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 them. “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 the 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.
“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 building. 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.