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"You did just fine, Janet. Your mother would be very proud."
That only brought fresh sobs.
"How touching."
Francisco turned to glare at the man in the Hawaiian shirt. He lolled in the doorway. Francisco noticed a pistol stuck casually in the waistband of his jeans. Stupid way to carry a firearm....
"Who are you?"
The man gri
"His name is Bill," Janet said in a dull voice. "He works for somebody named Carreras. We're hostages, Major Valdez."
Bill gave him another jaunty mock salute.
"I figured that out," Francisco muttered, "but what for?"
She shook her head. "It has something to do with my mother's work. I'm not sure what. She's very close-mouthed when it comes to classified research. But I do know the general thrust of her work before she began this project. Before she was approached for this project," she added significantly.
"And?"
Janet glared at Bill, who was still gri
"We're still in Alaska," she said dully. "But I wouldn't advise trying to escape. It wouldn't do a whole lot of good."
"Why not?" he asked irritably.
"Because we're about thirty-thousand years in the past."
She was serious. Francisco felt strangely disco
Janet added, "Not only is there nowhere to go, we're stranded in the middle of the Pleistocene Ice Age. It's twenty below out there, without windchill. Last week, the wooly mammoth herds started migrating south for the winter, through the ice-free corridor. I figure the nearest people live somewhere in the middle of Russia, if Russia had any Cro-Magnons. Or would it be Paleo-Indians? Uh, I'm afraid anthropology isn't my thing."
Her eyes were bleak.
Francisco didn't want to believe her. But he'd seen the... thing... they'd taken him through. And that brown, moving mass he'd seen in the distance... It really had looked like a herd of elephants. Brown ones. With lots and lots of hair. And enough ivory on each beast to put a modern elephant to shame.
"We're treated pretty well, everything considered," Janet said in a low, scared voice. "They need us."
It occurred to Francisco Valdez in that cramped, foul little room, that he had no family to hold hostage. He was entirely superfluous now that Zac Hughes' life was out of danger. And he knew far, far too much about these people—whoever they were—for them to risk letting him get back alive.
Something dull and scared in Janet Firelli's eyes told him she knew it, too. Bill's laughter echoed in his ears.
Chapter Thirteen
Sibyl roused to sounds of panic. Screams, crashes, ru
Sibyl tried to move, anyway. She had to get out of the house before the real eruption started. The steam explosions had already begun. Which meant the main eruption couldn't be more than minutes away. Sibyl rolled over and tried to gain her knees. Pain stabbed through her belly, her groin, her back. She sobbed aloud. She wouldn't have to wait for the volcano to kill her. She felt as though she were bleeding to death where she lay.
She heard Bericus shouting orders to bring out the spare carriage and heavy wagon. Then he vanished from her awareness. She was alone in the peristyle garden under a hot, sunlit sky, with the ground shaking so violently she knew it might be only seconds before the walls started to go.
Sibyl tried again to gain her knees. She cast a frantic glance upward. The sky was still a flawless, burning blue. She twisted to peer at the volcano. Her eyes widened. Vesuvius steamed. Billowing clouds of white vapor, mixed with grey ash and rock, rose majestically from the crater. The sight brought a chill to her spine.
The mountain had barely begun to blow open, after so many years of somnolence. Some poor shepherd or two had probably just died a violent death, along with the flocks which had routinely been driven up there to graze in the old caldera. First to die. But not the last, by a long, long shot.
Judging from the position of the sun, there wasn't much time before the famous one-o'clock explosion tore the entire top of the mountain off. That explosion would send rock and poisonous gas belching twelve miles into the atmosphere.
Gotta get out of here, now... .
"Sibyl!"
The incongruous sound of her name startled her. She swung around, dazed and shaken. "Wha—"
Benigna. Clutching her child. Lucania wasn't crying. She clung to her mother's neck with a fierceness Sibyl had seen so often in Charlie.
"Please, sibyl, help us! You warned us, please, have pity—"
"Help me up..."
Benigna lifted Sibyl to her feet. Her clothing, torn in places, bloody in others, fell around her seminakedness. She hardly noticed, except to wince in pain at each step. Benigna put an arm around her, guiding her toward the nearest doorway.
"We have to get out of the house," Sibyl mumbled.
"There is no time! We must take shelter in the nearest gateway!"
Gateway?
Still dazed and uncertain, Sibyl stumbled across the garden toward the nearest doorway, guided by the trembling slave woman. The ground lurched sharply under their feet. Benigna screamed. Her daughter whimpered and clung more tightly to her neck. "Hurry, sibyl!"
Xanthus ran into the garden, making for the doorway that led to the front of the house, and literally ran them down. Sibyl sprawled, jarring her lower body painfully. The slave trader roared and kicked at her, then swore at Benigna, who had fallen at his feet.
"You!" He snatched Lucania from her mother's arms. "I'll just take what Bericus promised and cut my losses!"
"No!" Benigna tried to grapple him.
Xanthus slapped her to the shaking ground.
Lucania began to scream for her mother.
Sibyl searched for a weapon—any weapon—and found the broken remains of a fountain almost under her hand. She snatched up a heavy section of lead piping and lunged forward. Xanthus had already begun ru
Sibyl panted and ran after him, gaining ground fast.
"Stop!"
When he kept going, Sibyl swung the heavy water pipe in a vicious arc. It co
Oh, God—
"Sibyl!"
Benigna's scream of terror distracted her. The woman was pointing to the mountain. Sibyl craned her neck around to see Vesuvius more clearly—
—and the whole sky exploded.
The top of the mountain blew apart. Vesuvius hurled itself toward the stratosphere. Almost simultaneously the sound smashed down across them. Benigna lost her footing and fell. Sibyl couldn't hear any screams, not even her own. The ground heaved like hurricane-maddened surf. Blackness the shape of an evil umbrella pine blotted out the sun, engulfing them in choking nightfall in an instant. Sibyl held her breath, terrified that hot ash and poisonous gas would envelop them. Rocks from what had been the top of the mountain smashed down within a few feet. Then the house wall above them cracked, began to go...