The Five-Day Dig (33 page)

Over his shoulder, she saw Hank dab his sleeve at a trickle of blood on his forehead. The scrape didn’t look deep, thank goodness.

Jack sat on the other side of Hank with a stunned expression on his face, but he wasn’t wincing or holding any body parts. So far, it appeared they’d gotten off easy.

Loosening her hold on Chaz, she looked around the dusty cavern of a room. Vaulted ceilings stretched over an empty central pool with some sort of a mosaic on the bottom. Three empty pedestals stood beside the pool on another tiled floor. On the opposite side of them, a series of archways appeared to lead to other rooms.

Beside her, Amara yelped as she pulled her foot out from under a chunk of masonry. “Oh – my heel!”

In a flash, Hank was at her side, his own wound forgotten. “Did you break it?”

She grimaced, gingerly removing the shoe from her foot. Holding the stiletto up toward him, she wriggled the heel, and it came off in her hand. “Yes. And my ankle hurts, too.”

Ignoring the shoe, he shifted closer to her, gently setting his hand on her shin. “Can you move it?”

She twirled the foot in a slow circle. “Yes, but it hurts like bloody hell.”

Further away, the source of the sobbing turned out to be Enza. Dunk, the only one standing, helped her to her feet. “Does anything hurt?”

She threw herself in his arms and cried harder, but as far as Winnie could tell, she didn’t appear to be injured.

Chaz pointed to the other side of the chamber. “Let’s move under one of those arches. If there are more structural failures, we’ll be safest there.”

She let him help her up and leaned into him as they crossed the room. “What happened? An earthquake? Do you think it’s over?”

“Whatever it was is over for now.” He glanced up toward the top of the slope. “But our way out of here is gone.”

Tracing his line of sight, she saw a dark hole gaping where the tunnel leading out of the room upstairs had been. Digging through the rubble would be a problem, since the tunnel was some twenty feet above them, and the slope of the floor was steep. “Crap.”

He pulled her down to sit next to him on the floor and gave her a squeeze. “There are plenty of workers outside who know we’re in here. They’ll get us out.”

She stole a kiss from him, looking at him sadly and wishing they could be anywhere safe – and alone.

“Is the camera still working, Hank?” Dunk called from across the room. “We’ve got to keep shooting.”

Busy wrapping a strip of T-shirt around Amara’s ankle, Hank didn’t bother to answer or check the camera.

Rushing over, Dunk snatched up the device and flicked a few controls on it. “It seems all right.” He hoisted it onto his shoulder and began to pan slowly around the room. In his TV voice, albeit agitated, he said, “We’ve had a serious collapse, and lighting is limited, so I’m not sure how much you can see, but the room we’re in now is huge.”

He swept the camera past Amara, then doubled back on her. “Amara, can you
suss
out that crate of lanterns and light more of them?”

Her eyes widened, but after a beat, she tried to get up, wincing.

Hank grabbed her arm. “Please, sit back down. I’ll find the lights.”

While he began his search, Dunk continued surveying the chamber, focusing on the center of the floor. “In this depressed area, there’s a magnificent Neptune-themed mosaic depicting fish and other sea creatures, both real ones and mythical ones. Surrounding it, we have more pedestals for statues. Unfortunately, like the one in the temple, they’re all missing. ... What is this place?”

“Part of a public bath complex,” Jack said without enthusiasm. “That’s a pool in the middle of the room.”

Winnie evaluated the scene again. Something wasn’t right. Not everyone was present. “Where’s Will?” she asked.

They all glanced around, making sure they hadn’t somehow overlooked him. Then Jack looked up the sloping floor toward the collapsed tunnel. “I think he was in front of Amara and me in the tunnel.”

Winnie’s gaze flew back up to the dark hole. The tunnel hadn’t been cleared well to begin with. No wonder the volcanic deposit in there had let go. A lump formed in her stomach.

Chaz jumped up. “We have to find a way up there to get him out.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Jack said. “The last thing we need is to have that material come down on top of us. They’ll have a much easier time reaching him from the outside.”

Chaz stared at the hole, rubbing his forehead. “I hope he’s not completely buried. There’s certainly no sign of him on this end.”

Enza
burst into tears again. “He is dead!
Che bruttissimo
! Dunk, what are we going to do?”

Still operating the camera, he turned to her. “There’s no reason to assume he’s dead, Enza. The rescue team will reach him in no time. He may even have made it out before the collapse.”

Winnie exchanged a doubtful look with Chaz.

“Stop shooting, Dunk,” Jack said.

He hesitated, then turned off the camera and set it down on the floor. “You’re right. We need a moment to pull ourselves together. But let’s look at this objectively. That tunnel doesn’t contain a lot of material. Surely, the rescue team will have us out of here within twenty-four hours. We have to document this experience while we have a chance.”

The lead archaeologist shook his head. “The room outside the tunnel may have collapsed, too. We could be stuck down here for days.”

Dunk shrugged. “Then we should take advantage of that time to do what we came here to do. There could be internationally important finds here. We owe it to the world to reveal them.”

Emotions flickered across Jack’s face as he weighed his colleague’s points. The rest of them sat deep in thought, too. In the silence, a muffled clanking began above them.

A rush of relief flooded through Winnie. “They’re digging for us.”

“What can we use to signal that we’re OK?” Chaz got up and grabbed a flashlight, shooting the beam around the room.

Behind Jack, two lead pipes ran up the wall. A chunk of one was broken off. He picked up the broken piece and banged it three times against the other pipe on the wall.

The clanking above stopped.

Jack banged the pipe three times again.

Three answering clanks sounded.

Winnie let her shoulders sag with relief.

“Yes!” Dunk shouted. He turned to Jack. “See? We don’t have much time to record what’s down here. You know this building is going to be ruled unsafe for the rest of the dig.”

“It
is
unsafe.”

The two men glared at each other.

“Here are the lanterns.” Hank dragged a crate out of a pile of rubble, carried it over, and set it on the floor next to them. “If you’re going to explore, you’ll need them.”

Jack looked down at it, then around at the extraordinary room. Sighing, he turned back to Dunk. “Your point does have some validity. I’ll help you document the archaeology, but not our team members’ emotions under this degree of strain.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Anyone else want to poke around with us?”

Hank reached for the camera. “I can take over shooting. My head has stopped bleeding.”

“I’ll join you, too,” Chaz said.

“Chaz!” Winnie said involuntarily.

He met her gaze, his muted smile telling her he was glad she cared enough to worry. “All we’re doing is looking around. Either the place collapses on us or not. We might as well be doing what we came here for.”

She thought about it, then got up, too. “What the heck. I could use the distraction.”

They all rummaged around to find working flashlights. Using shoelaces, Hank tied one to the top of the camera and focused the beam and lens on Dunk. “We’re rolling.”

The show host pointed toward the pool in the center of the room. “This large pool establishes that we’re in a public bathhouse.” Walking slowly toward one of the archways, he glanced back toward the others. “What might these side rooms constitute, Jack?”

His co-star joined him onscreen, and they moved toward the closest one. “Presumably changing rooms, saunas and cold baths.”

Both men shone lights inside, and Hank filmed them entering the first room.

Winnie and Chaz went to the doorway and got a view of another tiled room furnished with four person-sized tables.

“This type of room was called a
destrictarium
.” Jack patted one of the tables, then wiped his dust-coated hand on his baggy
cordoroy
pants. “Bathers would have been oiled up here and scraped down by enslaved attendants.”

Dunk grinned, despite the seriousness of their situation. “Good for some, eh?”

“That’s what the Romans thought.”

They backtracked, then moved into the next chamber, which had space enough for all five of them to step inside. This time Enza and a limping Amara migrated over to watch from the door.

Flashlight beams flitted around the room, unveiling stone benches lining three of the four walls. The lights gravitated to a single spot where a central fresco of a scantily clad woman straddling a nude man came into view. Though the colors had faded and the plaster had chipped in spots, the most significant body parts remained intact and conspicuous.

Dunk raised an eyebrow. “What have we here?”

Winnie smothered a smile and directed her flashlight elsewhere. On the wall adjacent to her, another erotic fresco depicted a man taking a woman from behind. She swung her light across the room and revealed a woman with her legs hoisted over a man’s shoulders.

“Whoa,” Chaz said next to her. “If we’re stuck here all night, let’s call dibs on this room.”

A ripple of laughter circled them, and several faces turned their way – including Hank’s with the camera attached to it. She grimaced. Noticing Enza slip out of the room, she guessed the girl had been embarrassed for her.

Even Chaz looked slightly abashed by the reaction his comment evoked. “Unless anyone else wants to flip us for it, of course,” he added.

Winnie shot Dunk an imploring look. “Can that be edited out of the program?”

He gave her a crooked grin. “Oh, I think not. But we will consider ceding the room to you two for the night.”

Thankfully, Jack continued with their work. “Erotic art was common in ancient
Rome
,” he said in narrator mode. “This was likely an
apodyterium
or changing room.”

He focused his flashlight on the far end of the room, where a second doorway stood, filled with a blob of hardened volcanic flow, molded with the shape of two long-gone wooden doors. Walking over to it, he said, “This blocked doorway probably led outside to an exercise area called a
palestra
. You can still see the impression the doors left in the pyroclastic flow before the wood decomposed.”