The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(15)

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 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 favourite 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 trolley 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 towards a row of metal canisters that looked like flasks, ‘but I figured we could fill them with explosives and make them active again! You like the World War Two 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 said.

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 round 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 colours 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.