Ground Zero(55)

“I don’t think we have time for that!” Reshmina yelled to Taz.

She spied something in the beam of her light—an old Soviet land mine—and it gave her an idea.

“Stay there!” she told Taz.

Reshmina propped the flashlight on the Greek statue’s head and carefully, gently, dragged the land mine over to the crack in the far wall. She wedged the land mine into the crack, then picked up the Greek shield. The leather straps inside had long since dried out and broken, but Reshmina was still able to hold it up by the metal buckles on its back.

POOM. POOM. More explosions rocked the cave from above.

“Reshmina, what are you doing?” her mother cried from the other side. “The ceiling’s falling apart in here!”

“Get as far away from the entrance as you can!” Reshmina called back to her mother. “I’m going to try to blow a hole in the other wall!”

“You’re what?” Mor cried.

There was a partial wall toward the back of the chamber, and between that and the shield, Reshmina hoped she would be protected enough from the mine. Now she just needed something to activate it. There weren’t any big rocks around, but the bust of Lenin would do nicely. Reshmina picked it up and said a silent prayer. Her hand still stung from the gash, but she swallowed the pain, lobbed Lenin’s head toward the land mine, and ducked down behind the wall, the shield held tight over her head.

Thunk.

Lenin missed.

Reshmina closed her eyes, her heart thumping in her chest. She’d been ready for an explosion, and then nothing! Still holding the shield, she got up to get Lenin and try again.

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

Big explosions outside rocked the cave again, and this time a little piece of the ceiling broke off right above the crack in the wall. The rock fell on the land mine, and—KABOOM!—the land mine exploded, and Reshmina went flying.





Brandon stood and stared.

The South Tower was gone. Like some sort of awful magician’s trick, it had just disappeared. Disappeared and been replaced by a mountain of concrete and twisted metal, shrouded in a cloud of dust and smoke.

That was what must have knocked them all down in the basement, Brandon realized. What had destroyed the underground mall. The tornado that had hit them was the blast from the South Tower coming down half a block away.

Gayle choked back a sob. “All those people.”

Brandon felt all the relief from his escape drain out of him, replaced by an icy chill.

“Maybe people made it out,” Richard said. “If they had time?”

Brandon glanced at his watch. Its face was cracked, but the digital readout still worked. It was 10:25 a.m. It had been a little over an hour and a half since the first plane hit. How long after that had the second plane hit? He tried to remember. Fifteen, twenty minutes? The people in the South Tower had had less than an hour to escape before the whole building had come down.

Brandon looked up. The North Tower still poured black smoke into the sky above him. Brandon’s father was up there at the top, in Windows on the World. He was still alive. He had to be! The South Tower had fallen—incredibly, unbelievably—but the North Tower was still standing. Brandon had passed those firemen on the stairs. They would get to the fire and get to Brandon’s dad. But if the South Tower had fallen …

“Oh my God,” Pratik said. “Look!”

Pratik pointed toward the middle of the North Tower. Mixed in with the falling metal and glass were things that were moving. People, Brandon realized. People were still jumping from the tower, falling ninety floors to their deaths. They dropped out of the thick black smoke that engulfed the top of the building with alarming speed, arms and legs flailing. Brandon saw one man reaching, grabbing as he fell, too far from anything to stop himself, his tie sticking straight up in the air above him.

“I need to find a phone booth,” Brandon said, blinking away the nightmare. He turned to Richard. “I need to call my dad!”

“We need to get out of here first,” Richard told him. “Get to my house. We can call your dad from there. My family will be there. You can stay the night with us, and … well, we’ve got some things to work out, but you can stay with me and my family for as long as you need to.”

Brandon cried. He cried because Richard was being so nice to him, and because he didn’t want to think about what would happen if his dad really did die in the North Tower.

An EMT wearing a white surgical mask hurried up to Gayle and took her by the elbow to sit her down on the curb. Another EMT ran over to Brandon, Richard, and Pratik and handed them little white masks like she and the other EMT wore. The masks were flimsy and thin and wrapped around your ears with an itchy elastic band, but they filtered the awful, gritty air.

“Don’t breathe the dust!” the EMT told them. “It’s toxic!”

The EMT found the bloody shirt wrapped around Brandon’s hand. He stood like a zombie as she peeled it away and treated his wound. Brandon’s eyes fell on a banged-up, cylindrical piece of machinery sitting right in the middle of the street. It was as tall as he was, and looked like a crumpled soda can. Brandon struggled to grasp what he was seeing. Was that an airplane engine from one of the planes that had hit the Twin Towers? Could one of them have really shot out all this way?

The EMT put something on Brandon’s hand that made it sting, and he hissed in pain. She had it wrapped and bandaged in no time though and gave him a quick examination to see if there was anything else that needed patching.