Ground Zero(42)

“It’s too soon to worry about any of that,” Richard told him. “We gotta worry about getting out of here first, okay? And maybe your dad will make it out after all.”

Brandon sniffed and nodded, but he knew that wasn’t happening. They both did.

Brandon heard cheering from below, and someone called out, “Stay to the right! Firefighters coming up!”

Firefighters? At last! Brandon felt a surge of hope, and he and Richard stepped aside with the others.

The first man from the New York Fire Department came huffing up the stairs. He was white, with brown hair and bright blue eyes, and he wore a big, bulky black jacket with fluorescent yellow bands and matching long pants and heavy boots. A tall black helmet sat on his head, and he carried a hatchet in one hand and a shovel in the other. On his back was a giant oxygen tank. The firefighter behind him was Black, with broad shoulders and stubble on his face. He was just as loaded down, carrying a pickax and a huge length of white canvas water hose.

Brandon couldn’t believe how much gear they were wearing and carrying. It had to be fifty pounds’ worth of stuff, and Brandon was tired just walking down seventy-five flights. These guys had to go up that far, hauling all that equipment.

The people along the wall burst into spontaneous applause for the rescuers, and the firefighters stopped for a moment to wave with gratitude and catch their breath. People patted them on the shoulders and thanked them.

“God bless you,” a woman said, giving the firefighter next to her a hug.

People handed them the plastic water bottles they’d been given upstairs, and the firefighters guzzled them gratefully.

“Don’t worry, the fire’s far above you,” the lead fireman told Brandon as he passed. “Keep going. It’s safe downstairs.”

“There’s fire all over the 93rd floor,” Brandon told them. “We saw it. You have to get up there. My dad’s trapped on the top floor, and the smoke is really bad.”

The fireman nodded. He and his partner were grim and stone-faced, as were the firefighters behind them, no doubt thinking about the long, grueling climb ahead of them. And they were only at the 16th floor.

Brandon, Richard, and everyone else escaping the building kept walking along just one side of the stairs. More and more firefighters passed them, and even though it slowed his escape, Brandon was glad to see them keep coming. Going up, toward the trouble, while everybody else went down.

Just after the 12th-floor landing, Brandon heard a man’s voice on a bullhorn blasting up the stairwell. “Stay calm and keep walking down in an orderly fashion!” he called. Then, inexplicably, he started singing “God Bless America.”

Richard and Brandon looked at each other.

“I was always more partial to ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ ” Richard said. “A little less … bombastic.”

Brandon didn’t care what song the man sang. He just wanted to get out of this stairwell.

When they reached the 11th floor, Richard and Brandon finally saw the man who’d been serenading them. He was a big white security guard, wearing khaki slacks and a blue jacket with a WORLD TRADE CENTER patch on it. “This is a day you’ll never forget!” he told them. “This is a day that will go down in history!”

“Why?” Brandon asked. “What’s going on?”

“They flew a plane into the Pentagon too,” the security guard told them.

There were gasps up and down the stairs.

“Who did?” Richard asked.

“Somebody who’s about to get their butts kicked by the US of A!” the security guard told them.

Brandon frowned. So the security guard didn’t know who’d done it. Nobody knew. All they knew was that somebody was flying planes into buildings in America, and for some reason they’d chosen the very building Brandon’s dad worked in. The building where Brandon just happened to be that day because he was suspended from school. If only he could go back in time and not punch Stuart Pendleton in the nose! But he had, and here he was. Now he just had to move forward. And he would, if people would just move forward on the stairs!

Down they went, step by maddeningly slow step. Past the 10th floor. Then the 9th. More and more people squeezed into the stairwells at every level. They couldn’t be office workers from those floors, Brandon thought. Those people would have been out of the building long ago. They must be people from other stairwells, looking for a faster route down, the way he and Richard had. But there was no faster route now.

The new people forced their way into the line where there wasn’t space, and suddenly everybody was pushing forward. But there wasn’t anywhere to go. The woman behind Brandon smushed right up against him, pressing him into the back of the man in front of him on the stairs.

“Hey! Quit shoving!” the man cried.

“I can’t help it!” Brandon told him.

The mob kept surging forward, and Brandon was crushed between the woman behind him and the man in front of him. He started to panic—he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—and then all at once his feet were lifted off the ground, and he was being swept forward against his will.

“Richard!” Brandon cried, turning his head around. “Help!”

“Watch the kid! Watch the kid!” Richard called out. He was already three steps behind Brandon. Richard reached out through the bodies, and Brandon stretched out a hand to try to grab him, but they were too far away from each other. A moment later Richard disappeared, and Brandon was on his own again, swept down the stairs by a river of pressing bodies.