Ground Zero(36)

The refugees from the 89th floor stayed close, holding each other’s hands.

“Should we just keep going down?” Esther asked.

If Richard had been hoping to find a person in charge, Brandon didn’t see one. There were no firefighters, no police officers, not even building security guards.

A dull blue light suddenly glowed above the heads of the crowd. It was a man holding up a cell phone. He was using the soft glow to lead a group of people to a stairwell on the other side.

“That guy looks like he knows what he’s doing,” Esther said. “Maybe we should follow him.”

Brandon didn’t know how anybody knew what they were doing. Not in this chaos.

“I’m with Esther,” Anson said. He stood perfectly still, one hand clutching the handle on the harness of his dog, and the other holding his cane. People bumped and cried out in panic all around him, but like Mr. Khoury, Anson stayed calm.

“It was pretty clear coming down Stairwell B,” Richard said. “I don’t know why we should switch out all of a sudden.”

“I’m with Richard,” Brandon said. He had promised his father he’d stay with him, and besides, he liked Richard.

“We go,” Mr. Khoury said, still calm and assured. He, Esther, and Anson moved forward, toward the stairwell that the man with the glowing cell phone had used, not back to the stairwell they had walked down.

Richard and Brandon hesitated. Before they could decide where to go, someone called out, “Coming through!”

The crowd parted for two men pushing another man in a wheelchair. Brandon’s jaw dropped. He’d thought it must be hard for Anson trying to get out of the towers. But how terrifying must it be for someone trying to escape in a wheelchair? They couldn’t use the elevators anymore, and they couldn’t get down the stairs on their own. Just the thought of being trapped like that made Brandon shudder.

The two men had to lift the wheelchair to get it into the stairwell, and a crowd piled up behind them to wait. Richard and Brandon quickly became separated from Esther, Anson, and Mr. Khoury in the confusion.

“Where are they? Do you see them?” Brandon asked Richard. Even jumping up and down, he couldn’t see over the wall of people.

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I’ve lost them. I think they went down the stairs before the man in the wheelchair.”

Richard took a look at the crowd waiting to go down the stairs and pulled Brandon back the way they had come.

“What are you doing? What about the others?” Brandon asked.

“Even at Mr. Khoury’s pace, we’ll never catch up to them,” Richard said. “Not with that wheelchair between us. Esther’s still with them. They’ll be all right as long as they keep moving. But we gotta get out of here too, and that line isn’t going anywhere. I figure we’re better off in the stairwell where we started. You okay with that?”

“Yeah,” said Brandon. He hated to leave the others, but it made sense.

“It’s just you and me now, kid,” Richard told him.

Brandon nodded in the darkness. He was okay with that too.

The people on Stairwell B moved steadily, two by two, down flight after flight. Some of the doors to the other floors were locked, or blocked by something, and Brandon hoped the people on those floors had found a different way out. Sometimes he and Richard would leave the stairs and cross a floor to see if another stairwell was faster, and along the way Brandon would pick up phones on random desks, just in case. Most of them didn’t work. The few that did gave them busy signals when they tried dialing Richard’s family and Windows on the World. All eight million people in the city must be trying to use the phone lines right now, Brandon thought.

With each busy signal, Brandon’s panic mounted. Was his father all right? Would the firefighters get to him in time? The first plane had hit the North Tower almost an hour ago, and he hadn’t seen a single firefighter yet. And now they had a second building to worry about.

Brandon’s legs were aching by the time they reached the 44th-floor Sky Lobby. He and Richard left the stairwell again to see if they could find Esther and the others, but things were even more chaotic here.

The 44th floor had become a kind of hospital. There were EMTs and paramedics here—at last!—helping scores of people with broken limbs, cuts and bruises, and burns. Brandon wondered if the poor burned woman from the 90th floor was here, getting treatment, or if she had already been taken downstairs.

People were moving every which way. Some of them were looking for a paramedic. Others were looking for a stairwell. There was a line for the telephone at the security station, which apparently still worked, and the few people with cell phones were loaning them to other people to try to reach their families. Here too, people were calling out floor numbers and names. Brandon looked around for Esther and Anson and Mr. Khoury, but he didn’t see them.

Ka-TISSSSH! Something massive crashed into the floor across the room, and everyone screamed. Smoke and debris shot through the crowd. People tried to run, but there was nowhere to go.

Brandon ducked and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the flaming jet fuel that would burn him alive. No! he thought in terror. Not another plane!





Reshmina crouched low, staring down at a sea of poppy flowers wedged between two steep canyon walls. They were bright and pink, and swayed gently in the mountain breeze.