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The South Tower was gone. Like some sort of awful magician’s trick, it had just disappeared. Disappeared and been replaced by a mountain of concrete and twisted metal, shrouded in a cloud of dust and smoke.
That was what must have knocked them all down in the basement, Brandon realized. What had destroyed the underground mall. The tornado that had hit them was the blast from the South Tower coming down half a block away.
Gayle choked back a sob. “All those people.”
Brandon felt all the relief from his escape drain out of him, replaced by an icy chill.
“Maybe people made it out,” Richard said. “If they had time?”
Brandon glanced at his watch. Its face was cracked, but the digital readout still worked. It was 10:25 a.m. It had been a little over an hour and a half since the first plane hit. How long after that had the second plane hit? He tried to remember. Fifteen, twenty minutes? The people in the South
Tower had had less than an hour to escape before the whole building had come down.
Brandon looked up. The North Tower still poured black smoke into the sky above him. Brandon’s father was up there at the top, in Windows on the World. He was still alive. He had to be! The South Tower had fallen—incredibly, unbelievably—but the North Tower was still standing. Brandon had passed those firemen on the stairs. They would get to the fire and get to Brandon’s dad. But if the South Tower had fallen …
“Oh my God,” Pratik said. “Look!”
Pratik pointed toward the middle of the North Tower. Mixed in with the falling metal and glass were things that were moving. People, Brandon realized. People were still jumping from the tower, falling ninety floors to their deaths. They dropped out of the thick black smoke that engulfed the top of the building with alarming speed, arms and legs flailing. Brandon saw one man reaching, grabbing as he fell, too far from anything to stop himself, his tie sticking straight up in the air above him.
“I need to find a phone booth,” Brandon said, blinking away the nightmare. He turned to Richard. “I need to call my dad!”
“We need to get out of here first,” Richard told him. “Get to my house. We can call your dad from there. My family will be there. You can stay the night with us, and … well, we’ve got some things to work out, but you can stay with me and my family for as long as you need to.”
Brandon cried. He cried because Richard was being so nice to him, and because he didn’t want to think about what would happen if his dad really did die in the North Tower.
An EMT wearing a white surgical mask hurried up to Gayle and took her by the elbow to sit her down on the curb. Another EMT ran over to Brandon, Richard, and Pratik
and handed them little white masks like she and the other EMT wore. The masks were flimsy and thin and wrapped around your ears with an itchy elastic band, but they filtered the awful, gritty air.
“Don’t breathe the dust!” the EMT told them. “It’s toxic!” The EMT found the bloody shirt wrapped around
Brandon’s hand. He stood like a zombie as she peeled it away and treated his wound. Brandon’s eyes fell on a banged-up, cylindrical piece of machinery sitting right in the middle of the street. It was as tall as he was, and looked like a crumpled soda can. Brandon struggled to grasp what he was seeing. Was that an airplane engine from one of the planes that had hit the Twin Towers? Could one of them have really shot out all this way?
The EMT put something on Brandon’s hand that made it sting, and he hissed in pain. She had it wrapped and bandaged in no time though and gave him a quick examination to see if there was anything else that needed patching.
“Can I move this to look at your other hand?” she asked, pulling at something Brandon didn’t know he was holding.
Brandon looked down. In his left hand, he carried the little stuffed animal he’d picked up in the wreckage in the underground mall. It was the Tasmanian Devil, a character from the Warner Bros. cartoons. Brandon stared at the wild, silly look on its face. It was like something from another planet, one where airplanes didn’t crash into buildings and skyscrapers didn’t fall. Why was he still holding it? He’d been so focused on surviving that he hadn’t even realized he’d picked it up and taken it with him.
Richard put a hand on Brandon’s shoulder. “You should keep that,” Richard told him. “It brought us luck.”
Luck? thought Brandon. How could anybody think he’d been lucky?
There was a sudden CRACK from high above, and somebody screamed. Brandon looked up. The tall red-and- white antenna on top of the North Tower was just visible, sticking out through the cloud of gray-and-black smoke that billowed from the upper floors. Brandon watched as the giant antenna tilted, leaned, and then disappeared down into the smoke as the top floor of the North Tower fell in on itself.
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
Brandon felt each boom in his stomach as the top floors of the North Tower collapsed, one by one, under the massive weight of each new falling floor, and then it was a rushing, expanding avalanche. Concrete crumbled to powder in an instant, exploding outward like a blooming flower, and giant pieces of rock and steel came shooting out like fireworks.
The North Tower was coming down.
“No no no no no” was all Brandon could say, all he could think. Then the sound of the individual floors collapsing became a rumble, a tidal wave, a static roar, and Brandon’s heart stopped as he watched one hundred and seven stories, along with five hundred thousand tons of concrete and steel and moldy carpets and computers and human beings, come straight down. All around him, the cars on the street shuddered and bounced. The gray cloud from the tower expanded out, out, out, and then the cloud of dust and rock and glass came blasting across the plaza and down the narrow streets between Manhattan’s surviving skyscrapers like a living thing, coming to swallow Brandon.
Like it had swallowed his father.
“Run, Brandon!” Richard cried. “Run!”
Brandon ran. He had never been so scared in all his life. Not when he had been trapped in the elevator. Not when he had almost fallen off the edge of the 89th floor. Not when he’d been battered and blind in the underground mall. The
thing that had killed his father was coming for him, chasing him like a giant monster through the streets of Manhattan, and he ran in a wild panic down Vesey Street, straight away from the thing that hunted him. Car alarms went off all around him, honking, beeping, flashing, like they were yelling at him to RUN. RUN. RUN. Then the sun went out in the sky and darkness surrounded him, and the air turned to ash in his mouth despite his white mask.
I’m going to die, Brandon thought.
He was just to the little old church called St. Paul’s, halfway down the long block to Broadway, when the full force of the blast caught up to him. FWOOMPH. The wind picked Brandon up and threw him down the street as though he weighed no more than a leaf. Brandon tumbled, skidded, bounced, rolled. Everything was a blur of asphalt and ash and pain, and then he slammed into a honking car and bounced off, sliding to a stop in the middle of the street.
Brandon wrapped his battered arms around his chest and tucked his head down as the monster roared over him, past him. Paper and ash fluttered in its wake, and then it was gone and Brandon lay alone in the street, covered from head to foot in white dust.
Brandon’s arms and legs shook as he got up on all fours to look around. Everything was covered in another coat of fine white dust, including the lump of a body that lay in the street a few yards back.
“Richard?” Brandon cried.
Brandon stood, staggered, limped back to the unmoving form, his feet leaving drag marks in the soot and ash. Manhattan was quiet again, silent as a grave. That’s what this place was now—a giant grave for the thousands of people who hadn’t been able to escape before the towers fell.
Brandon just prayed Richard hadn’t joined them.
Brandon fell to his knees next to the body of his friend. Richard lay facedown on the road, motionless. Brandon put a hand to Richard’s back and shook him gently.
“Richard?” he whispered. “Richard, please be alive.” Brandon couldn’t take it if Richard had died too.
Richard’s fingers twitched, and his arm slid out across the ash-covered asphalt, looking for something. Brandon didn’t know what Richard was looking for, but he was alive. Richard was alive.
Brandon put his hand in Richard’s, and Richard squeezed it. Richard relaxed then, stopped looking for whatever he’d been looking for, and Brandon took Richard’s hand in both of his and wept, the tears carving tracks down the white dust that covered his face. Because Brandon knew then what Richard had been looking for when he’d put his arm out.
He had just wanted to know, like Brandon, that his friend was all right, and that they were together.
