Ground Zero

by Alan Gratz

  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.

  “Give that back!” Pasoon cried, and he lunged for his plastic airplane.

  Reshmina was too fast for him. She held it above her head and twisted away when Pasoon made another grab for it.

  “Give it to me!” Pasoon commanded. “You’re just a girl! You have to do what I tell you!”

  “I’m not a girl, I’m your sister,” Reshmina shot back, which somehow made sense.

  Pasoon swiped for the plane again, and Reshmina danced out of the way.

  “You can’t tell the Taliban about Taz,” Reshmina told her brother. “We gave him asylum!”

  “Taz?” Pasoon said.

  Reshmina blushed. “That’s his name. The American soldier. And you can’t give him refuge and take revenge on him at the same time!”

  “See if I can’t,” Pasoon told her. “Badal is as Pashtunwali as nanawatai.”

  Pasoon grabbed for the airplane, but Reshmina was too quick for him again.

  “The Taliban don’t respect Pashtunwali,” Reshmina said. “They’ve killed just as many Afghans as the Americans have!”

  “When was the last time we had peace?” Pasoon asked. “Under the Taliban, that’s when. They ended the civil war.”

  “The Taliban killed whole families for no reason!” Reshmina told him, feeling a flash of frustration. “They made women wear burqas and locked them away in their houses!”

  “They give people jobs,” Pasoon argued. “Darwesh and Amaan told me.”

  “Darwesh and Amaan, Darwesh and Amaan!” Reshmina taunted in a singsong voice. “ ‘Darwesh and Amaan told me to jump off a mountain, so I did it!’ Do you ever have a thought that Darwesh and Amaan didn’t give you first?”

  Pasoon’s expression turned stormy. “All right. Here’s my own thoughts, Reshmina. Do you think I’m going to be able to afford to get married herding goats that have nothing to eat and growing crops in a never-ending drought? No,” he said. “Why should I starve when the Taliban pay twenty times what I can make working for myself?”

  “They’re killers, Pasoon. If you join them, you’ll become one too,” Reshmina said flatly.

  “Have you forgotten who killed the person who gave me that plane?” Pasoon said, pointing at the toy. He sounded calmer now. More resolute. As though arguing with Reshmina had talked him into joining the Taliban, not out of it. “The Americans dropped a bomb on our sister,” Reshmina said. “On her wedding day.”

  Reshmina tried to fight off that awful memory, but it came flooding back to her, overwhelming her.

  The day had started as one of the happiest days of Reshmina’s life. Her sister Hila had been sixteen and promised in marriage to a boy from a neighboring village. It was tradition to escort the bride-to-be to the house of her new family, where the wedding would take place, and the procession was always a party. Reshmina’s whole village had turned out for the parade. Married couples walked arm in arm, and young people sang and danced and fired rifles in the air. Reshmina and Pasoon had been nine years old. They’d chased each other around the adults, laughing and squealing at the top of their lungs. Reshmina had finally caught Pasoon and paused to catch her breath.

  That’s when Reshmina heard it. An angry buzz, like a hornet’s nest. She and Pasoon had looked up at the same time, searching the sky for the source of the sound.

  Reshmina saw it now in her mind’s eye, as clear and sharp as she had seen it that day. An American drone, high in the sky. It was sleek and gray, with wide wings like an eagle and a tail like a fish. She and Pasoon had watched as it flew closer, closer, coming up behind the wedding procession. Something small and black detached from the drone and streaked out toward the front of the parade. Toward her sister in her beautiful wedding dress, surrounded by all her friends. Reshmina remembered the whoosh of the missile, the gray trail of smoke behind it, and then—

  Reshmina turned away, feeling the heat of the blast on her face all over again as she stood here in the mountains with Pasoon, two years later.

  Now that she was older, she understood what had happened. The happy gunshots of the wedding procession had registered as an attack on an American airplane flying so high up that none of them had even seen it or heard it. But that had been enough for an American soldier in some tent miles away somewhere to fire a missile at them with a drone.

  “If the Americans can’t be here without killing innocent people, they must leave the valley,” Pasoon told her now. “Otherwise, there will be jihad.”

  Reshmina understood her brother’s anger. She felt it too. But a holy war wasn’t the answer.

  “So you’re going to leave our family and join the Taliban,” Reshmina said. “Leave me.”

  Pasoon swallowed. “Yes. And not because Darwesh and Amaan told me to. Because I want to.”

  Reshmina nodded. She had known this day was coming, but a part of her wanted to pretend that things would never change. That she and Pasoon could be young and happy and carefree forever. But they were both growing up fast. Too fast.

  A chill went through her, like the winter wind cutting through her shawl.

  Pasoon chose that moment to dive forward, not for the toy plane but for Reshmina. He tackled her to the ground and tried to pin her to take the plane away. Reshmina kicked and grunted, but where she was quick, Pasoon was strong. She tossed the plane away instead.

  Pasoon scrambled over her, trying to get at the toy, and Reshmina grabbed his foot. Pasoon fell flat on his face in the dirt, and Reshmina ran and snatched up the plane before he could get to it.

  “Ha!” Reshmina crowed, and she held the little plane in the air triumphantly.

  Pasoon stood, and Reshmina was shocked to see tears in his eyes. She’d wanted to make him mad, not sad. She suddenly felt terrible for taking the toy from him.

  “Keep it, then,” Pasoon said. He kicked a rock in Reshmina’s direction, a little of the old anger overriding his sadness, and then he turned and walked away.

  Reshmina’s heart broke. As twins, she and Pasoon knew exactly how to hurt each other. But they had always known where the line was, and when they’d crossed it.

  “Pasoon,” Reshmina called, following behind him. “Pasoon, I’m sorry.”

  Pasoon didn’t want to listen, and Reshmina trailed along behind him in silence.

  There was a graveyard on the other side of the mountain, and it matched their quiet mood as they walked through it. Hundreds of stone mounds dotted the hillside. The larger ones were for men and women. The smaller mounds belonged to children and babies. Some of the rock piles had colorful blankets on them—mementos left by loved ones for the recently buried. Over others bent tall wooden poles with ragged green fl
ags on top, marking the graves of people who had died fighting the jihad against the Soviet Union when Reshmina’s parents were children. In some places, the stones were scattered and low, and it was hard to tell there had been a grave there at all.

  “So many dead Afghans,” Reshmina said quietly. “Pasoon, if you join the Taliban, you’re just going to end up dead and buried under a pile of rocks somewhere.”

  “So I should wait around to die in our village, like our sister?” Pasoon said without looking at her. Without stopping. “Like Barlas? Like old Nazanina? Like Uncle Mehtar? Baba’s leg was torn up by a land mine just clearing a field for planting. If I’m going to die one way or another, I might as well die fighting.”

  “For revenge,” Reshmina said bitterly.

  “For freedom,” Pasoon told her. “Everybody invades and tries to tell us how to live our lives. The Greeks, the Mongols, the British, the Soviets, the Americans.”

  “The Taliban,” Reshmina added.

  “The Taliban are Afghans.”

  “Yes, but they only became powerful because they were supported by foreigners,” Reshmina said. She had learned about it in school. “People from Pakistan and from Saudi Arabia who wanted to tell us how to live. And invaders always beat us so easily because they have better weapons than we do. Greek shields, Mongol bows, British cannons, Soviet gunships, Taliban rockets.”

  “American drones,” Pasoon added.

  “Yes, American drones,” Reshmina said, feeling a pang of sorrow for Hila all over again. “But you know why we’re always behind? Because while everybody else in the world is making things, we’re fighting wars. We never get to move ahead, Pasoon. We’re stuck in the past.”

  “Infidels and outsiders may conquer us,” Pasoon said, still looking ahead. “But they can never rule us. Conquering Afghanistan and keeping it are two different things.”

  Reshmina huffed. Pasoon wasn’t listening to her.

  “Why would anybody want to rule Afghanistan?” she asked, frustrated. “There’s nothing left to rule.”

  Reshmina saw a dried-up old cedar cone on the ground and picked it up. Once, their father had told them, giant cedars towered over every kilometer of these mountains. Anaa told stories of streets in the capital, Kabul, lined with cedar trees. Now those trees were all but gone. Each invading army had cut down more and more of them, and the Afghans had cut down still more to pay for weapons to drive the invaders out again. Now Afghanistan was brown and rocky and dead. The only cedars left survived in the most inhospitable mountains, places where even armies feared to go.

  Is there some life left in this old cedar cone? Reshmina wondered. Something dormant inside, ready to sprout if given the room and resources to grow?

  Reshmina broke open the cone. There were still seeds inside. She took one, leaned over, and pushed the seed deep into the ground. That seed would grow to be a cedar tree fifty meters tall and stand for a thousand years—if only everyone would let it.

  “Pasoon,” Reshmina said, “what if there was another way? What if—”

  But when she looked up, Pasoon was gone.

  Brandon’s hands and feet moved like they were on autopilot as he and Richard made their way down the stairs.

  All Brandon could think about was what had just happened up on the 90th floor. Those people trapped in the elevator. When he’d turned around, they’d just been … gone. And that poor woman, burned all over. Brandon felt sick. He was the one who had told her she had to get out before the elevator fell.

  Brandon stopped and sat down amid the debris, his eyes hollow and unfocused.

  “It’s my fault,” Brandon said. “That lady—she got burned because of me.”

  Richard stopped and turned around. He looked as sick and sad as Brandon felt.

  “Oh, kid, you can’t blame yourself for any of that,” he said.

  “I told them they had to get out of the elevator,” Brandon said. “That lady ran through the fire because of me. Because of what I said.”

  “Brandon, if she’d stayed in that elevator, she’d be dead now,” Richard told him. “What you said saved her life.”

  “Saved her life?” Brandon said. “She’s going to be burned—scarred—for the rest of her life, and all because of me. I didn’t save her life, I ruined it!”

  “At least she has a life to ruin,” said Richard.

  Stay in the elevator and die, or run through flaming jet fuel and be horribly burned for the rest of your life, Brandon thought. What kind of choice was that?

  What would he have done, if he’d been inside that elevator? He didn’t know. Tears sprang to Brandon’s eyes, and he cried for the burned woman, for the people in the elevator, and for himself.

  Richard sat down beside him.

  “It’s gonna be all right, kid,” Richard told him. “How old are you?”

  Brandon didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to talk. But he choked out a response. “Nine,” he said.

  Richard nodded. “Same age as me when my dad died in Vietnam. I wasn’t there to see it, not like you were just now with that lady and those people in the elevator. But it wrecked me. I wish I could tell you there’s something you can do to make it better, to make it not hurt. But there isn’t. You just … you just get over it eventually. Because you have to. It scars over, like a bad cut. It still aches every now and then, when it’s cold and gloomy outside and you’re left alone with your thoughts. But most of the time … most of the time you just forget it’s there.”

  Brandon didn’t want to forget. He wanted it to hurt forever. How could it not hurt forever? He owed it to that burned lady and those dead people in the elevator.

  “Come on,” Richard said. “Let’s get back down to the 89th floor.”

  Richard worked in an office called Cosmos Services. He knocked on the door, and a woman opened it and let them inside. She shut the door behind them quickly and bunched a wadded-up jacket along the bottom of the doorframe to block the smoke.

  “I was beginning to worry that something happened to you,” the woman said to Richard as she led them through the reception area. She was Asian American and had long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore gray slacks and a white blouse.

  “A plane hit the building,” Richard told her.

  “We heard. I got my husband on the phone. I couldn’t get your wife, but I left a message, told her you were all right.” She nodded at Brandon. “Where’d you find him?”

  “He kind of fell into my lap,” Richard told her. “Brandon, this is my administrative assistant, Esther.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Esther told him. She led them to the office farthest away from the door, with a window that looked south, toward the other Twin Tower. The air was mercifully clearer here, and Brandon took a deep, grateful breath and looked around. Sports jerseys hung in glass frames on the walls, and a framed photo of Richard with a pretty woman and two little kids sat on the desk. This was Richard’s office, Brandon realized.

  There were two other people in the office with them. One of them was the oldest man Brandon had ever seen up close. His skin was light brown, about the same color as Brandon’s, but wrinkled all over. He had white hair mixed with streaks of darker gray, a big bushy white mustache, and thick bristly sideburns. He wore a maroon sweater-vest over a brown plaid shirt, and on top of his head was a dark brown, pie-shaped cap with a button in the middle of it. He sat perfectly still and calm on a chair in front of Richard’s desk, back straight, hands perched delicately on top of a polished wooden cane, as though things like planes crashing into his building happened all the time. His name, said Richard, was Mr. Khoury.

  “He’s Lebanese,” Richard explained. “I’ve heard him speak Italian, Arabic, French, and Spanish, but I don’t think his English is very good. He works at the shipping company next door. And this is Anson. He’s a software rep who picked the wrong day to make a sales call in the World Trade Center.”

  Brandon turned to look at the other person in the office. Anson wa
s a young white man with dark hair slicked back. He wore khaki slacks and a white shirt and a red tie. For some reason, he stood ramrod straight in the corner with his eyes closed.

  Brandon didn’t understand until he came around the side of the desk. In one hand, Anson held a long white cane, about chest high, and in the other he gripped the harness for his dog, a light brown Labrador retriever.

  His guide dog.

  Anson was blind! Brandon reeled. If any of them should be panicking, it should be Anson. But besides old Mr. Khoury, Anson was the calmest one there.

  “Can I pet your dog?” Brandon said, suddenly forgetting all the heavy things that had been weighing on him. What a good dog!

  “Usually no—not when she’s working,” Anson said. “But it’s okay right now. Her name’s Daphne.”

  Brandon knelt and rubbed the big dog’s head and scratched behind her ears. He’d always wanted a dog, but his dad kept saying no. They were gone from the house too much during the day to take care of one, Dad said. Brandon knew he was right, but he still wanted a dog of his own.

  At the desk, Esther turned on a radio. “It was Anson who had the idea to look for a radio, see if we can get any news,” Esther said. “We’d just dug one up when you came back.”

  Esther found a station with two morning radio show hosts talking and laughing.

  “So get this,” one of the radio DJs said. “Reports are coming in that somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center!”

  The other DJ laughed. “I mean, I get it. Planes crash. But how bad a pilot do you have to be to run right into a skyscraper? I mean, what is it they say in golf? ‘Trees are ninety percent air.’ You know what I’m saying? You’ve got to try to hit one of the towers.”

  “The guy flying that plane must have been drunk!” the other man said. He laughed. “Hey, stewardess! Cut that guy off—he’s got a plane to fly!”

  “Turn the channel,” Richard said, frowning. Brandon knew exactly how he felt. How could anyone be joking about something like this? If they’d seen what he’d just seen …

  “Do they give DUIs to pilots?” the DJ kept joking. “Hey, buddy! Pull it over! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Land that plane before I—”