Gunner opened the door, and we started running.
Blue lights winked above us, and our feet pounded the carpeted floor. At each intersection I expected an ambush, but we made it to the fourth and turned left.
“I don’t see any marks!” said Gunner.
Had we guessed wrong? Maybe that was why there was no ambush: we’d gone the wrong way. Rats lost in the Microsoft maze. We needed Sad-eyes to find our way home.
“Down there!” said Ape-man.
I glimpsed 520 gashed in the wall. This was the way we’d come in with Scranny. At the end of the corridor lay the room with the wall we’d breached.
Gunner led us, pistol raised. I glanced behind. Yoshio, in the rear, was making sure nothing snuck up behind us.
“Señor Tomb,” called Raisin. “If you don’t let us go peaceful, we gonna beat the crap out of you.”
Gunner chuckled. “You tell ‘em, girl.”
The corridor ended with a shattered window flush against the entombment wall, and our room on the left. We filed in. It looked the same as when we’d left it.
“It’s letting us go,” said Raisin.
The ceiling collapsed. Raisin screamed.
Girls leapt down on Gunner. More dropped from the doorway ceiling, trapping us.
Gunner fired twice, then four girls grabbed his arms and legs, lifting him in the air.
Ape-man swung his ax, taking out one near Raisin, but they knocked him down.
I swung my crowbar at the girl nearest me. It slashed the side of the thing’s face, exposing carbon frame and fiber optics.
Gunner struggled in the air. I attacked the girl holding his gun arm, raining steel blows against its skull, but it didn’t release him.
“I need the gun!” I shouted.
Gunner’s eyes met mine, and he let the gun drop.
I leapt, catching it before the girl could, and crashed onto the tabletop. As I turned to sit up, a girl landed on my chest, knocking my breath out. I fumbled with the gun in my hands and suddenly saw that the girl had a gun, too. It raised Scranny’s Colt .45 in both hands, aimed precisely between my eyes and pulled the trigger. My jaw froze.
Click.
Click.
I got the harmonica pistol turned in my hands and fired. On my third shot, the fembot froze up.
Every girl in the room turned toward me. I was pinned by the dead fembot. I began firing single shots, not knowing how to change to full auto.
I’d already lost count of shots, of the need to save five. Hands grabbed my ankles, trying to pull me off the table. I kept firing. From the corner of my eye I saw Ape-man on his feet again, swinging his ax. Yoshio protected Raisin, who still held the torch.
Pulled from the table, I fell heavily to the floor. The dead fembot tumbled off. I shot the girls holding my legs, firing as fast as I could pull the trigger.
“Gimme the pistol!” shouted Gunner.
I saw he was on his feet now, but fembots reached toward me, clambering over the dead ones. I kept firing.
Suddenly the gun was empty. I ejected the hot clip and threw the pistol toward Gunner. It bounced off the wall and landed on the carpet. Gunner grabbed it.
The girls turned toward him.
He snapped in the spare clip and began firing.
Bullets thudded into the walls. I crawled on the floor, trying to find the box of cartridges I’d dropped.
I found it under the table and began filling the clip. My trembling fingers dropped cartridges. A bullet careened off the tabletop over my head.
A girl crouched in front of me, reached toward me, then shook and froze. Between the bangs of Gunner’s pistol, I heard the thud of ax blows. We still had light from the torch. That meant Raisin still held it.
Abruptly the shots ceased along with the ax blows. Fembots littered the floor, some twitching. As my hearing recovered, I heard the whine of servos and gears. Ape-man and Yoshio panted from exertion.
“Go!” shouted Gunner, “Before it sends more. Yoshio, help Raisin out.”
I scooted from under the table, still pushing cartridges into the clip. Yoshio set his ax on the table, then climbed on and helped Raisin up. She handed Gunner her torch.
Yoshio climbed up through the hole. “Gordito!” he called, then turned and reached back for Raisin’s hand. I stepped onto the table to boost her up through the hole.
“Go on,” Ape-man said to me. He picked up Scranny’s pistol.
I tossed Gunner the clip and started to climb through.
By moonlight, I saw Yoshio and Raisin arranging the rope to rappel down tandem. Yoshio looped the free end of the rope around a piece of rebar, then handed it to me.
“I heard shots!” Gordito called from below.
“It went bad,” said Yoshio. “Did anything come out of the tomb?”
“Two girls. Looked like twins.”
“They weren’t no girls,” said Raisin.
Yoshio leaned back and they began rappelling down. I took their place atop the broken concrete, letting out rope for them.
“I called to them, but they didn’t stop,” said Gordito. “And Scranny said to stay with the horses.”
Raisin choked back a sob, and my throat tightened. Scranny wasn’t coming back. At least not the Scranny we knew.
“Good looting?” asked Gordito.
I remembered Scranny’s warning. “It’s a tomb,” I said, “not a 7-11.”
IN THE SHADOW OF VESUVIUS
by
DARYL WAYNE
“Tiger One to Base, Tiger One to Base, over.”
“We read you Tiger One, over.”
“Stinger scrub… have to turn back…”
The rest of his message was lost in a stream of static.
“Tiger One, repeat, over.”
“Stinger scrub… have to abort… CARDINAL… can’t see… Coming under heavy a…”
“Tiger One, repeat, over.”
“Tiger One, this is base, repeat, over.”
“Tiger One, come in.”
He reached out and clicked the STOP button on the tape player. There was no need to hear Base calling Tiger One another seven times to no response. He’d listened closely to the tape numerous times, long after it stopped offering new information. Base had been convinced his father had come under a fierce German attack and tried to scramble fighters, but they never left the ground. Something else had other plans. It was the same something else that had disrupted his father’s flight. That something else was Mount Vesuvius and the heavy barrage on his father was not German flak, but ash striking the plane.
Jordan “Jordie” Danielson, or Tiger Two, as his father affectionately nicknamed him, thumbed open the leatherbound book, moving aside a knitted red bookmark his mother had made and sent overseas. He reread the second to last entry:
March 16, 1944
Day 453
Too many goddamn days of this wretched war. I try not to think of my own misery and loneliness and how much I miss my wife and son. It is much worse for others, lying in battlefield cesspools or in trenches in danger of collapse on the front line or in a cold and damp field hospital waiting to die. I’m fortunate to be in Terzigno, but it’s far from a safe haven. Colonel Jones still hasn’t returned from his training mission and we all fear the worst. The idea of losing our C.O. has affected the men in different ways. It has firmed the resolve of some and sent others into despair. The locals are trying to spook us with their incessant talk of a god rising up to rid their beloved Italy of both the Germans and us. They say our bombs and noise of war are angering some spirit of the mountain… something along those lines anyway. The Latin I took in high school is only helpful to a certain point and my Italian is admittedly not what it could be. The murmurs of the locals cause no alarm with me. It may be stupid courage, but I truly have no fear when I’m in the air. Those roaring 2600s can be very soothing. Of course, mighty as they are, they can’t soothe everything. If I could be back home, fixing the deck or cleaning up the yard in preparation
for summer, as I would be if I wasn’t thirty missions short of finishing this seemingly endless tour… I would gladly make the trade. I’m volunteering for an “off the path” mission that will count for five of those thirty and hope like hell I can get out before they raise the mission level again. I miss my car. I miss those stupid bushes in the front that never seem to hold their shape after I trim them. I miss my life.
His fingers traced the map of his father’s projected mission flight path. Base had estimated his plane lost contact around Boscoreale, but wouldn’t tell him the ultimate destination. They insisted he was on a routine training mission when the plane lost radio contact.
He closed his eyes and pictured the falling ash and tephra the plane must have hit. The path seemed to suggest a southwesterly course from Terzigno, but that meant nothing. Where the plane actually went may or may not have had anything to do with any flight plan, especially when Tiger One radioed about scrubbing the mission, unless that was for the benefit of any German radio transmission interceptors. When the volcano let loose, he imagined all bets were off and his father would have tried any possible maneuver he thought might lead to safety.
Jordie was stalling, he knew, but he thumbed over the next and final page in the diary to read the entry there:
March 17, 1944
Day 454
The last night before the secret mission. HQ is calling it a “lonesome crow” flight and I am to log no flight plan nor will the time I spend on it officially count as flight hours. As far as the 340th Bombardment Group is concerned, I am in my bed, sleeping during those night hours and certainly not in the air. I imagine they will credit it on record later as a special training mission or some other military jargon. I still don’t know what the mission is. It must be super top secret for them to wait this long for briefing. I’ve been told to be in the air before I open the coded envelope that tells me what it is that I’ll be doing. I will have no air support, no friendly company up there in the clouds. I wouldn’t normally agree to a phantom flight, but the enticement of making up five flights for the price of one and their assurance that it will be a milk run is too much to refuse. Then again, refusing might not have made much difference. I suppose had I declined, they would have simply ordered me to do it. In that case, though, the mission would have to be officially sanctioned and would have only counted as one. Knowing them, they would have also raised the level again. Although no one in the base knows about the mission (my basic instructions were coded, sealed and delivered by blind courier), the locals have sensed something is up. They keep pulling at my sleeve and asking for rations, then saying a phrase before parting. I have not heard them say it to anyone else and when I asked the men, not only had they not heard it, they asked me what it meant. The phrase was “caveo vertices di isis”, which I translate as “Beware vortex or vortexes.” The other part sounds like something to do with Isis, but we’re nowhere near Egypt. It doesn’t make any sense. That by itself I would normally consider odd, a mere curiosity, yet I have a sense of vague trepidation. It should be expected, I guess and a healthy sense of caution is necessary when flying any mission, Hell, when leaving the ground at all, especially in the theatre of war. We never know what Jerry will do or where he will be, so best to be wise and alert at all times.
Jordie wiped a tear from his eye and gently closed the book. He had read that last entry a thousand times and it still had an irresistible power over him.
He was nine, almost ten, when that last letter from his father came, heavy line-outs blocking sections of the text, making it look like a crossword puzzle. The family also received a collection of old letters, a folded flag, some clothing, a few Italian souvenirs, some money and his father’s diary. His mother refused to look at any of those things and cried for days. His grandmother had moved into the house, first to comfort her daughter, then permanently once it became clear her daughter would remain inconsolable. Jordie had never quite believed his father was gone for good. It still seemed impossible. He stood up and walked to the window of the hotel overlooking Scavi di Pompeii and sighed.
Many were the days he spent looking out his bedroom on the second floor of the bungalow in tiny Pearl City, Texas, dreaming about the reunion between father and son. Neither he nor his father had aged in his initial fantasies, but as time went on, the reunion changed from Jordie running across the lawn and flinging himself into his father’s arms and became something more dignified. By the time he graduated, he had to look at old photographs to remember his father’s face, but his reunion vision was unshakable.
It had taken a lot of petitioning and a degree of outright begging, but eventually a kindly Air Force archivist had relented and made him a copy of the tape containing his father’s final words. He’d almost worn the thing out, listening to it again and again. Wrapped around the tape was a mimeograph of the ill-fated flight plan his father had received. Jordie had nearly missed it and only happened by chance to glance into the garbage can and notice the writing on the packaging.
His high school years were spent in heavy study of World War II history and poring over maps obsessively. If he were inclined to hazard a best guess about his father’s mission, he’d estimate it was investigating pockets of the 16th Panzer Division in the hills around Salerno. The Air Force would neither confirm nor deny his suspicions and refused to acknowledge there was any mission at all, stating flatly and officially that his father had lost radio contact during regulation standard air maneuvers. The plane was never recovered and was assumed destroyed. Lost without confirmation was not an unusual fate for planes and pilots in World War II and the Air Force could cite numerous other examples if he wanted them. He didn’t. He wanted his father. Jordie booked a flight to Naples and bought an Italian phrase book at the airport to study on the flight.
***
It didn’t go as planned. The cab driver who picked him up tried to take a much longer trip in the wrong direction, north to Nettuno, where there was a United States soldier memorial. After realizing his mistake in telling the driver he was looking for his father who never came back from the war, Jordie shrieked “No!” in the backseat until the driver finally stopped the car. He’d brought out the map and showed the driver Boscoreale, since he intended to follow his father’s flight path on foot, starting from where the plane lost radio contact. His driver shook his head and pointed to Pompeii on the map, stabbed the paper with his finger and drew a circle around the city. “Is good hotel, si?”
Jordie flipped open his phrase book to try and find a better wording to explain again, then closed it and shook his head slightly. He said, “Si,” and settled back. He was tired from the flight and hadn’t the energy for further crippled and halting wordplay. Once he got to a hotel, he could get settled in and start backtracking in the morning. He had to cover the ground anyway.
***
Now, in the Hotel Villa dei Misteri, he watched the mists clearing in the morning sun. Bright and hot as the day was becoming, it could not shake away his cloud of dismay. The speech of the Italian natives, if the cabbie and the hotel staff were any indication, was too fast for Jordie to navigate easily and he couldn’t tolerate the idea of spending time to ask them to speak slowly enough for him to find the phrases in his book and respond. It would take ages to do anything and the thought of further delay created waves of internal anxiety. This left him flying as solo as his dad on that last flight.
Without money enough to steadily use a cab, without time to quickly learn enough Italian to rent a car or use the public busses, he would have to either find a way to rent a bike or go on foot. Jordie had harbored earnest hopes of being able to solve the mystery of his father before his money ran out, but as it stood, his search would run long and he’d be out of money well before he was close. Without speaking the language, he couldn’t get a job to get more money and would thus be stranded.
The resolve and excitement, from when he boarded the plane in Fort Worth, had nearly evaporated. There was a dark pall over him, much as h
e imagined must have been over the whole area when Vesuvius blew. Jordie had seen pictures of other bombers in his father’s squad covered with ashes, servicemen standing on the wings with giant brooms trying to rid the planes of the dark blanket. He’d spent years preparing and now he was here, feet on the ground in the country that presumably held his father and he had no idea what to do next.
***
Leaving the room and going downstairs, he hoped breakfast might steady him. Finding a seat at an empty table, Jordie waited patiently, with only a small amount of nervous finger drumming, until a waitress came over. She held a pad of paper and looked at him. He stared back. She smiled and said, “Colazione?” With a start, he realized he’d left his phrase book upstairs. He couldn’t very well leave her there waiting while he went back to the room upstairs to get it, so he dazedly nodded and hoped for the best. Breakfast was not turning out to be so steadying.
Jordie put his head in his hands and slumped forward, looking up only as the waitress brought him a cup of what looked like heavily creamed coffee and a slice of something between cake and bread. She waited expectantly and he opened his mouth to say something, then closed it abruptly and nodded. “Si. Grazie.”
“Prego, Signore.”
When Jordie was alone again, he brought the cup to his lips and sampled the liquid. It was coffee, not half-bad, just not as dark and strong as he liked first thing in the morning. Trying the bread-cake thing, he decided it was an Italian version of a roll. He was chewing thoughtfully when a small swarthy man pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. Jordie sighed loudly. His second day in Italia and already he was finding the cultural mannerisms almost too much to bear. It would probably be considered rude for him to leave the table and the last thing he wanted was a fistfight due to a misunderstanding. Unsure of what to do, he continued slurping his coffee and working at his bread-cake.
The other man also seemed to be contemplating something. Pulling out a pack of cigarettes in a red box, he shook one out further than the others and extended the pack across the table. “Sigarette?”
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