Ground Zero(51)

Reshmina turned the flashlight toward the front of the cave. Where there had once been a large, open cavern filled with old Soviet equipment, now there was just a pile of rocks.

The whole front half of the ceiling had caved in.

Reshmina explored the rockfall, looking for a way through. She stopped when she saw the legs of some poor soul sticking out from under a boulder, the rest of the woman’s body crushed in the cave-in.

Crushed like all the other people who’d been with them in the cave.

And there was no way through. The fallen rocks covered everything.

I’ve killed us, Reshmina thought. Everyone we know and love. Mor was right. I brought death to our village when I brought Taz into our home. She cried silently. She had chosen what was right over what was easy. She had dared to be someone new, someone better, to carve a path for herself. And look at where it had gotten her: buried with her family in a grave of her own making.

Reshmina quickly swept the light away, so no one else could see the body.

“Is it bad?” Taz asked.

Reshmina felt the anger of a hundred souls well up inside her, and she turned on the American soldier.

“Is it bad?” she said. “Yes, it’s bad! There was only one entrance to this cave, and now we’re trapped! We’re trapped, and all those other people who were in here with us are dead!”

Reshmina picked up a rock from the ground and hurled it at Taz. He still couldn’t see well, but he heard the rock strike the wall behind him and flinched. Reshmina picked up another stone and threw it at him, hitting him in the arm.

“Hey, what—?” he started to ask.

“We’re trapped and they’re dead and it’s all your fault!” Reshmina yelled at him. It wasn’t her fault for dreaming. It was his fault for being here.

“But I didn’t—”

“You and all the other Americans!” Reshmina told him. She threw another rock that clanged off an old Soviet hubcap. “Why don’t you get out of Afghanistan? All you’re doing is killing us!”

“We’re trying to fix things!” Taz argued.

“Things you broke to begin with!” Reshmina told him.

“We’re building wells. Roads. Schools!” Taz said. “Probably the school you go to.”

“You killed my sister!” Reshmina cried.

Taz looked horrified. “I what? How? When?”

“Not you. Your country,” Reshmina said. She was crying now, big wet tears fed by the horrible things that had happened two years ago, and today. “You bombed my sister! She died. So many of our friends did too.”

“I’m sorry,” Taz told her. “Really, I am. But we’re fighting a war against the Taliban. Sometimes innocent people get hurt. We’re trying to help.”

Reshmina burned inside. Was this anger what Pasoon felt all the time? The fury that had pushed him to join the Taliban?

“You can help us by leaving,” Reshmina told Taz. “My village was never bombed until the Americans came!”

“We have to be here,” Taz argued. “Do you know the first thing that will happen if the US leaves Afghanistan? There will be another civil war, and the Taliban will take over again. You’re too young to remember, Reshmina, but they did awful things. They are bad, bad people.”

“I know all about the Taliban!” Reshmina told him. “I know how awful they are.”

“Well, if we leave, you’ll be right back where you started before we got here.”

“But your drones kill as many of us as them,” Reshmina said. She held up her injured hand. “You bandage our wounds and want us to say thank you, but you’re the reason we were hurt.”

Taz was quiet for a moment. “If we can just beat the Taliban. Get Afghanistan back on its feet. Give you a chance to grow …”

Reshmina remembered the cedar cone in the graveyard—and the graves from the previous wars. All those invaders who had swept to victory with their superior weapons, only to be driven out again by Afghan fighters.

“You say you have been here for ten years,” Reshmina said. “Your country has been here nearly twice that long. And still you haven’t won. You never will. Nobody can rule Afghanistan. Not even Afghans. So I ask you again: Why are you still here?”

Taz looked away without answering.

“Zahir! Come away from there!” Reshmina’s mother called.

Reshmina shined the flashlight in her little brother’s direction. All she could see was his legs, sticking out from under a rock. For a horrible moment, she thought Zahir had been buried like the lady at the front of the cave. But Zahir just had his head in a hole in the wall—a crack that had opened up during the cave-in. Marzia and their mother were able to drag the curious two-year-old out by his ankles.

Reshmina examined the hole with her flashlight, and she gasped.

“What is it? What’s under there?” asked a woman standing nearby.

Reshmina felt a tiny spark of hope rekindle in her chest, and she turned excitedly to the others.

“It might be another way out!”





Brandon followed the sound of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” through the darkness and found Richard trapped under part of a wall.

“Help me get him out of here!” Brandon cried.