Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
5
5
"FFFFffffff," it hissed, sea foam dripping from its mouth. The smell coming off it was like a
garbage can full of fish sticks that had been sitting in the sun all week.
Alarms blared. Soon I was going to have lots of company and I had to keep moving.
"Hey, crabby." I inched around the edge of the courtyard. "I'm just gonna scoot around you
so—"
The crab moved with amazing speed. It scuttled out of the fountain and came straight at me,
pincers snapping. 1 dove into a gift shop, plowing through a rack of T-shirts. A crab pincer smashed
the glass walls to pieces and raked across the room. I dashed back outside, breathing heavily, but
Mr. Crabby turned and followed.
"There!" a voice said from a balcony above me. "Intruder!"
If I'd wanted to create a distraction, I'd succeeded, but this was not where I wanted to fight. If
I got pinned down in the center of the ship, I was crab chow.
The demonic crustacean lunged at me. I sliced with Riptide, taking off the tip of its claw. It
hissed and foamed, but didn't seem very hurt.
I tried to remember anything from the old stories that might help with this thing. Annabeth
had told me about a monster crab—something about Hercules crushing it under his foot? That
wasn't going to work here. This crab was slightly bigger than my Reeboks.
Then a weird thought occurred to me. Last Christmas, my mom and I had brought Paul
Blofis to our old cabin at Montauk, where we'd been going forever. Paul had taken me crabbing, and
when he'd brought up a net full of the things, he'd shown me how crabs have a chink in their armor,
right in the middle of their ugly bellies.
The only problem was getting to the ugly belly.
I glanced at the fountain, then at the marble floor, already slick from scuttling crab tracks. I
held out my hand, concentrating on the water, and the fountain exploded. Water sprayed
everywhere, three stories high, dousing the balconies and the elevators and the windows of the
shops. The crab didn't care. It loved water. It came at me sideways, snapping and hissing, and I ran
straight at it, screaming, "AHHHHHHH!"
Just before we collided, I hit the ground baseball-style and slid on the wet marble floor
straight under the creature. It was like sliding under a seven-ton armored vehicle. All the crab had to
do was sit and squash me, but before it realized what was going