by Alan Gratz
“Be careful!” one of the older men from the village said. “Some of these weapons might explode if you kick them the wrong way!”
Their parents had told them the same thing when they were little, of course. Told them in no uncertain terms not to play in the caves beneath the village. That it was too dangerous. All that had done, of course, was make Reshmina and Pasoon and the others want to come down here and explore. Besides, how was it any safer to play aboveground, when there were Americans and Taliban running around shooting at each other?
Reshmina remembered wandering, amazed, through all the old Soviet-era machines. They had been so foreign, so mysterious.
Now they just looked sad.
Taz put his hands out, frowning as he tried to feel what was around him. “I hate being blind,” he said.
Reshmina turned off the flashlight, saving the battery. “We’re all in the dark,” she told him.
“I’m scared of the dark,” Taz confessed. “I was lost in the dark once and couldn’t see. When I was a boy. It was very scary. I’ve been afraid of the dark ever since.”
Reshmina wasn’t afraid of the dark. Lantern fuel was expensive, and they burned the lantern in their house only when they had to. She got up just before dawn every day and went to bed every night after the sun went down. Darkness was just another part of her world. Not something to love or fear. But whatever had happened to Taz as a boy, being in the dark was making him sweat with panic now.
Poom. Poom. Dirt and rock misted down from the cave ceiling as muffled explosions struck nearby.
“M320 grenade launcher,” Taz said.
“How do you know?” Reshmina asked.
“The sound. The feel,” Taz said. “I’ve been here a long time.”
“How long?” Reshmina asked.
“Ten years, off and on,” Taz told her.
“Ten years, and you speak no Pashto?” Reshmina asked.
Taz didn’t answer right away. Perhaps he was ashamed. Reshmina would be. After all, she had spent the last few years of her life learning English.
“I speak Mandarin Chinese,” Taz said.
“You speak Chinese?” Reshmina asked. She couldn’t believe it.
“Shì de,” Taz said. “Army Special Forces have to learn a second language, and I was taught Mandarin.”
“Because so many people in Afghanistan speak Chinese,” Reshmina said wryly.
“I guess they figured there was life after Afghanistan,” Taz said. From the way he said it, it sounded like Taz wasn’t so sure that was true anymore.
The ground and walls shook, and Reshmina felt her insides shake with them. She knew that feeling—a helicopter was flying by.
“Apache,” she said.
Taz shook his head. “Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk,” he told her. “Modified Black Hawk. Apaches are more like pppppppp,” he said, blowing out through his lips. “Sixties are more like ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. The Sixties are for me, I guess. They’re search-and-rescue birds.”
All this was for Taz, Reshmina thought. And all because she’d led him back to her house.
Her house that wasn’t there anymore.
Toom.
Something big exploded on the ground above the cave, and the interior shook harder than before. A woman cried out as a piece of one of the walls broke off and tumbled down into the metal junk on the floor.
Reshmina watched Taz, who was suddenly alert.
TOOM.
The next explosion was bigger, closer. This one knocked them all to the ground. Reshmina’s eyes went wide, and she put her palms against the dirt, as though she could command the earth to stop shaking. It didn’t work, and she began to think that coming into the caves was a very, very bad idea.
What if this place became their tomb?
A chunk of the ceiling fell on an old man toward the front of the cave, and the people around him cried out and tried to unbury him.
Taz put his hand to the wall and slowly stood, a look of fear on his face.
“What is it?” Reshmina asked, still on the ground.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell down here. But to shake us like that … it feels like Reaper drones. Laser-guided bombs!”
No sooner had Taz said it than—K-TOOM!—a bomb hit right on top of the cave, and the whole ceiling fell in.
Brandon’s eyes fluttered open, but he couldn’t see a thing. He was lying on his side in three inches of water, arms and legs splayed out and pieces of metal and wood on top of him. The darkness pressed in on him, like he’d been holding his breath in a pool for too long and the water was trying to push its way in. The air was a solid thing that surrounded him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear. He tried to move his arms, but they didn’t want to move. His legs were like dead lumps attached to his hips.
Brandon’s heart hammered in his chest, and he gasped for air. His mouth and nose were full of dust and little bits of debris, and he coughed and spat and retched until most of it was gone. Slowly, dully, the feeling in his arms and legs came tingling back. But his eyesight didn’t.
Panic welled up inside him. I’m blind, Brandon thought. I’m blind and I’m lost and I’m alone and the air is closing in on me and I’m never going to get out of here.
“Richard?” he called. “Richard? Are you there?”
No one answered, and Brandon sobbed. He couldn’t see and his ears were ringing and he was all alone.
“Richard!” he called again. But Richard was gone.
Brandon curled up into a ball and cried. The world had exploded, and now he was totally, utterly alone. All his life, a parent had been there for him. First his mother, who had loved him and laughed with him and cared for him when he was little. He remembered her face—her blonde hair and pale skin and blue eyes—more from photographs now than his own fading memories. But the idea of her was still there—a tall, warm, embracing figure who picked him up and sang him lullabies.
When his mother had died, Brandon had thought he couldn’t go on. He had stopped talking, stopped caring. Every night he had cried himself to sleep.
It was his father who brought him back. His father, who had probably been losing sleep too, and who might have wanted to withdraw from the world when his wife had died but hadn’t, for Brandon’s sake. His father who had read comic books with him and taken him to the skate park every weekend. They had been a team.
And now Brandon was alone.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t go on. It would have been better if he had never run away at all and stayed trapped in Windows on the World with his father, with the smoke choking them. He needed his father to make the decisions, to guide him through the danger.
Without his father, Brandon thought, he was better off dead.
But eventually his tears dried and the sprinkler stopped and the ringing in his ears faded, and Brandon was still there. He wasn’t dead. He was battered and sore, but his head, his face, his arms, his body, his legs and feet—they were all still there, still working. He had little cuts and bruises all over, but he was alive, and in one piece, and he couldn’t just lie here in the dark forever. What was it his father had told him?
You’re strong, Brandon. You can survive without me.
Brandon was strong. And he had survived, all by himself. He didn’t want to, but he could when he needed to. And he needed to now.
Brandon put a hand down into the water to push himself to his feet and felt the razor-sharp burn of a broken piece of glass cutting into his palm. He pulled back with a hiss and squeezed his hands together. The mall shops all around him must have been destroyed in the blast, which meant there was broken glass and debris everywhere now. He couldn’t see, and now he was lost in what was left of the underground mall after it had been nuked.
But nuked by what? Had another plane crashed into the plaza above them? Who was doing this? And why? Why hurt and kill all these people?
“Richard?” Brandon called again.
He heard someone moan in response.
; Richard! He was alive!
The cut on Brandon’s hand still stung, but he had to move. He’d lost the handkerchief Richard had given him, but feeling around in the darkness, he found a shirt from one of the stores. He threw the hanger away and wrapped the wet shirt around his injured hand. He couldn’t see the cut, but he knew it must be deep from how much it hurt.
“Richard, I’m coming!” Brandon called.
Richard moaned again, and Brandon put his hands out carefully, trying to feel his way toward the sound without hurting himself again. His left hand found something plastic in a cardboard package, floating by in the ankle-deep water, and as he searched its contours with his fingers, Brandon recognized with a start what it was.
It was the toy Wolverine claws he’d left to buy at Sam Goody that morning.
Brandon blinked in the darkness. It was so strange to finally hold the toy in his hands. This is why I’m here, Brandon thought. This is why I’m not with my dad right now.
This is why I’m alive.
It was so random. So stupid. So meaningless now, and yet so important at the same time.
Richard moaned again, and Brandon dropped the Wolverine claws and focused. Brandon was here, now, for whatever reason, and so was Richard. And Richard needed his help.
Arms and legs trembling, Brandon put his hands out in front of him again and shuffled forward, sloshing through the water and the rubble. The air in front of him was empty, but he was sure he was going to run into something.
“Richard, say something so I can find you,” Brandon said.
“I am here,” said a man with a heavy Indian accent.
Brandon’s heart sank. It wasn’t Richard he’d heard moaning. It was someone else.
“Help me. Please,” the man said.
“Keep talking so I can find you,” Brandon told the man.
“I’m here. I’m alive,” the man said. There were tears in his voice. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m here, and I’m frightened. I don’t know what’s going on. The world’s gone crazy.”
Brandon found the man, and they clasped hands like they were a long-lost father and son, finding each other again after years and years.
“Oh my God, I thought I was dead,” the man said. “My name is Pratik.”
“I’m Brandon.”
“I—I can’t see,” Pratik said.
“I can’t see either,” Brandon told him.
“Oh, thank God,” Pratik said. “I thought I had been blinded. But if you can’t see either, then it’s just too dark to see.”
Brandon was relieved too. I’m not blind, he thought. Not forever. The electricity must have gone out, and now there wasn’t a hint of light anywhere in the windowless mall.
“What happened?” Pratik asked.
“I don’t know,” Brandon told him. “Maybe another plane. Are you hurt bad? Can you stand?”
“I think my arm is broken, but I can stand.”
“Help,” a woman rasped nearby. Somewhere else in the darkness, Brandon heard another person groan.
There had been dozens of people with them down here in the mall, all following the Port Authority’s directions to the Church Street exit. Some of them might be dead from the blast, but there had to be other survivors like Brandon and Pratik.
They found the woman, who told them her name was Gayle. She managed to stand and join their human chain, and they shuffled their way through the darkness toward the person who was groaning. Please let it be Richard, Brandon thought. Please let it be Richard.
The groaning man couldn’t speak. Gayle bent down to examine him with her hands, and she gasped and stood.
“We have to leave him,” she said.
“Why? What is it?” Brandon asked, afraid it was Richard.
“I’m not sure he’s even still alive” was all Gayle would say.
They heard something rattle and fall nearby, and Pratik turned.
“No, wait—” Brandon said. He bent down to check on the wounded man. “I have to know if it’s Richard.”
“Stay away from his stomach,” Gayle told him, her voice queasy.
Brandon’s hands found the man’s shoulders first, and then his suspenders. Richard had been wearing suspenders! Please no, please no, Brandon said to himself.
His hands fumbled for the man’s face, and he felt smooth, shaved skin. Brandon cried tears of relief. This couldn’t be him. Richard had a beard. Brandon felt a pang of guilt for feeling relieved when this man was dying—maybe even dead already—but he couldn’t help being grateful.
“I’m sorry,” Brandon whispered to the dying man.
Brandon stood, and he and Pratik and Gayle listened again for a groan or a voice in the darkness.
“If you are hurt or trapped and can hear my voice, make any noise you can so we can find you,” Pratik called out.
No one answered.
“I think we should go,” said Gayle. “It’s hard to breathe, and we don’t even know which way is out.”
“Wait, please,” Brandon said. “My friend is still down here somewhere.”
“I’m sorry, boy,” said Pratik. “But if we haven’t heard him by now—”
“Just let me look a little more,” Brandon told him. He couldn’t leave Richard behind. Not after all they’d been through together.
“Richard?” Brandon called. “Richard!”
Long moments went by, and Brandon could sense the other two survivors growing restless. They wanted to get out of here. He did too.
Brandon pulled the human chain farther into the darkness, desperate to find his friend.
“Richard!” he cried.
Then, softly, Brandon thought he heard something. Was that … singing? Brandon’s ears were still buzzing. Maybe they were playing tricks on him. But no, the others stopped to listen too.
“Richard?” Brandon called.
There was no answer. Just the indistinct hum of a tune.
“I think it’s coming from this way,” Gayle said, pulling them gently in the dark.
Faintly, almost no more than a whisper, came the words to a familiar song:
This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California, to the New York island—
Brandon gasped. It was Richard!
Reshmina woke to the sound of singing.
We are Afghan people
We are Afghans of the mountains
It was pitch-black and Reshmina couldn’t see, but she would know the sound of her grandmother’s voice anywhere. The song she was singing, “Momardene Afghane,” was one of Anaa’s favorites.
Ears ringing, dust clogging her mouth and throat, Reshmina crawled toward the sound. She found her grandmother lying on the ground, half-covered by the door of an old Soviet truck.
“I figured if I kept singing, someone would find me,” her grandmother rasped.
Reshmina pulled the door off her. “Are you all right, Anaa?”
“I may have a broken bone or two,” she admitted. “Just let me lie here, Mina-jan.”
Reshmina’s heart skipped a beat. Her grandmother was as stubborn as a donkey when it came to doctors. She claimed she’d never been sick in her life, but Reshmina knew she just didn’t like to make trouble. She might be lying there without a leg right now and not even admit it.
Reshmina patted her grandmother’s body just to be sure.
“Stop fussing,” Anaa groused.
Reshmina heard whining and crying in the darkness—her brother! Zahir was alive!
“Hush,” Reshmina’s mother said, her voice heavy. “Anaa, keep singing.”
“Mor!” Reshmina cried. She wanted to go to her mother, but where was she?
Reshmina’s grandmother sang “Momardene Afghane” again, and Reshmina heard the sound of people crawling to them through the scraps of old Soviet metal that had been scattered by the blast. First came her mother and Zahir. Then Marzia. As Reshmina hugged her family, more people found them: an old couple from next door, a young girl fro
m farther up the steps. Taz too.
For a little while, everyone was too dazed to move or speak. Anaa finished her song, and things grew deathly, oppressively quiet. They couldn’t even feel vibrations anymore from the fighting up above.
“Is everyone all right?” Taz asked at last. “What’s happened? I still can’t see.”
“I don’t know,” Reshmina told him. “We can’t see either. It’s completely dark. Wait,” she remembered. “The flashlight!”
Thank God she had put it in her pocket before the explosion. She put her hand in her pocket, but when she touched the flashlight, a sharp pain shot through her palm and she gasped.
“What is it, Mina-jan?” Mor asked in Pashto.
“What’s wrong?” Taz asked in English.
Reshmina pulled the flashlight out with her other hand and clicked it on. Everyone squinted again in the bright light. Even Taz, a little.
“Hey—I can see that!” Taz said. “Not great, but I can see a dull glow! I think my eyes are getting better.”
Reshmina shined the light on her hand. There was a deep gash across her right palm. It must have happened when part of the ceiling caved in.
“I have a bad cut. On my hand,” Reshmina told her mother, then translated for Taz.
Reshmina’s mother started to tear a piece of cloth from her tunic for a bandage.
“Wait. I have some Kerlix,” Taz told them.
Reshmina didn’t know that word, but it was some kind of bandage Taz carried in his pockets. He told her how to use it, and she pushed the gauze into her cut with a hiss of pain.
“Sorry,” he told her. “This stuff is good, but if the cut’s deep, you may still end up with a scar. See? I’ve got one too.” He held out his hand to show her. He had a long, dirty scar in almost the same place on his palm. “It still aches every now and then, when it’s cold and gloomy outside,” he told her. “But most of the time …”