by Rick Riordan
No, I thought. But it was one of his favorite titles.
I decided not to share that information; not here in the dark, with only a jumpy satyr for company. If I confessed what I now knew, Grover and I might break down and sob in each other’s arms, which would be both embarrassing and unhelpful.
We passed the gates of the neighborhood: DESERT PALMS. (Had someone really gotten paid to think up that name?) We continued to the nearest commercial street, where fast-food joints and gas stations shimmered.
“I hoped Mellie and Gleeson would have new information,” Grover said. “They’ve been staying in LA with some demigods. I thought maybe they’d had more luck tracking down the emperor, or finding the heart of the maze.”
“Is that why the Hedge family came to Palm Springs?” I asked. “To share information?”
“Partly.” Grover’s tone hinted at a darker, sadder reason behind Mellie and Gleeson’s arrival, but I didn’t press.
We stopped at a major intersection. Across the boulevard stood a warehouse store with a glowing red sign: MARCO’S MILITARY MADNESS! The parking lot was empty except for an old yellow Pinto parked near the entrance.
I read the store sign again. On second look, I realized the name was not MARCO. It was MACRO. Perhaps I’d developed a bit of demigod dyslexia simply from hanging around them too long.
Military Madness sounded like exactly the sort of place I didn’t want to go. And Macro, as in large worldview or computer program or…something else. Why did that name unleash another herd of ground squirrels into my nervous system?
“It looks closed,” I said dully. “Must be the wrong army-surplus store.”
“No.” Grover pointed to the Pinto. “That’s Gleeson’s car.”
Of course it is, I thought. With my luck, how could it not be?
I wanted to run away. I did not like the way that giant red sign washed the asphalt in bloodstained light. But Grover Underwood had led us through the Labyrinth, and after all his talk about losing friends, I was not about to let him lose another.
“Well, then,” I said, “let’s go find Gleeson Hedge.”
HOW hard could it be to find a satyr in an army-surplus store?
As it turned out, quite hard.
Macro’s Military Madness stretched on forever—aisle after aisle of equipment no self-respecting army would want. Near the entrance, a giant bin with a neon purple sign promised PITH HELMETS! BUY 3, GET 1 FREE! An endcap display featured a Christmas tree built of stacked propane tanks with garlands of blowtorch hoses, and a placard that read ’TIS ALWAYS THE SEASON! Two aisles, each a quarter mile long, were entirely devoted to camouflage clothing in every possible color: desert brown, forest green, arctic gray, and hot pink, just in case your spec-ops team needed to infiltrate a child’s princess-themed birthday party.
Directory signs hung over each lane: HOCKEY HEAVEN, GRENADE PINS, SLEEPING BAGS, BODY BAGS, KEROSENE LAMPS, CAMPING TENTS, LARGE POINTY STICKS. At the far end of the store, perhaps half a day’s hike away, a massive yellow banner screamed FIREARMS!!!
I glanced at Grover, whose face looked even paler under the harsh fluorescents. “Should we start with the camping supplies?” I asked.
The corners of his mouth drifted downward as he scanned a display of rainbow-colored impaling spikes. “Knowing Coach Hedge, he’ll gravitate toward the guns.”
So we started our trek toward the distant promised land of FIREARMS!!!
I didn’t like the store’s too-bright lighting. I didn’t like the too-cheerful canned music, or the too-cold air-conditioning that made the place feel like a morgue.
The handful of employees ignored us. One young man was label-gunning 50% OFF stickers on a row of Porta-Poo™ portable toilets. Another employee stood unmoving and blank-faced at the express register, as if he had achieved boredom-induced nirvana. Each worker wore a yellow vest with the Macro logo on the back: a smiling Roman centurion making the okay sign.
I didn’t like that logo, either.
At the front of the store stood a raised booth with a supervisor’s desk behind a Plexiglas screen, like the warden’s post in a prison. An ox of a man sat there, his bald head gleaming, veins bulging on his neck. His dress shirt and yellow vest could barely contain his bulky arm muscles. His bushy white eyebrows gave him a startled expression. As he watched us walk past, his grin made my skin crawl.
“I don’t think we should be here,” I muttered to Grover.
He eyed the supervisor. “Pretty sure there are no monsters here or I’d smell them. That guy is human.”
This did not reassure me. Some of my least favorite people were human. Nevertheless, I followed Grover deeper into the store.
As he predicted, Gleeson Hedge was in the firearms section, whistling as he stuffed his shopping cart with rifle scopes and barrel brushes.
I saw why Grover called him Coach. Hedge wore bright blue double-weave polyester gym shorts that left his hairy goat legs exposed, a red baseball cap that perched between his small horns, a white polo shirt, and a whistle around his neck, as if he expected at any moment to be called in to referee a soccer game.
He looked older than Grover, judging from his sun-weathered face, but it was hard to be sure with satyrs. They matured at roughly half the speed of humans. I knew Grover was thirty-ish in people years, for instance, but only sixteen in satyr terms. The coach could have been anywhere between forty and a hundred in human time.
“Gleeson!” Grover called.
The coach turned and grinned. His cart overflowed with quivers, crates of ammo, and plastic-sealed rows of grenades that promised FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!!!
“Hey, Underwood!” he said. “Good timing! Help me pick some land mines.”
Grover flinched. “Land mines?”
“Well, they’re just empty casings,” Gleeson said, gesturing toward a row of metal canisters that looked like canteens, “but I figured we could fill them with explosives and make them active again! You like the World War II models or the Vietnam-era kind?”
“Uh…” Grover grabbed me and shoved me forward. “Gleeson, this is Apollo.”
Gleeson frowned. “Apollo…like Apollo Apollo?” He scanned me from head to toe. “It’s even worse than we thought. Kid, you gotta do more core exercises.”
“Thanks.” I sighed. “I’ve never heard that before.”
“I could whip you into shape,” Hedge mused. “But first, help me out. Stake mines? Claymores? What do you think?”
“I thought you were buying camping supplies.”
Gleeson arched his brow. “These are camping supplies. If I have to be outdoors with my wife and kid, holed up in that cistern, I’m going to feel a lot better knowing I’m armed to the teeth and surrounded by pressure-detonated explosives! I got a family to protect!”
“But…” I glanced at Grover, who shook his head as if to say Don’t even try.
At this point, dear reader, you may be wondering Apollo, why would you object? Gleeson Hedge has it right! Why mess around with swords and bows when you can fight monsters with land mines and machine guns?
Alas, when one is fighting ancient forces, modern weapons are unreliable at best. The mechanisms of standard mortal-made guns and bombs tend to jam in supernatural situations. Explosions may or may not get the job done, and regular ammunition only serves to annoy most monsters. Some heroes do indeed use firearms, but their ammo must be crafted from magical metals—Celestial bronze, Imperial gold, Stygian iron, and so on.
Unfortunately, these materials are rare. Magically crafted bullets are finicky. They can be used only once before disintegrating, whereas a sword made from magical metal will last for millennia. It’s simply impractical to “spray and pray” when fighting a gorgon or a hydra.
“I think you already have a great assortment of supplies,” I said. “Besides, Mellie is worried. You’ve been gone all day.”
“No, I haven’t!” Hedge protested. “Wait. What time is it?”
“After dark,” Grover s
aid.
Coach Hedge blinked. “Seriously? Ah, hockey pucks. I guess I spent too long in the grenade aisle. Well, fine. I suppose—”
“Excuse me,” said a voice at my back.
The subsequent high-pitched yelp may have come from Grover. Or possibly me, who can be sure? I spun around to find that the huge bald man from the supervisor’s booth had sneaked up behind us. This was quite a trick, since he was almost seven feet tall and must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was flanked by two employees, both staring impassively into space, holding label guns.
The manager grinned, his bushy white eyebrows creeping heavenward, his teeth the many colors of tombstone marble.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” he said. “We don’t get many celebrities and I just—I had to be sure. Are you Apollo? I mean…the Apollo?”
He sounded delighted by the possibility. I looked at my satyr companions. Gleeson nodded. Grover shook his head vigorously.
“And if I were Apollo?” I asked the manager.
“Oh, we’d comp your purchases!” the manager cried. “We’d roll out the red carpet!”
That was a dirty trick. I’d always been a sucker for the red carpet.
“Well, then, yes,” I said, “I’m Apollo.”
The manager squealed—a sound not unlike the Erymanthian Boar made that time I shot him in the hindquarters. “I knew it! I’m such a fan. My name is Macro. Welcome to my store!”
He glanced at his two employees. “Bring out the red carpet so we can roll Apollo up in it, will you? But first let’s make the satyrs’ deaths quick and painless. This is such an honor!”
The employees raised their labeling guns, ready to mark us down as clearance items.
“Wait!” I cried.
The employees hesitated. Up close, I could see how much they looked alike: the same greasy mops of dark hair, the same glazed eyes, the same rigid postures. They might have been twins, or—a horrible thought seeped into my brain—products of the same assembly line.
“I, um, er…” I said, poetic to the last. “What if I’m not really Apollo?”
Macro’s grin lost some of its wattage. “Well, then, I’d have to kill you for disappointing me.”
“Okay, I’m Apollo,” I said. “But you can’t just kill your customers. That’s no way to run an army-surplus store!”
Behind me, Grover wrestled with Coach Hedge, who was desperately trying to claw open a family fun pack of grenades while cursing the tamper-proof packaging.
Macro clasped his meaty hands. “I know it’s terribly rude. I do apologize, Lord Apollo.”
“So…you won’t kill us?”
“Well, as I said, I won’t kill you. The emperor has plans for you. He needs you alive!”
“Plans,” I said.
I hated plans. They reminded me of annoying things like Zeus’s once-a-century goal-setting meetings, or dangerously complicated attacks. Or Athena.
“B-but my friends,” I stammered. “You can’t kill the satyrs. A god of my stature can’t be rolled up in a red carpet without my retinue!”
Macro regarded the satyrs, who were still fighting over the plastic-wrapped grenades.
“Hmm,” said the manager. “I’m sorry, Lord Apollo, but you see, this may be my only chance to get back into the emperor’s good graces. I’m fairly sure he won’t want the satyrs.”
“You mean…you’re out of the emperor’s good graces?”
Macro heaved a sigh. He began rolling up his sleeves as if he expected some hard, dreary satyr-murdering ahead. “I’m afraid so. I certainly didn’t ask to be exiled to Palm Springs! Alas, the princeps is very particular about his security forces. My troops malfunctioned one too many times, and he shipped us out here. He replaced us with that horrible assortment of strixes and mercenaries and Big Ears. Can you believe it?”
I could neither believe it nor understand it. Big ears?
I examined the two employees, still frozen in place, label guns ready, eyes unfocused, faces expressionless.
“Your employees are automatons,” I realized. “These are the emperor’s former troops?”
“Alas, yes,” Macro said. “They are fully capable, though. Once I deliver you, the emperor will surely see that and forgive me.”
His sleeves were above his elbows now, revealing old white scars, as if his forearms had been clawed by a desperate victim many years ago….
I remembered my dream of the imperial palace, the praetor kneeling before his new emperor.
Too late, I remembered the name of that praetor. “Naevius Sutorius Macro.”
Macro beamed at his robotic employees. “I can’t believe Apollo remembers me. This is such an honor!”
His robotic employees remained unimpressed.
“You killed Emperor Tiberius,” I said. “Smothered him with a pillow.”
Macro looked abashed. “Well, he was ninety percent dead already. I simply helped matters along.”
“And you did it for”—an ice-cold burrito of dread sank into my stomach—“the next emperor. Neos Helios. It is him.”
Macro nodded eagerly. “That’s right! The one, the only Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus!”
He spread his arms as if waiting for applause.
The satyrs stopped fighting. Hedge continued chewing on the grenade pack, though even his satyr teeth were having trouble with the thick plastic.
Grover backed away, putting the cart between himself and the store employees. “G-Gaius who?” He glanced at me. “Apollo, what does that mean?”
I gulped. “It means we run. Now!”
MOST satyrs excel at running away.
Gleeson Hedge, however, was not most satyrs. He grabbed a barrel brush from his cart, yelled “DIE!” and charged the three-hundred-pound manager.
Even the automatons were too surprised to react, which probably saved Hedge’s life. I grabbed the satyr’s collar and dragged him backward as the employees’ first shots went wild, a barrage of bright orange discount stickers flying over our heads.
I pulled Hedge down the aisle as he launched a fierce kick, overturning his shopping cart at our enemies’ feet. Another discount sticker grazed my arm with the force of an angry Titaness’s slap.
“Careful!” Macro yelled at his men. “I need Apollo in one piece, not half-off!”
Gleeson clawed at the shelves, grabbed a demo-model Macro’s Self-Lighting Molotov Cocktail™ (BUY ONE, GET TWO FREE!), and tossed it at the store employees with the battle cry “Eat surplus!”
Macro shrieked as the Molotov cocktail landed amid Hedge’s scattered ammo boxes and, true to its advertising, burst into flames.
“Up and over!” Hedge tackled me around the waist. He slung me over his shoulder like a sack of soccer balls and scaled the shelves in an epic display of goat-climbing, leaping into the next aisle as crates of ammunition exploded behind us.
We landed in a pile of rolled-up sleeping bags.
“Keep moving!” Hedge yelled, as if the thought might not have occurred to me.
I scrambled after him, my ears ringing. From the aisle we’d just left, I heard bangs and screams as if Macro were running across a hot skillet strewn with popcorn kernels.
I saw no sign of Grover.
When we reached the end of the aisle, a store clerk rounded the corner, his label gun raised.
“Hi-YA!” Hedge executed a roundhouse kick on him.
This was a notoriously difficult move. Even Ares sometimes fell and broke his tailbone when practicing it in his dojo (witness the Ares-so-lame video that went viral on Mount Olympus last year, and which I absolutely was not responsible for uploading).
To my surprise, Coach Hedge executed it perfectly. His hoof connected with the clerk’s face, knocking the automaton’s head clean off. The body dropped to its knees and fell forward, wires sparking in its neck.
“Wow.” Gleeson examined his hoof. “I guess that Iron Goat conditioning wax really works!”
The clerk’s decapitated bod
y gave me flashbacks to the Indianapolis blemmyae, who lost their fake heads with great regularity, but I had no time to dwell on the terrible past when I had such a terrible present to deal with.
Behind us, Macro called, “Oh, what have you done now?”
The manager stood at the far end of the lane, his clothes smeared with soot, his yellow vest peppered with so many holes it looked like a smoking piece of Swiss cheese. Yet somehow—just my luck—he appeared unharmed. The second store clerk stood behind him, apparently unconcerned that his robotic head was on fire.
“Apollo,” Macro chided, “there’s no point in fighting my automatons. This is a military-surplus store. I have fifty more just like these in storage.”
I glanced at Hedge. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Yeah.” Hedge grabbed a croquet mallet from a nearby rack. “Fifty may be too many even for me.”
We skirted the camping tents, then zigzagged through Hockey Heaven, trying to make our way back to the store entrance. A few aisles away, Macro was shouting orders: “Get them! I’m not going to be forced to commit suicide again!”
“Again?” Hedge muttered, ducking under the arm of a hockey mannequin.
“He worked for the emperor.” I panted, trying to keep up. “Old friends. But—wheeze—emperor didn’t trust him. Ordered his arrest—wheeze—execution.”
We stopped at an endcap. Gleeson peeked around the corner for signs of hostiles.
“So Macro committed suicide instead?” Hedge asked. “What a moron. Why’s he working for this emperor again, if the guy wanted him killed?”
I wiped the sweat from my eyes. Honestly, why did mortal bodies have to sweat so much? “I imagine the emperor brought him back to life, gave him a second chance. Romans have strange ideas about loyalty.”
Hedge grunted. “Speaking of which, where’s Grover?”
“Halfway back to the Cistern, if he’s smart.”
Hedge frowned. “Nah. Can’t believe he’d do that. Well…” He pointed ahead, where sliding glass doors led out to the parking lot. The coach’s yellow Pinto was parked tantalizingly close—which is the first time yellow, Pinto, and tantalizingly have ever been used together in a sentence. “You ready?”