Ground Zero(45)

Brandon did as he was told and didn’t ask questions, and Richard followed suit.

As they shuffled along, Brandon realized why there were Port Authority officers lining the windows. There was something out there they didn’t want anybody to see. There weren’t enough of them to completely block the view though, and Brandon snuck a look.

He gasped at what he saw. Out on the plaza between the North Tower and the South Tower were bodies. And parts of bodies. Broken, bloody things too awful to think about. Brandon didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t look away either. It was like a horror movie. It couldn’t be real. How could what he was looking at be real?

Thousands of sheets of paper fell like snow around the bodies, and broken glass and twisted metal were everywhere. While Brandon watched, a piece of metal crashed into the plaza—SHANG!—and Brandon flinched. The big beam was immediately followed by something white and blue and brown plummeting down from above, and it hit the ground with a sickening THUMP.

Brandon put his hands to his mouth and turned away. He had just seen a human being hit the ground from very high up.

“Keep moving,” a Port Authority policewoman said, “and don’t look down into the lobby!”

Brandon looked down into the lobby.

It was even worse than the plaza. The big, beautiful lobby where Brandon had been that morning was where the emergency responders had decided to take all the injured and burned people. Dozens, hundreds of bodies were lined up in rows across the floor. Some of them had missing limbs. Others had open wounds. Paramedics moved among the burned, broken, and dying people, doing what they could. Dust and debris were everywhere. The elevator shafts in the center of the lobby were twisted and mangled where cars had fallen, and there was a dull, ammonia-like taste in the air, like the way hospitals smelled.

“Don’t look! Keep moving!” the Port Authority police told them.

Brandon kept moving, but he kept looking too. He should have been sick. He should have been screaming. But it was all so surreal. So impossible. He felt like a character in a movie, walking through a nightmare that couldn’t be real.

Their scenic tour through hell came to an end on the other side of the mezzanine. A white Port Authority policewoman with her brown hair in a ponytail pointed them toward another staircase.

“Wait, doesn’t this go into the basement?” Richard asked. “Why can’t we just go outside?”

“We can’t take you out through the lobby, it’s too full of injured people,” the policewoman said. “And it’s dangerous right outside the building.”

Brandon knew why. Outside through the window he could still hear what sounded like pebbles and stones raining down on the concrete plaza. But he knew they weren’t pebbles and stones. They were bits of building and glass windows. And people.

“Keep going,” the policewoman told them. “You’ll come up on the other side of the plaza, away from all this.”

“What if the building comes down on top of us?” a hysterical man asked.

The policewoman shook her head. “It’s a steel structure. No way it’s coming down. Go on—trust me, you’ll be safer down there.”

Brandon hated to go into another stairwell. He almost balked, almost backed out, but he knew there was no way out across that plaza. Not with all that stuff raining down from above. They’d just as likely be killed by a falling piece of metal or … well, he didn’t like to think about what else.

Brandon took a deep breath and followed Richard and the others down the stairs. This wasn’t a tight stairwell like before. This was a bigger set of stairs, and everyone was at last able to spread out and move at their own pace. Brandon let out a sigh of relief, even though they were still inside the building. It finally felt like he had room to breathe.

Richard and Brandon went down two floors of steps to a bank of revolving doors that had been opened up so they could pass straight through without spinning them. Just beyond that was a larger public space, and suddenly Brandon recognized where they were.

They were back where he’d started his day, in the underground mall beneath the World Trade Center.





Reshmina stood still, staring at the place where her house had been. People from her village flowed around her like water around a rock in the river. She couldn’t even see over their heads anymore, but she could see the black-and-gray plume of smoke as it rose into the air.

Her house. The place where she and her family had been standing just minutes ago was gone. Destroyed. Blasted into bits. The house where she had been born. The house where she had spent every day and night of her life.

Not just her house. Her home. The place she always came back to.

Her home was no more.

“Reshmina!” her mother cried. “Reshmina, move! We have to get to the caves!”

“Our house, Mor,” Reshmina said quietly. “Our home. They blew it up.”

“They’ll blow us up too if we don’t go!” her mother told her. “We’ll find a new place to live, Reshmina. Now please come!”

PAK-PAK-PAK-PAK!

T-koom. T-koom. T-koom.

An assault rifle barked, and another fired back. The villagers screamed. The Taliban and the Americans were both in the village now, and fighting each other. Nobody was safe.

What have I done? Reshmina thought.