Immortal (12 page)

Just then the mountain ejected a larger mass of smoke and running seemed like a very good idea.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s run, shall we?” The proper thing to do would have been to warn Adolphus and his wife first, but they were in Rome on business at the time, so I was obligation free. I ran.

I headed down the hill, taking the most direct path I knew of to the shore. Any boat close to the mountain would be rendered useless by a big enough pumice rock or flaming ember—wood boats and all—and I was betting that any boat owner with half a brain would know this and act accordingly. Getting on one of those boats before they left would be a good thing.

And then, as I was halfway to the dock, Mount Vesuvius erupted. It began with an earthquake tremor, which knocked me off my feet, leaving me prone and looking up at the top of the mountain, which put me into position to see something amazing. The entire top cone of the mountain rocketed skyward in a million pieces propelled by an enormous column of ejecta that spread outward in all directions. It looked a bit like those mushrooms I’d been picking for Win, only writ large and much deadlier. As horrifying as it was, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything quite so magnificent.

My immediate and very human reaction was to sit there and watch, as one rarely gets a chance to see something this extraordinary. (I’d been sleeping when the volcano off Crete blew.) Fortunately I had Win to watch my back.

“Move now!” she urged, tugging at my earlobe.

Snapped from my reverie, I got to my feet and stumbled down the hill as the ashes began to rain down from the initial blast. I’d gotten about twenty paces, still turning from time to time to admire the view, when a massive chunk of pumice landed right where I’d been admiring the volcano. That sealed it. It was time to get the hell out of Herculaneum, and fast.

As I sprinted through town, I came across dozens of neighbors who didn’t seem at all inclined to motivate themselves toward the shore. They just stood there and watched. Either they simply didn’t comprehend the peril they were in or they knew there was no place to run and figured they might as well catch the show. I wasn’t quite at that point. I’d swim to Capri if I had to.

When I reached the shore I found . . . no boats.

“Oh, Hades,” I said.

“Where boat?” Win asked from her perch on my shoulder.

“It’s the middle of the day. Everyone’s fishing in the bay right now.”

“No boat?” she clarified.

“No boat.”

Another massive blast from the mountain shook the Earth and sent me to my knees. Ashes were starting to rain down in force and the sky had darkened considerably. Clouds were forming over the mountain. If prior experience served, lightning would be next.

I shuffled through my options quickly. There weren’t many. “Win, do you know where Torre del Greco is?”

“Tory . . . ?”

“. . . del Greco. It’s down the beach from here. I need you to fly ahead and see if there are any boats there. I know you can fly very fast.”

“Very fast.”

“Yes. See if there are boats there.”

“You stay here?”

“I’m going to run as fast as I can along the shore. I’d just like to know if there’ll be a boat waiting for me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And Win? If the air gets too bad and you don’t think you can make it back to me, don’t. Just fly off to somewhere safe. I’ll be all right.”

“I come back.”

“Only if it’s safe.”

“I come back.” She zipped off.

I knelt down and removed my sandals. Nobody should ever be forced to run in sandals for any length of time. I wore them because everyone else did, but considering I went something like fifty millennia without footwear, for me they were more of a contrivance than a convenience. Plus, you ever tried running in the sand in wood sandals?

I looked up once again and saw what looked like a giant rain cloud rapidly losing altitude. It was a volley of heavier ashes, and they looked hot. Time to run again.

As I said, my muscles don’t seem to grow in time with exercise. I’m about as strong and fast as I was in the beginning. But I was always a good runner. At one time I had to be. It was how we hunted. There were animals that were faster, sure, but we could run for days without getting winded. (This is why I never understood why everyone made such a big deal out of marathon runners, twenty-six miles is a warm-up.)

I took off down the beach. The sand made the going a little rough, but nothing unmanageable. I would have made excellent time if I didn’t have to breathe. Unfortunately I did, and that became a difficult thing to do when the ash fall really got going.

About halfway to Torre Del Greco I had to stop just to find some air. It was a bit like trying to run while breathing through fifty lit cigarettes. I fell to my knees and cupped my ash-covered hands over my mouth, but when that didn’t make a difference I tried removing my toga and breathing through that instead. This helped. It left me stark naked, but people back then weren’t nearly as uptight about that sort of thing as they are today.

Behind me, I could see that the town was on fire. The second floor of most of the buildings in Herculaneum were made of wood rather than the stone used on the bottom level, and a lot of that wood had surrendered to the hot ash and pumice. I wondered if the people now understood that this was not something to patiently wait out. Probably they would do the same as I did and flee to the water line. Maybe they would be safer there. I was thinking it might be a better idea to find indoor shelter and wait it out, but that was because I was trying jog in an ashtray.

My eyes were burning, so I splashed some water into my face to rinse them. Then I started running again.

*
 
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*

When I reached Torre del Greco I found an abandoned shoreline. No boats. No pixie. She’d apparently chosen discretion over valor. And it looked like I was screwed.

Collapsing in a heap at the edge of the water I panted hard and tried to kick loose the sulfur that had nested in my lungs. The water was cool, so I lay down in it and let the tide splash loose some of the mottled grime coating my naked body and soothe what had to be at least a couple of second degree burns on my back. I imagine I looked something like a mud sculpture prior to the finishing touches.

I could still see the western side of Vesuvius from my vantage point, and it appeared things were not going to end well for my about-to-be-former residence. A gush of lava had lipped out of the top of the mountain and was arcing its way right for the city. It moved extremely slowly, but it was most surely moving, and there was nothing that could possibly stop it except the water.

I began to regret my decision to simply up and run. In practical terms, there were horses available. No doubt one or two of the wealthy landowners had thought of this and were now someplace with less airborne ash. In humanitarian terms, I could have convinced at least one or two people to go with me along the shore . . . so they could die in Torre del Greco, like I was evidently about to. Okay, so following me wasn’t always the best idea. Win certainly must have come to that conclusion.

“Hey! Get up!”

My tinny-voiced pixie had returned. She was hovering above my face and looking quite sternly at me.

“Why?” I asked. “No boats. And, it’s a nice view.”

“Stupid.”

“I’m stupid? You should get the hell out of here while you can, Win.”

“Win found boats.”

I looked up and down the shore again. “Where?”

“Not here. No boats here. Found boats down there.”

I thought about it. “Stabiae?”

“Don’t know.”

“But there are boats there?”

“Yes. Hurry!”

I got back up again and half-ran, half-walked to Stabiae. I wanted to quit a dozen times, but Win wouldn’t let me. (She would have made an excellent personal trainer.) It helped that the closer I got, the milder the conditions got, with the shower of pumice and heavy ash replaced by a light ash shower that wasn’t half as scalding. Still, it was nearly the next morning when I reached Stabiae. Win had been right. There were boats.

*
 
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*

We ended up stuck in Stabiae for two more days. Nowadays when you think of a boat you think sailboat or motorboat or rowboat. We had flat, ugly beasts with square rigged sails that were entirely dependent on favorable winds. I made myself fairly useful on board a ship owned by an excitable fellow named Pompanianus, and I got to meet the recently deceased body of Pliny the Elder, but other than that, it was a dull, unpleasant couple of days marred by the intense feeling of impending doom.

When the winds finally smiled upon us, we set out for the open waters of the bay with as many living persons as we could fit on six ships (two owned by Pompanianus, four consisting of Pliny’s fleet). Herculaneum and the landward town of Pompeii were both gone by then. We all hoped that more had escaped death and simply chosen a route deeper inland to flee the mountain.

The ships quickly spread out to take advantage of the winds. As I stood on the deck of Pompanianus’s largest vessel, I looked across at one of Pliny’s smaller ships as it receded from us. On the bow, facing me, was a tall pale woman with striking red hair.

*
 
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*

We landed on Capri, where I remained for another two years. (It was six months before I stopped coughing up ash.) Win stayed with me up until her death, which came about a year after the Vesuvius eruption. An unfortunate fact about pixies is that their life span is only about twenty years, so it was not a big surprise for either of us. I buried her in an olive grove.

Many hundreds of years later, I got a chance to see a museum exhibit showing some of the artifacts uncovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was, to put it mildly, a strange experience, especially since I recognized several of the preserved dead. I also saw my broom on display. I considered reclaiming it but decided it would take more effort than it was worth.

Historians had long speculated that Herculaneum got off easy by being wiped out by a large mud flow, and for a while I thought maybe I’d been wrong about the lava. But I was vindicated by the recent discovery of skeletal remains and half-preserved bodies when the beach houses on the shore along which I ran so long ago were excavated. It looked like half the village opted to wait it out rather than flee, and died when lava engulfed their refuge.

I still feel kind of bad about this.

So far, the mushrooms don’t seem to be doing anything, except adding to the overall bouquet of the room. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m losing my mind.

   
I’m wondering now who’s in the third cell. I know the one next to me is occupied, and I know who’s in the fourth cell—I think—but the third one is a mystery. I initially assumed it was unused, but lately I’ve been hearing noises that have me thinking otherwise. Viktor and the others have been mum about it—as they have been about everything except the tests they’re running on me personally—but that just makes me more curious. I might have to ask one of them point blank.

Whoever it is in there, he’s in a lot of pain. I can hear the moaning. Is he a volunteer, or a prisoner like the rest of us?

*
 
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*

Waiting for Iza to return, I sat in a coffee shop two blocks from the police station reading the morning paper and enjoying—if one could call it that—a bitter latte sweetened by a splash of schnapps.

My relationship with alcohol is complicated. Give or take a few days here and there, I hadn’t been dry since the speakeasy fire in 1922. By all normal human standards that would make me a raging alcoholic, except that by those same human standards I would also be dead by now, if not from old age then from cirrhosis of the liver. But eighty years for me is like a glass of wine with dinner for anybody else.

Many times over my long history, I have allowed myself to become entirely dependent upon alcohol to the point where I now make advance plans in anticipation of being drunk for a decade or two. The unspoken understanding is that I will eventually either grow tired of being drunk or something interesting will happen that will demand my undivided attention for a while.

You might think this is terribly naive, and perhaps I should just admit that I’m being stupid, as I am clearly already an alcoholic, but I don’t think it’s altogether fair to apply that term to me. More to the point, I think if you gave any drunkard immortality he would eventually pull himself together with a century or two to work on it. And trust me, alcohol is just about the only way to get through the duller periods of history. For instance, I spent most of the tenth century in Spain when there was simply nothing to do except drink wine. Everybody else did anyway.

Not that I’m lumping twenty-first century America in with tenth century Spain. On the contrary, the last hundred years had been very interesting, and despite being sauced most of the time, I’ve kept up-to-date on the big stuff. But I’ve also been in mourning pretty much since that 1922 fire, which upset me perhaps more than I realized.