‌Brandon kicked and fought, trying to get free of the people pressing in on him from all sides.‌

“Help!” he cried. “I can’t breathe! Please!”

More people cried out, and from below, someone shouted, “Back it up! Back it up!”

And then, mercifully, the people on the stairs did exactly that. The lady behind Brandon took a step back up, and that was enough to stop pushing him into the man in front of him. Brandon’s feet landed back on the stairs, and he grabbed the handrail as he fought to catch his breath.

“Coming through!” Richard cried somewhere up the stairs above Brandon. “I’m trying to get to my kid! Please!” The people on the stairs parted, and then Richard was there, holding Brandon while they both wept tears of exhaustion and relief.

“I just about lost you back there,” Richard said. “Promised your dad I wouldn’t do that.”

Brandon nodded, his head still buried in Richard’s chest. He’d been telling the truth when he’d told his dad he

couldn’t do this alone. He couldn’t survive without Richard either.

“How did things clear up?” Brandon asked.

“The man with the bullhorn, upstairs. When he saw what was happening, he made people stop coming down for a minute. Gave us room to spread out again.”

Thank goodness for the man with the bullhorn, Brandon thought.

“I’m sorry I crushed you,” the woman behind Brandon told him. “I couldn’t help it.”

Brandon understood. So did the man in front of him when Brandon apologized for kicking him. “For what it’s worth,” the man said, “I was freaking out too.”

There were no stair exits at floors 8, 7, and 6, which made Brandon feel even more claustrophobic. What if people started pushing forward again? He couldn’t get out of the stairwell now if he wanted to. But they were so close. Just five more floors to go!

At last the stairwell dead-ended at a doorway on the second floor. There was a palpable sense of excitement from the people around Brandon as they all filed into a short, dark passageway. The crowd squeezed in more tightly again.

“Hey, watch the kid, watch the kid!” Richard said, keeping his hand on Brandon’s shoulder.

Things stayed tight but didn’t get out of control. As they inched forward, Brandon’s feet splashed through water, and he coughed from the dust and smoke in the air. If he didn’t know better, Brandon would have thought they were going toward the trouble, not away from it.

And then, at last, more than an hour after the first plane had hit the North Tower, Richard and Brandon stepped out into the tall, open-air mezzanine above the lobby. It was the same half floor Brandon had seen above him when he’d

gotten his ID that morning, and he blinked in the bright, sudden sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Keep moving!” a Port Authority policeman told them.

There were a bunch of Port Authority officers here on the mezzanine, all lined up with their backs to the windows. The Port Authority were the people who managed all the subways and tunnels and bridges and seaports in New York and New Jersey. They ran the World Trade Center too.

There were escalators right in front of Brandon that would take him straight down to the lobby and out the front doors onto the street. But the Port Authority police were directing everybody away from the escalators, toward a set of stairs on the far wall. Brandon was confused. Why couldn’t they just go down the escalators? That was the quickest way out of the building. Even if the escalators weren’t working, they could use them as stairs. Why send everybody all the way around?

Brandon did as he was told and didn’t ask questions, and Richard followed suit.

As they shuffled along, Brandon realized why there were Port Authority officers lining the windows. There was something out there they didn’t want anybody to see. There weren’t enough of them to completely block the view though, and Brandon snuck a look.

He gasped at what he saw. Out on the plaza between the North Tower and the South Tower were bodies. And parts of bodies. Broken, bloody things too awful to think about. Brandon didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t look away either. It was like a horror movie. It couldn’t be real. How could what he was looking at be real?

Thousands of sheets of paper fell like snow around the bodies, and broken glass and twisted metal were everywhere. While Brandon watched, a piece of metal

crashed into the plaza—SHANG!—and Brandon flinched. The big beam was immediately followed by something white and blue and brown plummeting down from above, and it hit the ground with a sickening THUMP.

Brandon put his hands to his mouth and turned away. He had just seen a human being hit the ground from very high up.

“Keep moving,” a Port Authority policewoman said, “and don’t look down into the lobby!”

Brandon looked down into the lobby.

It was even worse than the plaza. The big, beautiful lobby where Brandon had been that morning was where the emergency responders had decided to take all the injured and burned people. Dozens, hundreds of bodies were lined up in rows across the floor. Some of them had missing limbs. Others had open wounds. Paramedics moved among the burned, broken, and dying people, doing what they could. Dust and debris were everywhere. The elevator shafts in the center of the lobby were twisted and mangled where cars had fallen, and there was a dull, ammonia-like taste in the air, like the way hospitals smelled.

“Don’t look! Keep moving!” the Port Authority police told them.

Brandon kept moving, but he kept looking too. He should have been sick. He should have been screaming. But it was all so surreal. So impossible. He felt like a character in a movie, walking through a nightmare that couldn’t be real.

Their scenic tour through hell came to an end on the other side of the mezzanine. A white Port Authority policewoman with her brown hair in a ponytail pointed them toward another staircase.

“Wait, doesn’t this go into the basement?” Richard asked. “Why can’t we just go outside?”

“We can’t take you out through the lobby, it’s too full of injured people,” the policewoman said. “And it’s dangerous right outside the building.”

Brandon knew why. Outside through the window he could still hear what sounded like pebbles and stones raining down on the concrete plaza. But he knew they weren’t pebbles and stones. They were bits of building and glass windows. And people.

“Keep going,” the policewoman told them. “You’ll come up on the other side of the plaza, away from all this.”

“What if the building comes down on top of us?” a hysterical man asked.

The policewoman shook her head. “It’s a steel structure. No way it’s coming down. Go on—trust me, you’ll be safer down there.”

Brandon hated to go into another stairwell. He almost balked, almost backed out, but he knew there was no way out across that plaza. Not with all that stuff raining down from above. They’d just as likely be killed by a falling piece of metal or … well, he didn’t like to think about what else.

Brandon took a deep breath and followed Richard and the others down the stairs. This wasn’t a tight stairwell like before. This was a bigger set of stairs, and everyone was at last able to spread out and move at their own pace. Brandon let out a sigh of relief, even though they were still inside the building. It finally felt like he had room to breathe.

Richard and Brandon went down two floors of steps to a bank of revolving doors that had been opened up so they could pass straight through without spinning them. Just beyond that was a larger public space, and suddenly Brandon recognized where they were.

They were back where he’d started his day, in the underground mall beneath the World Trade Center.