by Alan Gratz
Pasoon aimed the rifle at the old camp and pulled the trigger.
PAKOW!
Reshmina put her hands over her ears. “Pasoon, what are you—?”
Pasoon fired again. PAKOW!
What was he doing? There was nobody down there!
PAKOW! The old Soviet rifle echoed down through the valley.
Suddenly Reshmina understood. I’m going to call the Taliban, Pasoon had said. Which was silly, because neither of them had a phone. But if Pasoon couldn’t call the Taliban on the phone, he could call them with a rifle.
He’d make them come to see who was shooting.
Reshmina grabbed the rifle and tried to pull it from Pasoon’s hands.
“Pasoon, don’t!” Reshmina pleaded. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“I do too,” Pasoon said as they tussled. “I’m doing what you and Baba should have done in the first place! I’m going to tell the Taliban there’s an American soldier in our house!”
Pasoon was too strong for her. He wasn’t going to give up the gun. Reshmina tucked a foot around his leg and tripped him, and they fell to the ground with a thud. The rifle slipped from Pasoon’s fingers and they fought for it, kicking and shoving and wrestling each other. And not in the playful way they had that morning. This was desperate. Vicious. Reshmina felt like she was fighting for her life.
Pasoon pushed her away with his foot and got enough separation from her to stand. He held the gun to one side, barrel pointed at the ground, and panted to catch his breath. His eyes were wide and wild, and his chest heaved.
“You’re so stupid, Pasoon!” Reshmina told him. She pulled herself to her feet. “You’re like a worm who crawls into a snake’s nest and says, ‘Hey, what are we snakes going to do today?’ You’re just a little baby playing at being a grown-up!”
Pasoon hit her hard on the side of her face with his open palm. The blow was so sudden, so brutal, it sent Reshmina to her hand and knees. Rocks cut into her palms, but she didn’t move. Reshmina tasted blood where she’d bitten her own tongue, and her face burned from the sting of Pasoon’s hand. But what made her cry was the awful, shocking savagery of it. Reshmina and her twin brother had played rough since they were babies, pushing and poking and yanking at each other whenever they squabbled. But Pasoon had never hit her. Not like this. Not with such venom.
The worm was a snake after all.
Reshmina dragged her sleeve across her eyes, but stayed on her hands and knees.
“Pasoon—” she began, but her brother cut her off.
“I may be your twin brother, Reshmina, but this is still Afghanistan. I am still a man, and you are still a woman, and you can’t speak to me like that.”
Reshmina kept her eyes on the ground. “Pasoon, you know what the Taliban does to anyone who helps the Americans. If you tell them we’re hiding an American soldier in our house, they will kill us all when they come for him. Everyone you love will die. Anaa. Mor. Baba. Marzia and Zahir. Me.”
Pasoon’s voice wavered as he answered. “Baba made his decision. He’s the one who sided with the infidels.”
“They will kill everyone in the village just to teach us a lesson, Pasoon. You’ve seen them do it. The Taliban will kill us all. You’ll kill us all.”
Reshmina heard Pasoon sniff like he was crying, but she still didn’t look up. Wouldn’t.
“So be it,” Pasoon told her. “Whatever happens to our family, it’s Baba’s fault. And yours,” he added.
Pasoon slid the bolt back and forth on the rifle and fired again—PAKOW!—into the air. Reshmina shrank from the noise.
He did it again. PAKOW!
Reshmina kept her head down and closed her eyes, waiting for another shot. When nothing came, she looked up again.
Three Taliban fighters were coming along the path toward them.
“Pasoon—” Reshmina pleaded. “Pasoon, I still have your toy,” she said, digging it out of her tunic to show to him.
“Keep it,” Pasoon told her. “Toys are for babies. I’m a man now.”
Reshmina got to her feet. She saw now there was no stopping Pasoon from telling the Taliban about Taz. And as soon as he did, the Taliban would come to their village. They would kill Taz, and they would kill the rest of them for giving him refuge.
The only thing she could do was get back to her village first. She had to warn her family and everyone else.
Reshmina turned and ran down the steep hillside, tumbling and falling and hitting every rock and bush along the way. She slid to a stop in a narrow ravine, but could still see the Taliban up above. They were almost to her brother. Reshmina wrapped her scarf around her head and stumbled away, sobbing. All she wanted to do was sit down and cry, but she had to hurry.
She hurt all over from her rough descent, and her face still burned where Pasoon had struck her. But it was the loss of her brother that hurt worse than anything. Everything they had ever had, everything they had shared as twins, as close as two people could perhaps ever be in this world, was gone forever.
Reshmina glanced over her shoulder one last time. Pasoon was talking animatedly with the Taliban and pointing back in the direction of their village.
Reshmina ran faster.
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 a
sked.
“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!
Reshmina crouched low, staring down at a sea of poppy flowers wedged between two steep canyon walls. They were bright and pink, and swayed gently in the mountain breeze.
And they were right in Reshmina’s path.
Reshmina carefully climbed down the ridge and stood at the edge of the poppy field. How strange to see such brilliant color here, among all the brown of the mountains. The flowers were so thin, so delicate, and they moved back and forth as though they were people mingling at a party. Like they were dancing.
Reshmina wished she could just sit and watch them. She was tired—pushed to the edge of exhaustion. She’d been running since she left her brother behind, taking shortcuts up and down rocky, desolate hills. She was desperate to get back to her village. If her fathe
r hadn’t returned from the ANA camp yet, she had to hide Taz so the Taliban wouldn’t find him. If Baba had returned, and Taz was already gone, Reshmina still had to alert the villagers that the Taliban were coming.
No matter what, the Taliban weren’t going to be happy the villagers had given Taz refuge. And it was all Reshmina’s fault, just like Pasoon said.
Reshmina walked out among the poppies. The flowers were so tall they came up to her nose. The effect of standing among them, of almost being swallowed up by them, was magical. She wished the whole of Afghanistan were covered with the beautiful flowers.
But Reshmina knew it couldn’t be. People didn’t grow poppies for their pretty pink colors. Poppy seeds had a gummy substance that was the raw material for heroin. Heroin was a drug that took away people’s pain. For many Afghans hurt by decades of war, it was the only kind of medicine they could find to erase that suffering—and their awful memories. Afghan parents had long given the drug to their babies to ease earaches, or in place of food to soothe their hunger pains.
But Reshmina knew that heroin wasn’t medicine. It was an addictive, destructive drug that eventually killed everyone who couldn’t stop using it. And addicts would do anything for their next fix—lie, steal, even sell their own children.
Poppies loved the rocky, dry soil of the mountains, and it was easy to hide fields like this one high up in the mountains. You could get rich growing poppies for heroin, but you could get in trouble too. The Taliban made a lot of money that way to pay for more guns and bombs, so the United States destroyed any poppy fields they could find and arrested the farmers who had planted them.
Reshmina put her hands out, brushing the stalks of the poppies as she walked, pretending for just a moment that they were nothing but beautiful flowers, not the source of so much agony and heartbreak.
Reshmina’s father refused to grow poppies, even though their family was very poor. And with Afghanistan getting hotter and drier, it was harder for Baba to grow real crops, like wheat and melons. Pasoon had fought with Baba about it, of course. Pasoon had argued that they only had to grow poppies for one, perhaps two seasons, and they would make more money than they would see in a lifetime of growing food. It would be easier too—every year there was less water, less usable land, and more chance the food crops would fail and they would earn nothing. Reshmina knew Pasoon was right about that part, at least. But Baba had said growing heroin was a bad business, and against Islam, and that had been that.