Flashback Four #4

by Dan Gutman

  The Flashback Four jammed themselves together. Jones typed several commands into the computer.

  “Remember,” Ms. Gunner told the kids, “you are only going to Weehawken to shoot this video. That is your sole purpose. You’re not going there to sightsee or bring back souvenirs. You take video, not things.”

  “We know the drill,” Luke said, slightly irritated. “We’ve done this before. That’s why you chose us, right?”

  “I know, I know,” Ms. Gunner replied. “I’m just making sure. Be careful not disturb the past in any way. You don’t need to talk to anybody or interact with anything. Got it?”

  “Got it,” the Flashback Four said.

  “Are you ready?”

  “We’ve been ready,” David said.

  “Are you nervous?” asked Ms. Gunner. It almost seemed like she was stalling for time.

  The kids weren’t nervous. Well, maybe a little. How could you not be? But after going to Gettysburg, Pompeii, and the Titanic, the Flashback Four were now experienced time travelers. Like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it. They no longer needed to be told to brace themselves, or to close their eyes. They knew exactly how the Board worked and exactly what was going to happen.

  “Let’s light this candle,” said Luke.

  “Okay, do it, Jones,” Ms. Gunner instructed.

  Jones typed the last few commands into the computer keyboard.

  “Oh, and be sure to text me every step of the way,” said Ms. Gunner. “And get that video! That’s the important thing. Your number one priority.”

  “We know, we know,” said David wearily. “Just give it a rest already.”

  Jones looked up at the screen. Then he looked at the Board. Then he looked up at the screen again. He had a concerned look on his face.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Ms. Gunner.

  “Nothing’s happening,” Jones finally said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Oh, great,” said David. “It’s busted.”

  “Serves ’em right, stealing the Board from Miss Z,” muttered Julia.

  Ms. Gunner and Jones put their heads together, feverishly trying to figure out what they had done wrong. They were muttering some gibberish about megabytes and warp speeds and other incomprehensible jargon, but the kids couldn’t make it out. It looked like the mission would have to be scrapped.

  “Did you hit the ENTER key?” shouted David.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Jones.

  He tapped the ENTER key. There was a short buzzing sound, and then the five bands of color—red, green, blue, orange, and yellow—flashed on the Board.

  “Okay, it’s working!” shouted Jones. “This is it!”

  “Oh, one last thing,” hollered Ms. Jones as the Board flashed on and off. “Needless to say, if something should go wrong and any of you get hurt, disappear, or die, NOYB will disavow all knowledge of your existence. Do you understand that? This is your risk, not ours.”

  “Isn’t it a little late to be telling us that?” shouted David.

  “Better late than never,” said Ms. Gunner.

  “I thought you said nothing was going to go wrong!” hollered Isabel.

  “Nothing will go wrong,” said Ms. Gunner. “But if it does—”

  She didn’t have the chance to finish her thought. There was a flash of light and an explosion of sound. The five bands of color merged together to form one band of intense white light.

  “You’d better close your eyes!” Luke shouted to Gunner and Jones. “It’s about to get really bright in here.”

  Gunner and Jones put their hands over their faces to shield their eyes. No matter where they looked, it was like staring into the sun. They could still see the light through their eyelids.

  “It’s blinding!” Jones hollered.

  The band of white light jumped off the Board with a sharp crackle as it stretched a few feet away from the surface, toward the Flashback Four.

  Then the humming sound kicked in, a low-frequency rumbling. It sounded like a thousand people humming at the same time. The floor was vibrating. It felt like the whole building was coming apart.

  “I hope we don’t blow a fuse and lose power,” said Jones.

  The band of white light had made a connection with the Flashback Four. It was pulling them in.

  “I feel it!” David yelled.

  “Here we go!” yelled Luke.

  One by one, the kids started flickering, like a fluorescent lightbulb that was about to blow.

  “Look! It’s happening!” shouted Ms. Gunner.

  “Hold on!” hollered Julia.

  The Flashback Four grabbed one another’s shoulders for support. They had reached the point of no return. They were transitioning out of the twenty-first century and into the nineteenth.

  Gunner and Jones could only stare, openmouthed.

  There was one last flash of light, a puff of smoke, and the Flashback Four vanished. The noise, the lights, and the vibrations came to a crashing halt. Everything was quiet, almost peaceful.

  “Wow!” Ms. Gunner said, gasping for breath. “The thing really works!”

  CHAPTER 9

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 1804

  ISABEL AND LUKE CRASHED INTO EACH OTHER AS they landed, bumping heads and falling down in a patch of dirt. David nearly ran into a tree. Julia tripped over a rock and stepped on something soft. It was a rat.

  “Eeeek!” Julia shouted after the rat squealed to let her know it was displeased.

  The rat managed to scurry away unharmed, but Julia might have been scarred for life.

  “Ugh! I stepped on something that was alive!” she screamed. “I think it was a rat! I think I may have to throw up!”

  “Shhhhhh!” said Luke. “Will you keep quiet?”

  “What if there are rats all over this place?” whispered David. He was terrified of rats. But then, most people are. For some reason, people are more afraid of rats than rats are afraid of people.

  The Flashback Four had landed in a small field with bushes and a few trees. There were some bottles and garbage strewn around. It seemed like a vacant lot.

  “Okay, calm down,” Luke said, taking charge. “First of all, is everybody okay? Any arms or legs chopped off?” He was still out of breath as he helped Isabel to her feet.

  “I think I’m okay,” Julia replied. “Just freaked out.”

  “I got a scratch on my leg,” said David. “But I’m all right.”

  “Shhhh,” Luke said. “Keep your voice down. We’re not supposed to talk to anybody, remember?”

  It was dark out and there were no streetlights or lights of any kind anywhere. Thomas Edison wouldn’t be inventing the incandescent lightbulb for another seventy-five years. The sun had not reached the horizon, so there was no way to tell the time. From the light of the moon, the kids could barely make out the outlines of some buildings in the distance.

  It was chilly for the month of July. The kids could hear the sound of water gently lapping on their left. It was the Hudson River.

  “Okay, let’s remember that this is going to be our meeting spot,” Luke told the others. “After the duel is over, we need to come back here so the Gunner can bring us home. Everybody on board?”

  “Yeah,” said David. “And if we get separated for any reason, we’ll meet up again right here. So nobody can get lost.”

  “Before we do anything else, I should let the Gunner know we’re here,” Isabel said, as she pulled the TTT out of her pocket. She opened the cover and typed a very simple one-word message on the keypad . . .

  ARRIVED

  She wasn’t expecting a quick reply, but after a couple of seconds had passed, this appeared on the screen . . .

  FANTASTIC! KEEP US POSTED.

  The kids walked around the lot carefully, always on the lookout for rats or anything else that might be moving.

  “This doesn’t seem like a very good place for a duel,” David noted. “People may live in those buildings over there. Somebody could come
out of one of them and get hit by a stray bullet.”

  “I can’t imagine any place would be a good place for a duel,” Isabel said. “The whole idea of shooting somebody just because you disagree with something they said seems totally stupid and immoral to me.”

  “For all we know, this may not be the dueling ground,” said Julia. “Maybe Weehawken is a big town, and we’re only seeing one small part of it.”

  They went out to the edge of the water and peered up and down the shore line. It all looked the same. There were no people in sight. They had arrived in advance of Hamilton and Burr, as planned.

  “Hey, didn’t the Gunner say the duel was going to take place near a cliff?” asked Isabel. “I don’t see any cliff here.”

  Isabel was right. There was no cliff. The river came right up to the edge of the shore. There were a few rowboats tied to a small, rickety wooden pier that was a little ways upstream.

  “Are you sure this is Weehawken?” David asked. “It doesn’t look like what they were describing.”

  “That Jones guy punched in the latitude and longitude for Weehawken,” Luke said. “Or I assume he did. I couldn’t see what he was typing.”

  “I wish there was somebody we could ask for directions,” said Julia.

  “We’re not supposed to talk to anybody,” Luke reminded her.

  “Maybe Jones messed up,” said David. “He and the Gunner didn’t exactly have their act together. They didn’t even know enough to hit the ENTER key.”

  Suddenly Luke stopped in his tracks. He was looking across the water as he pointed to the other side of the river.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Look over there!”

  It was hard to see clearly in the dark, but if you squinted your eyes you could just about make out the cliffs that were directly across the river.

  “This isn’t Weehawken!” David said, perhaps a little too loudly. “That must be Weehawken over there! What are we doing over here?”

  To the reader: You didn’t really think the Flashback Four were going to land exactly where they expected to land, did you? We’re only on chapter 9. If our story ended here, this would be a pretty short book. Something, of course, is going to have to happen. And it will. Please be patient.

  “They messed up!” Isabel said. “We’re on the wrong side of the Hudson River!” You could hear the frustration in her voice. It sounded like she might cry.

  “If Weehawken is over there, that must mean we’re in New York City!” said Luke.

  Everybody looked around. It certainly didn’t look like New York City. There were no skyscrapers, no streets crowded with cars and people. But of course, this was 1804. Skyscrapers and cars hadn’t been invented yet. The population of New York was around eighty thousand people. In the twenty-first century, it would be eight and a half million.

  “Hey,” David said, “we were here before. Do you remember?”

  David was right. On the Titanic mission, after the ship sank, the kids were rescued and taken to a dock at Fourteenth Street, just about a mile south of where they were now. Of course, that was in 1912, over a hundred years in the future. A city can change a lot in a century.

  David remembered from his Boy Scout days that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. New Jersey is west of New York. He could tell that the sun was coming up behind them. So that was proof they were in New York, and New Jersey was across the river.

  “What do you think went wrong?” asked Julia.

  “Beats me,” said Luke.

  What went wrong, reader, is that Jones messed up the longitude. He had the latitude right—40.7664° N. But instead of typing 74.0254 west for the longitude, Jones had typed 74.00254 west. By adding that one little zero, he had sent the kids across the river to the island of Manhattan.

  “I told you this was a dumb idea!” Isabel said angrily. “I said something could go wrong, and it did. You wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Let’s not start playing the blame game, okay?” David replied.

  “Why not?” Isabel said, pulling out the TTT again. She was angry now. “I know who to blame. It’s them. The Gunner and that Jones guy at NOYB. They’re the ones who sent us here. We didn’t know them from a hole in the wall. I knew we shouldn’t have trusted them!”

  She punched the keypad angrily . . .

  YOU SENT US TO THE WRONG PLACE!

  A response from Ms. Gunner came back quickly . . .

  WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?

  Isabel replied . . .

  NO CLIFFS HERE. WE ARE ACROSS THE RIVER IN NY!

  ARE YOU SURE?

  YES, WE’RE SURE!

  OOPS

  “Oops!” exclaimed Isabel. “All she has to say for herself is oops?”

  No, that wasn’t all she had to say for herself. In Boston, in the twenty-first century, Ms. Gunner was furious. She called Jones over.

  “You idiot!” she shouted at him. “You punched in the wrong longitude coordinate! You messed up the whole mission!”

  “What? Are you sure?” Jones asked.

  “They’re on the wrong side of the river!” Ms. Gunner yelled at him. “What else could have happened?”

  Jones checked the computer and saw that she was right.

  “I’m sorry. It was an honest mistake!” he whined. “Anybody could have done that.”

  “It was not an honest mistake!” Ms. Gunner hollered, still red in the face. “It was a careless mistake! You put those kids in danger! You might have dropped them in the middle of the river to drown! You’re fired! Get out of here! Turn in your badge!”

  Meanwhile, the Flashback Four were in the wrong place at the right time. Some decisions had to be made.

  “What are we gonna do now?” asked Isabel, still on the verge of tears.

  “Let me think this through,” Luke replied. “Give me a minute.”

  “Do we even know if this is the right day?” Isabel asked nobody in particular. “Maybe they got that wrong too.”

  “Man, I thought we would be able to just shoot the video and get out,” David complained. “They said it was going to be an easy mission. In and out.”

  “They always say it’s going to be easy,” Isabel said. “Nothing is easy.”

  Luke hadn’t come up with a solution yet.

  “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly, wheeling around. “Where’s Julia?”

  David and Isabel turned around too.

  “Oh no!”

  “Julia! Julia!” they began shouting.

  Julia was gone.

  CHAPTER 10

  DESPERATE TIMES

  NOW IT WAS THE FLASHBACK THREE, AND THE three were in panic mode.

  “I can’t believe she would do this to us again!” Luke ranted to nobody in particular.

  “We were supposed to stay together as a group,” fumed David.

  “She always does this,” Isabel said. “What is her problem?”

  Julia did seem to have a problem with the idea of staying together with the group. At Gettysburg, she ran off and tried to steal one of the five known copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s handwriting so she could bring it home and sell it. On the Titanic, she ran off to grab the famous poem “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” before it went down with the ship. Who knew where she’d run off to this time?

  Somebody had to take charge, and as usual, that somebody was Luke.

  “Okay, I’ll go upstream and look for her,” he barked. “David, you look downstream. Isabel, stay right here in case she comes back.”

  Luke and David ran off in opposite directions.

  “Julia! Julia!” they started shouting.

  It wasn’t long before a voice could be heard shouting back.

  “I’m right here, you dopes!”

  It was Julia. The Flashback Three rushed over to where she was, near the water’s edge.

  “What are you doing over here?” David asked. “We were supposed to stay together.”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Julia replied. �
��I’m getting one of these boats! How else are we going to get across the river? Come on, help me untie this rope.”

  Several rowboats were floating at the water’s edge, bumping gently against a dock. But before David could reply, there was a buzzing sound. It was the TTT in Isabel’s pocket.

  “What do they want now?” Isabel grumbled as she grabbed for the TTT and opened the case.

  SO SORRY WE SENT YOU TO THE WRONG PLACE. NOT TO WORRY. I WILL BRING YOU BACK HOME RIGHT NOW. GO TO THE MEETING SPOT.

  “Tell her to stop!” Luke hollered.

  STOP

  “Let’s talk this over,” David said.

  “It was all the Gunner’s fault to begin with,” whined Julia. “She was the one who got us into this mess.”

  “It doesn’t matter whose fault it was,” Luke said. “We need to deal with the situation as it is now.”

  “Look, we came all this way,” Julia said. “We’re here. Why don’t we just take a boat across the river to Weehawken?”

  Luke and David looked across the water to try to gauge the distance to the other side of the river.

  “It doesn’t look that far to me,” Julia said.

  “All right, let’s vote on it,” said Luke. “All in favor of taking a boat across the river, say aye.”

  “Aye!” Julia said immediately. She and Luke looked at David for his vote.

  “I . . . don’t know how to swim,” he reminded them. “You know that.”

  “The boat is not going to sink, dude!” Luke said, putting an arm around David, who appeared as though he might tear up.

  “I’m . . . afraid.”

  “It’s not like we’re going to be on the Titanic again,” Luke told his friend. “There are no icebergs out here. And you know I’ve got your back if you fall out of the boat.”

  “Are there any life jackets?” David asked.

  “Come on, man!” said Luke, losing his patience. “Will you just say aye and get in the boat?”

  “Aye . . . guess,” David said reluctantly. “Okay, are you happy?”

  Everybody looked at Isabel.

  “I don’t know, you guys,” she said. “Can’t we just go back home and try again some other time, when they can send us straight to Weehawken in the first place?”