by Dan Gutman
“Didn’t you hear me the first time, slave?” the thug replied, slapping David in the face. “I said shut up!”
It was a hopeless situation. Luke knew it would be up to him to get them out of it. He leaned over and tried to whisper to Isabel.
“If you can get a hand free,” he whispered, “try to send a text.”
Of course! If they could let Miss Z know the situation they were in, she could zap them back to Boston. They wouldn’t get the photo of Mount Vesuvius, of course, but at least they would be able to get away from these thugs. Isabel struggled to get an arm free to pull the TTT out of her pocket.
“I can’t reach it!” she groaned.
David saw what was going on. He figured a diversionary tactic might give Isabel the chance to get out the TTT.
“So,” he said to the thugs, “could you guys use some money? I have a hundred gold coins that are yours if you let us go.”
Luke shot David a look. He knew that David didn’t have any coins.
The thugs stopped.
“Where are these coins of which you speak?” one of them said.
“I’ll bring you to them,” David said. “Just take your arm off my neck.”
The four thugs shot each other glances, and one by one loosened their grip on the Flashback Four.
“That’s better,” David said, rubbing his neck.
“Now take us to the coins,” one thug demanded.
“Yeah, uh, sure . . .” David looked around. “Now let me see. I think I left them around the corner over there. . . .”
While David was trying to distract the thugs, Isabel hurriedly reached into her pocket for the TTT. She got it out, but in her haste to send a message, she lost her grip and it fell, clattering to the stone street below.
“What’s this?” one of the thugs asked, snatching the TTT up off the ground before Isabel could grab it.
“Nothing,” Isabel told him. “Please can I have it back?”
“Sure,” the thug said, putting the TTT on the ground again. Then he stomped on it heavily with his boot heel, crushing it.
“No!” shouted the Flashback Four in horror.
“You broke it!” Isabel shouted. “I can’t believe you did that!”
The thugs laughed. One of them picked the TTT up off the ground and handed the pieces to Isabel as if he was giving her a gift.
The TTT was destroyed. Once again, the Flashback Four had managed to lose their link to contact Miss Z in Boston. Isabel started bawling, and who could blame her?
“Where are the gold coins?” one of the thugs demanded.
“I . . . uh . . . give me a minute to think . . . maybe . . . ,” David stammered.
“These slaves have no coins,” shouted one of the thugs. “We are not fools!”
Now angrier than ever, they grabbed the kids, even more roughly this time, and dragged them down the street.
“What are we going to do now?” whispered Julia.
“I’ll think of something,” Luke assured her.
“Think fast,” said David.
They came to an open doorway. The four thugs pushed the kids through it and down a staircase into a basement area. The walls were made of rough stone. There was nothing in the room except for two pairs of chains attached to each of the four walls. It looked like a dungeon.
No, strike that. It didn’t look like a dungeon. It was a dungeon.
The thugs took Luke, who they correctly perceived to be their biggest threat, and pushed him against the wall. While one thug forced his arms up in the air, two of the other thugs wrapped iron chains around his wrists and snapped them in place with two locks. After Luke’s arms had been secured, the same was done with his legs, pushed wide apart. He was spread-eagle with his back against the wall, unable to move more than an inch or two in any direction.
“Is this really necessary?” Luke complained as the thugs pushed David against the opposite wall and did the same thing to him. Then they turned to Isabel and Julia, chaining them to the other two walls of the room. So each of the walls had a member of the Flashback Four chained to it.
“That should hold ’em,” one of the thugs said as the last chain was clicked into place on Julia’s ankle. With that, the thugs began to file out of the dungeon.
“Really? You’re leaving now?” Julia asked. “This is how you treat innocent people in the Roman Empire? Didn’t you people invent democracy?”
“I think that was the Greeks,” Isabel muttered.
“History is not going to judge you people kindly,” Julia shouted after the thugs. “Your empire is going to collapse, mark my words.”
“Yeah,” David added. “I take back all those nice things I said about the Romans in that social studies report I wrote in third grade.”
“Stop talking, slaves!” hollered the last thug to leave the dungeon. Then he slammed the heavy door behind him. The lock clicked shut from the other side.
Quiet is a strange sound. We hear it so rarely. After the thugs left, the only noise that could be heard in the dungeon was the sound of heavy breathing from Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David. No words were spoken. Their chains rattled whenever they moved.
It took a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the dark. On the walls of the dungeon were a couple of bronze oil lamps, but they weren’t lit. The only illumination was a small patch of daylight that came through an iron grate in the ceiling. There were no electric lights in the year 79, of course.
“My heart is pounding,” David said, finally breaking the silence.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Isabel. “I feel like I must be in the middle of a bad dream, and I’m going to wake up any minute in my bed at home.”
She was on the verge of losing it. Luke pushed against the chains that were wrapped around his wrists. There was no give.
“I didn’t know they had the technology to make iron in the year 79,” he said, grunting from the effort. “I figured people sort of lived like cavemen in these times.”
The dungeon was damp and musty. Scary-looking insects crawled around on the dirt floor. In the distance, the sound of people being whipped and tortured could be heard.
“That’s what they’re going to do to us soon,” Isabel said, breaking down in tears. It wasn’t long until the other three were in various stages of crying, sobbing, and holding it in.
“Any bright ideas?” David asked Luke.
“Yeah,” Luke replied. Then he started shouting, “Help! Let us out! Can anybody hear me?”
“Shut up!” a distant voice hollered back. It was unclear whether it was the voice of a guard or somebody who was being guarded.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” Isabel said, pulling herself together. “I shouldn’t have been holding the TTT. I should have given it to one of you.”
“It could have happened to anybody,” David told her. “You had to try. That counts for something.”
Luke continued to look for an escape route, even though there was clearly no way out. It was his nature—find a problem, fix the problem.
“I knew this trip was a dumb idea,” Julia said. “What were we thinking? We should have quit while we were ahead, after we survived the Titanic.”
“If I recall, you were complaining that your life back home was boring after we got back from the Titanic. Remember?” David told her. “Well, are you bored now?”
When something goes wrong in a group, there’s a natural tendency to blame somebody.
“Whose idea was this, anyway?” Luke asked.
“Not me,” Isabel replied. “I didn’t want to do this.”
“I said we should go back to 1776 and take a picture of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence,” David said. “If we had done that, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“I didn’t want to do this,” Isabel said. “That’s what I get for giving in to peer pressure.”
“You’re the big leader,” Julia said to Luke. “So maybe you should take the blame.”
“Look, stop it, you guys!” Luke told the group. “This is ridiculous! We were all in agreement that we wanted to do this. So it’s nobody’s fault. Let’s stop playing the blame game and think of a way out of here.”
“Way out of here?” Julia said with a laugh. “Are you kidding? We’re chained to the wall in a locked dungeon. The volcano is going to blow in less than two hours, and we’re going to die in here. Can you come up with a solution to that?”
“What do you think they’re going to do with us?” Isabel asked.
“Nothing,” David replied. “They’ll just leave us here. Nobody will find us for a couple of thousand years. Then they’ll pour liquid plaster into the empty cavities where our dead bodies used to be.”
David started thinking about his dogs back home. He had three beagles—Moe, Larry, and Curly—and they were the love of his life. David had always been an animal lover, and the thought of never seeing his dogs again pushed him over the edge. He started crying, and couldn’t wipe the tears away.
“Will you stop it?” Luke scolded him. “We’re not going to be dead bodies. We’ll find a way out of this. We always do. Remember Gettysburg? Remember Titanic? We thought we were in trouble. We thought it was all over. But we found a way out. You’ve got to think positively.”
“I’m thinking that we’re positively going to die,” David sobbed.
A few minutes passed while everybody tried to cool off.
“How much time do we have left?” Isabel asked.
“I don’t know,” David replied. “I can’t reach the timer.”
In his pocket, the timer counted down: 99 minutes.
“I’m hungry,” Julia said.
“How can you think about food?” Isabel asked. “We’re going to die here!”
“My stomach is growling,” Julia claimed. Then she shouted, “Guard! Guard!”
There were some footsteps outside the door, and then it opened. One of those thugs appeared.
“What do you want?” he asked gruffly.
“We’re hungry,” Julia replied. “Can we have something to eat, please?”
The thug looked at the four of them and left the room without closing the door. A minute later he came back, holding a plate with some kind of meat on it. He went over to Luke first.
“You need to keep up your strength,” the thug told him.
“Do you have a fork?” Luke asked.
“A what?”
Luke had no idea that he would have to wait several centuries for the fork to be invented. The Romans ate mainly with their fingers.
Even if they had forks, there was no way the guard was going to give Luke one. A fork could be used as a weapon.
The thug put a piece of meat into Luke’s mouth. He accepted it gratefully.
“Hey, I’m the one who asked for food,” Julia complained. “Why are you giving it to him?”
“Quiet over there!” the thug replied. He went over to David with the plate.
“No thank you,” David said. “That stuff looks gross.”
“You need to keep up your strength,” the thug told him.
“How come they need to keep up their strength but we don’t?” complained Isabel. “It’s not fair. What, are women second-class citizens around here?”
In fact, women were second-class citizens around there.
“Shut your mouth, wench!” the thug barked at her.
Meanwhile, he gave Luke a second piece of meat, which he chewed vigorously.
“Mmm, not bad,” Luke said. “What is this, chicken?”
“No, it is dormice,” said the thug, “sweetened with honey and sprinkled with poppy seeds.”
“It’s good,” Luke said. “Crunchy. I kind of like this dormice stuff.”
“It’s a mouse, you dope!” Julia said from across the room. “You’re eating a mouse.”
Luke stopped chewing for a moment. Then he started in chewing again.
“That’s good mouse,” he said.
“Oh, gross!” Isabel exclaimed. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Guard, is dormice really mouse?” asked Luke.
“Yes. Dormice is mouse. It is stuffed.”
“Stuffed with what?” asked Luke.
“Another dormouse, of course.”
“No wonder it’s so crunchy,” Luke said. “You really need to try this, David.”
“I don’t think so,” his friend replied. “I’m on a strict no-mouse diet.”
“Stupid slave,” said the thug as he left the room and locked the door behind him. “A smart slave would give anything for a dormouse.”
A few minutes passed. It didn’t look like the guard would be coming back any time soon. Time was running out. Even Luke was losing confidence.
“I think this might be the end of the line, you guys,” he said solemnly. “In an hour or so, Mount Vesuvius is going to blow its top. Miss Z will try to bring us back home, but we won’t be at the meeting spot. If those goats are still there, she’ll be in for a surprise. And when that happens, I guess, we’re cooked. In more ways than one.”
“I never thought it would end this way,” Isabel said softly.
“We’ve been through a lot together,” Luke said. “I just want to say I love you guys.”
“I love you too, man,” David replied. “I thought you were kind of a jerk when we first met, but everything is different now.”
“Will you two knock it off?” Julia shouted. “I liked it better when boys didn’t have feelings.”
This discussion came to an abrupt end when the door suddenly swung open with a loud squeak that startled the Flashback Four. Two of the thugs had come back.
“Slaves!” the taller one shouted. “Come with us!”
“Well, it’s about time,” Julia said grumpily. “What’s the name of your supervisor? I’m going to write a strongly worded letter of complaint—”
“Not you,” the thug told her. “Just the males. Come with us.”
“What?!” both girls exclaimed.
The thugs unchained the boys and grabbed them by the elbows.
“Where are you taking us now?” David asked.
“You will see,” one of the thugs grunted.
“Hey, what about us?” Julia shouted after them. “We don’t want to stay here all by ourselves!”
The thugs weren’t listening. They dragged Luke and David out of the dungeon.
As they were escorted away, Luke shouted back at the girls, “If you’re able to get free, head for the meeting spot.”
CHAPTER 11
LET’S PUT ON A SHOW
THE THUGS PULLED LUKE AND DAVID UP THE steps and out onto the street. Both boys shielded their eyes. It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning now, and the sun was high in the sky. If they hadn’t been blinded, it would have been tempting to make a break for it.
Right outside was a wooden vehicle, with a horse tethered to it. It was almost the size of a bus, like a giant cage on wheels. Through the bars the boys saw a group of men, sitting sullenly and not speaking. They looked tired, disheveled, and beaten down.
A red-haired man hopped off the horse that was pulling the wagon. He had a whip in his hand, which he used to control the horse as well as the men in the cage. He opened a door on the side.
“Climb in, slaves!”
“Look, buddy, we’re not slaves,” Luke said, speaking quickly before he could be slapped or beaten. “You’ve got to listen to me. Mount Vesuvius is going to erupt in a little more than an hour. I know. Don’t ask me how. I just know. Instead of hassling us, you should be evacuating the whole town. It’s going to be buried under twenty feet of ash. Everybody’s going to die.”
The red-haired man let out a laugh.
“You would make a good storyteller, slave!” he said. “What is your name?”
“Luke.”
“I mean, what do they call
you?”
“They call me Luke. That’s my name.”
“That is no kind of name,” said the red-haired man. “From now on, your name is Oceanus. I have named you in honor of the god of the waters.”
Next he turned to David.
“And what is the name they call you, slave?” he asked.
“My name is David.”
“From now on, your name is Hilarius.”
“What!” David exclaimed. “Hilarius?”
“That is what I said. You are Hilarius.”
“That’s a great name, dude,” said Luke. “I always thought you were Hilarius.”
“Why can’t you just call us by our regular names?” asked David.
“Do not question me, slave!” shouted the red-haired man. “Do you want fifty lashes?”
“Eyelashes?” asked David.
“No, idiot! A flogging!”
He took his whip and held it menacingly in front of David. Luke climbed into the wagon, with David right behind him.
“The top of the mountain is going to explode!” Luke shouted. “You’ve got to believe me!”
“Enough wild talk,” the red-haired man said as he calmly closed and locked the door. Then he climbed up on the horse and used his whip to urge it forward.
It was a bumpy, uncomfortable ride through the streets. There were no seats in the wagon, and no padding. The red-haired man, who the boys quickly nicknamed “Fred the Red,” guided it through an alleyway called Via di Nocera.
Out on the street, people were pointing and laughing at the wagon, as if they were watching animals in a zoo. A few spit at them.
“Where are you taking us?” David shouted at Fred the Red.
“You will find out in good time, Hilarius.”
“My name is David!”
Luke turned to look at the ragged man sitting next to him. His hair was messed up, and when he smiled it was obvious that most of his teeth were missing. He smelled bad.
“My name is Crustus,” the toothless man said, shaking hands with both of the boys. “I heard what you said about Vesuvius, and I believe you. Giants roam the land near the mountain. They make the ground move, and the giants are angry.”