Ground Zero

by Alan Gratz

  Pasoon’s grip on Reshmina slipped, and she fell a few centimeters before he caught her again.

  The American helicopter kept hovering right behind her—WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP. Reshmina knew that with just one squeeze of the pilot’s trigger finger, bullets would tear through her and her brother. Everything she had cared about, everything she had worked for and struggled for, would all be gone in an instant.

  “Come on, Reshmina!” Pasoon cried over the roar of the helicopter. “Climb!”

  Pasoon shifted his weight and pulled harder on her hand. Reshmina’s fear and panic gave her a desperate strength, and she wriggled her chest up onto the edge of the cliff and swung a leg up and over. Pasoon dragged her the rest of the way over the edge, and they collapsed in each other’s arms, weary but safe.

  Except for the helicopter.

  WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP.

  Reshmina turned around again. The Apache’s blades swirled in the air, blowing Reshmina’s headscarf back from her hair and face. Reshmina thought she saw the pilot talking into the mic at his mouth. Was somebody far away deciding her fate, the same way somebody far away, piloting a drone, had decided her sister Hila’s fate? Reshmina stared into the eyes of the helicopter pilot. Would those be the last eyes she ever saw?

  The Apache hung in the air a moment longer, and then, as suddenly as it had come, it tilted and lifted away to the right, leaving Reshmina and Pasoon where they sat on the edge of the cliff.

  Reshmina slumped against her brother. She wanted to flop back on the ground and pass out. But the pops and booms of the Americans and the Taliban still fighting behind them meant that she and Pasoon were still too exposed.

  Pasoon knew it too. They helped each other up, and with a quick squeeze of Pasoon’s hand, Reshmina thanked him for saving her life. Pasoon nodded, and then they hurried along the cliff, putting as much mountain between themselves and the battle as they could.

  They followed a goat path down and around the mountainside, where they ran into an old abandoned logging camp. It was a small plateau where people had once lived while they cut down Afghanistan’s towering cedars and pines and sold them across the border to Pakistan. The Americans had shut most of these logging camps down, convinced the money made there was being used to buy weapons for the Taliban. But the move had backfired, in a way: When the loggers were put out of work, many of them traded their chain saws for rifles and joined the very same insurgents the Americans were trying to stop.

  An explosion boomed from the other side of the ridge, and a tall gray mushroom cloud spiraled up over the peak. Reshmina took Pasoon’s hand again, and they dove behind a pile of old cedars as bullets peppered the logs.

  Reshmina wanted to scream, partly from fear and partly from anger. She had just gone looking for her brother! She hadn’t expected to end up in the middle of a battle. Why couldn’t everyone just leave them alone?

  Reshmina stayed flat on her face for a moment, catching her breath. When she finally looked up, she was staring right into the eyes of a camel.

  The sight of it was so silly, so surreal after what they’d just been through, that she wanted to laugh out loud.

  Pasoon did laugh. “Ha!”

  Plegh. The camel spit in Pasoon’s face.

  “Gross!” Pasoon cried, and he wiped his face on his sleeve.

  “Uh, Pasoon?” Reshmina said, putting a hand on his arm.

  Pasoon froze. There were even more camels sitting behind the woodpile—and people too. Twenty or thirty of them, an entire tribe of men, women, and children, all cross-legged on the ground, staring at Reshmina and her brother. The men were white-bearded and wore trousers and turbans and long tunics like Reshmina’s father did. Most of the women wore tunics and pants like Reshmina, but a few wore dresses with full skirts and wide sleeves, decorated with metallic laces and pendants and amulets. Their children huddled among them, the boys wrapped in blankets, the girls wrapped in shawls, unblinking and unmoving.

  These people were Kochi, Reshmina realized suddenly. She had seen them before, but only in the distance. The Kochi were nomads. They had no year-round home, instead traveling back and forth across the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan with the seasons, selling rugs they had made and trading the meat and cheese and wool from their goats and sheep and camels.

  “Hi,” Reshmina said.

  The Kochi stared at her and Pasoon.

  Rock and dirt exploded from the mountaintop above them as the battle between the Taliban and the Americans raged on, but the Kochi and their animals didn’t even flinch.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Pasoon whispered. He tried to get up and go, but Reshmina pulled him back down.

  “Not with them still shooting!” Reshmina told him.

  One by one, the Kochi unrolled prayer rugs. Reshmina couldn’t believe it—they were going to pray right here, with an American helicopter flying around shooting bullets every which way.

  Reshmina and her brother felt obligated to join them. Ordinarily they would have done wudu—washed and cleaned themselves with water in preparation for praying. They made tayammum instead, using the dust of the ground to clean themselves. God was forgiving and merciful and would still accept their prayers if He willed it. Better to pray than to not pray, their father always told them.

  Reshmina fixed her headscarf and stood and bowed, stood and knelt. God knew Reshmina’s heart better than she knew her own, and when she sat to ask for forgiveness, she also said a prayer for Pasoon. Please help turn my brother’s heart from revenge, Reshmina prayed. Please show him another path.

  Reshmina spied Pasoon’s toy airplane sticking out of his pocket, and she snatched it and tucked it away under her tunic while he had his eyes closed in prayer. She still hoped God would answer her prayers, but it didn’t hurt to have a backup plan.

  When they were finished praying, an old Kochi woman stood and came over to Reshmina and Pasoon. “Come,” she said, and held out a hand.

  Reshmina glanced at her brother. His scowl was back. Reshmina knew her brother wanted to be on his way to the Taliban, not playing nice with nomads. But they could still hear the tung-tung-tung of Taliban rifles over the ridge. She and her brother weren’t going anywhere. Not yet.

  Reshmina accepted the old woman’s invitation, and she and Pasoon crouched low as they followed her to a small blanket, where a mother and father sat with their two children. The old woman was their grandmother, Reshmina guessed. Chickens clucked quietly in wooden cages all around them, and a baby camel in a tightly bundled blanket twisted its long neck to sniff them. Three baby goats bleated and butted their heads against Reshmina and Pasoon as they sat down.

  Naan, rice, cooked chicken, and pistachios were already laid out on the blanket in bowls, and the old woman offered the food to her guests. Pasoon dug in greedily, and Reshmina gave him a swift elbow to the ribs. They had to accept the act of hospitality—to refuse would be a grave insult—but they shouldn’t eat too much either. The Kochi were clearly poor, and the rice alone must be very precious to a tribe with no land of their own.

  Reshmina took a small piece of naan and a pinch of rice, and nodded her thanks. Pasoon frowned, but he did the same.

  Reshmina looked around at the Kochi as she ate. What would happen if the battle between the Americans and the Taliban spilled over the ridge? What would all these people do? There was nowhere for them go, nowhere else for them to hide.

  Reshmina seemed to be the only one worried about it. The two little children giggled as the baby goats butted Pasoon for his food. The grandmother worked at weaving a carpet on a small, portable loom, and the father looped and knotted cloth into some kind of satchel. The mother cradled something under her shawl, and Reshmina was surprised to see a tiny baby, wrapped up so tightly in swaddling clothes that it couldn’t move anything but its little mouth. Its eyes fluttered closed as it drifted off to sleep.

  What must it be like to live this way? Reshmina wondered. To be born under the sky. To be raised on the move, a
nd sleep around a softly crackling fire. There was a charming simplicity to it. The Kochi owned only what their camels could carry, did only what was necessary to survive. There was no walking three kilometers every day to go to school, no fitting in homework around housework. Reshmina doubted any of them could read, let alone do long division. They certainly didn’t know what a computer was, and didn’t care.

  Pasoon appeared to be just as charmed, laughing with the children as a baby goat tried to climb their father’s back. Reshmina wished for a moment that she and her brother were both Kochi. It seemed like the nomads existed in their own world, one completely separate from the conflict between the Taliban and the Americans. She knew it couldn’t be that simple—that the Kochi had to have been drawn into the war and affected by it just like everyone else. But she loved the idea of climbing on a camel and leaving all of this behind.

  The explosions on the other side of the mountain moved away down the valley, and Pasoon stood. “I have to go,” he said, and the spell was broken.

  Reshmina bowed their thanks again to the old woman and her family, stood, and hurried to follow her brother. She caught up to him just outside the old logging camp and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Reshmina said. “You’re not going to the Taliban, Pasoon!”

  Pasoon pulled free. “Watch me,” he said, and he kept moving.

  Reshmina seethed. Her brother could be so stupid sometimes. “You grew up in a jam bottle!” she told him, following on his heels.

  “You’re the daughter of a sheep,” Pasoon fired back.

  “May you be eaten by termites,” Reshmina told him. She could trade insults with her brother all day.

  “Go home,” Pasoon told her. “You’re not even supposed to be out without a male chaperone.”

  Reshmina caught up again and matched her brother step for step. “Well, I have one now,” she told him.

  “You’re not coming with me,” Pasoon told her.

  “Watch me,” Reshmina said.

  Pasoon stopped and turned on Reshmina. “There is nothing you can say or do to stop me from going to the Taliban,” he told her.

  “Oh yeah?” Reshmina said. She pulled the toy airplane from inside her tunic and waggled it just out of his reach. “Then I suppose you don’t mind leaving without this.”

  Brandon and Richard came out of the stairwell cautiously, tentatively, scanning the 91st floor. They had seen fire through the walls just above them, but there was no fire here. Not yet.

  There were no people either. They went through every office they could get to through the rubble and debris: a shipping company, two banks, two investment companies, a Manhattan cultural council. There were lots of cubicles, lots of desks, but each of them was empty.

  Brandon was searching one of the offices when he saw something fall past the window outside.

  Was that—was that a person?

  Brandon shook his head to clear it. It couldn’t have been a person. Nobody in their right mind would jump from the Twin Towers this high up.

  Brandon remembered the wind lifting him off his hands and knees, dragging him toward the open edge of the skyscraper before Richard had caught him and pulled him inside. Had someone else been trying to cross a similar divide and been swept away on the wind? He shuddered just thinking about it.

  “Hey, kid, you find anything?”

  Richard’s voice was soft, but Brandon jumped. They had both been whispering, as though if they talked too loud the whole building would come down around them like an avalanche.

  “No. I just thought I saw … I thought I saw somebody falling past the window,” Brandon said.

  Richard recoiled. “God, I hope not. No, can’t be. Just your mind playing tricks on you.”

  Brandon nodded. That had to be it.

  Didn’t it?

  A huge crack ran down the length of the floor in one hallway, almost fifty yards long. The hallway led right into the central part of the floor, the one with the bathrooms and elevators and stairwells. Smoke poured out from the elevator banks, and Brandon and Richard held their wet cloths tight against their noses and mouths. It helped, but Brandon’s eyes still stung from the heavy smoke.

  On the north side of the building, the ceiling had completely collapsed. The plane must have hit somewhere on this side of the building on the floors up above.

  “Come on,” Richard said. “Everybody’s got themselves up and out of here. We should do the same. Let’s check the next floor real fast, then get back to our people on 89.”

  Brandon followed Richard down to the 90th floor. He was surprised to come out of the stairwell and see two people standing in the hall—a white man in paint-splattered coveralls and a Black woman in a business skirt and blouse. They stood near the elevators like they were waiting for one to arrive.

  “Hey,” Richard said to them. “We’re from one floor down. We were checking to make sure you guys are all right up here.”

  “We are,” the woman said. She gestured to the elevator. “But they’re not.”

  Brandon turned to look. The elevator door was open and five people were inside—three men and two women. They were all dressed in business suits, and all clearly terrified. The elevator was full of swirling black smoke, and they ducked and cried out as sparks popped in the elevator’s ceiling.

  Panic rose in Brandon as he remembered that awful feeling of being trapped in an elevator. Of it sliding. Dropping.

  “You have to get out of there!” Brandon cried. He rushed toward the elevator doors, but the man outside in the hallway held him back.

  “They can’t,” the painter told Brandon. “Look at that stuff falling in front of the door.”

  An eerie, iridescent blue haze shimmered down like a curtain between the open doors and the elevator car, blocking the way in and out. The passengers in the elevator would have to go right through the haze to get out.

  “What is that stuff?” Richard asked.

  “Fire,” said one of the men in the elevator. “It’s like … a sheet of blue flame.”

  Brandon was momentarily mesmerized by it. He’d never seen anything like it in his entire life. A steady stream of bright blue flame, like from a super-hot gas stove. What could cause that?

  As they all watched, the blue haze dripped more heavily. Soon it would be a waterfall. A waterfall of pure flames.

  “We don’t want to run through it,” said one of the women inside the elevator. “We’re afraid we’ll get burned.”

  The elevator groaned and dropped an inch, and everyone in the car screamed. Goose bumps moved up Brandon’s arms to the top of his head, and he got the sickening feeling of falling all over again.

  “You have to get out of there,” Brandon told them. “I was in an elevator when the plane hit. We just barely got out in time before the cable snapped and the elevator car fell down the shaft!”

  One of the men in the elevator groaned, and another cursed.

  “We called building security,” said the woman in the hallway. “They said to wait for the fire department.”

  “Somebody’s looking for something to block the flames,” the painter said. “A cardboard box or something.”

  “Cardboard is just going to catch on fire!” one of the men in the elevator yelled. He was clearly at his wits’ end. They all had to be. Another man was pacing frantically back and forth, the armpits of his shirt ringed with sweat. One woman cried with her eyes closed. The other was muttering something under her breath. Whether it was curses or regrets or prayers, Brandon didn’t know.

  “What about a fire extinguisher?” Richard asked.

  “To extinguish what?” one of the men in the elevator said. “The fire’s raining down through the elevator shaft. The source is somewhere upstairs!”

  The 93rd floor, Brandon thought. He and Richard had seen it. And no fire extinguisher was going to put out those flames. Until the inferno upstairs was extinguished by the fire department, it was going to keep on burning—in both
directions.

  Something clunked in the elevator shaft up above, and the elevator dropped another two inches. The passengers grabbed onto the rails and cried out. One of the men started sobbing.

  The woman who’d been muttering to herself stood taller, as though she’d come to some sort of decision. “I’m getting out,” she said. Her voice was shaky and her eyes were wide with panic. “I’m going through the blue stuff, whatever it is.” She nodded, talking herself into it. “It’s just flames, right? I mean, you can run your hands through a candle flame and be fine. I’ll just—I’ll just be fast.”

  Nobody tried to talk her out of it. The other passengers parted for her, and she positioned herself in the middle of the doorway. Richard and Brandon and the two other people in the hall got out of her way.

  The woman took a deep breath, covered her face with her hands, and darted through the blue mist.

  For a moment—for half a heartbeat—everything was fine. And then the woman burst into flames.

  She screamed and beat at her burning hair as she collapsed to the floor. Brandon had never seen anything like it outside a horror movie, and experiencing it now, feeling the raging heat, hearing her awful screams, made him want to retch.

  Inside the elevator, the other woman screamed and one of the men threw up.

  “Roll! Roll!” the painter said, and unbelievably the woman had the presence of mind to do it. Richard beat the last of the flames with the wet shirt he carried, putting the fire out for good. The woman had burned so hot and so fast she had even set the carpet on fire.

  “Don’t come through!” the painter told everyone else in the elevator. “That stuff’s jet fuel or something!”

  The other woman in the hallway went running for water. The burned woman crawled over to the wall and leaned against it.

  “I think I’m a little burned,” the woman said.

  Brandon didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the lady. Her hair was gone, and her hands and arms were burned. Badly.

  “I can’t even feel it,” the woman whispered.