The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(17)

I pulled Hedge down the aisle as he launched a fierce kick, overturning his shopping trolley 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 footballs 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 pan 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 practising 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 body 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 assistant 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 the end of the aisle. 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, Pintos and tantalizingly have ever been used together in a sentence. ‘You ready?’

We charged the doors.

The doors did not cooperate. I slammed into one and bounced right off. Gleeson hammered at the glass with his croquet mallet, then tried a few Chuck Norris kicks, but even his Iron-Goat-waxed hooves didn’t leave a scratch.

Behind us, Macro said, ‘Oh, dear.’

I turned, trying to suppress a whimper. The manager stood twenty feet away, under a whitewater raft that was suspended from the ceiling with a sign across its prow: BOATLOADS OF SAVINGS! I was beginning to appreciate why the emperor had ordered Macro arrested and executed. For such a big man, he was much too good at sneaking up on people.

‘Those glass doors are bombproof,’ Macro said. ‘We have some for sale this week in our fallout shelter improvement department, but I suppose that wouldn’t do you any good.’

From various aisles, more yellow-vested employees converged – a dozen identical automatons, some covered in bubble wrap as if they’d just broken out of storage. They formed a rough semicircle behind Macro.

I drew my bow. I fired a shot at Macro, but my hands shook so badly the arrow missed, embedding itself in an automaton’s bubble-wrapped forehead with a crisp pop! The robot barely seemed to notice.