Ground Zero

by Alan Gratz

  Taz paused, as though what he was saying brought back a painful memory for him.

  “But most of the time you just forget it’s there,” he finished.

  Some of the others in the cave had injuries too.Reshmina did what she could to help them with the bandages Taz had given her.

  “Where are all the other people?” Reshmina’s mother asked. “There were a lot more of us before.”

  Reshmina turned the flashlight toward the front of the cave. Where there had once been a large, open cavern filled with old Soviet equipment, now there was just a pile of rocks.

  The whole front half of the ceiling had caved in.

  Reshmina explored the rockfall, looking for a way through. She stopped when she saw the legs of some poor soul sticking out from under a boulder, the rest of the woman’s body crushed in the cave-in.

  Crushed like all the other people who’d been with them in the cave.

  And there was no way through. The fallen rocks covered everything.

  I’ve killed us, Reshmina thought. Everyone we know and love. Mor was right. I brought death to our village when I brought Taz into our home. She cried silently. She had chosen what was right over what was easy. She had dared to be someone new, someone better, to carve a path for herself. And look at where it had gotten her: buried with her family in a grave of her own making.

  Reshmina quickly swept the light away, so no one else could see the body.

  “Is it bad?” Taz asked.

  Reshmina felt the anger of a hundred souls well up inside her, and she turned on the American soldier.

  “Is it bad?” she said. “Yes, it’s bad! There was only one entrance to this cave, and now we’re trapped! We’re trapped, and all those other people who were in here with us are dead!”

  Reshmina picked up a rock from the ground and hurled it at Taz. He still couldn’t see well, but he heard the rock strike the wall behind him and flinched. Reshmina picked up another stone and threw it at him, hitting him in the arm.

  “Hey, what—?” he started to ask.

  “We’re trapped and they’re dead and it’s all your fault!” Reshmina yelled at him. It wasn’t her fault for dreaming. It was his fault for being here.

  “But I didn’t—”

  “You and all the other Americans!” Reshmina told him. She threw another rock that clanged off an old Soviet hubcap. “Why don’t you get out of Afghanistan? All you’re doing is killing us!”

  “We’re trying to fix things!” Taz argued.

  “Things you broke to begin with!” Reshmina told him.

  “We’re building wells. Roads. Schools!” Taz said. “Probably the school you go to.”

  “You killed my sister!” Reshmina cried.

  Taz looked horrified. “I what? How? When?”

  “Not you. Your country,” Reshmina said. She was crying now, big wet tears fed by the horrible things that had happened two years ago, and today. “You bombed my sister! She died. So many of our friends did too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Taz told her. “Really, I am. But we’re fighting a war against the Taliban. Sometimes innocent people get hurt. We’re trying to help.”

  Reshmina burned inside. Was this anger what Pasoon felt all the time? The fury that had pushed him to join the Taliban?

  “You can help us by leaving,” Reshmina told Taz. “My village was never bombed until the Americans came!”

  “We have to be here,” Taz argued. “Do you know the first thing that will happen if the US leaves Afghanistan? There will be another civil war, and the Taliban will take over again. You’re too young to remember, Reshmina, but they did awful things. They are bad, bad people.”

  “I know all about the Taliban!” Reshmina told him. “I know how awful they are.”

  “Well, if we leave, you’ll be right back where you started before we got here.”

  “But your drones kill as many of us as them,” Reshmina said. She held up her injured hand. “You bandage our wounds and want us to say thank you, but you’re the reason we were hurt.”

  Taz was quiet for a moment. “If we can just beat the Taliban. Get Afghanistan back on its feet. Give you a chance to grow …”

  Reshmina remembered the cedar cone in the graveyard—and the graves from the previous wars. All those invaders who had swept to victory with their superior weapons, only to be driven out again by Afghan fighters.

  “You say you have been here for ten years,” Reshmina said. “Your country has been here nearly twice that long. And still you haven’t won. You never will. Nobody can rule Afghanistan. Not even Afghans. So I ask you again: Why are you still here?”

  Taz looked away without answering.

  “Zahir! Come away from there!” Reshmina’s mother called.

  Reshmina shined the flashlight in her little brother’s direction. All she could see was his legs, sticking out from under a rock. For a horrible moment, she thought Zahir had been buried like the lady at the front of the cave. But Zahir just had his head in a hole in the wall—a crack that had opened up during the cave-in. Marzia and their mother were able to drag the curious two-year-old out by his ankles.

  Reshmina examined the hole with her flashlight, and she gasped.

  “What is it? What’s under there?” asked a woman standing nearby.

  Reshmina felt a tiny spark of hope rekindle in her chest, and she turned excitedly to the others.

  “It might be another way out!”

  Brandon followed the sound of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” through the darkness and found Richard trapped under part of a wall.

  “Help me get him out of here!” Brandon cried.

  Together, Brandon, Pratik, and Gayle were able to lift the layers of drywall high enough for Richard to crawl out. When Richard was free, Brandon dropped to his knees and threw his arms around him.

  “Brandon!” Richard cried, hugging him back. “I couldn’t hear and couldn’t see. I thought I’d been blinded and deafened by the blast, so I just started singing. I couldn’t even hear myself, but I hoped somebody else would. And you did. You saved my life, kid.”

  “Now we’re even,” Brandon said. He wasn’t sure Richard heard him, but he’d make sure he told him again later.

  “We need to find one of the exits up onto the street,” Pratik told them.

  Brandon didn’t want to move, didn’t want to let Richard go, but he knew they had to get out of here. And he’d kept the others waiting long enough.

  Richard was wobbly and had to lean on Brandon to stand, but he could make it.

  “Which way do we go? I still can’t see a thing,” Gayle said.

  “What if we walk right into a hole in the floor, and fall down into a subway tunnel?” Pratik asked.

  Something crunched in the near distance, like rock shifting, and the ceiling groaned.

  “I don’t think we have a lot of choice,” Brandon said.

  “We have to try,” said Gayle. She took their hands. “Human chain.”

  Brandon went first. He was closest to the ground and could feel his way as they went. Pratik was the biggest of them, and he took over helping Richard walk.

  Brandon moved very slowly, pushing his waterlogged sneakers forward an inch. Then another inch. Then another. The darkness was total and complete. Pratik was right; the blast might have blown holes in the floor. Would he stumble into a hole and fall to his death? Walk straight into a broken window and slice himself into pieces? Brandon had to fight down his panic. The only way out of here was if they all kept their cool.

  Brandon kicked things as he went—broken glass, pieces of drywall, wet clothes, soda cups, shoes, boxes with unknown things in them. He called out warnings about obstacles to the others when he could.

  Without his sight, Brandon focused on his other senses. He reached out with his hands, but also listened for clues in the sound of the water at their feet and the creaking of the building. He used his nose too. What was that smell? Something made him think of bananas and pink gr
apefruit, and he frowned. What in the mall would smell like that? He ran through the shop directory in his head. Was there a smoothie place here? No. There was a Ben & Jerry’s and a yogurt place, but those were very different smells.

  Suddenly he had it, and he stopped.

  “We’re going the wrong way!” he told the others.

  “How do you know?” Pratik asked.

  “Smell that? Bananas and pink grapefruit? We’re near the Body Shop! That’s the smell of hair and hand stuff!”

  “Oh my God, he’s right,” said Gayle. “I can smell the ginger shampoo!”

  Brandon turned the group around, following the map in his head. He moved more confidently now, and in his hurry he ran right into something shin-high. Gayle tried to hang onto him, but the thing was big and hard and hollow, and Brandon fell down face-first on top of it.

  “Ow!” Brandon cried. His shins screamed in pain, and his right hand where he was cut stung all over again.

  “Brandon! You okay?” Richard called.

  “Yes,” Brandon grunted.

  A fuzzy wet furball bumped into his arm in the water, and Brandon jerked back in disgust. A rat! New York City was full of rats. There had to be a bunch of them down here right now, trying to survive like Brandon and the others. The thought horrified him, and he scrambled to get away. In his panic, his hand brushed another of the furballs, and he felt its big fingers.

  Its big fingers?

  Brandon put his hand back out in the darkness, afraid but curious, and felt for one of the furry things. It had arms and legs and big cloth eyes and teeth, and a tag sewn into the side. Brandon sagged with relief. He would have laughed if he hadn’t been so afraid. He’d been frightened by a harmless stuffed animal!

  Gayle helped him back to his feet, and Brandon ran his hands over the big, hollow thing he’d run into. It had all kinds of weird curves and contours, and was slick and cool and smooth, like fiberglass covered with a varnish. What was Brandon touching?

  A very recent memory came back to him, and he turned excitedly to the others.

  “It’s the statue of Bugs Bunny!” Brandon said. “We’re at the Warner Bros. Store! We’re going in the right direction!”

  They couldn’t get past the debris near the Sunglass Hut, but Brandon knew there was another way around, past the FILA store with its sportswear and sneakers. That would take them right to the exit to Vesey Street, next to the Duane Reade. They could get out there!

  Brandon told the others the plan, and they were off again. Brandon went slowly. Achingly slowly. But he wasn’t eager to repeat his Bugs Bunny collision with something that could be a lot more dangerous—like the railing to the PATH escalators.

  Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

  The sound of a cell phone ringing out in the darkness made them all jump, then stop in their tracks.

  “It’s a Nokia,” said Pratik. “My wife has one just like it. She’s not here, thank God,” he added.

  Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

  The phone kept ringing.

  “What do we do?” Brandon asked.

  “See if you can get to it,” Richard told him.

  Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

  Brandon changed course, veering slightly off to the left. He got closer, closer—and then the ringing stopped. He froze and waited.

  “Do we—” he started to ask, and then—

  Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

  The phone started ringing again. Brandon homed in on it in the darkness, leading the human chain closer and closer, inch by inch, until his foot ran into something big and hard. He put his hands out and felt around, and Gayle and the others did the same.

  Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot.

  The phone was buried under a pile of rubble. Along with whoever had been carrying it.

  “I think I found a part of the ceiling, but I can’t lift it,” Pratik said, straining.

  “I can’t even see what to lift,” said Richard.

  “We have to leave them for the rescue workers when they get here,” Gayle said quietly.

  If they get here, Brandon added in his head. From the way no one spoke, he wondered if they were all thinking the same thing.

  They came together again in their human chain, and Brandon led them away while the phone continued to ring behind them: Deet-deet-deet-doot. De-de-deet-doot. Somebody somewhere outside the towers, desperately dialing a number again and again that would never be answered.

  A few minutes later, Brandon found the corner of what he guessed was the FILA store. When he made the turn into the next hallway, he saw a small fire in one of the restaurants down the way. It was the Sbarro! Brandon had taken them the right way!

  “We’re almost there!” Brandon told his friends.

  They inched closer. The fire wasn’t big, but it was a beacon in the darkness. Probably a grease fire, Brandon thought, like the one he’d seen that morning in Windows on the World. The last time he’d seen his dad. He swallowed the memory. He had to focus on getting out, leading his friends to safety.

  A pile of debris blocked the exit up to Vesey Street, but there was enough light from the fire in the Sbarro to pick their way up and over the rubble. When they were on the other side, they could see daylight at the top of the escalator.

  “We made it!” Pratik cried.

  Brandon wanted to sink to his knees in thanks and exhaustion, but they couldn’t stop yet. Not when they were so close.

  Still holding hands, they hurried up the stairs toward the sunlight at the top. They came out on Vesey Street, right across from the post office, and laughed and cried and hugged each other.

  They were out. Out of the mall, out of the Twin Towers, out of danger. They had survived!

  But something was wrong—very, very wrong. Soon they all began to notice it and stopped celebrating.

  A thick, heavy smoke cloud hung over Lower Manhattan. Outside had looked bright when they were underground, but now that they were up on the street, the sky was so dim it felt like twilight.

  It looked too like somebody had driven a tank through the city. Trash cans and cars were crushed, lampposts were bent, bus stops were broken, and trees were shattered. And everything was covered with a fine, light gray dust. A fire truck and an ambulance parked in the middle of Vesey Street were coated in the same stuff, their red lights still flashing underneath the thin layer of gray. The dust reminded Brandon of snow. Not just the way it blanketed everything, but how it made things quiet too. Muffled the sounds of the city. Manhattan was never quiet—not even at night. But now it felt as quiet and still as the underground mall had been after the blast.

  Something else was wrong too.

  “Where are all the people?” Gayle whispered.

  There were footprints in the dust, but the streets were empty. There were always people in Manhattan. Millions of them. Now there were none.

  Pratik turned and took a step back. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

  Brandon looked up. It took his brain a long moment to process what he was seeing—or what he wasn’t seeing. What was supposed to be in the big empty slice of the Manhattan skyline but wasn’t there anymore.

  The South Tower of the World Trade Center was gone. The whole 107-floor skyscraper had collapsed.

  Reshmina wriggled through the hole in the cave wall and fell clumsily to the floor of another room. She paused for a long moment, scared to move. She had no idea what was in this hidden chamber, but she had to see if it led to some way out.

  Her mother handed the flashlight to her through the hole. “Be careful, Mina-jan!”

  “We’ll work on widening the entrance from this side, just in case,” Taz told her, and Reshmina heard him begin to chip away at the rock.

  Reshmina clicked on the flashlight, and a bright white ghost with soulless eyes stared back at her.

  Reshmina screamed and dropped the flashlight.

  “Mina-jan?” her mother called. “Mina-jan, are you all righ
t?”

  “Reshmina?” Taz called.

  Reshmina grabbed her chest and waited for her heart to stop trying to thump its way out of her. The flashlight was still on but pointed away from whatever she had seen, and she was afraid to pick it up again. But the thing was still there, right in front of her in the dark.

  “Reshmina?” her mother called again.

  With shaking hands, Reshmina picked up the flashlight and pointed it up at the ghost.

  Reshmina exhaled. It wasn’t a ghost at all. It was just a statue. A statue carved out of white marble, with blank, empty eyes.

  “I’m all right,” Reshmina told her mother. “I just … saw something that scared me. I’m all right,” she added in English, for Taz.

  The shiny white statue was the top half of a bare-chested man wearing a toga. His face was young, his nose was long and flat, and his stone hair was curly.

  Reshmina hadn’t seen anything like it before. Islamic art almost never included human figures, so this statue must have been very old. From the time when the Greeks had invaded and ruled Afghanistan, perhaps? But that was thousands of years ago. Had this statue really been sitting here, hidden away in this cave all that time?

  “What’s in there?” Taz asked.

  “An old statue,” Reshmina called back to him. “And other things too.”

  Reshmina played the flashlight over the artifacts in the room, relics of times long past she knew only from her history lessons. There was a round brass shield with a black winged horse painted on it that must have been from ancient Greece. Next to that was a white pith helmet, like the kind British soldiers had worn when they had invaded Afghanistan two hundred years ago. Along the far wall were a few old English Enfield rifles, and next to that was a stack of curved bows, like the kind the Mongols had once wielded in their conquest of Afghanistan. There were Soviet weapons here too—rusty old land mines and automatic rifles and belts of bullets. Like the statue, everything was covered by a thin gray dust.

  Nobody had been in this room in a long, long time.

  On the other side of the wall, Taz sang softly.