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The elevator kept sliding down—and not the way it was built to. Brandon could feel how wrong it was in the pit of his stomach. From the horrified looks on their faces, the other passengers in the elevator felt it too.
“Hit the emergency stop button,” the blonde woman said. Nobody moved. The elevator kept sliding. Above them,
something groaned sickeningly.
“Hit the emergency stop!” the woman cried.
There was a loud chung! above them, and the floor of the car dropped like a stone. Brandon’s heart jumped into his throat, and he lunged for the control panel and slapped the red STOP button. The elevator’s emergency brakes grabbed hold with a squeal and the car jolted to a stop. Everyone tumbled to the ground, and then they were still.
Brandon’s breath came fast and hard, and he panted with fear. What had just happened?
Something smelled like it was burning, but not like a kitchen fire. It had a chemical tinge to it, like when you squirted lighter fluid on the burning charcoal in a grill.
The passengers stirred and helped each other to their feet. Brandon’s legs were trembling so much he almost couldn’t stand.
“What the heck just happened?” the big man in the blue blazer asked.
None of them had an answer.
“I rode out Hurricane Belle in this tower in ’76,” said Shavinder, the Windows on the World worker. “During the hurricane, the towers swayed back and forth five yards each way. But it was nothing like that.”
The silver-haired man clutched at the buttons on his shirt. “Good God, if this thing fell over, it’d reach all the way to Chinatown.”
Brandon blanched. The Twin Towers fall over?
“That’s not helping,” the woman said. “Try the phone.” There was an emergency phone behind a metal panel,
and Shavinder pressed the call button and waited.
“Yes! Hello!” he said after a moment, and Brandon relaxed. If somebody knew they were in the elevator, they could come rescue them. “Yes, something happened, and we’re stuck in an elevator around the 85th floor.”
Brandon heard a calm voice on the other end answering back.
“He says there is some kind of problem on the 91st floor,” Shavinder told the other passengers. “An explosion or something. He says— Hello? Hello, are you there? He’s gone.”
An explosion? Brandon thought. What could have exploded?
The big man took the phone from Shavinder and pressed the call button again. He shook his head. “The line’s dead.”
Black smoke crept through the seams at the top of the elevator, and Brandon felt a bead of sweat roll down his back. Smoke? Was there a fire? It was getting really hot too.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” the silver-haired man cried.
“Stay cool,” the woman told him. She dug a cell phone out of her briefcase and flipped it open, but she couldn’t get a signal. Nobody else had a cell phone to try.
They were trapped and cut off from the rest of the world.
Brandon put his head in his hands and tried not to cry. He was scared and separated from the person he relied on the most—his dad.
It’s you and me against the world, Brandon. This is how we survive.
But how was Brandon supposed to survive without him?
Smoke tickled the back of Brandon’s throat, and he coughed. The old man coughed too, longer and harder. Brandon could now see the black smoke among them, curling and twisting like something alive.
The big man pulled cloth napkins from the wreckage of the cart. “Here, wrap these around your faces,” he said.
“Dab them in some water first,” Shavinder said. The overturned pitcher had a little water left in it, and he wet the napkins and handed them out. Brandon tied his napkin around his mouth and took a deep breath. It was still hard to breathe, but the napkin filtered out a lot of smoke. The old man kept coughing though, even with the damp napkin to help.
They all sat down on the floor to get as far away from the smoke as they could and went around introducing themselves. The blonde woman’s name was Marni, and she was a stockbroker from Connecticut. Shavinder was born in New Delhi, India, and lived in Queens. He had worked at Windows on the World since it opened in 1976. The old man’s name was Stephen. He was an investment banker who worked on the 101st floor and lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’d been a New Yorker all his life. The
big man’s name was Mike, and he lived in New Jersey. He was in the tower to interview for an insurance job.
“I’m Brandon,” Brandon said when it was his turn. It was weird, talking to a bunch of grown-ups like he was one of them. But in a way, he was. It didn’t matter whether they were young or old, or where they were from. They were all stuck in the same bad situation together.
“Wait, you’re Leo Chavez’s kid, aren’t you?” Shavinder said. Brandon nodded. There was no sense hiding it now. Getting in trouble with his father was the least of his worries.
“Whaddya think that sound was?” Mike asked. “That snapping sound right before the kid hit the stop button? You think that was the elevator cable?”
Nobody answered him. So far no one seemed to be outright panicking, but Brandon realized he was shaking and he couldn’t make himself stop.
He wished he could reach his dad. If only I hadn’t gone off on my own, Brandon thought. And all for some stupid Wolverine gloves. What a fool he had been, and now he was going to choke to death inside this metal coffin.
“Kid, you with us?”
It was Mike. He and the others were looking at Brandon like they’d asked him something when he wasn’t listening.
“We’re gonna try to get out of here,” Mike told him. “Can I lift you up so you can try the ceiling?”
Brandon agreed, and Mike boosted him up onto his shoulders. The smoke was heavier up there, and Brandon held his breath. He pushed and pounded on every inch of the ceiling, but nothing budged.
“Let’s see if we can get the doors open instead,” Shavinder said. He and Mike put their palms flat on the shiny metal doors of the elevator and pulled, and the doors opened a crack. Brandon felt a tiny thrill—maybe they were
going to get out of here after all! He and Marni jumped in to help. Together the four of them pulled the elevator doors wide, and Shavinder jammed a metal serving tray between the doors to keep them open.
Brandon stepped back, expecting to see a hallway. Or at least part of one. Instead there was nothing but an unpainted gray wall, with the number 85 handwritten on it in pencil.
They were at the 85th floor, but they couldn’t exit onto it. Of course, Brandon realized. The local becomes an express after the 97th floor. There were no exits from this elevator until the Sky Lobby far below them on the 78th
floor.
Which meant they really were trapped. And the smoke and heat were getting worse.
“It’s drywall,” Mike said. “Sheetrock. The stuff they make walls out of.”
“Maybe we can bust our way out of here,” said Marni. Mike lifted a big foot and kicked at the wall.
THWACK!
Brandon leaned in close to look. All the kick had done was leave a footprint.
Mike waved everybody back, lowered his shoulder, and ran full tilt at the wall.
THUNK.
Nothing happened to the wall, but the elevator shuddered and jerked down another half a foot. Brandon thought he was going to have a heart attack.
“Let’s not do that again!” Stephen said.
“Well, excuse me for trying to save our lives!” Mike snapped.
Everybody started yelling at each other, and Stephen started coughing again and couldn’t stop. The smoke was getting worse, and now the elevator felt like a sauna.
Brandon plucked a butter knife out of the wreckage from the serving cart and held it up triumphantly. “What about this?” he cried.
Everybody stopped arguing and stared.
“Yeah, that’s good. That could work!” Mike said, and Brandon felt a small flush of pride. Mike took the knife and hacked at the Sheetrock. A tiny bit of drywall crumbled into dust and rained down on the carpet, leaving a divot in the wall.
“There we go!” Mike said. He pulled off his blazer and loosened his tie, and went back to hacking on the wall. Shavinder grabbed a spatula-like serving utensil from the floor, and he used that on the hole too, taking turns with Mike. When they got tired, Marni and Brandon took turns. It was exhausting work. They didn’t ask Stephen to help though, and he didn’t offer. He was having enough trouble breathing already.
Smoke streamed in through every crack and every seam now, and something up above them popped and groaned.
Stephen tried the elevator phone again, but there was no answer.
What was going on? Where was everybody? “We’re all going to die here,” Stephen wheezed.
“We’re not going to die,” Marni said, but it didn’t sound like she believed it.
Brandon’s arms shook, and he could barely aim straight when he whacked at the hole. How could he be trapped without his dad? Just this morning they had been together in another elevator. Why hadn’t this happened then, when they could have helped each other?
Mike and Shavinder took over again, steadily chipping away at the wall. There wasn’t one layer of drywall, they discovered, there were three. But working together, the
elevator passengers managed to carve, yank, and kick a pizza-sized hole in the wall.
None of them could fit through it though—except for Brandon.
“Go, young man, go!” Shavinder told him.
“But we don’t even know where it leads!” said Brandon.
The space beyond the hole was dark and empty.
“Who cares, as long as it’s not in here?” said Marni.
Brandon couldn’t argue with that. He took a deep breath of wet, smoky air, and with Mike and Shavinder’s help, he climbed up and out, into the unknown.
