Ground Zero

by Alan Gratz

  “No, not now,” Reshmina told him.

  “Nope! Not now!” Taz agreed, letting them hurry him along.

  Reshmina suddenly heard the familiar sound of a missile hissing across the valley and turned to look. The villagers all around her knew the sound too, and they ducked, giving Reshmina a clear view of the thing as it streaked across the valley.

  Shhhhh-THOOM!

  The missile slammed into a house on the hillside, and the building exploded.

  “No!” Reshmina cried.

  “Reshmina, what is it? What’s happened?” Taz asked her.

  Reshmina couldn’t answer. Couldn’t find the words.

  The rocket had just destroyed Reshmina’s home.

  Brandon kicked and fought, trying to get free of the people pressing in on him from all sides.

  “Help!” he cried. “I can’t breathe! Please!”

  More people cried out, and from below, someone shouted, “Back it up! Back it up!”

  And then, mercifully, the people on the stairs did exactly that. The lady behind Brandon took a step back up, and that was enough to stop pushing him into the man in front of him. Brandon’s feet landed back on the stairs, and he grabbed the handrail as he fought to catch his breath.

  “Coming through!” Richard cried somewhere up the stairs above Brandon. “I’m trying to get to my kid! Please!” The people on the stairs parted, and then Richard was there, holding Brandon while they both wept tears of exhaustion and relief.

  “I just about lost you back there,” Richard said. “Promised your dad I wouldn’t do that.”

  Brandon nodded, his head still buried in Richard’s chest. He’d been telling the truth when he’d told his dad he couldn’t do this alone. He couldn’t survive without Richard either.

  “How did things clear up?” Brandon asked.

  “The man with the bullhorn, upstairs. When he saw what was happening, he made people stop coming down for a minute. Gave us room to spread out again.”

  Thank goodness for the man with the bullhorn, Brandon thought.

  “I’m sorry I crushed you,” the woman behind Brandon told him. “I couldn’t help it.”

  Brandon understood. So did the man in front of him when Brandon apologized for kicking him. “For what it’s worth,” the man said, “I was freaking out too.”

  There were no stair exits at floors 8, 7, and 6, which made Brandon feel even more claustrophobic. What if people started pushing forward again? He couldn’t get out of the stairwell now if he wanted to. But they were so close. Just five more floors to go!

  At last the stairwell dead-ended at a doorway on the second floor. There was a palpable sense of excitement from the people around Brandon as they all filed into a short, dark passageway. The crowd squeezed in more tightly again.

  “Hey, watch the kid, watch the kid!” Richard said, keeping his hand on Brandon’s shoulder.

  Things stayed tight but didn’t get out of control. As they inched forward, Brandon’s feet splashed through water, and he coughed from the dust and smoke in the air. If he didn’t know better, Brandon would have thought they were going toward the trouble, not away from it.

  And then, at last, more than an hour after the first plane had hit the North Tower, Richard and Brandon stepped out into the tall, open-air mezzanine above the lobby. It was the same half floor Brandon had seen above him when he’d gotten his ID that morning, and he blinked in the bright, sudden sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “Keep moving!” a Port Authority policeman told them.

  There were a bunch of Port Authority officers here on the mezzanine, all lined up with their backs to the windows. The Port Authority were the people who managed all the subways and tunnels and bridges and seaports in New York and New Jersey. They ran the World Trade Center too.

  There were escalators right in front of Brandon that would take him straight down to the lobby and out the front doors onto the street. But the Port Authority police were directing everybody away from the escalators, toward a set of stairs on the far wall. Brandon was confused. Why couldn’t they just go down the escalators? That was the quickest way out of the building. Even if the escalators weren’t working, they could use them as stairs. Why send everybody all the way around?

  Brandon did as he was told and didn’t ask questions, and Richard followed suit.

  As they shuffled along, Brandon realized why there were Port Authority officers lining the windows. There was something out there they didn’t want anybody to see. There weren’t enough of them to completely block the view though, and Brandon snuck a look.

  He gasped at what he saw. Out on the plaza between the North Tower and the South Tower were bodies. And parts of bodies. Broken, bloody things too awful to think about. Brandon didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t look away either. It was like a horror movie. It couldn’t be real. How could what he was looking at be real?

  Thousands of sheets of paper fell like snow around the bodies, and broken glass and twisted metal were everywhere. While Brandon watched, a piece of metal crashed into the plaza—SHANG!—and Brandon flinched. The big beam was immediately followed by something white and blue and brown plummeting down from above, and it hit the ground with a sickening THUMP.

  Brandon put his hands to his mouth and turned away. He had just seen a human being hit the ground from very high up.

  “Keep moving,” a Port Authority policewoman said, “and don’t look down into the lobby!”

  Brandon looked down into the lobby.

  It was even worse than the plaza. The big, beautiful lobby where Brandon had been that morning was where the emergency responders had decided to take all the injured and burned people. Dozens, hundreds of bodies were lined up in rows across the floor. Some of them had missing limbs. Others had open wounds. Paramedics moved among the burned, broken, and dying people, doing what they could. Dust and debris were everywhere. The elevator shafts in the center of the lobby were twisted and mangled where cars had fallen, and there was a dull, ammonia-like taste in the air, like the way hospitals smelled.

  “Don’t look! Keep moving!” the Port Authority police told them.

  Brandon kept moving, but he kept looking too. He should have been sick. He should have been screaming. But it was all so surreal. So impossible. He felt like a character in a movie, walking through a nightmare that couldn’t be real.

  Their scenic tour through hell came to an end on the other side of the mezzanine. A white Port Authority policewoman with her brown hair in a ponytail pointed them toward another staircase.

  “Wait, doesn’t this go into the basement?” Richard asked. “Why can’t we just go outside?”

  “We can’t take you out through the lobby, it’s too full of injured people,” the policewoman said. “And it’s dangerous right outside the building.”

  Brandon knew why. Outside through the window he could still hear what sounded like pebbles and stones raining down on the concrete plaza. But he knew they weren’t pebbles and stones. They were bits of building and glass windows. And people.

  “Keep going,” the policewoman told them. “You’ll come up on the other side of the plaza, away from all this.”

  “What if the building comes down on top of us?” a hysterical man asked.

  The policewoman shook her head. “It’s a steel structure. No way it’s coming down. Go on—trust me, you’ll be safer down there.”

  Brandon hated to go into another stairwell. He almost balked, almost backed out, but he knew there was no way out across that plaza. Not with all that stuff raining down from above. They’d just as likely be killed by a falling piece of metal or … well, he didn’t like to think about what else.

  Brandon took a deep breath and followed Richard and the others down the stairs. This wasn’t a tight stairwell like before. This was a bigger set of stairs, and everyone was at last able to spread out and move at their own pace. Brandon let out a sigh of relief, even though they were still inside the buil
ding. It finally felt like he had room to breathe.

  Richard and Brandon went down two floors of steps to a bank of revolving doors that had been opened up so they could pass straight through without spinning them. Just beyond that was a larger public space, and suddenly Brandon recognized where they were.

  They were back where he’d started his day, in the underground mall beneath the World Trade Center.

  Reshmina stood still, staring at the place where her house had been. People from her village flowed around her like water around a rock in the river. She couldn’t even see over their heads anymore, but she could see the black-and-gray plume of smoke as it rose into the air.

  Her house. The place where she and her family had been standing just minutes ago was gone. Destroyed. Blasted into bits. The house where she had been born. The house where she had spent every day and night of her life.

  Not just her house. Her home. The place she always came back to.

  Her home was no more.

  “Reshmina!” her mother cried. “Reshmina, move! We have to get to the caves!”

  “Our house, Mor,” Reshmina said quietly. “Our home. They blew it up.”

  “They’ll blow us up too if we don’t go!” her mother told her. “We’ll find a new place to live, Reshmina. Now please come!”

  PAK-PAK-PAK-PAK!

  T-koom. T-koom. T-koom.

  An assault rifle barked, and another fired back. The villagers screamed. The Taliban and the Americans were both in the village now, and fighting each other. Nobody was safe.

  What have I done? Reshmina thought.

  Her mother had been right. She had brought death to them all.

  Still in a daze, she caught up to Taz and the guard.

  “Is everything all right?” Taz asked from inside the burqa. “Where’s Reshmina? Is she all right?”

  “I’m here,” Reshmina said. “They blew up my house with a rocket.”

  “Who blew up your house? Not the Americans,” he said defensively. “Not if your dad told them I was somewhere in the village. They would never fire a missile into the village if they thought I was here.”

  The Taliban, then. They had blown up her house, trying to get at the Americans. The Americans who shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  Not just any Americans, Reshmina realized. One in particular. The Taliban had fired at her house on purpose because Pasoon had told them Taz was there.

  Reshmina felt like she was sinking. Like her body was still standing, still moving down the steps, but her spirit was draining out of her, leaving her hollow and empty inside. That her brother had finally gone to join the Taliban shouldn’t have surprised her. All the boys did eventually. That was the path Pasoon had been headed down, long before today.

  But to have pointed out his own home to them, with his own mother and grandmother and brother and sister in it, knowing the Taliban would shoot a missile at it? How could the brother she loved have been so heartless? So evil?

  PAK-PAK-PAK-PAK!

  Bullets hit the wall beside them, spraying them with bits of concrete and rock. They all ducked, and Reshmina scanned the rooftops. There—a Taliban fighter with an AK-47!

  The guard next to Taz whipped the rifle off his shoulder and shot back.

  PAKOW. PAKOW.

  PAK-PAK-PAK!

  Taliban bullets struck the guard, and he fell to the ground, dead. Reshmina screamed. She put her hands over her head, bracing for the bullets she knew were coming for her next, but then—

  T-koom. T-koom. T-koom.

  —an American soldier on a nearby rooftop fired back, and the Taliban fighter fell.

  Reshmina started to call out to the American soldier, to tell him Taz was with them. But at the same moment, from the other side of the steps, came the sound of another AK-47. PAK-PAK-PAK. The American soldier on the rooftop immediately took cover and traded bullets with his unseen attacker above the line of frightened villagers heading down the stairs.

  “Come! Follow my voice! Hurry!” Reshmina yelled to Taz. Their only hope was to make it to the safety of the caves, and then wait out the fight.

  K-THOOM! K-THOOM! K-THOOM!

  Huge blasts rocked the village above them, and three more houses exploded in clouds of rock and splinter. Reshmina didn’t know if it was Taliban RPGs or the American helicopter. Or both.

  “Don’t look! Go! Go!” an elderly man behind them cried.

  People bottlenecked at the bottom of the steps, but soon the survivors were out onto the small path that led along the river. A few people ran in the direction of Asadabad, just trying to get as far away as quickly as possible, but more of the villagers followed Reshmina and her family down toward the caves. The entrance was small, and overgrown with brush, but they were all able to squeeze through. Even Taz.

  And then, at last, they were in the dark, ancient caves underneath the village.

  Sprinklers rained down from the ceiling of the underground mall, and in seconds Brandon was soaked through to the skin.

  He squinted, trying to see in the rain and the darkness. There were burn marks around the blown-out elevator doors by the stairs, as though giant balls of flame had blasted down all the way from above. There was no fire that Brandon could see, but the sprinklers still ran. The water on the floor was ankle deep.

  Port Authority and New York City police guided people toward the exit to Church Street on the other side of the mall. Brandon didn’t need directions. He knew this mall like he knew his own neighborhood. There was the familiar coffee shop to his left and the Banana Republic just ahead on the right. Beyond that would be the Gap, and the Speedo store where Brandon liked to laugh at the male mannequins in their skimpy bathing suits. Farther along, he knew, was the Duane Reade where he and his father bought cough medicine and snacks, and a Sbarro where they sometimes grabbed a quick slice of pizza before heading home.

  “Keep moving!” a policeman called through a bullhorn.

  The mall looked very different than it had that morning. The main hallway was like a gushing aqueduct during a storm, but the electricity was still on in the stores. TVs ran, music played, and lights glowed. But there was no one there. No clerks, no salespeople, no cooks, no customers.

  For the first time in Brandon’s life, the mall felt incredibly garish. The lights were too bright, the music too happy. And the things for sale: Designer jeans. LEGO sets and plastic dinosaurs. Sunglasses and necklaces and greeting cards and remote-controlled cars. How could anybody care about all that stuff? How could any of that matter when there were people flying planes into buildings? When there were people trapped and burned and broken and jumping and dying?

  How could any of this ever matter again after what Brandon had seen?

  A woman near them stopped and cried, and Richard put an arm around her shoulder.

  “Come on. We gotta go,” he told her. “It’s going to be okay.”

  They came to an intersection. To the right were more shops. To the left, past the Borders bookstore, were stairs down to the subway and the escalator up to Church Street. Straight ahead of them was the Warner Bros. Store, with its Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck statues outside the entrance.

  How many afternoons had Brandon and his dad spent watching Batman and Superman and Looney Tunes cartoons? They were both big fans, and they loved going in the Warner Bros. Store and looking at all the superhero T-shirts and stuffed cartoon animals and movie posters.

  All of it was drowning in sprinklers now.

  As the water poured down, Brandon pictured his dad trapped up in Windows on the World. Smoke pouring in, and no water to put out the fire climbing up from below.

  “Brandon, we have to go,” Richard told him. “We’re almost out.”

  “They have phones in the store,” Brandon said, wiping his eyes. “We could try my dad again.”

  “Not exactly the best place to stop,” Richard said, squinting up into the water coming down from the sprinklers. “Come on. We’ll call from a pay phone out on the
street.”

  The ground underneath Brandon’s feet suddenly began to vibrate, and Brandon threw his arms out to steady himself. It felt like a subway car rattling by beneath them.

  But this was no subway car. The rumbling grew and grew, and Brandon and Richard just had time to look at each other in horror before something exploded above and behind them. It was like the whole mall collapsed in on them at once, and with a roar like a garbage truck, a blast of smoke and dust lifted Brandon off his feet and hurled him into darkness.

  It was cool and damp and dark inside the cave, and eerily quiet. Reshmina could still hear the pops and booms of guns above, but they were muted here. Muffled by the meters of rock that Reshmina hoped would keep them safe until the battle was over.

  Reshmina took a step forward and banged her shin on something metal. She yelped in pain.

  “What is it?” Taz asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Reshmina forgot he still couldn’t see. “We’re in a cave now. We’re safe,” she told him. “But it’s dark. I ran into something.”

  “Here—use my flashlight,” Taz said.

  She heard the rip of Velcro, and Taz fumbled to lift the burqa he wore.

  “Here, I think we can liberate him now,” Anaa said, and she helped Taz out of the burqa.

  Reshmina took the flashlight and clicked it on. The cave was smaller than she remembered. But the cave would have looked bigger to her back then, she realized. The last time she’d been here it had just been her and Pasoon and a few other kids, playing hide-and-seek. Now she was taller, and a dozen or so families from her village were squeezed inside with her.

  “I wish your baba was here,” Reshmina’s mother said. She had Zahir in one arm and held Marzia’s hand with the other. “I hope he’s safe.”

  Reshmina hoped he was too. He had made it to the ANA base, at least, and they had gotten his message to the Americans that Taz was in the village. The soldiers fighting up above them were proof enough of that.

  Reshmina used Taz’s flashlight to lead Taz and her family to the back of the cave, as far away from the entrance as they could get. The cave was full of rusty old Soviet-era junk they had to step around. Propellers, engine parts, spare tires, electronics with wires sticking out like wild hairs, big pieces of metal from trucks. And parts of old weapons too—the metal bits of rifles, RPG launchers with no rockets, disassembled land mines.