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.
“Be careful!” one of the older men from the village said. “Some of these weapons might explode if you kick them the wrong way!”
Their parents had told them the same thing when they were little, of course. Told them in no uncertain terms not to play in the caves beneath the village. That it was too dangerous. All that had done, of course, was make Reshmina and Pasoon and the others want to come down here and explore. Besides, how was it any safer to play aboveground, when there were Americans and Taliban running around shooting at each other?
Reshmina remembered wandering, amazed, through all the old Soviet-era machines. They had been so foreign, so mysterious.
Now they just looked sad.
Taz put his hands out, frowning as he tried to feel what was around him. “I hate being blind,” he said.
Reshmina turned off the flashlight, saving the battery. “We’re all in the dark,” she told him.
“I’m scared of the dark,” Taz confessed. “I was lost in the dark once and couldn’t see. When I was a boy. It was very scary. I’ve been afraid of the dark ever since.”
Reshmina wasn’t afraid of the dark. Lantern fuel was expensive, and they burned the lantern in their house only when they had to. She got up just before dawn every day and went to bed every night after the sun went down. Darkness was just another part of her world. Not something to love or fear. But whatever had happened to Taz as a boy, being in the dark was making him sweat with panic now.
Poom. Poom. Dirt and rock misted down from the cave ceiling as muffled explosions struck nearby.
“M320 grenade launcher,” Taz said.
“How do you know?” Reshmina asked.
“The sound. The feel,” Taz said. “I’ve been here a long time.”
“How long?” Reshmina asked.
“Ten years, off and on,” Taz told her.
“Ten years, and you speak no Pashto?” Reshmina asked.
Taz didn’t answer right away. Perhaps he was ashamed. Reshmina would be. After all, she had spent the last few years of her life learning English.
“I speak Mandarin Chinese,” Taz said.
“You speak Chinese?” Reshmina asked. She couldn’t believe it.
“Shì de,” Taz said. “Army Special Forces have to learn a second language, and I was taught Mandarin.”
“Because so many people in Afghanistan speak Chinese,” Reshmina said wryly.
“I guess they figured there was life after Afghanistan,” Taz said. From the way he said it, it sounded like Taz wasn’t so sure that was true anymore.
The ground and walls shook, and Reshmina felt her insides shake with them. She knew that feeling—a helicopter was flying by.
“Apache,” she said.
Taz shook his head. “Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk,” he told her. “Modified Black Hawk. Apaches are more like pppppppp,” he said, blowing out through his lips. “Sixties are more like ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. The Sixties are for me, I guess. They’re search-and-rescue birds.”
All this was for Taz, Reshmina thought. And all because she’d led him back to her house.
Her house that wasn’t there anymore.
Toom.
Something big exploded on the ground above the cave, and the interior shook harder than before. A woman cried out as a piece of one of the walls broke off and tumbled down into the metal junk on the floor.
Reshmina watched Taz, who was suddenly alert.
TOOM.
The next explosion was bigger, closer. This one knocked them all to the ground. Reshmina’s eyes went wide, and she put her palms against the dirt, as though she could command the earth to stop shaking. It didn’t work, and she began to think that coming into the caves was a very, very bad idea.
What if this place became their tomb?
A chunk of the ceiling fell on an old man toward the front of the cave, and the people around him cried out and tried to unbury him.
Taz put his hand to the wall and slowly stood, a look of fear on his face.
“What is it?” Reshmina asked, still on the ground.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell down here. But to shake us like that … it feels like Reaper drones. Laser-guided bombs!”
No sooner had Taz said it than—K-TOOM!—a bomb hit right on top of the cave, and the whole ceiling fell in.
Brandon’s eyes fluttered open, but he couldn’t see a thing. He was lying on his side in three inches of water, arms and legs splayed out and pieces of metal and wood on top of him. The darkness pressed in on him, like he’d been holding his breath in a pool for too long and the water was trying to push its way in. The air was a solid thing that surrounded him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear. He tried to move his arms, but they didn’t want to move. His legs were like dead lumps attached to his hips.
Brandon’s heart hammered in his chest, and he gasped for air. His mouth and nose were full of dust and little bits of debris, and he coughed and spat and retched until most of it was gone. Slowly, dully, the feeling in his arms and legs came tingling back. But his eyesight didn’t.
Panic welled up inside him. I’m blind, Brandon thought. I’m blind and I’m lost and I’m alone and the air is closing in on me and I’m never going to get out of here.
“Richard?” he called. “Richard? Are you there?”
No one answered, and Brandon sobbed. He couldn’t see and his ears were ringing and he was all alone.
“Richard!” he called again. But Richard was gone.
Brandon curled up into a ball and cried. The world had exploded, and now he was totally, utterly alone. All his life, a parent had been there for him. First his mother, who had loved him and laughed with him and cared for him when he was little. He remembered her face—her blonde hair and pale skin and blue eyes—more from photographs now than his own fading memories. But the idea of her was still there—a tall, warm, embracing figure who picked him up and sang him lullabies.
When his mother had died, Brandon had thought he couldn’t go on. He had stopped talking, stopped caring. Every night he had cried himself to sleep.
It was his father who brought him back. His father, who had probably been losing sleep too, and who might have wanted to withdraw from the world when his wife had died but hadn’t, for Brandon’s sake. His father who had read comic books with him and taken him to the skate park every weekend. They had been a team.
And now Brandon was alone.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t go on. It would have been better if he had never run away at all and stayed trapped in Windows on the World with his father, with the smoke choking them. He needed his father to make the decisions, to guide him through the danger.
Without his father, Brandon thought, he was better off dead.
But eventually his tears dried and the sprinkler stopped and the ringing in his ears faded, and Brandon was still there. He wasn’t dead. He was battered and sore, but his head, his face, his arms, his body, his legs and feet—they were all still there, still working. He had little cuts and bruises all over, but he was alive, and in one piece, and he couldn’t just lie here in the dark forever. What was it his father had told him?
You’re strong, Brandon. You can survive without me.
Brandon was strong. And he had survived, all by himself. He didn’t want to, but he could when he needed to. And he needed to now.
Brandon put a hand down into the water to push himself to his feet and felt the razor-sharp burn of a broken piece of glass cutting into his palm. He pulled back with a hiss and squeezed his hands together. The mall shops all around him must have been destroyed in the blast, which meant there was broken glass and debris everywhere now. He couldn’t see, and now he was lost in what was left of the underground mall after it had been nuked.
But nuked by what? Had another plane crashed into the plaza above them? Who was doing this? And why? Why hurt and kill all these people?
“Richard?” Brandon called again.
He heard someone moan in response.
Richard! He was alive!
The cut on Brandon’s hand still stung, but he had to move. He’d lost the handkerchief Richard had given him, but feeling around in the darkness, he found a shirt from one of the stores. He threw the hanger away and wrapped the wet shirt around his injured hand. He couldn’t see the cut, but he knew it must be deep from how much it hurt.
“Richard, I’m coming!” Brandon called.
Richard moaned again, and Brandon put his hands out carefully, trying to feel his way toward the sound without hurting himself again. His left hand found something plastic in a cardboard package, floating by in the ankle-deep water, and as he searched its contours with his fingers, Brandon recognized with a start what it was.
It was the toy Wolverine claws he’d left to buy at Sam Goody that morning.
Brandon blinked in the darkness. It was so strange to finally hold the toy in his hands. This is why I’m here, Brandon thought. This is why I’m not with my dad right now.
This is why I’m alive.
It was so random. So stupid. So meaningless now, and yet so important at the same time.
Richard moaned again, and Brandon dropped the Wolverine claws and focused. Brandon was here, now, for whatever reason, and so was Richard. And Richard needed his help.
Arms and legs trembling, Brandon put his hands out in front of him again and shuffled forward, sloshing through the water and the rubble. The air in front of him was empty, but he was sure he was going to run into something.
“Richard, say something so I can find you,” Brandon said.
“I am here,” said a man with a heavy Indian accent.
Brandon’s heart sank. It wasn’t Richard he’d heard moaning. It was someone else.
“Help me. Please,” the man said.
“Keep talking so I can find you,” Brandon told the man.
“I’m here. I’m alive,” the man said. There were tears in his voice. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m here, and I’m frightened. I don’t know what’s going on. The world’s gone crazy.”
Brandon found the man, and they clasped hands like they were a long-lost father and son, finding each other again after years and years.
“Oh my God, I thought I was dead,” the man said. “My name is Pratik.”
“I’m Brandon.”
“I—I can’t see,” Pratik said.
“I can’t see either,” Brandon told him.
“Oh, thank God,” Pratik said. “I thought I had been blinded. But if you can’t see either, then it’s just too dark to see.”
Brandon was relieved too. I’m not blind, he thought. Not forever. The electricity must have gone out, and now there wasn’t a hint of light anywhere in the windowless mall.
“What happened?” Pratik asked.
“I don’t know,” Brandon told him. “Maybe another plane. Are you hurt bad? Can you stand?”
“I think my arm is broken, but I can stand.”
“Help,” a woman rasped nearby. Somewhere else in the darkness, Brandon heard another person groan.
There had been dozens of people with them down here in the mall, all following the Port Authority’s directions to the Church Street exit. Some of them might be dead from the blast, but there had to be other survivors like Brandon and Pratik.
They found the woman, who told them her name was Gayle. She managed to stand and join their human chain, and they shuffled their way through the darkness toward the person who was groaning. Please let it be Richard, Brandon thought. Please let it be Richard.
The groaning man couldn’t speak. Gayle bent down to examine him with her hands, and she gasped and stood.
“We have to leave him,” she said.
“Why? What is it?” Brandon asked, afraid it was Richard.
“I’m not sure he’s even still alive” was all Gayle would say.
They heard something rattle and fall nearby, and Pratik turned.
“No, wait—” Brandon said. He bent down to check on the wounded man. “I have to know if it’s Richard.”
“Stay away from his stomach,” Gayle told him, her voice queasy.
Brandon’s hands found the man’s shoulders first, and then his suspenders. Richard had been wearing suspenders! Please no, please no, Brandon said to himself.
His hands fumbled for the man’s face, and he felt smooth, shaved skin. Brandon cried tears of relief. This couldn’t be him. Richard had a beard. Brandon felt a pang of guilt for feeling relieved when this man was dying—maybe even dead already—but he couldn’t help being grateful.
“I’m sorry,” Brandon whispered to the dying man.
Brandon stood, and he and Pratik and Gayle listened again for a groan or a voice in the darkness.
“If you are hurt or trapped and can hear my voice, make any noise you can so we can find you,” Pratik called out.
No one answered.
“I think we should go,” said Gayle. “It’s hard to breathe, and we don’t even know which way is out.”
“Wait, please,” Brandon said. “My friend is still down here somewhere.”
“I’m sorry, boy,” said Pratik. “But if we haven’t heard him by now—”
“Just let me look a little more,” Brandon told him. He couldn’t leave Richard behind. Not after all they’d been through together.
“Richard?” Brandon called. “Richard!”
Long moments went by, and Brandon could sense the other two survivors growing restless. They wanted to get out of here. He did too.
Brandon pulled the human chain farther into the darkness, desperate to find his friend.
“Richard!” he cried.
Then, softly, Brandon thought he heard something. Was that … singing? Brandon’s ears were still buzzing. Maybe they were playing tricks on him. But no, the others stopped to listen too.
“Richard?” Brandon called.
There was no answer. Just the indistinct hum of a tune.
“I think it’s coming from this way,” Gayle said, pulling them gently in the dark.
Faintly, almost no more than a whisper, came the words to a familiar song:
This land is your land, this land is my land,From California, to the New York island— Brandon gasped. It was Richard!