Next Stop, Pompeii – A Short Story

In Colorado Territory, 1887, at the town of Angel’s Rest, spring came early that year. On the stone footbridge over Caldera Creek, five children lean over the railings. Scraped knees. Pinafores and suspenders. They skip stones toward the current, each trying to out-skip the next. “Feels like the sun’s zooming in,” says Martha Cabot, tugging her sister’s hand to go down to the river’s edge.

On a warm April morning, with snowmelt running off the slopes of Mount Caldera, five children played on the old stone bridge where the river narrowed and chattered. Clara Fitch, age nine, the sheriff’s daughter, crouched on the railing and tried to balance on one foot. Elias Boonrabble, lanky and nervous, counted pebble skips. Martha and June Cabot, twins with matching braids, dared each other to spit off the highest arch.

Oliver Prentiss, smaller than the rest, leaned so far over the edge he could smell the creek’s cold breath. “Let’s go in!”, he cries out.

It was hot for April. The children complained. Clara fanned herself with her schoolbook. Oliver’s shout hung in the warm air, a childish challenge to the unseasonable heat. The sun, indeed, felt like a brassy eye glaring down from a sky too blue for April, a sky that promised an even hotter day. Clara, ever the pragmatist, lowered her textbook, the faint scent of ink and paper mingling with the damp earth.

“Go in? Oliver, you’re mad,” she said, her voice carrying the authority of the sheriff’s daughter. “The creek’s still a glacier, even if the sun’s trying its best to melt it.” Elias, his brow furrowed in concentration as he tallied another string of skips, nodded in agreement. He’d already counted a respectable dozen for his best stone, and the idea of submerging those precious skipping limbs was anathema.

Martha, however, her braids swinging with the energy of a spring bird, bounced on the balls of her feet. “But it *is* hot, Clara! My pinafore feels like a blanket. And look at June,” she nudged her twin, who was already loosening the buttons on her suspenders, “she’s practically wilting.” June, with a faint smile, stretched her arms towards the sun, a bold, defiant gesture against the lingering chill of the snowmelt. The river, a lively ribbon of silver below, seemed to beckon, its gurgling laughter a stark contrast to the children’s sticky discomfort.

Oliver, undeterred, edged closer to the water’s edge, his small hands gripping the mossy stones of the bridge. He dipped a finger in, pulling it back with a sharp intake of breath. “Just a little bit,” he pleaded, his eyes wide and earnest. “Just to cool our toes. We won’t go in all the way, promise!” The allure of the cool, clear water, coupled with the insistent warmth of the sun, was a potent temptation, a promise of relief in the heart of this peculiar, early spring.

“Pa says we have to stay out of the river, unless he’s along,” Elias said, glumly. “He says the Farmer’s Almanac calls for early spring floods, this year. My grampa is half Indian and he says Caldera Mountain is an angry mountain.”

Martha snorted. “Mountains can’t be angry.”

“Maybe not,” Elias muttered, “but something’s not right. Pa says he’s heard strange rumblings. Loud groaning noises at midnight.”

Just as the words escaped his lips, the mountain emitted a loud low groan of the exact same sort they were discussing. A hush fell over them. They look up.
Near the peak of Mount Caldera, above the tree line and thin streaks of snow, something floated in the sky. Perched on the crown of the mountain, something gleams. Oval. Metallic. Drifting, not falling. A floating steamship? A metal cloud?

Their imaginations strained to understand what they were looking at. It was, indecipherably beyond their comprehension. They had no frame of reference by which to contextualize their shared vision. Elias’s jaw slackened, his eyes wide and fixed on the impossible object. Martha, who moments before had scoffed, now stood frozen, her snort forgotten.

The thing in the sky wasn’t a barn, or a silo, or anything remotely familiar. It was smooth, impossibly so, reflecting the pale spring sunlight with a dull, pewter sheen. It pulsed, a soft, almost imperceptible thrumming that Oliver felt more than heard, a vibration that resonated deep in his bones. The groaning from the mountain seemed to shift, morphing into a deeper, more resonant hum that seemed to emanate from the floating anomaly itself.

The metallic gleam intensified, casting long, distorted shadows across the snow-dusted peaks of Caldera Mountain. It was oval, yes, but a perfect, impossible oval, as if carved from a single, colossal drop of mercury. All the children felt a prickling sensation on their skin. The groaning from the mountain subsided, becoming more like a sigh, a weary exhalation. The air itself grew heavy, charged with an unseen force that tugged at Elias’s clothes and rustled the sparse, stubborn pine needles on the trees below.

A nervous energy that made them want to run, but their feet were rooted to the spot, mesmerized by the silent spectacle. Elias’ usual anxieties about the river and his Pa’s warnings about early spring floods seemed trivial now, like rain drops against the roar of this new, unfathomable mystery.

“I seen a picture once,” the biggest boy says. “In school. A dirigible. Could be one o’ them.”

Then the world tore open.

A thunderclap cracked across the valley so loud it shivered thought the tree branches, sending a flock of starlings screaming skyward. The bridge trembled. The water thrashed against the pilings.

The children fell. Books and pebbles scattered.
No storm clouds. No lightning. Just that sound — like God had snapped a branch.

The floating shape jerked, angled downward, and began drifting toward them. Maneuvering slowly. Deliberately. Then, with a movement so graceful it was almost terrifying, the oval object began to descend. It didn’t plummet or fall; it drifted, as if a feather caught on an invisible current. Whatever it was, it was no longer content to simply hover; it was coming down, and it was coming their way.

Clara felt her breath leave her body. “It’s coming,” she said.

It came over the tree line. Over the river. Over the bridge.
Low enough to throw a shadow the size of an ocean liner. It came around the side of the bridge; the windows obscured the human forms on the other side. The underside was paneled metal. Curved windows ran along the sides. The forms of standing passengers lined along them, seemingly staring out.

A low hum, a resonant vibration that pulsed through the soles of their worn shoes, replaced the deafening crack. It was a sound that suggested immense, unseen power, a gentle giant breathing its way into their small world. The dirigible, a silver behemoth against the bruised sky, eased its descent, its metallic skin catching the last rays of the sun, turning it a molten gold.

Clara gripped the splintered railing of the bridge, her knuckles white, eyes wide as saucers. The passengers within, those indistinct shapes behind the darkened glass, seemed to press closer, their gazes – she imagined – fixed upon the tiny, insignificant figures below.
The colossal shadow it cast was not just a darkening of the afternoon; it felt like a physical weight pressing down, suffocating their familiar world.

The air grew heavy, charged with an unknown energy, carrying the faint scent of ozone and something else… something metallic and ancient, like rust and distant stars. The river, moments ago a tempest of thrashing water, now seemed to hold its breath, its surface mirroring the impossible craft now hanging almost directly overhead. The starlings, previously scattered in a panicked frenzy, began to wheel in wider, more tentative circles, drawn by this new, silent titan.

The impossible dirigible hovered, its massive form blotting out the sun, casting the bridge and the riverbank into an eerie twilight. The hum deepened, a low thrum that vibrated not just the air, but the very bones of the children watching, mesmerized and terrified. The world, which had just torn open, was now being offered something new, something incomprehensible.

Elias screamed first. They ran. Up the road, past the livery and the telegraph post, into the wide dirt street of Angel’s Rest, where the townsfolk already spilled from their homes, drawn by the thunderclap.

“What in God’s good name—” Sheriff Fitch began, and his daughter crashed into him, sobbing.

“It followed us!” Clara gasped. “It’s chasing!”

They looked. And it was.

Fifty feet above the ground, keeping pace like some awesome metal cloud from the end of word, an archangel wielding a sword on top. The enormous object drifted down Main Street. Horses reared. Chickens scattered. Mrs. Harrow fainted in front of the general store.

Sherrif Fitch called up toa man in the hotel’s room window to ask if he saw an angel on thew top of the cloud. The man never answered. He stared mouth agape at the obscured human shapes in the windows that glided past his own.

Someone started frantically ringing the church bell.
Panic took them. Instinctively, everyone in town began to gather in a crowd, then at the toll of the bells, they ran enmasse to the church.

Townspeople fled into St. Jude’s — a squat stone church by the cemetery. Doors slammed. Benches scraped the floor as they barricaded them shut. Children wailed. Men clutched rifles they feared were useless. The bell tolled again, desperate plea hammered into turbulent air.

Inside St. Jude’s, the scent of old hymnals and fear hung heavy. Elias, his face streaked with dust, huddled near his mother, his small hands clamped over his ears. Clara, her eyes wide and unblinking, pressed herself against her father, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

Sheriff Fitch, his usual gruff demeanor replaced by a grim pallor, stood by the thick oak doors, his rifle held loosely, a stark symbol of his helplessness. The thunderclap, the initial harbinger of this unearthly spectacle, had faded, replaced now by the muted groans of timbers and the chilling whisper of the strange vehicle outside, a wind that seemed to carry with it the immense shadow of the descending behemoth.

Through the small, stained-glass windows, slivers of a strange, diffused light pulsed, painting the faces of the terrified townsfolk in shifting hues of crimson and gold. At first, no one spoke, save for the occasional whimper of a child or the choked sob of a woman, but a panicked clamor began to rise. The man in the hotel window, the one who had failed to answer the Sheriff, stood against the wall. A stranger, a frozen silhouette against the encroaching darkness, his terror palpable. He’d only been here to spend the night before continuing his trek to New Orleans. The silence within the church was more disturbing than any shriek, a collective holding of breath as the sky itself seemed to peel back.

Then, a new sound began to creep through the barricaded doors, a low, resonant hum that vibrated not just in the air, but deep within their bones. It was a sound that spoke of immense power, of something ancient and unstoppable. The massive archangel, a silhouette against a sky now painted with the fiery hues of an unholy dawn, continued its silent, majestic descent, its celestial sword glinting with an ethereal light, its gaze, if it could be said to have one, fixed upon the trembling sanctuary of St. Jude’s.

Reverend Talbot climbed the pulpit, voice trembling but loud. “Let us regain our demeanor! This is the house of the Lord, and you will have reverence for this place.”
Chester Boonrabble held Elias close, eyes watering in terror, “What in God’s name has happened to us? Have we been adjudged as guilty? The salon? The saloon girls, the drinking? Is it the mining? Were the Indians right to say we shouldn’t mine Caldera Mountain? They warned us, but we paid no heed!”

Reverend Talbot’s voice, though still shaking, seemed to gather strength from the sheer weight of the congregation’s fear. He gripped the worn wooden Bible, its pages a testament to decades of sermons and whispered confessions. “Guilty? Adjudged? Brother Boonrabble, we are not here for judgment today. We are here for understanding, for solace. The Lord’s house is not a place for accusations, but for seeking His grace, even in these… unusual circumstances.” He gestured vaguely towards the stained-glass window depicting a bewildered-looking saint, the usual comforting glow now a sickly hue.

A low murmur rippled through the pews, a cacophony of hushed questions and desperate prayers. Elias, nestled in Chester’s embrace, felt a strange prickling sensation on his skin, like a thousand tiny insects crawling beneath his burlap tunic. He dared a peek at the women in the front rows. Their usually pristine bonnets askew, their lace collars stained with dark sweat. Mrs. Gable, the stern matriarch of the town council, was frantically trying to tie a strip of torn linen around her husband’s head, his face ashen.

Chester, his own breath catching in his throat, pulled Elias closer. “The mining,” he whispered, his voice raspy. “That cursed Caldera Mountain. We dug too deep, Elias. We disturbed something that wasn’t meant to be disturbed. The old ones, the tribes… they knew. They warned us about the spirits of the mountain, about the hunger beneath the stone.” He shuddered, the metallic tang of fear, mingled with something else, something acrid and earthy, filling the air.

The reverend placed a hand on the panicked father’s shoulder and guided the two of them to a nearby pew where the overcrowded parishioners made room for them to join.

Elias said, “Some think it is a judgement from heaven or the end of the world”.

The minister calms them reassuringly and explains that God’s will is perfect and immutable. “When our time comes our time comes, the Lord is calling you home to be in peace for all eternity. To abandon this world of suffering for the glory of heaven above.”

A woman wretched with terror broke from her seat to clutch the preacher at his knees, “Help me to have faith, reverend. We sinned the sin of hubris when we named the town Angel’s Rest. We invited the judgement of the Lord!”

Reverand Talbot got to his knees with her to embrace. He signaled to all the assembled to take a knee, and they did. As he held her, he said, “The ways of the Lord are mysterious to the mind of humanity. But in our infinitely perfect universe, there is no room for evil. There is only room for one infinite, all knowing, omniscient deity and we are his charges. In all of the universe, there is only one place where one may find anything less than perfection; for every rock, every leaf, every stream, every drop of rain, every star in the sky, they are all pristine perfection. They are as they must be and can be no other way, than God intended. In all of God’s creation there is only one place one may find evil, premeditated malice. That place is in the mind of man. Should this be the end for all of us, we have communed in the spirit and welcomed the everlasting life of God’s perfect will into our hearts.”

The prayer hung heavily in the air, a fragile shield against the dread that had descended upon Angel’s Rest. Elias, still pressed against his father, felt the communal embrace of their shared terror and the reverend’s desperate attempt to anchor them. The sickly green light from the stained glass seemed to intensify, casting elongated, dancing shadows that mimicked the writhing fear within each soul. The metallic tang Chester had spoken of was now a suffocating presence, thick and cloying, and Elias thought he heard a faint, low thrumming beneath the floorboards, like a wounded beast stirring in its slumber.

A sudden, sharp cry ripped through the hushed reverence. Across the aisle, young Sarah Miller, no older than Elias himself, pointed a trembling finger towards the church doors, her face contorted in a silent scream. The doors, firmly shut moments before, now quivered, and peering through the window revealed not the familiar sun-drenched road leading out of town, but a swirling, inky blackness that seemed to breathe in the play of light, rising dust from the tremoring ground and darkness. From this void, a thin, sinuous tendril of shadow snaked its way along a sunbeam into the sanctuary.

The reverend, his face pale but his eyes still fixed on the woman he cradled, seemed not to notice the encroaching darkness. His words, though meant to soothe, now echoed with a desperate, almost defiant faith. “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Yet, the tremor in his voice was no longer just from fear; it was the strain of a man trying to hold back a tide with a prayer. The tendril of shadow reached the front pew, caressing the carved oak as it passed.

They kneel in prayer as the ground begins rumbling around them. A low rumble, like a train miles away, growing in intensity as everything shakes and quakes. Outside, the buildings began to tremble.

Glass rattled. Hymnals slid from pews. The floor quaked. Cracks spidered up the walls. Dust rained down.

Someone screamed, “The mountain is angry!”

A roar rose — not thunder, not wind — water. A sound like the roaring sea.

The children clung to their parents. The parents clung to each other. The Reverend’s voice soared on the words Be not afraid.

The rectory wall exploded inward.

A thirty-foot wall of water, thick with uprooted trees and debris from the town, swallowed them. Bodies, pews, saints, sinners, candles — all swept into the torrent. The church vanished in an instant, along with the rest of the town.

Angel’s Rest ceased to exist. In the weeks and months that followed, as the waters receded, it was almost as if it had never existed at all. No town grew up to replace it at the foot of the angry mountain.

Only the mountain remembered. Its granite brow, scarred by millennia of wind and rain, bore witness to the fleeting nature of mortal endeavors. The mountain saw the spire of the church, then the gaping maw where the rectory wall had stood, then nothing but churned earth and the relentless march of the river. They were ghosts, wandering a landscape that had been violently scrubbed clean, their past lives buried beneath silt and sorrow.

Years bled into decades. The river, its fury now a placid murmur, continued its journey, carrying away the last vestiges of Angel’s Rest. Wildflowers, tenacious and indifferent, pushed through the mud, their vibrant hues a stark contrast to the muted grief that clung to the air. Occasionally, a lone traveler, drawn by the sheer desolation or a whispered legend, would stumble upon the forgotten place. They would find only a scattering of broken stones, a gnarled oak that had somehow survived the deluge, and an unsettling silence of what had been lost.

But the mountain kept its counsel. It had seen empires rise and fall, floods surge and recede, and the stubborn persistence of life in the face of annihilation. It had seen Angel’s Rest, and it remembered. The wind, whispering through the pines, carried tales of the town’s abrupt end, a secret shared only between the earth and the sky. And so, the memory of Angel’s Rest lived on, not in brick and mortar, but in the enduring, silent gaze of the mountain.

Above the raging waters that surged where the town of Angel’s Rest used to be, the vessel hovered, observing the aftermath through sealed windows.

Inside, the walls were clean white. The air smelled faintly of citrus and machinery. Rows of cushioned seats faced panoramic glass. The chairs revolved to face the passengers to the center of the craft, where a young man in the fashionable silver speed-suit that featured a bold ‘Dister Tours’ logo on the front.

“Alright, folks,” he said, solemnly professional, “that concludes our observation of the Angel’s Rest Flash Flood, Colorado Territory, April 1887. Total casualties: two hundred and eleven. Remember, per Federal Temporal Law, no waving, no knocking, and absolutely no attempts at communication — even if it looks like they can see you. They cannot. You are temporally insulated.”

The tour guide tapped a screen on his console, and a large hologram of their home spaceport began to revolve in their midst, which the guide accompanied with a script he read from a clipboard.

“Since time travel was invented, it has been forbidden to in any way change the past. You can’t have any contact w/anything or anyone and the only people you can observe, are people who are about to face catastrophic disaster, so there’s no way to affect the timeline. After carefully examining the ethical ramifications, our leadership determined the educational and cultural advantages outweighed any issues of disturbing the populace, with our presence. Invaluable information about the lives of Americans in this time period have been gained through our excursions to the past.” He gestured to the holographic cityscape; its shimmering spires a stark contrast to the somber depiction of Angel’s Rest they had just witnessed.

The rotating hologram changes to an image of the small lake that had accumulated in the basin on Mount Caldera. The tour guided continued with the presentation, “The basin on Mount Caldera that fed the creek which ran through Angel’s Rest had been blocked by a midwinter avalanche, so spring melt off accumulated in the basin, reaching an approximately 65-acre surface area, small lake.”

The viewer now replayed the shocking moment when the natural dam broke with a loud concussion and gave way to a cataract, cascading over the ridge in a massive, billion-gallon waterfall.

Several tourists wiped their eyes. Everyone gazed on in stunned wonder at the awesome display. A teenager replayed the footage on her wrist console, zooming in on the moment the church roof and steeple washed away to save for her class at school.

“Our geologists estimate the Mount Caldera meltwater lake had achieved an average depth of 23 meters or 75 ft, when the ice dam broke. When an ice dam fails suddenly, such as a classic glacial lake outburst flood, initial surge velocities can exceed 20–30 mph in steep terrain. The flood front often behaves like a moving wall, not a spreading river. Trees, boulders, buildings become debris battering rams. A town in a narrow valley has minutes at most, often seconds, to prepare”.

“Let’s all take a moment of silence,” the guide said. He waited the full 60 seconds, genuinely reflecting on the tragedy they’d all just observed and were now a part of.

The girl who saved the flood sequence for her school class, raised her hand with a question, “Do they always behave the same way, like a recording?”

The tour guide smiled, “No they do not, but the variance is quite nominal. This is a rare tour where we allow our craft to be witnessed by the residents. We have several routes that are carefully planned, so as to not disturb the residents from their activities of daily living. Each visit discovers slight variations from the last which could pose problems for our timeline, if the entire town was not immediately obliterated in just the way it is.”

Then he rose as the holographic depiction of the former Angel’s Rest, Colorado dissipated from view and announced, “And now, as a palate cleanser for the soul, we embark on a journey to a more uplifting era.”

A subtle hum filled the cabin as the young man’s fingers danced across the console. The panoramic glass shimmered, and the stark image of the 19th-century disaster dissolved, replaced by a vibrant, pulsating metropolis.

“Prepare yourselves for the grand unveiling of Neo-Veridian City, a beacon of progress and prosperity in the year 2247. Witness the marvels of bio-integrated architecture, the symphony of sentient public transport, and the sheer, unadulterated joy of a society that has finally beginning to approach the harmony humanity has long anticipated for itself.”

Structures seemed to grow from the very earth, alive with iridescent light, while sleek, silent vehicles glided through aerial pathways.

“As you can see,” the guide continued, his voice regaining warmth, “Our excursions are not solely focused on tragedy. Dister Tours believes in showcasing the full spectrum of human endeavor. From the ashes of disaster, we see the resilience of the human spirit, and from the heights of innovation, we witness its boundless potential. Remember to keep your senses engaged. The future, much like the past, is a delicate tapestry, sometimes best admired from a safe, temporal distance.”

“Next stop… Pompeii.”

A soft chime resounded, then reverberated. A shimmer of light. And the vessel was gone.