Ground Zero

by Alan Gratz

  It was all because Reshmina had tried to give refuge to a man who asked for help.

  Reshmina wiped her eyes with her headscarf and looked out at the view. To the north and the east, beyond the white-capped mountains, was Pakistan. To the west lay the familiar river valley of her home, the houses of her village climbing up into the hills like giant stairs. Reshmina sagged. She had traveled so far in a day, and yet had gone almost nowhere at all. And now she wasn’t sure she could go on. That she should go on.

  Why keep trying when every decision she made was the wrong one?

  A small pebble skittered down a steep hill a few meters away, as though something had knocked it loose. Reshmina’s eyes flashed to it. She caught the slightest of movements, as though the rocks themselves were alive, but nothing was there.

  Then she saw it.

  Reshmina gasped quietly. Camouflaged against the rocks was a snow leopard. And it was looking right at her.

  The big cat was light gray and brown with black spots. Reshmina would never have seen it if the rocks under its feet hadn’t shifted as it snuck by. It wasn’t hunting her, she was sure. Snow leopards might take a sheep or goat from the village every now and then, but they never attacked people.

  Reshmina’s heart raced all the same. It was incredibly rare to see a snow leopard. It felt almost magical to come face-to-face with one here, now, in this remote, inaccessible place.

  The snow leopard held its long tail rigid and stared back at her, its pale eyes flashing in the shadowy light. Reshmina’s skin tingled, and energy coursed through her. It was almost as though she could feel the leopard’s strength in herself. As though they were two creatures who lived outside the bounds of society, beyond the reach of the rest of the world. She breathed in and out, matching the slow, powerful rise and fall of the snow leopard’s chest.

  Poom.

  The tiny echo of an explosion somewhere far away made them both flinch. Reshmina instinctively looked over her shoulder, toward the sound. When she looked back, the snow leopard was already darting off, around the other side of the mountain.

  “Safe travels, leopard,” Reshmina whispered. “Peace be upon you.”

  The snow leopard was gone, but the humming, rippling strength of it remained. Reshmina’s long black hair, free of her headscarf, blew around her. She felt a power, a purpose, that she had never felt before.

  That morning—before the Americans, before the battle, before Taz, before everything—Reshmina and Pasoon had laughed and played like they did when they were children. Reshmina had wanted to capture that moment in amber, to preserve it like a fossil. She hadn’t wanted a thing in her life to ever change again. But insects trapped in amber, fossils preserved in stone, those things were dead. Forever stuck in the past.

  And the Kochi—Reshmina had longed for their fairy-tale life, riding camels through mountain passes and trading food and stories around the campfires of a hundred different villages and towns. But as idyllic as that sounded, Reshmina didn’t want to be a Kochi either. They had been living the same lives, uninterrupted and unchanged, for thousands of years. Every generation the same as the last. There was no way up, and no way out.

  Moving forward was scary. Sometimes you made mistakes. Sometimes you took the wrong path. And sometimes, even when you took the right path, things could go wrong. But Reshmina realized that she wanted—needed—to keep moving forward, no matter what.

  It was her fault that her family was in danger. It was her fault that Pasoon had chosen today to leave and join the Taliban. If she had chosen revenge over refuge with Taz, she and Pasoon would still be home right now, living their normal lives.

  But sometimes what was right and what was easy were two different things.

  With renewed strength in her heart, Reshmina drew her scarf up around her head and started down the mountain toward her village.

  Brandon almost tripped on a high-heeled shoe. The World Trade Center stairs were littered with uncomfortable work shoes, hand-held radios that got no reception, bulky laptop computers, jackets—anything people had decided they were tired of carrying or wearing after an hour of walking down the stairs. It made the going even slower to dodge all the castoffs.

  The crowd stopped moving again, trapped for long minutes between the 17th and 16th floors. A few steps ahead of Brandon and Richard, a woman began to sob quietly, and another woman took her hand and squeezed it.

  Brandon felt his own tears coming back. How was it possible that he might never see his dad again, when just that morning they’d been eating breakfast together? Brushing their teeth together? Riding the train together?

  Richard put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, kid,” he said quietly. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Brandon shook his head. How was he going to be all right? How was anything ever going to be all right ever again?

  “I didn’t say I loved him,” Brandon said. The tears came harder now, and he turned toward the wall to hide his face. “He told me he loved me, and I never said it back, and now he’s—”

  Brandon didn’t want to finish. Didn’t want to say it out loud.

  Now he’s going to die.

  Richard pulled Brandon into a hug. “He knows, kid. Trust me. He knows. And as much as he loves you, he’s happier you’re down here than up there with him.”

  Brandon cried into Richard’s shirt until they had to take another step. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “What am I going to do now? Where am I going to live?”

  “Your dad said his parents live in Honduras.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t go live in another country,” Brandon said. “I live here!”

  “What about your mom’s parents?” Richard asked.

  “They’re really old, and they live in Idaho,” Brandon explained. “I never see them. I barely know them. I don’t want to go live with strangers. This is where I live. Where I go to school. New York City is my home.”

  They took another step down and waited again.

  “If my mom and dad are both gone—” Brandon swallowed down another sob. “If my mom and dad are gone, that makes me an orphan, right? Will I go into a foster home?”

  “It’s too soon to worry about any of that,” Richard told him. “We gotta worry about getting out of here first, okay? And maybe your dad will make it out after all.”

  Brandon sniffed and nodded, but he knew that wasn’t happening. They both did.

  Brandon heard cheering from below, and someone called out, “Stay to the right! Firefighters coming up!”

  Firefighters? At last! Brandon felt a surge of hope, and he and Richard stepped aside with the others.

  The first man from the New York Fire Department came huffing up the stairs. He was white, with brown hair and bright blue eyes, and he wore a big, bulky black jacket with fluorescent yellow bands and matching long pants and heavy boots. A tall black helmet sat on his head, and he carried a hatchet in one hand and a shovel in the other. On his back was a giant oxygen tank. The firefighter behind him was Black, with broad shoulders and stubble on his face. He was just as loaded down, carrying a pickax and a huge length of white canvas water hose.

  Brandon couldn’t believe how much gear they were wearing and carrying. It had to be fifty pounds’ worth of stuff, and Brandon was tired just walking down seventy-five flights. These guys had to go up that far, hauling all that equipment.

  The people along the wall burst into spontaneous applause for the rescuers, and the firefighters stopped for a moment to wave with gratitude and catch their breath. People patted them on the shoulders and thanked them.

  “God bless you,” a woman said, giving the firefighter next to her a hug.

  People handed them the plastic water bottles they’d been given upstairs, and the firefighters guzzled them gratefully.

  “Don’t worry, the fire’s far above you,” the lead fireman told Brandon as he passed. “Keep going. It’s safe downstairs.”

  “There’s fire all over the 93rd floor,” Brandon told the
m. “We saw it. You have to get up there. My dad’s trapped on the top floor, and the smoke is really bad.”

  The fireman nodded. He and his partner were grim and stone-faced, as were the firefighters behind them, no doubt thinking about the long, grueling climb ahead of them. And they were only at the 16th floor.

  Brandon, Richard, and everyone else escaping the building kept walking along just one side of the stairs. More and more firefighters passed them, and even though it slowed his escape, Brandon was glad to see them keep coming. Going up, toward the trouble, while everybody else went down.

  Just after the 12th-floor landing, Brandon heard a man’s voice on a bullhorn blasting up the stairwell. “Stay calm and keep walking down in an orderly fashion!” he called. Then, inexplicably, he started singing “God Bless America.”

  Richard and Brandon looked at each other.

  “I was always more partial to ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ ” Richard said. “A little less … bombastic.”

  Brandon didn’t care what song the man sang. He just wanted to get out of this stairwell.

  When they reached the 11th floor, Richard and Brandon finally saw the man who’d been serenading them. He was a big white security guard, wearing khaki slacks and a blue jacket with a WORLD TRADE CENTER patch on it. “This is a day you’ll never forget!” he told them. “This is a day that will go down in history!”

  “Why?” Brandon asked. “What’s going on?”

  “They flew a plane into the Pentagon too,” the security guard told them.

  There were gasps up and down the stairs.

  “Who did?” Richard asked.

  “Somebody who’s about to get their butts kicked by the US of A!” the security guard told them.

  Brandon frowned. So the security guard didn’t know who’d done it. Nobody knew. All they knew was that somebody was flying planes into buildings in America, and for some reason they’d chosen the very building Brandon’s dad worked in. The building where Brandon just happened to be that day because he was suspended from school. If only he could go back in time and not punch Stuart Pendleton in the nose! But he had, and here he was. Now he just had to move forward. And he would, if people would just move forward on the stairs!

  Down they went, step by maddeningly slow step. Past the 10th floor. Then the 9th. More and more people squeezed into the stairwells at every level. They couldn’t be office workers from those floors, Brandon thought. Those people would have been out of the building long ago. They must be people from other stairwells, looking for a faster route down, the way he and Richard had. But there was no faster route now.

  The new people forced their way into the line where there wasn’t space, and suddenly everybody was pushing forward. But there wasn’t anywhere to go. The woman behind Brandon smushed right up against him, pressing him into the back of the man in front of him on the stairs.

  “Hey! Quit shoving!” the man cried.

  “I can’t help it!” Brandon told him.

  The mob kept surging forward, and Brandon was crushed between the woman behind him and the man in front of him. He started to panic—he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—and then all at once his feet were lifted off the ground, and he was being swept forward against his will.

  “Richard!” Brandon cried, turning his head around. “Help!”

  “Watch the kid! Watch the kid!” Richard called out. He was already three steps behind Brandon. Richard reached out through the bodies, and Brandon stretched out a hand to try to grab him, but they were too far away from each other. A moment later Richard disappeared, and Brandon was on his own again, swept down the stairs by a river of pressing bodies.

  Reshmina ran up the steps of her village, taking them two at a time. She didn’t see any American soldiers, or any Taliban. Not yet. Was she in time?

  Reshmina burst through the front door of her house. “Mor! Baba!” she cried. Two Afghan men with rifles were sitting just inside the door, and Reshmina jumped back. Who were they? Why were they here?

  Marzia and Mor came in from the women’s room.

  “Reshmina, it’s all right!” Marzia told her. “The village sent them to guard us and the American.”

  So Taz was still here! That meant Baba wasn’t back from the ANA base yet.

  “Where have you been, Reshmina?” Mor demanded. “Where did you get those scratches? Those bruises? You’re filthy!”

  “The Taliban are coming!” Reshmina cried. “They know the American is here! Pasoon told them!”

  The guards jumped to their feet, their faces a mix of shock and horror.

  Anaa came into the front room with Zahir in her arms. She had heard everything. “Go and warn the others in the village,” she told the guards. “Tell them they must get to safety.”

  “Where?” one of the men said. “What place is safe?”

  Reshmina grabbed her mother’s arm. “Mor, let’s take everything we can and leave the village. Let’s go to Kabul.”

  “Go to Kabul?” Mor said. “You foolish girl. That must be three hundred kilometers! It would take us days to walk there, and days to come back!”

  “I mean go and never come back,” Reshmina said. She was tired of standing still. She wasn’t sure the capital city was the right place to go, but it had to be better than their village. “We’ll live in Kabul forever.”

  Mor looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “Without land to farm? Without a place to live? Nonsense.”

  “Anaa still has family there, don’t you?” Reshmina asked her grandmother. “There must be someone. A nephew. A distant cousin.”

  “Child—” Anaa said in that infuriating tone adults used when they were going to dismiss your idea out of hand.

  Anger flared in Reshmina. It was just like her mother to say no, but Anaa too? Why couldn’t they leave this village and the Taliban behind and never come back? Move forward, even if it was hard?

  “Now is not the time, Mina-jan,” Anaa told her. “We need a more immediate solution. Many people are in danger.”

  Reshmina huffed, but her grandmother was right. Running away wouldn’t save the rest of the village. But where could you hide an entire village?

  Hide.

  Reshmina remembered playing hide-and-seek with Pasoon when they were young, and suddenly she had the answer.

  “The caves!” Reshmina said. “The caves beneath the village! We can hide there!”

  “Stay and watch the American,” one of the guards told the other. “I’ll go tell the others.”

  The guard hurried off. Mor and Marzia began gathering things to take with them, and Reshmina followed Anaa and Zahir into the women’s room.

  Taz still lay on the mat, sleeping. Reshmina was relieved to see him alive. But he wouldn’t be for very long if they didn’t move. None of them would be.

  Reshmina dropped to her knees next to Taz. Anaa had wrapped wet cloths around his wounds, but fresh blood had already soaked through some of the bandages. Anaa had also wiped away the black marks on his face from the explosion, but the skin around his eyes was still bright red and raw.

  “Taz,” she said. “Taz, wake up. We have to go. The Taliban are coming.”

  Taz instantly jerked awake. “What? Where? Are they here?”

  “No, not yet. But they will be soon. I’m sorry, but we must move.”

  “Reshmina,” Taz said, anguish in his voice as he blinked, “I still can’t see!”

  “I will lead you,” Reshmina told him. “Follow my voice, like before.”

  Pakow. Pakow.

  They heard shots in the distance. Reshmina knew what that meant.

  The Taliban were almost here.

  The guard rushed in from the other room. “We have to go!” he cried. The guard helped Taz to his feet. Reshmina frowned. How were they going to hide Taz until they got him into the caves?

  Anaa was one step ahead of her. She came into the room with an old blue burqa, the kind of garment women had been forced to wear outside during t
he rule of the Taliban. It was a robe that covered every inch of a woman’s body, from head to foot, with a small mesh window to see out of. Some women still wore them by choice, but not Reshmina’s mother or grandmother.

  “Put this on him, quickly,” Anaa said.

  The guard helped Taz into the burqa. It hid his head and his shape, but the material only came down to his ankles. Reshmina just had to hope the Taliban wouldn’t notice that the “woman” under this burqa was wearing American army boots.

  “Come,” Reshmina said. “We must hurry.” The guard took Taz’s elbow and led him to the front room and out the door. Reshmina, Marzia, and Anaa followed, along with Mor, who carried Zahir.

  The steps down through the village were already crowded with people who’d been warned by the other guard. They carried children, chickens, bundles of clothing, and treasured possessions. Anything of value they could take with them.

  Reshmina’s family went slowly, staying with Taz and the guard. As they descended, more and more people joined them on the twisting switchback stairs that led down through the gray-and-brown stone walls of the village.

  Higher above them, toward the top of the village, something exploded—P-TOOM—and Reshmina froze in fear. She turned to see the hilltop glow orange with flame. There were more cries, and more gunfire. The Taliban had arrived.

  THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. An Apache helicopter thundered by right overhead, and Reshmina ducked instinctively.

  “That’s my people!” Taz cried, recognizing the sound of the helicopter.

  Reshmina’s heart sank. Now the Americans were here too! That was good in one way: The Americans would keep the Taliban busy. But in another way it was very, very bad.

  Now the village was a war zone.

  Taz stopped in the middle of the stairs. “Maybe we can just flag them down, let them know where I am!”

  PERRRT! PERRRRRRT! the helicopter’s machine gun erupted, and something exploded in the village with a BOOM.