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 1STUCK 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
