The Pompeii Disaster

by Dan Gutman

WE R HERE

  The TTT, having only to transmit text across distance and not across time, flashed a response almost right away. . . .

  HAVE FUN! SEE YOU IN AN HOUR.

  More than a million tourists visit Pompeii every year, so naturally it’s somewhat of a tourist trap. Right outside the Porta Marina gate were some small shops that sold snacks, guidebooks, postcards, refrigerator magnets, and other trinkets.

  Some young men immediately surrounded the group with cries of “Buongiorno! Do you speak English?” They were offering to sell fruit, coral jewelry, and bottles of water. Professional guides offered to give the kids a tour. Beggars who spoke no English held out their hands and silently asked for money.

  There were signs all over the shops. Some of the words were written in Italian, but many were written in English for the sake of American tourists. Like PIZZA.

  “Pizza!” shouted the Flashback Four.

  “Can we get some pizza?” asked Julia.

  The other three looked at Miss Z with their puppy-dog eyes.

  “Well . . . okay.”

  “Yay!”

  Miss Z bought a margherita pizza (named after Margherita, the queen of Italy) and the kids quickly devoured it. It wasn’t the best pizza in the world, but it was special because it came from the place where pizza was invented.

  “This is real Italian pizza,” Luke announced. “From Italy.”

  Tickets to enter the ruins cost thirteen euros per person. Miss Z paid with her credit card.

  “Be careful,” she advised as she handed a ticket to each of the kids. “Anyplace there are a lot of tourists, there will be pickpockets.”

  “What if we get robbed?” asked Isabel.

  “We’re not going to get robbed,” David assured her.

  “I know karate,” said Luke. “Stick with me.”

  “This will be our meeting spot,” Miss Z told the kids. “Let’s stay together as a group. But if we should be separated for any reason, we’ll meet right back here in a little less than one hour, at one o’clock. Got it?”

  “One hour, one o’clock,” replied David.

  “Now, before we enter the city, turn around and look behind you.”

  The Flashback Four turned around. There it was, about ten miles to the north, looming over the city—Vesuvius. It’s a huge blue-gray mountain with two peaks, over four thousand feet high and stretching about eight miles across. If modern Italy is the shape of a boot, Mount Vesuvius is toward the top front edge of the boot.

  “Is that Mount Vesuvius?” asked Isabel. Miss Z nodded her head.

  “It’s still there!” marveled Julia.

  “Well, of course it’s still there,” David said, rolling his eyes. “Where’s it going to go? It’s a mountain.”

  “But it was a taller mountain before it blew its top,” said Miss Z. “Almost twice as high.”

  “How do we know it won’t erupt again?” asked Isabel, a little nervously.

  “We don’t.”

  It was the truth. Vesuvius is still an active volcano. It has erupted eighty times since the big one in the year 79. The most recent eruption was in 1944.

  The group entered the gate. Luke pushed Miss Z’s wheelchair with David’s assistance, and it wasn’t easy. The street was unpaved. It was made of large, flat stones that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  The town is surprisingly large, about a mile from end to end. It had been laid out in a grid, like a modern city. The group set off down the main street, which is called Via dell’Abbondanza.

  “There was no country named Italy in the year 79,” Miss Z told the kids, like a tour guide. “Pompeii was part of the Roman Empire, which ruled over southern Europe along the Mediterranean Sea for five hundred years.”

  Walking through Pompeii felt like going back in time (that is, if you ignored the tour groups and cell phones). Via dell’Abbondanza was lined with stone and brick ruins of houses, shops of all kinds, and even restaurants. The ancient Romans liked going out to eat. There were twenty bakeries in town when the volcano erupted. In one of them, eighty-one loaves of bread were found in an oven.

  The kids noticed the sidewalks were higher than the ones back home. This is because the streets were flooded with water every night to flush away dirt and waste. The Romans were masters at moving water from one place to another. They built aqueducts to carry water from rivers and lakes that were miles from the city, using only gravity to do the work.

  It’s hard to believe, but houses in Pompeii had running water. Twenty-five fountains were scattered at intersections around the town. There were public baths that had pools of hot, warm, and cold water to soak in. This took amazing technology, considering the fact that they didn’t have pumps, steel, plastics, cranes, bulldozers, electricity, trucks, or computers in the year 79.

  Julia noticed that many of the buildings had a jug on the ground outside the doorway. She asked Miss Z about them.

  “People would leave their pee in those jugs to be taken away,” she explained.

  “Where did they take it?” Julia asked. “What did they do with it?”

  “Do you really want to know?” asked Miss Z.

  “No,” Julia replied. “I’m sure it’s gross.”

  “Where did kids go to school?” asked Isabel.

  “They haven’t dug up any schools or classrooms,” Miss Z told her. “Teachers would just take their students out in the street or anywhere it was convenient for a lesson.”

  Isabel took the TTT out of her backpack again and sent a quick text to Mrs. Vader. . . .

  HAVING FUN. WISH YOU WERE HERE.

  SO DO I was the quick reply.

  Miss Z told Luke to stop pushing her wheelchair for a moment.

  “Think of it,” she told them. “All of this, the entire city, was covered by twenty feet of ash after Vesuvius erupted. It formed a seal around the city. That’s why these ruins are still here today for us to see.”

  “So it’s sort of like a big time capsule,” Isabel noted.

  “Yes!” Miss Z agreed. “Isn’t it ironic? The volcano completely destroyed Pompeii, but at the same time it preserved Pompeii.”

  She told the kids how the city had sat undisturbed under that layer of ash for over fifteen hundred years. And then, in 1748, it was rediscovered. Ever since then, archeologists have been uncovering this lost city, piece by piece. To this day, there are still parts of Pompeii that haven’t been excavated.

  “It’s like a ghost town,” Miss Z said. “But the ghosts are still here. Let me show you something.”

  A little farther down the street was a small glass building, like a greenhouse. When the group got closer, they could see it was filled with white figures of men, women, children, and animals posed in different positions. They looked almost like sculptures.

  “Are they mummies?” David asked.

  “No,” Miss Z said. “They’re not even dead bodies.”

  She explained that over the centuries, the bodies of the victims had disintegrated under all that volcanic ash. That left cavities in the shapes of their bodies. In 1860, a very clever archeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli came up with the idea of drilling small holes into the ash and pouring liquid plaster into the cavities. After the plaster hardened, he chipped away the ash to discover the shapes of bodies at the moment they died. Hundreds of figures were unearthed this way.

  “That’s creepy,” Isabel said, looking away.

  “I think it’s cool,” said Julia.

  “Fortunately, these people didn’t suffer for long,” said Miss Z. “Maybe a few seconds. It must have been like swallowing fire.”

  The Flashback Four couldn’t stop staring at the figures. Some of them seemed to be crying out in pain.

  “Let me show you something else,” Miss Z said. She instructed Luke to make a right turn at a street called Vicolo dell’Anfiteatro. One block down were the ruins of a gigantic oval-shaped building.

  “It looks like a stadium,” David commented.

  “It was
a stadium,” Miss Z told him. “This is the earliest surviving stone amphitheater in the world. It was built in 70 BC. That’s a hundred and fifty years before the famous Colosseum in Rome.”

  “What did they play here?” David asked. “It’s not like they had basketball, football, or baseball in those days.”

  “Their spectator sport was gladiator competitions,” Miss Z replied. “Men would face off against each other with weapons. They would fight to the death.”

  “That is gross,” Isabel said.

  “You’re right,” Miss Z agreed. “It must have been really gross.”

  “Hey, which of you guys do you think would win a fight to the death?” Julia asked David and Luke.

  “Oh, me, definitely,” Luke replied right away. “I’m bigger and stronger than David. I would kick his skinny butt nine ways to Sunday.”

  “I beg to differ,” David replied. “It is you, my friend, whose butt would surely be kicked. I am infinitely faster, smoother, and wiser. Like my man Ali, I’d win, you see. I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

  “The gladiator contests were a big deal,” Miss Z told the kids. “They were free, and everybody in town would come to see the blood and gore.”

  “Can we go inside the amphitheater?” asked Isabel.

  “I don’t think we have time,” Miss Z said, looking at her watch. “We need to get back to our meeting spot. We should let Mrs. Vader know. Isabel, will you text her and tell her we’re on our way?”

  Isabel went to get the TTT out of her backpack, but it wasn’t in the pocket where she’d put it.

  “Where is it?” asked David, concerned.

  “I had it a few minutes ago,” Isabel said, quickly opening the other zippered compartments of her backpack.

  “That thing cost a fortune,” Luke said, looking at Miss Z. “You’ve got to find it, Isabel. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I know! I know!” Isabel said frantically. “I . . . I don’t have it anymore. It’s gone.”

  “What do you mean it’s gone?” asked Julia. “Check all the pockets.”

  “I did!” Isabel was on the verge of tears.

  “Maybe your backpack was picked!” said Luke, looking around quickly. “We’ve gotta find the guy who did it.”

  “He couldn’t have gone far,” David said.

  There were a few dozen tourists in the area. Many of them were holding cell phones, which looked much like the TTT.

  “How are we going to know who has it?” asked Isabel.

  In Boston, Mrs. Vader’s TTT beeped and she looked at the message. . . .

  AMERICANS ARE MUTO!

  She looked at it twice to make sure she had read it correctly. Muto meant “stupid” in Italian. Why would Isabel write a thing like that?

  IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT? Mrs. Vader texted back.

  The reply . . .

  GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS A LITTLE GIRL.

  Mrs. Vader realized immediately that somebody had pickpocketed Isabel, and the TTT had fallen into the wrong hands. But there was nothing she could do about it.

  In Pompeii, the Flashback Four quickly split in two groups, rushing around to peer at the cell phones in the hands of every person in the area. It was a few minutes until David spotted a short teenager with a mohawk haircut holding the TTT, texting and chuckling to himself. David went over and grabbed Luke.

  “Over there!” David whispered. “That guy has it!”

  The two boys walked purposefully to the teenager with the mohawk, who put his hand behind his back as they approached.

  “Excuse me,” Luke said politely.

  “Buongiorno,” the teenager replied.

  “I believe you have something that belongs to us,” Luke told him.

  “No speak English,” the guy said.

  “Give it back, buddy,” David said, holding his hand out.

  “I’m not your buddy.”

  “I thought you didn’t speak English,” Luke said.

  “So I lied,” the guy said.

  “You stole that,” accused David, pulling the guy’s hand in front of him.

  “What is it you Americans say?” the guy said. “Finders keepers, losers weepers?”

  “You didn’t find it,” Luke said, getting closer to the guy’s face. “You opened my friend’s backpack.”

  By now, the rest of the group had come over to see what was going on.

  “There’s no need to fight, boys,” Miss Z said as she pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and held it out to the Italian guy. “Will this be sufficient to make you give that back?”

  The guy looked at the bill and then at Miss Z. Twenty US dollars could buy a lot. But he could tell these American tourists wanted the strange cell phone pretty badly. He made the instant calculation in his head that the thing must be worth at least five times what the lady in the wheelchair was offering.

  “I’ll give it to you for a hundred,” he said.

  Miss Z started reaching into her purse.

  “No way!” Luke said, stopping her.

  He got in the guy’s face. “You stole that. We’re not giving you a dime for it.”

  The Italian teenager stepped back and looked at Luke from head to toe, sizing him up.

  “My friends are on a rugby team,” he said. “They will take care of you.”

  “Oh, yeah, I don’t see your friends,” Luke said, looking around. “Where are they?”

  “They will be here very soon,” the boy assured him. “Believe me.”

  “Back off, dude,” David told Luke. “Let it go. Miss Z will pay the money.”

  “Hurry up!” Isabel said, pulling on Luke’s elbow. “It’s almost one o’clock. If we don’t get to the meeting spot soon, we’re not going to make it home. That’s more important than the TTT.”

  Luke shook her off. It wasn’t the money. It was the principle of the thing. The guy with the mohawk had stolen their TTT. It was in his hand. Luke wasn’t going pay a ransom for it.

  “Give it back, man,” he said, holding his hand out. “Now. You don’t need it.”

  “Americans,” the guy said dismissively, and then he spit on the ground to emphasize the point.

  “How do you know we’re Americans?” David asked. “Maybe we’re . . . Canadians.”

  “You think you own the world,” the boy replied. “That’s how I know you are Americans.”

  “We don’t own the world,” Luke informed the guy. “But we do own that thing you’re holding. It belongs to us.”

  “Are you accusing me of stealing?” the guy asked.

  “Yes!”

  “It’s not important, Luke,” Miss Z told him. “I can make a new—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, Luke made a quick, hard jab with his right hand to the guy’s throat and followed it up with a left to his stomach. The guy gasped and doubled over, flipping the TTT a few feet up in the air. David grabbed it before it could hit the ground.

  “Thank you!” Luke said with exaggerated gratitude as the guy gasped for breath on his knees. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Nice move, dude!” David said as they hurried away, genuinely impressed. “You learn that in karate?”

  “Yeah,” Luke replied. “It was just a video I saw. The element of surprise. Works every time.”

  The Flashback Four pushed Miss Z’s wheelchair hurriedly back down Via dell’Abbondanza and through the Porta Marina gate, to the spot where they had arrived at Pompeii an hour earlier. It was just before one o’clock.

  “Okay, everybody get tight,” Miss Z instructed, “like you’re posing for a picture.”

  The group squeezed closer together. In the distance, a church bell rang, announcing the hour.

  “Hey, look!” Julia shouted, pointing toward the Porta Marina gate.

  Five burly guys in rugby shirts were striding purposely in their direction. The guy with the mohawk was in front of them, talking in Italian.

  “Oh, shoot!” Luke said.

  The rugb
y players were about twenty feet away and closing.

  “What are we going to do now?” asked Isabel, putting her hands over her eyes.

  Fortunately, the Flashback Four didn’t have to do anything. At that moment, in the offices of Pasture Company, Mrs. Vader hit the SEND button on her keyboard. The Board lit up in bands of color. In Pompeii, the Flashback Four started flickering.

  “Huh?” one of the rugby players said, stopping short a few feet away.

  “So long, suckers!” shouted David.

  At that moment, the Flashback Four and Miss Z disappeared from Pompeii and reappeared back in Boston.

  CHAPTER 8

  TOOLS OF THE TRADE

  “AHAHAHAHAHA!”

  The Flashback Four were in hysterics as they tumbled onto the carpet, nearly knocking down a floor lamp and falling all over each other.

  “Did you see the look on that guy’s face?” David said, barely able to control himself. “I wish we took a picture of him.”

  “I didn’t see it,” Isabel cackled. “I had my eyes closed the whole time!”

  “They looked like they were gonna kill us!” said Luke.

  Even Miss Z couldn’t stop herself from giggling a little.

  “I want you kids to know that I do not approve of violence in any form,” she said, trying to regain her composure. “But that fellow did have it coming.”

  “What happened?” asked Mrs. Vader. “Did you get in trouble over there?”

  “No, no,” Miss Z assured her. “Everything went perfectly. We had an absolutely delightful time in Pompeii. It was just as I remembered it.”

  “I’m sorry I lost the TTT for a little while,” Isabel said.

  “You didn’t lose it,” Luke told her. “That guy was a criminal.”

  “Oh, who cares, anyway?” Julia bubbled, not wanting to put a damper on the festive mood. “That was fun! I haven’t had so much fun since . . . since we were on the Titanic.”

  Luke, David, Julia, and Isabel glanced at one another. Each of them had the same thought. Their quick outing to Pompeii had been a blast all around. They had forgotten what pure exhilaration felt like. They had experienced it in Gettysburg and on the Titanic. Now they wanted to feel that feeling again. It was almost like an addiction.