The blast of fire Brandon braced for never came. He looked up and saw Richard crouching next to him. He’d been ready for a shock wave too.
But if it wasn’t another plane, what was it? What happened?
Richard stood to look. He put a hand over his mouth and pulled Brandon away as new screams—screams of horror— filled the air.
“It wasn’t a plane—it was an elevator,” Richard told him. “An elevator just crashed down, and the people in it—”
He couldn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Brandon could guess without seeing it himself.
This is my reality now, Brandon realized. I hear a crash, and my first thought is “A plane is hitting the building!” He never would have assumed that a day ago, an hour ago, but things were different now. He’d gone from a world where planes didn’t fly into buildings to one where things like that did happen. Now he expected it.
Brandon and Richard hurried back into the stairwell and kept going down.
Everyone seemed to have gotten the message to get out as quickly as they could, and the stairwells were a bottleneck of desperate, frightened people. Their descent slowed to a crawl. Sometimes Richard and Brandon stood on one step for a full minute before they got to move down to the next step. All around them, men and women who had cell phones kept trying to make calls. No one could get a signal.
“Hey, so tell me something about yourself,” Richard said to Brandon while they waited. “What do you like to do?”
Brandon shrugged. “I don’t know. Skateboard, I guess.” “We’ve got a skate park near us in Queens,” Richard told
him. “Drive by there sometimes. I see kids doing the craziest things on those skateboards.”
Brandon knew Richard was just trying to distract him, but he couldn’t think about skateboarding right now. He couldn’t think about anything but getting out of here.
Fifteen minutes later, Brandon and Richard were only to the 36th floor. Brandon could feel his frustration mounting. He and Richard shared a look of despair. But they didn’t say anything, and neither did anyone else. No one yelled, and no one got mad. No one told anybody to get a move on, for God’s sake. For a bunch of New Yorkers who honked if you took a second too long to cross the street, everybody was remarkably calm. Brandon didn’t know how they were doing it. He felt like he was two seconds away from screaming.
They hit the landing for the 29th floor, and Brandon sagged with relief. They were in the twenties! Not far now! A man in a delivery uniform stood in the doorway, handing out bottles of water to people as they went by, and Brandon drank his greedily, his throat raw and dry.
Another man carried a glass coffee pot filled with water, with paper towels floating inside. “I’ve got wet paper towels to breathe through, if anybody needs one!” he called out.
Brandon and Richard kept going. Brandon’s legs ached even worse than before. All he wanted to do was sit down.
One man they came to had sat down, right there on the stairs. He was older and overweight, and he had clearly been pretty high up when he started his walk down. The back and armpits of his shirt were covered in sweat, and his face was pale and his breathing labored. A woman stood in front of him, waving a newspaper at him to cool him down.
“Lionel, can you walk?” she asked him. “We have to keep moving.”
Lionel stayed where he was.
Somehow the fumes were worse down here, even though they were farther away from the fire above. Brandon’s head was groggy, his eyes unfocused. He ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth and realized he could taste the jet fuel fumes.
At the 20th floor, Richard grabbed Brandon and pulled him through the door.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s see if one of the other stairwells is faster.”
The 20th floor was empty of people. Computer monitors still glowed. On one, a cursor blinked in the middle of an unfinished sentence. Across the room, a phone rang plaintively, no one there to answer it.
But that meant the phones here were still working!
Brandon’s heart fluttered with cautious hope. He was desperate to talk to his father again, but he had been disappointed so many times before when he couldn’t get through. He rushed to a phone near a window and dialed the number for Windows on the World.
Richard knew what Brandon was doing and sat down at another desk to try to call his own family.
Brandon waited breathlessly, and then—the line was ringing! He’d gotten through! Brandon clung to the receiver,
waiting for someone to pick up, when something went plummeting past the window.
Not something. Someone.
Richard stood from his chair. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. He had seen it too, then. Brandon wasn’t imagining things. A man in dark pants and a white shirt and a light blue tie had just fallen past their window, twenty stories in
the air.
“Hello? Brandon? Is that you?” his father said, finally answering the phone.
“Dad! Oh my God, Dad, I just saw a man falling past the window!”
“Brandon, I—I can’t talk long,” his father said slowly. His voice was quiet. Weak. “Everybody else—everybody is down on 106. We broke a window to get some air. The smoke is getting thicker. But I waited—”
“Dad, you have to get up to the roof! Get to the helicopters!” Brandon told him.
“Can’t. Too much smoke,” his dad said sadly. “Helicopters can’t land.”
What? How could that be? The helicopters had to be able to land on the roof! How else were they supposed to get all those trapped people out?
“The floor is groaning. Buckling. Fire’s coming up through the floor,” Brandon’s father said. “No sprinklers. We already threw the fire extinguisher out the window to break it open for air. Not that it would help.”
Brandon realized he was crying. He knew what his father was telling him. He could hear it in the strain in his voice, in the things he was saying. His dad just didn’t want to say it, and Brandon didn’t want to hear it.
“Dad,” Brandon said. “Dad, you have to get out of there.” He felt so helpless. He knew there was nothing he could do,
nothing his father could do, or his dad would have done it already. But still he tried to think of something.
“Brandon, I want you to do something with your life, all right?” his dad said. His voice was trembling. “I want you to get out of this building and survive and do something worth living for. Do you understand?”
“Stop it!” Brandon cried. “Stop talking like that!” “Brandon—”
“No!” Brandon told him. “No, we’re a team. I need you.”
“No you don’t,” his dad told him. “You’re strong, Brandon.
You make good decisions.”
Brandon sobbed. “But I don’t. I’m always making mistakes. I got suspended from school. I ran away from you this morning.”
“I’m glad you did, Brandon. If you hadn’t gone off on your own, you’d be trapped up here with me right now.”
“I wish I was!” Brandon told him. “No you don’t, Brandon.”
But he did. Brandon wished he was with his father, even if the floors were buckling and the fire was spreading and they couldn’t breathe. Even if his dad was dying. Brandon would rather die with his dad than live alone.
“We survive together. That’s what you always say,” Brandon said. He couldn’t see for his tears. “I can’t do this alone.”
“Yes you can, Brandon. You’re already becoming your own man. You can survive without me.”
Brandon put his elbows on the desk and covered his face with one hand. He didn’t want to be a man, or make his own decisions, or survive all by himself. He wanted his dad.
“The firemen are going to rescue you,” Brandon managed to say. “They’re going to make it up to the 93rd floor and put out the fire and come get you.”
But even as he said it, Brandon knew it wasn’t true. They both did. Brandon hadn’t even seen any firemen yet.
“Brandon, is that man still with you? The one you were with?”
“Richard,” Brandon said. He sniffed. “Yes.” “Tell him I need to talk to him.”
Brandon didn’t want to let his father go, but he was crying so hard now he could barely talk. He held the phone out to Richard but couldn’t even say why.
Richard understood. He hung up the phone he’d been using to try to get through to his own family and took the receiver.
“This is Richard,” he said into the phone.
Brandon couldn’t hear what his father was saying, but Richard nodded.
“I’ll make sure he’s safe,” Richard said.
Brandon choked back another sob. This was all so stupid! His dad wasn’t going to die. He couldn’t. This wasn’t how people died. People didn’t die on sunny September mornings, going to work like they did every other day of their lives. People died when they were old, in hospital beds or old folks’ homes.
Brandon’s father kept talking. Richard closed his eyes and lowered his head.
“I understand,” Richard said at last. “I will. I promise.”
Richard held the phone back out to Brandon. “He needs to talk to you again,” he said.
Brandon took the phone, holding onto it with both hands like it was the most precious thing in the world.
“Brandon,” his father said, his voice faint. “I want you to promise to stay with Richard. At least for a few days, until he can figure things out.”
“No!” Brandon said, tears streaming down his face. “I want to stay with you!”
“Do what I tell you, Brandon. Promise me.” Brandon could only blubber.
“Brandon, I love you,” his father told him. “And I’m proud of you. I always have been. I want you to know that. I know it hasn’t been easy since your mother died—”
“No, I know,” Brandon said. “I’m sorry, Dad. You were great. I’m sorry I made things harder.”
His dad didn’t answer back. “Dad?”
There was no voice on the other end of the line. Just dead air.
Brandon hung up and dialed again, but he couldn’t get through.
The number was no longer in service.
