by David Poyer
At that moment a phone rang. She heard the sound, knew it had something to do with her, but for a moment couldn’t remember what. Then she snatched her cell out of her purse.
It was Dan. They had just a few words, then the connection was cut off. He said it was another airliner. Which confirmed the text message. She stared at the phone, debated calling back for half a second, then thrust it back into her purse. She had to escape, not chat.
When they opened the door to the stairs, smoke poured out with a muffled roar and flickering glow. The executive pushed it closed hastily. His blue tie was smudged and awry. The air was getting hot here too, though not as bad yet as it had been in the elevator. He peeled his jacket off and lashed the sleeves around his waist. “Let’s stay together,” he said. “My name’s Tommy.”
“Hi, Tommy. Harry.”
“Blair.”
“Cookie.”
“How far along are you, Cookie?”
“About six months.”
“You were saying you knew the building?”
“Yes, well, I been here five years, but I know my office, not this floor. I never been down here. But we got to try to find a way out.”
“Down’s toward the fire,” Tommy said. “If we go up, we go away from the fire, and away from the smoke. Then when they put the fire out, we can come back down. I’m from Chicago. That’s what they tell us there, in these high-rises. You’re safe as long as you’re isolated from the fire.”
“I don’t think this fire’s isolated,” Blair said. “And we don’t know how big it is, or how far down it goes. Harry, what can you contribute?”
“Maybe we should try the other stairwells,” Giory said. “If we can go down, we probably ought to. If there’s fire in all the stairwells, we’ll go up, like Tommy says. Find someplace without all this smoke and wait for the fire department.”
“Sounds like a plan. Is that the other stairwell?” Blair shone her light down the corridor, coughing up what felt like raw pieces of lung. The smoke was streaming up, it seemed, through the carpet. Sucking it in was like breathing powdered flame.
The executive seemed about to protest, but ducked his head, holding a handkerchief over his mouth. They tried other doors, but all were either locked or opened to smoke or roaring flame. Until at last Giory cried, “Over here. Over here.”
When they forced the door open enough to crowd through, it was into a vertical concrete pipe meat-packed solid with terrified humanity. “Close the door!” many voices shouted at once. She pulled it shut behind her, both tremendously relieved and conscious of a new fear: of being crushed, or smothered, by the sheer press of frightened people intent on getting one more step lower.
The smoke was thinner here but still hot and choking. It blew steadily up the stairwell, leaded with that fuel-and-meat stink that made those in the line double and cough until they retched. The emergency lighting was barely enough to make out faces. The bare, painted concrete stair-treads were so narrow only two could stand on each; or only one, if he or she was heavy. No one seem to be making any progress. The stink of fear-sweat was as strong as the fuel smell. Faces glistened as she swung the flash, then turned it off. Better save the batteries. “Let me in?” she pleaded. Faces rigid, two women first refused to move, then crowded in even more tightly to allow her to insert herself sideways. Giory pushed in behind her; Cookie and Tommy squeezed themselves into the vertical queue.
“Don’t shove. Wait your turn!”
“We’ll all get out. Stay calm.”
It occurred to her that this stair too might be blocked, that everyone would just stand here as the temperature increased until they roasted to death, a vertical mini-Holocaust. “What have you heard? Are we moving at all?” she asked the women into whom she was press-fitted. “Can we get out this way?”
“It was a bomb.”
“No, a missile.”
She told them what Dan had said, that it was another aircraft. She shuddered. Two planes … one could have been a suicidal pilot. But two … flown by remote control? Where had they come from?
The press eased below her. With a murmur and surge the crowd swayed, and everyone took a step down. But those behind kept pushing, leaning her forward until she would have toppled save for the wall of flesh below. The man in front had a briefcase slung over his shoulder, into which her chest was was painfully jammed. A hot gust eddied up and the coughing intensified, echoing in the concrete well like the barking of trapped, terrified dogs.
Over the next few minutes they advanced a few more steps. Then the press suddenly seemed to loosen, like highway traffic just past an accident. The flow speeded up. She took one step after another. But now heat was radiating off the concrete, heating the steel handrails. They must be level with the fire. Level with whatever had exploded, jolting the elevator and leaning the whole building. She got down another flight. Another.
“Blair,” someone yelled behind her.
When she turned, it was Cookie, half limping, half sliding, face a mask of exhaustion. People kept pushing past, thrusting her aside. She came to a landing and halted, bulled aside by those who continued to fight their way downward, gazes intent on the next step.
“Help,” she mouthed through the din. Resting her stomach against the handrail. Sweat glazed her forehead.
Blair tried to fight her way back up, but she faced a huge man whose sole ambition seemed to be to go through her. All she could do was beckon, then step to the side at the next landing. Looking up, she shouted, “Come to me. Come on, Cookie. Can’t you let her in? Can’t you see she’s pregnant?”
“We need to keep going,” said Giory.
She scowled at him. “You go on if you have to, Harry.”
When she glanced back again, he was gone. So much for that … but some remnant of something beyond animal self-preservation must still have flickered, because two men in rumpled shirts halted, damming the crowd with their bodies, and pulled Cookie off the landing. They held her under the shoulders as she limped down. Blair got an arm around her too, and together the three helped her from step to step. She was panting; her blouse was soaked. Blair hoped she wasn’t losing the baby. To her astonishment, some cursed them as they pushed by. As if their lives were infinitely more important. “Another step. Keep on going. Stay with me, Cookie. Stay with me.”
Fifty-fifth story.
Fifty-four.
Fifty-three. The numbers on the landings crept by with incredible slowness. Still, the air was free of fumes now. Rank with sweat and perfume but no longer cooking with smoke. She panted, throat raw, toes masses of pain. The Christian Louboutins had always turned heads. But right now, they were turning her ankles. She envied the younger women who romped past, running shoes flashing white under skirts, purses and dress heels slung over their shoulders. She wanted to turn off and rest, the way older people were doing at the landings. But pressed on.
The stream of exiting people was moving faster now. The stairwell opened ahead. The residents of these floors must already have left. They were outside, safe; only now and then would one of the doors open and some latecomer join the exodus. Also, she figured, the other exit stairways must be open here, below the crash. Reasoning this out as she dragged her burden and her weary self down one excruciating step after another gave her an obscure pleasure.
Reasoning about things meant you maintained some tiny measure of control.
At the fortieth floor one of the men let go, no apology, just stepped away suddenly from their dragging progress and slipped into the stream. Giory and the other man they’d been trapped in the elevator with, Tommy, had long before vanished. They must be outside in the open by now. The air was cooler, though, and the lack of crowding, of frantic, hurrying, panicking humanity, was reassuring. “We’ll make it,” she told Cookie. Now she and the one man left supported the groaning soon-to-be mother. Their eyes met over her bent head. He winked, but his jaw was taut with effort. Or fear … she felt it too … expecting the roar of another jet. She want
ed out, out, out. But there was no exit save this endless limbo of featureless stairs, only the painted numbers different at each landing. The same single fluorescent tube each time the steps angled left. The same putty-colored concrete.
If only she’d just kept going from the Sky Lobby. That express elevator would have had her on solid ground in three minutes. Why had she gone back up, after seeing the North Tower explode? For pride? A job? She’d have been halfway across town, at Penn Station waiting for the Amtrak. She’d never, ever go higher than four stories again.
All the other stairways had been blocked. If this one hadn’t been open, they’d still be huddled up there, waiting to die.
A commotion below rose toward them as they dragged downward. Yelling, what almost sounded like cheers. Hoarse cries from raw throats.
A straining, exhausted-looking man in a heavy black coat festooned with yellow and silver reflective patches and a large, strangely contoured helmet was trudging up toward them on the left side of the stairway. Another climbed directly behind him. Both were covered with gear that swayed and clanked. They looked bulky and determined and strong, but also flushed, nearly used up. She saw why. They carried coils of heavy-looking hose, portable radios, hanks of manila line, steel pry bars, yellow flashlights, goggles, oxygen canisters. She was shaking and all she’d had to do was walk down stairs. She couldn’t imagine carrying all that load up—her eye went to the number at the landing—twenty-eight flights. And they still weren’t even halfway to the fire.
And walking up into it, when everyone with any sense knew to get out. Her gaze met the lead fireman’s. “You managing okay?” he asked, hauling himself up on the handrail, between gasps for breath.
“We’ll get her out,” the guy who had Cookie’s right arm said. His blue silk shirt was sweated through. “Good to see you fellas.”
“Yeah, good to see you,” Blair said, the words petty and inadequate. But she couldn’t think of any better.
“Seen the fire, lady?”
Lady. “Yes. It’s on the seventy-eighth or eightieth floor. I smelled jet fuel.” He pulled himself past and she smelled sweat and rubber and smoke and char, that must be from their gear, their clothes, the fires they’d fought in the past, and a trace of garlic. “Was it another plane?” she called after him.
“Yeah. Another one.”
“Be careful,” she shouted. The second fireman eyed them too, tall, with a flash of blue eyes, reddened Irish cheeks, wordless. Then others, filing steadily upward, filling the stairwell with clanking and huffing and the scrape and scuff of heavy boots. They went up as her little party limped down, through what was now nearly an empty stairwell, only a few late departures scampering shamefacedly past, turning to slip by, not meeting their eyes. Not one stopped to offer a hand.
“Almost there,” the guy said. He was sticking, anyway. She looked at her watch. They’d been in this stairwell for almost an hour. But they were almost out. The fourth floor!
But how bad was the fire, above them? Could the New York Fire Department put it out? Those men had looked as if they knew what they were doing. But all they’d had to work with was what they could carry.
Cookie said something Blair didn’t catch. Then rasped, louder, “I need to rest. No. I really really need to … pee. Can we stop? On one of these floors?”
“We better not, honey. Let it go, if you have to. Just three more floors! We really do need to get out of here.”
“Just leave me. I’ll catch up. You all go on ahead. You done enough.”
“No way, honey,” Blair told her. “Not till we get you outside. Hey, uh, you—”
“Sean.” He gave her a tousle-headed grin. Too young for her, but cute. Yeah. The chiseled look.
“Sean, let’s switch sides, okay? I’m getting a cramp—”
A door slammed far above them. For a moment she thought that must be what it was. Then, that it was another plane. That distant roar. But it didn’t sound like a plane.
The others had heard it too; they halted, teetering on the steps, sparrows on a swaying wire. Sean cocked his head like a border collie. The sound was like nothing she’d ever heard before. A distant slam. Slam. Slam. Muffled, distant, regular concussions, with a gradually building grating tumult behind them. “What the hell is that?” she muttered. “Cookie?”
“Don’t know. Never heard such as that before.”
“Let’s go,” Sean said, voice going high, but determined. “C’mon.”
He was right. Whatever it was probably wasn’t good. They hobbled downward. Cookie cried out. Blair lost patience with her shoes and kicked them off, then cursed as she immediately stepped on a bottle of fingernail polish fallen from someone’s purse. The noise was getting closer. Louder, as if a freight train were rolling end over end down the stairway behind them. Something big, really big, Godzilla sized, had started at the top of the building and was eating its way down to them.
Slam. Slam … SLAM. Faster and faster, louder and louder. Her ears popped as if she were back in the elevator. The walls quivered. They were taking the stairs as fast as they could now, nearly running, trying to keep in step and failing, weaving, stumbling. Cookie yiped. Her hair had fallen down over her eyes and wet patches stained her blouse. Blair came down wrong and pain shot through her ankle.
She kept going. The whole stairway was shaking. The handrail quivered with each concussion. The avalanche slams came louder and louder, with that roar growing behind it until she couldn’t think, as if the whole sky were falling in on them. Cookie screamed and launched herself into the air. Blair tottered under her weight.
SLAM. She jumped down a step, almost fell, her side cramp forgotten in sudden panic terror as the lights went out, plunging them into that utter blackness again.
SLAM. She sobbed and stepped down a step.
SLAM. Sean groaned, across from her in the sudden dark.
SLAM, and Cookie screaming in the midst of a noise louder than anything Blair had ever imagined could be. Needles driving into her eardrums. The taste of dust and concrete in the air, gritty on her tongue, stinging her face, her scalp, sanding the back of her neck.
The stairway reeled, then seemed to topple, and as she cowered helplessly, it all came down on her in the dark, an annihilating thunder louder than anything she’d ever heard in her life, compressing the black into something hard and incredibly heavy that all in an instant battered her bent head and crushed her upraised arms.
9:00 A.M., THE NAVY COMMAND CENTER
Dan tried the phone again. What was wrong with the thing? Just a click as if it had connected, then nothing. Or else “All lines are busy. Try your call again later.”
He put it away. The images were up on the large-screen displays, dwarfing the smaller rectangles of the televisions. The watch team stared in silence. Smoke blanketed the canyons of downtown Manhattan. He tore his gaze away. The watch captain sat overlooking the room, eagles glittering on his khaki collar.
“Sir? My wife’s in New York. At the Trade Center. What are we getting on this?”
“Just what’s coming over the networks. CNN said some waiter saw a light plane hit and bounce off.” The captain kneaded a grizzled scalp. “It’s a huge complex. Lots of other buildings. Chances are she isn’t in the one it hit.”
“Now they’re saying a two-engine jet,” someone called. “Maybe a 737.”
“Pilot lost control,” the captain said. “Maybe a heart attack.”
But wasn’t that what copilots were for? Dan was turning away, pulling out the cell again, when beside him the captain stiffened. Someone gasped.
Men and women started to their feet. He turned. The screen had the ABC logo. Live, the caption read.
Sailing low across the city, seeming to pass behind the towering, smoking spire of the North Tower, a large, dull blue airliner, twin-engine, swept-wing, slid across the skyline of the city and merged with it. For a moment he thought, So someone filmed it. Then the angle changed, the network switched to another camera, on
the ground, and he realized with numbed horror that the second plane had hit the tower that wasn’t yet on fire. The South Tower.
“No,” he said. If she hadn’t gotten out in time … but surely they’d have evacuated by now. Surely.
An immense, off-center bloom of poppy-colored fire. White-hot parts shooting off like sparks. He stood frozen, appalled. He wanted to rush outside. But to go where, to do what?
Voices rose around him again. “No way that’s an accident.”
“Was it a missile?”
“No. I saw it. A fucking airliner.”
Dan checked his watch, memorizing the time by some obscure reflex. The captain said, “Listen up! Get the word out. Contact the CNO. Is the Vice CNO still back there? Get him out here ASAP. He needs to see this.”
Niles emerged, arms dangling, to halt mesmerized like all the rest at the unbelievable images. Dan stared at his broad back. What they’d just discussed suddenly seemed petty. A promotion board, another ship … now the country was under attack. By whom, they didn’t yet know. But they had to act. Prevent more deaths, if they could. He took a step toward the watch captain, who was barking into a phone, then stopped. He didn’t know the comm procedures here. How to run the consoles. The best thing he could do right now was stay out of their way.
He hit SEND again, despairing, and to his astonishment connected. A weird clicking, but her voice behind it. “Dan. Dan? Is that you?”
Relief flooded him. He had to put a hand to the TV support to stay on his feet. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s me. You all right, hon? We’re watching all this on TV.”
