The Pompeii Disaster Read online

  DEDICATION

  TO NINA, SAM, AND EMMA

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the people who helped me with this project: Rosemary Brosnan, Lello Coppola, Melanie Weil Goldman, Andrew Eliopulos, Alan Kors, David Lubar, Kelly Eckel Mahoney, Ellen Graff Roberts, Liza Voges, Nina Wallace, and Allen Winningham.

  EPIGRAPH

  You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

  —seventeen-year-old Pliny the Younger, eyewitness to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Stuck in the Past

  Chapter 2: A Crazy Idea

  Chapter 3: One for All and All for One

  Chapter 4: The End of the Flashback Four

  Chapter 5: It’s All Downhill from Here

  Chapter 6: Hold on Tight

  Chapter 7: Back to the Present

  Chapter 8: Tools of the Trade

  Chapter 9: A New Old City

  Chapter 10: Shut Your Mouth!

  Chapter 11: Let’s Put on a Show

  Chapter 12: Some Die Sooner than Others

  Chapter 13: The Element of Surprise

  Chapter 14: Meanwhile, Back in Boston . . .

  Chapter 15: Next Victim

  Chapter 16: What Am I Supposed to Do Now?

  Chapter 17: Working Girls

  Chapter 18: The Main Event

  Chapter 19: Run for Your Life

  Epilogue

  Facts & Fictions

  About the Author

  Books by Dan Gutman

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  EVERY STORY SHOULD START WITH A BANG. THIS one starts off with just about the biggest bang ever.

  The date: August 24, 79. That’s not 1979. It’s not 1879 either. It’s the year 79. In other words, our story takes place seventy-nine years after they started counting years. It was a long time ago.

  The place: the city of Pompeii, on what is now the west coast of Italy.

  Picture this: It was nine o’clock on Tuesday, like any other Tuesday morning during the Roman Empire. Merchants were working in their shops, and farmers in their fields. Children were playing. Pompeii was a bustling town with twenty thousand people. Everybody was going about their business, living their lives. It was a hot day, like most summer days in Pompeii.

  Few people noticed anything different at first, but the birds had stopped singing. Dogs became agitated, and they started to howl. The cattle were moaning. Animals have some kind of a sixth sense. They know when something terrible is about to happen.

  Ordinarily, I don’t like to describe the weather in books. You know how some authors try to set the “mood” and go on for page after page talking about what the sky looks like, or the shape of the clouds?

  My attitude is, who cares? Weather is boring. It bogs down the story.

  But in this case, I’m going to make an exception. In this story, the sky and the clouds matter.

  The waters around the Bay of Naples near Pompeii had suddenly become choppy. There was a chill in the air, and an eerie silence.

  Ten miles northwest of Pompeii is a large humpbacked mountain—Mount Vesuvius. It’s a little over four thousand feet high, with green forests on its slopes. Oh, and it’s also a volcano. That’s important.

  People had felt a few minor tremors around Vesuvius over the previous four days. But the mountain hadn’t erupted for hundreds of years, so nobody was overly concerned.

  Just after nine o’clock in the morning, a thin line of steam rose out the top of Vesuvius. A small amount of ash spit out and sprayed like a fine mist on the eastern slope of the mountain. People in Pompeii and the neighboring towns barely noticed.

  But around noon, the ground started to vibrate in Pompeii. Some tiles were shaken off roofs. They shattered as they hit the ground.

  And then, suddenly, Vesuvius blew its top! The peak of the mountain exploded like the cork out of a bottle. Molten rock and pumice blasted out of Vesuvius, mixed with ash and gas—a million and a half tons of debris per second. It was like an atomic bomb, but bigger. People who were hundreds of miles away could hear it. There was a giant crater where the top of Mount Vesuvius had been.

  In Pompeii, the people stopped what they were doing and stared at Vesuvius in the distance. The smart ones gathered up their belongings and made a run for it. They headed for the Bay of Naples to board boats and get out of there.

  The boiling rock shot high in the sky. Within a half hour, a dense mushroom-shaped cloud had risen ten miles above Vesuvius. It would eventually reach a height of twenty miles. And the wind was blowing that cloud toward Pompeii.

  Then the debris began to spread out, mix with cold air in the atmosphere, and solidify. The sky turned dark. By three o’clock, the sun was blocked out. It looked like nighttime in the middle of the afternoon. The mushroom cloud collapsed, and all that stuff that had blasted out of the mountain started falling from the sky.

  Rocks rained down like hot, black snow. Some were as small as golf balls. Others were as large as watermelons. They hit the ground like missiles, slamming into houses and killing people instantly. Families dashed for shelter or helped the wounded and dying. Bricks, tiles, stones, and junk were flying everywhere. People climbed trees. Animals ran around crazily. The ground was shaking. Buildings were crushed. People were screaming. Hot ash was falling like snow, and in an hour there were five or six inches on the ground, covering Pompeii. It looked like the end of the world.

  More people tried to flee the city at this point. Thousands escaped. The rest figured it would all blow over, and life would return to normal. Big mistake.

  It wasn’t a constant bombardment of debris that spewed out of Mount Vesuvius. It came in surges. There was another one at five thirty. Sparks flew, and lightning flashed in the sky. Buildings shook, collapsed, and caught on fire. Bigger pieces of rock were falling from above, destroying everything they landed on. Roofs that were only designed to withstand rain caved in from the weight, wiping out entire families. The devastation was incredible. Even the course of the River Sarno had changed. Two feet of ash and stone covered the ground now.

  By evening, things had calmed down. Rocks and boulders were no longer falling from the sky, but fires were burning everywhere. First-story doors and windows were covered by five feet of ash.

  The survivors probably thought they had lived through the worst of it when they went to bed that night. They were wrong. Vesuvius wasn’t finished yet. The worst was yet to come.

  At six thirty the next morning—August 25—there was another surge of volcanic activity. A glowing cloud spilled over from the top of Mount Vesuvius and began to roll down the sides of the mountain.

  It wasn’t lava. Lava moves slowly, and can be avoided. This was a gigantic wave of toxic sulfuric gas mixed with hot cinders and pieces of molten rock. It was moving fast, close to a hundred and eighty miles per hour. And it was hot, maybe seven hundred degrees. It poured into Pompeii like a hurricane and enveloped it, incinerating everything in its path. A black cloud of death.

  If you wanted to say something positive about the destruction of Pompeii, you could say the people who were
still alive at that point didn’t suffer much pain. In fact, they might have been the lucky ones. Death was almost instantaneous.

  Then there was an eerie silence. It was over. The sun tried to poke through the dust and smoke, but it was a lost cause. The sky would be dark for the next three days. There were no cries for help. Nobody was left alive. A gray haze hung over everything.

  In less than twenty-four hours, the city of Pompeii and its two thousand people had been buried under a ten-billion-ton mountain of ash.

  It was like Pompeii had never even been there.

  CHAPTER 1

  STUCK IN THE PAST

  TO TELL THIS STORY THE RIGHT WAY, WE NEED TO go back, or, I should say, forward in time. Specifically, we need to go to April 18, 1912.

  Pretend you’re watching a movie in your head. It was a cold and rainy day. Okay, okay, no more weather, I promise! It doesn’t matter anymore.

  This part of the story takes place in New York City. Remember, this is forty years before the Empire State Building was built. New York is still a big city, but the skyscrapers haven’t gone up yet.

  Now zoom in. You’re looking at Pier 54, near Fourteenth Street, at the edge of the Hudson River. Can you see the park bench near the water? There are four kids sitting on that bench. Sixth graders. Two girls, and two boys—Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David. They call themselves the Flashback Four.

  Of course, you already met these kids if you read Flashback Four: The Lincoln Project and Flashback Four: The Titanic Mission. If you haven’t read those books, you really need to. If you have read them, you’re ahead of the game.

  Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David were not supposed to be in New York City in the year 1912. It was all a huge mistake. What had happened was that a Boston billionaire named Chris Zandergoth—or “Miss Z,” as she is called—used her fortune to develop a smartboard much like the ones in your school, except that it also functions as a time-traveling device. Miss Z has a special interest in collecting photographs of things that have never been photographed before. So she recruited the Flashback Four and assigned them to go back to 1912 to take a picture of the Titanic as it was sinking. Her intention is to build a museum filled with photos of great moments in history.

  Well, the kids did take the picture, but due to circumstances beyond their control, they were unable to get back to their own time before the Titanic went under. After a terrifying dip in the frigid Atlantic, where they very nearly drowned, Luke, Julia, Isabel, and David managed to climb aboard a lifeboat. Along with nearly seven hundred other Titanic passengers, they were rescued by a ship called the Carpathia. It steamed into New York Harbor a few days later. And that takes us up to where we are now, with the Flashback Four sitting on a bench near the water. The wind blew a newspaper across the pier. . . .

  If you want to learn more about what happened on the Titanic, read Flashback Four: The Titanic Mission. I don’t have time to tell that story now. I’ve got another story to tell.

  So these four kids are sitting on the bench that you’re looking at in your mind’s eye. The crush of reporters, photographers, and loved ones who had greeted the Titanic survivors is over. They all went home. The Flashback Four sat on Pier 54 and stared across the water at the shores of New Jersey.

  “I’m hungry,” said Luke, a big boy who was pretty much always hungry.

  “How can you think about food at a time like this?” snapped Isabel. “My whole life is over.”

  Isabel’s life was not really over, and in fact, her life would be starting all over again, except in the year 1912. She wiped a tear on her sleeve.

  An hour before, the kids had still held out the faint hope that Miss Z or her assistant, Mrs. Vader, would be waiting at the pier to scoop them up and transport them back home to Boston in the twenty-first century. But those hopes dwindled as the pier gradually emptied. There would be no rescue this time. They were alone. It was starting to sink in that they would have to spend the rest of their lives in the wrong century. All four of them were tired, miserable, and still in a state of shock.

  “I’ll never see my family again,” mumbled David, the only African American in the group. “I’ll never see my dogs again.”

  At the mention of family and pets, Isabel and Julia burst into tears.

  By all rights, this is where the time-traveling adventures of the Flashback Four should come to an end. They’re stuck. There’s no way out.

  But obviously, that can’t happen. We’re only at the beginning of the book. You’re only on page 11. If our story ended here, it would be a short story, not a book.

  Something, of course, will have to happen. Please be patient.

  “It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” Isabel moaned through her tears. “What went wrong? I’m the good kid. I always did everything I was told to do. Why me? What am I going to do now?”

  David and Julia just shook their heads.

  It’s been said that people who have suffered a traumatic experience go through five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. The Flashback Four were churning through those stages quickly.

  “Look on the bright side,” Luke told the others. “Fifteen hundred passengers on the Titanic died. We didn’t. We survived. That’s a good thing, right? We’ll just have to start over again.”

  “Luke’s right,” Julia said, getting up off the bench. “Our lives aren’t over. Maybe they’re just beginning.”

  Isabel and David were not convinced. They hung their heads forlornly.

  “Think of it this way,” Luke told them. “Nothing worse than this will ever happen to us. We’re bulletproof now. If we survived the Titanic, we can survive anything, right, guys?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” David said, looking up.

  “We need to pull ourselves together and figure out a strategy,” Luke continued. “Let me think this through. People are going to ask us how we got here. We need to get our story straight.”

  “Maybe we should just tell them the truth,” Isabel volunteered.

  Isabel’s natural inclination was always to tell the truth. Besides the fact that lying is just wrong, it also gets complicated. When you lie, then you have to remember the lie and who you told it to. It’s a lot to remember.

  “The truth?!” Julia looked at Isabel and shook her head. “Are you kidding? You want to tell people that we traveled through time and ended up on the deck of the Titanic? They’ll put us in an insane asylum.”

  Julia sat back down on the bench.

  “We have no birth certificates,” Julia continued. “No paper trail. We have no proof that we existed before today.”

  “We already talked about this, remember?” David reminded the others. “We decided to pretend we were orphans. Our parents went down with the Titanic.”

  “Oh yeah! That’s good,” said Julia, who knew a good lie when she heard one. “That could work. I don’t know if they kept careful records of who was on the ship.”

  “What’s our money situation?” Luke asked Julia, who had been holding their cash.

  She pulled out a wad of wet bills that John Jacob Astor—one of the wealthiest men in the world—had given to her before he perished on the Titanic.

  “Eight hundred . . . nine hundred . . . a thousand bucks,” Julia said after counting ten hundred-dollar bills.

  That was a lot of money in 1912. The average salary in those days was $750 a year.

  “That’ll hold us for a while,” Luke said. “But it won’t last forever. We’re gonna have to get jobs.”

  “Jobs?” David asked. “How are we gonna get jobs? We’re kids.”

  “Kids had jobs in 1912,” Isabel pointed out. “They didn’t have child labor laws yet.”

  “I’m not going to work in some sweatshop for two dollars a week,” Julia insisted.

  “You won’t have to work in a sweatshop,” Luke assured her. “There are lots of other jobs we can get.”

  “Like what?” David asked. “Do you mind if I
point out the obvious? I’m black. Do you think anybody’s gonna hire me for a good job in 1912? Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t even born yet. Neither was Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X—”

  “Look,” Julia said, “none of us have to get jobs. Don’t you guys remember? We talked about this. We’ve got something nobody else here has.”

  “What?” asked Isabel.

  Julia lowered her voice to a whisper, as if anyone might be listening in to their conversation.

  “We know what’s going to happen,” she said. “When you go back in time, naturally you can predict the future.”

  David snapped his fingers and stood up excitedly.

  “Luke, remember you told that Astor guy that the Red Sox were going to win the World Series?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, we could bet our thousand bucks on the Red Sox and make a bundle!”

  “Brilliant. Just one problem,” Luke told David. “The World Series isn’t until October. It’s April now. What are we gonna do for the next six months? We’ll need to spend that money for food, a place to live, and other stuff.”

  “Oh yeah,” David said, sitting back down on the bench.

  Julia jumped off the bench again.

  “No, you dopes!” she exclaimed. “You don’t have to bet on the World Series to make money! I can’t believe you all forgot. We talked about this, too. We can invent something that we have in our time but they don’t have here! It will be brand-new to them. Remember?”

  The Flashback Four had been through a lot over the last few days. It made sense for them to forget the idea they had discussed when they had been all stressed out and their lives were in danger. In fact, it made sense for them to block some of those memories out.

  “The zipper!” shouted Luke, Isabel, and David.

  Of course, the zipper. The modern zipper was perfected by a Swedish American engineer named Gideon Sundback in 1913. It took him four years to get a patent. If the Flashback Four could create a simple zipper in 1912 and sell it to a company that would manufacture it, they could make millions. It might not be fair to Gideon Sundback, but this was a matter of survival. And the kids would never have to work a day in their lives.