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Brandon and Richard came out of the stairwell cautiously, tentatively, scanning the 91st floor. They had seen fire through the walls just above them, but there was no fire here. Not yet.
There were no people either. They went through every office they could get to through the rubble and debris: a shipping company, two banks, two investment companies, a Manhattan cultural council. There were lots of cubicles, lots of desks, but each of them was empty.
Brandon was searching one of the offices when he saw something fall past the window outside.
Was that—was that a person?
Brandon shook his head to clear it. It couldn’t have been a person. Nobody in their right mind would jump from the Twin Towers this high up.
Brandon remembered the wind lifting him off his hands and knees, dragging him toward the open edge of the skyscraper before Richard had caught him and pulled him inside. Had someone else been trying to cross a similar
divide and been swept away on the wind? He shuddered just thinking about it.
“Hey, kid, you find anything?”
Richard’s voice was soft, but Brandon jumped. They had both been whispering, as though if they talked too loud the whole building would come down around them like an avalanche.
“No. I just thought I saw … I thought I saw somebody falling past the window,” Brandon said.
Richard recoiled. “God, I hope not. No, can’t be. Just your mind playing tricks on you.”
Brandon nodded. That had to be it. Didn’t it?
A huge crack ran down the length of the floor in one hallway, almost fifty yards long. The hallway led right into the central part of the floor, the one with the bathrooms and elevators and stairwells. Smoke poured out from the elevator banks, and Brandon and Richard held their wet cloths tight against their noses and mouths. It helped, but Brandon’s eyes still stung from the heavy smoke.
On the north side of the building, the ceiling had completely collapsed. The plane must have hit somewhere on this side of the building on the floors up above.
“Come on,” Richard said. “Everybody’s got themselves up and out of here. We should do the same. Let’s check the next floor real fast, then get back to our people on 89.”
Brandon followed Richard down to the 90th floor. He was surprised to come out of the stairwell and see two people standing in the hall—a white man in paint-splattered coveralls and a Black woman in a business skirt and blouse. They stood near the elevators like they were waiting for one to arrive.
“Hey,” Richard said to them. “We’re from one floor down. We were checking to make sure you guys are all right up
here.”
“We are,” the woman said. She gestured to the elevator. “But they’re not.”
Brandon turned to look. The elevator door was open and five people were inside—three men and two women. They were all dressed in business suits, and all clearly terrified. The elevator was full of swirling black smoke, and they ducked and cried out as sparks popped in the elevator’s ceiling.
Panic rose in Brandon as he remembered that awful feeling of being trapped in an elevator. Of it sliding. Dropping.
“You have to get out of there!” Brandon cried. He rushed toward the elevator doors, but the man outside in the hallway held him back.
“They can’t,” the painter told Brandon. “Look at that stuff falling in front of the door.”
An eerie, iridescent blue haze shimmered down like a curtain between the open doors and the elevator car, blocking the way in and out. The passengers in the elevator would have to go right through the haze to get out.
“What is that stuff?” Richard asked.
“Fire,” said one of the men in the elevator. “It’s like … a sheet of blue flame.”
Brandon was momentarily mesmerized by it. He’d never seen anything like it in his entire life. A steady stream of bright blue flame, like from a super-hot gas stove. What could cause that?
As they all watched, the blue haze dripped more heavily.
Soon it would be a waterfall. A waterfall of pure flames.
“We don’t want to run through it,” said one of the women inside the elevator. “We’re afraid we’ll get burned.”
The elevator groaned and dropped an inch, and everyone in the car screamed. Goose bumps moved up Brandon’s
arms to the top of his head, and he got the sickening feeling of falling all over again.
“You have to get out of there,” Brandon told them. “I was in an elevator when the plane hit. We just barely got out in time before the cable snapped and the elevator car fell down the shaft!”
One of the men in the elevator groaned, and another cursed.
“We called building security,” said the woman in the hallway. “They said to wait for the fire department.”
“Somebody’s looking for something to block the flames,” the painter said. “A cardboard box or something.”
“Cardboard is just going to catch on fire!” one of the men in the elevator yelled. He was clearly at his wits’ end. They all had to be. Another man was pacing frantically back and forth, the armpits of his shirt ringed with sweat. One woman cried with her eyes closed. The other was muttering something under her breath. Whether it was curses or regrets or prayers, Brandon didn’t know.
“What about a fire extinguisher?” Richard asked.
“To extinguish what?” one of the men in the elevator said. “The fire’s raining down through the elevator shaft. The source is somewhere upstairs!”
The 93rd floor, Brandon thought. He and Richard had seen it. And no fire extinguisher was going to put out those flames. Until the inferno upstairs was extinguished by the fire department, it was going to keep on burning—in both directions.
Something clunked in the elevator shaft up above, and the elevator dropped another two inches. The passengers grabbed onto the rails and cried out. One of the men started sobbing.
The woman who’d been muttering to herself stood taller, as though she’d come to some sort of decision. “I’m getting
out,” she said. Her voice was shaky and her eyes were wide with panic. “I’m going through the blue stuff, whatever it is.” She nodded, talking herself into it. “It’s just flames, right? I mean, you can run your hands through a candle flame and be fine. I’ll just—I’ll just be fast.”
Nobody tried to talk her out of it. The other passengers parted for her, and she positioned herself in the middle of the doorway. Richard and Brandon and the two other people in the hall got out of her way.
The woman took a deep breath, covered her face with her hands, and darted through the blue mist.
For a moment—for half a heartbeat—everything was fine.
And then the woman burst into flames.
She screamed and beat at her burning hair as she collapsed to the floor. Brandon had never seen anything like it outside a horror movie, and experiencing it now, feeling the raging heat, hearing her awful screams, made him want to retch.
Inside the elevator, the other woman screamed and one of the men threw up.
“Roll! Roll!” the painter said, and unbelievably the woman had the presence of mind to do it. Richard beat the last of the flames with the wet shirt he carried, putting the fire out for good. The woman had burned so hot and so fast she had even set the carpet on fire.
“Don’t come through!” the painter told everyone else in the elevator. “That stuff’s jet fuel or something!”
The other woman in the hallway went running for water. The burned woman crawled over to the wall and leaned against it.
“I think I’m a little burned,” the woman said.
Brandon didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the lady. Her hair was gone, and her hands and arms were burned. Badly.
“I can’t even feel it,” the woman whispered.
The woman in the business skirt ran back with a cup of water, but no one knew what to do. She poured some of the water over the burned woman’s bubbling pink arm, and the burned lady screamed.
“We’ve got to take her down the steps,” the painter said. “Get her to a hospital.”
Down the steps? thought Brandon. They were ninety floors up!
“Can you move?” the businesswoman asked her.
The burned woman wept. Blisters were forming all over her body, but she nodded.
The painter and the businesswoman lifted her to her feet, and she cried out in pain.
“We’ll take her down. You two stay here,” the painter told Brandon and Richard. “See if you can find something to block that blue flame and get the rest of those people—”
The painter looked back over his shoulder and froze.
Brandon turned.
The elevator car wasn’t there anymore.
No, Brandon thought. No—they couldn’t have fallen! They were just here!
His heart in his throat, Brandon edged as close as he dared to the river of burning jet fuel and looked down. Broken cables dangled where the car had been, and the elevator shaft was a big, empty black hole.
The elevator car had fallen. How far Brandon didn’t know. All the way to the basement? Wherever it had gone, the four people in it were surely dead.
