“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.”
“Hey, if it weren’t for Luke, you’d still be in the Atlantic Ocean right now!” David barked at her.
“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
