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A plane had hit the South Tower. A second plane. Brandon still couldn’t believe it. But he’d seen it. Flying in, turning at the last second so that it hit the South Tower full on. Not an accident. Deliberate.
An attack.
But by whom? And why?
Brandon was so distracted he almost tripped as he followed Richard and his floor mates down the stairs. They formed two rows, going down side by side: Esther leading Mr. Koury by the elbow in front, Anson and his guide dog behind them following the railing, Brandon and Richard together in the rear. Brandon wanted to run down the stairs, to get out of the North Tower as quick as he could, but Anson and Mr. Khoury couldn’t go any faster.
“At least the stairs are better than the last time,” Esther said. “After the bombing.”
Brandon looked up. “What bombing?” he asked. “Terrorists set off a bomb in the parking garage under the
building,” Richard explained. “Back in ’93.”
Brandon’s dad had been working in Windows on the World then, but it was no wonder Brandon didn’t remember it—he’d only been a year old.
“Was anybody hurt?” Brandon asked.
“A few people died, and a thousand more were hurt,” Richard told him. “It was a scary time.”
It couldn’t have been as scary as today, Brandon thought. “It took us three hours to get downstairs that day,” Esther said. “The bomb took out the building’s power, and you couldn’t see a blessed thing in the stairs. They were total caves. It was chaos. All the smoke from the bomb came up the stairs. You couldn’t breathe. Now at least there’s fluorescent paint on the walls. But they didn’t make the
stairs any wider.”
“Why did terrorists bomb the World Trade Center back then?” Brandon asked. “Is this another terrorist attack?”
“I don’t know, kid. Maybe so,” said Richard. “I don’t know who else would do it. The ones who bombed the building back in ’93 said they did it because we kept sticking our noses in the Middle East, and they wanted us out.”
“But why the World Trade Center?” Brandon asked.
“It’s a pretty easy target,” said Esther. “And a pretty noticeable one too. Sticking up taller than everything else around it.”
Brandon still didn’t understand. What purpose did attacking the Twin Towers serve? Hurting all these innocent people?
Down and down they went. Broken light fixtures hung from the ceiling, and water still streamed down around their feet. But not as much as before. There were more cracks in the walls too, ten floors down from where the first plane had hit. Through some of them, Brandon could see flames. Why were some floors on fire, and others weren’t?
They didn’t stop to find out.
“You doing okay, Anson?” Richard asked.
“Yes, I’m fine,” he called back, even though his voice sounded strained.
“How about you, Mr. Khoury?” Richard asked.
“I too am all right,” Mr. Khoury said in heavily accented English.
“You seem very calm, Mr. Khoury,” Esther told him. Brandon had been thinking that too. How could the old man be so chill with everything that was going on?
Mr. Khoury shrugged. “In 1978, I come to United States from Lebanon, where these war like this happen when I am young man,” he said, waving his hand at the destruction. “I am refugee once. Now I am refugee again.”
Brandon didn’t understand. The United States wasn’t at war with anybody, were they? No—not that he knew of.
But maybe now they were.
Brandon thought going downstairs would be easy. It was certainly easier than going up. But his legs burned and his feet ached. All he wanted to do was sit down and rest, but he knew he couldn’t stop. Not for long. Besides, if Mr. Khoury could do it, Brandon could do it. Despite his age, Mr. Khoury moved right along at his slow, deliberate pace and never stopped, never complained.
At the 78th floor, they came to the highest of the two Sky Lobbies, where people got on and off the local elevators that serviced the floors above and below them.
This was where I was headed in that first elevator when I left Windows on the World! Brandon realized with a start. How long had it taken him to go thirty floors?
“Let’s get out here and see if we can find somebody in charge,” Richard suggested, and the group exited the stairwell.
The last time Brandon had been through the Sky Lobby, on another trip to work with his dad, it had been quiet and
mostly empty. Now it was dark, smoky, and crowded. People called out numbers—“86! 84! 79! 81!”—and Brandon finally figured out they were saying their floor numbers, trying to connect with friends and coworkers. Trying to find out who had made it and who hadn’t.
Nobody called out any numbers higher than 89. “This is a madhouse,” said Richard.
The refugees from the 89th floor stayed close, holding each other’s hands.
“Should we just keep going down?” Esther asked.
If Richard had been hoping to find a person in charge, Brandon didn’t see one. There were no firefighters, no police officers, not even building security guards.
A dull blue light suddenly glowed above the heads of the crowd. It was a man holding up a cell phone. He was using the soft glow to lead a group of people to a stairwell on the other side.
“That guy looks like he knows what he’s doing,” Esther said. “Maybe we should follow him.”
Brandon didn’t know how anybody knew what they were doing. Not in this chaos.
“I’m with Esther,” Anson said. He stood perfectly still, one hand clutching the handle on the harness of his dog, and the other holding his cane. People bumped and cried out in panic all around him, but like Mr. Khoury, Anson stayed calm.
“It was pretty clear coming down Stairwell B,” Richard said. “I don’t know why we should switch out all of a sudden.”
“I’m with Richard,” Brandon said. He had promised his father he’d stay with him, and besides, he liked Richard.
“We go,” Mr. Khoury said, still calm and assured. He, Esther, and Anson moved forward, toward the stairwell that
the man with the glowing cell phone had used, not back to the stairwell they had walked down.
Richard and Brandon hesitated. Before they could decide where to go, someone called out, “Coming through!”
The crowd parted for two men pushing another man in a wheelchair. Brandon’s jaw dropped. He’d thought it must be hard for Anson trying to get out of the towers. But how terrifying must it be for someone trying to escape in a wheelchair? They couldn’t use the elevators anymore, and they couldn’t get down the stairs on their own. Just the thought of being trapped like that made Brandon shudder.
The two men had to lift the wheelchair to get it into the stairwell, and a crowd piled up behind them to wait. Richard and Brandon quickly became separated from Esther, Anson, and Mr. Khoury in the confusion.
“Where are they? Do you see them?” Brandon asked Richard. Even jumping up and down, he couldn’t see over the wall of people.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I’ve lost them. I think they went down the stairs before the man in the wheelchair.”
Richard took a look at the crowd waiting to go down the stairs and pulled Brandon back the way they had come.
“What are you doing? What about the others?” Brandon asked.
“Even at Mr. Khoury’s pace, we’ll never catch up to them,” Richard said. “Not with that wheelchair between us. Esther’s still with them. They’ll be all right as long as they keep moving. But we gotta get out of here too, and that line isn’t going anywhere. I figure we’re better off in the stairwell where we started. You okay with that?”
“Yeah,” said Brandon. He hated to leave the others, but it made sense.
“It’s just you and me now, kid,” Richard told him.
Brandon nodded in the darkness. He was okay with that too.
The people on Stairwell B moved steadily, two by two, down flight after flight. Some of the doors to the other floors were locked, or blocked by something, and Brandon hoped the people on those floors had found a different way out. Sometimes he and Richard would leave the stairs and cross a floor to see if another stairwell was faster, and along the way Brandon would pick up phones on random desks, just in case. Most of them didn’t work. The few that did gave them busy signals when they tried dialing Richard’s family and Windows on the World. All eight million people in the city must be trying to use the phone lines right now, Brandon thought.
With each busy signal, Brandon’s panic mounted. Was his father all right? Would the firefighters get to him in time? The first plane had hit the North Tower almost an hour ago, and he hadn’t seen a single firefighter yet. And now they had a second building to worry about.
Brandon’s legs were aching by the time they reached the 44th-floor Sky Lobby. He and Richard left the stairwell again to see if they could find Esther and the others, but things were even more chaotic here.
The 44th floor had become a kind of hospital. There were EMTs and paramedics here—at last!—helping scores of people with broken limbs, cuts and bruises, and burns. Brandon wondered if the poor burned woman from the 90th floor was here, getting treatment, or if she had already been taken downstairs.
People were moving every which way. Some of them were looking for a paramedic. Others were looking for a stairwell. There was a line for the telephone at the security station, which apparently still worked, and the few people with cell phones were loaning them to other people to try to reach
their families. Here too, people were calling out floor numbers and names. Brandon looked around for Esther and Anson and Mr. Khoury, but he didn’t see them.
Ka-TISSSSH! Something massive crashed into the floor across the room, and everyone screamed. Smoke and debris shot through the crowd. People tried to run, but there was nowhere to go.
Brandon ducked and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the flaming jet fuel that would burn him alive. No! he thought in terror. Not another plane!
