Ground Zero(38)

But Reshmina couldn’t wait for that. She had to get past him. Now.

Reshmina inched forward in a crouch, trying to squeeze between the tall poppies without making them move. She didn’t know what she was going to do when she got to the end of the field. Throw a rock to distract the guard? Maybe he would wander off to relieve himself, and she could slip by. But every minute she waited was another minute the Taliban might be getting closer to her village.

Snap!

Reshmina pulled her foot back from the brittle poppy stem she’d stepped on and froze.

“Is somebody there?” the guard called.

Reshmina closed her eyes and silently cursed herself.

Clack-clack.

Reshmina’s eyes flew open. She knew that sound. It was the guard cocking his rifle. Making it ready to shoot.

“I see you!” the guard cried. “Come out with your hands up!”





The blast of fire Brandon braced for never came. He looked up and saw Richard crouching next to him. He’d been ready for a shock wave too.

But if it wasn’t another plane, what was it? What happened?

Richard stood to look. He put a hand over his mouth and pulled Brandon away as new screams—screams of horror—filled the air.

“It wasn’t a plane—it was an elevator,” Richard told him. “An elevator just crashed down, and the people in it—”

He couldn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Brandon could guess without seeing it himself.

This is my reality now, Brandon realized. I hear a crash, and my first thought is “A plane is hitting the building!” He never would have assumed that a day ago, an hour ago, but things were different now. He’d gone from a world where planes didn’t fly into buildings to one where things like that did happen. Now he expected it.

Brandon and Richard hurried back into the stairwell and kept going down.

Everyone seemed to have gotten the message to get out as quickly as they could, and the stairwells were a bottleneck of desperate, frightened people. Their descent slowed to a crawl. Sometimes Richard and Brandon stood on one step for a full minute before they got to move down to the next step. All around them, men and women who had cell phones kept trying to make calls. No one could get a signal.

“Hey, so tell me something about yourself,” Richard said to Brandon while they waited. “What do you like to do?”

Brandon shrugged. “I don’t know. Skateboard, I guess.”

“We’ve got a skate park near us in Queens,” Richard told him. “Drive by there sometimes. I see kids doing the craziest things on those skateboards.”

Brandon knew Richard was just trying to distract him, but he couldn’t think about skateboarding right now. He couldn’t think about anything but getting out of here.

Fifteen minutes later, Brandon and Richard were only to the 36th floor. Brandon could feel his frustration mounting. He and Richard shared a look of despair. But they didn’t say anything, and neither did anyone else. No one yelled, and no one got mad. No one told anybody to get a move on, for God’s sake. For a bunch of New Yorkers who honked if you took a second too long to cross the street, everybody was remarkably calm. Brandon didn’t know how they were doing it. He felt like he was two seconds away from screaming.

They hit the landing for the 29th floor, and Brandon sagged with relief. They were in the twenties! Not far now! A man in a delivery uniform stood in the doorway, handing out bottles of water to people as they went by, and Brandon drank his greedily, his throat raw and dry.

Another man carried a glass coffee pot filled with water, with paper towels floating inside. “I’ve got wet paper towels to breathe through, if anybody needs one!” he called out.

Brandon and Richard kept going. Brandon’s legs ached even worse than before. All he wanted to do was sit down.

One man they came to had sat down, right there on the stairs. He was older and overweight, and he had clearly been pretty high up when he started his walk down. The back and armpits of his shirt were covered in sweat, and his face was pale and his breathing labored. A woman stood in front of him, waving a newspaper at him to cool him down.

“Lionel, can you walk?” she asked him. “We have to keep moving.”

Lionel stayed where he was.

Somehow the fumes were worse down here, even though they were farther away from the fire above. Brandon’s head was groggy, his eyes unfocused. He ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth and realized he could taste the jet fuel fumes.

At the 20th floor, Richard grabbed Brandon and pulled him through the door.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s see if one of the other stairwells is faster.”

The 20th floor was empty of people. Computer monitors still glowed. On one, a cursor blinked in the middle of an unfinished sentence. Across the room, a phone rang plaintively, no one there to answer it.

But that meant the phones here were still working!

Brandon’s heart fluttered with cautious hope. He was desperate to talk to his father again, but he had been disappointed so many times before when he couldn’t get through. He rushed to a phone near a window and dialed the number for Windows on the World.

Richard knew what Brandon was doing and sat down at another desk to try to call his own family.

Brandon waited breathlessly, and then—the line was ringing! He’d gotten through! Brandon clung to the receiver, waiting for someone to pick up, when something went plummeting past the window.