Ground Zero(53)

The phone kept ringing.

“What do we do?” Brandon asked.

“See if you can get to it,” Richard told him.

Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

Brandon changed course, veering slightly off to the left. He got closer, closer—and then the ringing stopped. He froze and waited.

“Do we—” he started to ask, and then—

Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

The phone started ringing again. Brandon homed in on it in the darkness, leading the human chain closer and closer, inch by inch, until his foot ran into something big and hard. He put his hands out and felt around, and Gayle and the others did the same.

Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

The phone was buried under a pile of rubble. Along with whoever had been carrying it.

“I think I found a part of the ceiling, but I can’t lift it,” Pratik said, straining.

“I can’t even see what to lift,” said Richard.

“We have to leave them for the rescue workers when they get here,” Gayle said quietly.

If they get here, Brandon added in his head. From the way no one spoke, he wondered if they were all thinking the same thing.

They came together again in their human chain, and Brandon led them away while the phone continued to ring behind them: Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot. Somebody somewhere outside the towers, desperately dialing a number again and again that would never be answered.

A few minutes later, Brandon found the corner of what he guessed was the FILA store. When he made the turn into the next hallway, he saw a small fire in one of the restaurants down the way. It was the Sbarro! Brandon had taken them the right way!

“We’re almost there!” Brandon told his friends.

They inched closer. The fire wasn’t big, but it was a beacon in the darkness. Probably a grease fire, Brandon thought, like the one he’d seen that morning in Windows on the World. The last time he’d seen his dad. He swallowed the memory. He had to focus on getting out, leading his friends to safety.

A pile of debris blocked the exit up to Vesey Street, but there was enough light from the fire in the Sbarro to pick their way up and over the rubble. When they were on the other side, they could see daylight at the top of the escalator.

“We made it!” Pratik cried.

Brandon wanted to sink to his knees in thanks and exhaustion, but they couldn’t stop yet. Not when they were so close.

Still holding hands, they hurried up the stairs toward the sunlight at the top. They came out on Vesey Street, right across from the post office, and laughed and cried and hugged each other.

They were out. Out of the mall, out of the Twin Towers, out of danger. They had survived!

But something was wrong—very, very wrong. Soon they all began to notice it and stopped celebrating.

A thick, heavy smoke cloud hung over Lower Manhattan. Outside had looked bright when they were underground, but now that they were up on the street, the sky was so dim it felt like twilight.

It looked too like somebody had driven a tank through the city. Trash cans and cars were crushed, lampposts were bent, bus stops were broken, and trees were shattered. And everything was covered with a fine, light gray dust. A fire truck and an ambulance parked in the middle of Vesey Street were coated in the same stuff, their red lights still flashing underneath the thin layer of gray. The dust reminded Brandon of snow. Not just the way it blanketed everything, but how it made things quiet too. Muffled the sounds of the city. Manhattan was never quiet—not even at night. But now it felt as quiet and still as the underground mall had been after the blast.

Something else was wrong too.

“Where are all the people?” Gayle whispered.

There were footprints in the dust, but the streets were empty. There were always people in Manhattan. Millions of them. Now there were none.

Pratik turned and took a step back. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

Brandon looked up. It took his brain a long moment to process what he was seeing—or what he wasn’t seeing. What was supposed to be in the big empty slice of the Manhattan skyline but wasn’t there anymore.

The South Tower of the World Trade Center was gone. The whole 107-floor skyscraper had collapsed.





Reshmina wriggled through the hole in the cave wall and fell clumsily to the floor of another room. She paused for a long moment, scared to move. She had no idea what was in this hidden chamber, but she had to see if it led to some way out.

Her mother handed the flashlight to her through the hole. “Be careful, Mina-jan!”

“We’ll work on widening the entrance from this side, just in case,” Taz told her, and Reshmina heard him begin to chip away at the rock.

Reshmina clicked on the flashlight, and a bright white ghost with soulless eyes stared back at her.

Reshmina screamed and dropped the flashlight.

“Mina-jan?” her mother called. “Mina-jan, are you all right?”

“Reshmina?” Taz called.

Reshmina grabbed her chest and waited for her heart to stop trying to thump its way out of her. The flashlight was still on but pointed away from whatever she had seen, and she was afraid to pick it up again. But the thing was still there, right in front of her in the dark.

“Reshmina?” her mother called again.

With shaking hands, Reshmina picked up the flashlight and pointed it up at the ghost.