blood. Her life was really complicated, and it was kind of sad of where she had to go through.

Toward the end of our second day on the train, eight days before the summer solstice, we passed through some golden hills and over the Mississippi river into St. Louis. We started going up, inside the Arch. I'd never been in an elevator that went in a curve, and I wasn't feeling so good. Then we ran into a fat lady that had a chihuahua. Something was weird about the chihuahua, it kept growling at us, even when the fat lady told the dog to be quiet. The dog looked to be very vicious and I was kinda thinking it was a monster. The dog kept barking and barking until one boy came up and said "Look a dog!" Then the dog's bark became a roar. The little boy screamed and went away to his parents. The dog changed into a chimera and it was so tall! It's back rubbed against the roof. It's head was the size of a lion, the body and hooves of a giant goat, and a serpent for a tail. Even the fat lady changed, Echidna was a snake lady. I had to face a fire breathing monster and its mother. They took my sword out and it went all the way in the water. Then Echidna told told me that if I was the son of the sea God she wouldn't harm. I had no choice but to jump in and retrieve my sword, it was actually a bad idea. I was stuck in the middle of nowhere!