Ground Zero

by Alan Gratz

  We’re here because we’re here because

  we’re here because we’re here.

  We’re here because

  we’re here because

  we’re here because we’re here.

  “What is that song?” Reshmina asked softly. She didn’t know why, but this room made her want to whisper.

  “It’s nonsense, really,” said Taz. “Something I heard my sergeant singing years ago, when I came back for my third tour of duty. It comes from World War I. The soldiers in the trenches sang it while they were waiting to be sent charging straight into the enemy machine guns. The tune is something we sing on New Year’s Eve. ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Do you know it?”

  “No,” Reshmina said.

  Taz sang another song.

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

  and never brought to mind?

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

  and auld lang syne.

  The lyrics didn’t make any sense to Reshmina, but she didn’t ask. She searched the chamber for a way out while Taz kept talking.

  “The soldiers back in World War I, they changed the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ because they didn’t know why they were fighting,” he said. “You asked me why the US is still here. I think we’re still in Afghanistan because we got in, and we don’t know how to get out. If we stay, it’s bad, and if we leave, it’s bad. There’s no right answer. I think it’s the same as those boys back in World War I. We’re here because we’re here, and we don’t know how to leave.”

  Taz was quiet for a moment. Reshmina’s flashlight moved across old military medals and flags and pennants. Little statues of the Buddha. A bust of Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader. Greek and Persian and English coins. Bits of pottery with colorful drawings and a British pocket watch and a furry Russian cap with a red star on it.

  “One of the new guys I knew back at Bagram, a rookie soldier named Garcia,” Taz said. “He was born after we invaded Afghanistan. He stepped on a roadside bomb that hadn’t been there the day before, and now he’s dead. He died fighting a war that started before he was born. You have to be eighteen to join the army. Eighteen! We’re still fighting the same war almost twenty years later, and for what? We’re never going to change this place.”

  As Taz’s words sank in, Reshmina realized what this room was. This wasn’t an arsenal, like the cave where she and Pasoon had found the Taliban cache. This was a kind of shrine. A memorial to all the armies who had invaded Afghanistan and conquered it, just like Taz and the Americans, only to learn that they could never rule it.

  Reshmina’s flashlight caught some Pashto words painted on the wall, and she took a step back. The paint was very old and the dialect a little strange, but Reshmina could just read the words. It said, We are content with conflict. We are content with fear. We are content with blood. But we will never be content with a master.

  “Reshmina, do you see any way out?” her mother called.

  There was no other entrance to this little room. But there was a little crack in the wall at the back. Reshmina clicked off her flashlight, and—yes! She saw a tiny sliver of daylight through the crevice.

  “This wall,” she called. “It leads outside! If we can just break through it.”

  “I’ll come through,” Taz said. “I can chip away at it like I did this one.”

  THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

  The cave shook with more blasts from above. Apparently the fighting wasn’t over. Dirt and rock rained down from the ceiling of the cave, right around the little hole to the other room. The statue of the Greek half-man toppled to the ground with a thud, and the shield clattered as it fell.

  “I don’t think we have time for that!” Reshmina yelled to Taz.

  She spied something in the beam of her light—an old Soviet land mine—and it gave her an idea.

  “Stay there!” she told Taz.

  Reshmina propped the flashlight on the Greek statue’s head and carefully, gently, dragged the land mine over to the crack in the far wall. She wedged the land mine into the crack, then picked up the Greek shield. The leather straps inside had long since dried out and broken, but Reshmina was still able to hold it up by the metal buckles on its back.

  POOM. POOM. More explosions rocked the cave from above.

  “Reshmina, what are you doing?” her mother cried from the other side. “The ceiling’s falling apart in here!”

  “Get as far away from the entrance as you can!” Reshmina called back to her mother. “I’m going to try to blow a hole in the other wall!”

  “You’re what?” Mor cried.

  There was a partial wall toward the back of the chamber, and between that and the shield, Reshmina hoped she would be protected enough from the mine. Now she just needed something to activate it. There weren’t any big rocks around, but the bust of Lenin would do nicely. Reshmina picked it up and said a silent prayer. Her hand still stung from the gash, but she swallowed the pain, lobbed Lenin’s head toward the land mine, and ducked down behind the wall, the shield held tight over her head.

  Thunk.

  Lenin missed.

  Reshmina closed her eyes, her heart thumping in her chest. She’d been ready for an explosion, and then nothing! Still holding the shield, she got up to get Lenin and try again.

  THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

  Big explosions outside rocked the cave again, and this time a little piece of the ceiling broke off right above the crack in the wall. The rock fell on the land mine, and—KABOOM!—the land mine exploded, and Reshmina went flying.

  Brandon stood and stared.

  The South Tower was gone. Like some sort of awful magician’s trick, it had just disappeared. Disappeared and been replaced by a mountain of concrete and twisted metal, shrouded in a cloud of dust and smoke.

  That was what must have knocked them all down in the basement, Brandon realized. What had destroyed the underground mall. The tornado that had hit them was the blast from the South Tower coming down half a block away.

  Gayle choked back a sob. “All those people.”

  Brandon felt all the relief from his escape drain out of him, replaced by an icy chill.

  “Maybe people made it out,” Richard said. “If they had time?”

  Brandon glanced at his watch. Its face was cracked, but the digital readout still worked. It was 10:25 a.m. It had been a little over an hour and a half since the first plane hit. How long after that had the second plane hit? He tried to remember. Fifteen, twenty minutes? The people in the South Tower had had less than an hour to escape before the whole building had come down.

  Brandon looked up. The North Tower still poured black smoke into the sky above him. Brandon’s father was up there at the top, in Windows on the World. He was still alive. He had to be! The South Tower had fallen—incredibly, unbelievably—but the North Tower was still standing. Brandon had passed those firemen on the stairs. They would get to the fire and get to Brandon’s dad. But if the South Tower had fallen …

  “Oh my God,” Pratik said. “Look!”

  Pratik pointed toward the middle of the North Tower. Mixed in with the falling metal and glass were things that were moving. People, Brandon realized. People were still jumping from the tower, falling ninety floors to their deaths. They dropped out of the thick black smoke that engulfed the top of the building with alarming speed, arms and legs flailing. Brandon saw one man reaching, grabbing as he fell, too far from anything to stop himself, his tie sticking straight up in the air above him.

  “I need to find a phone booth,” Brandon said, blinking away the nightmare. He turned to Richard. “I need to call my dad!”

  “We need to get out of here first,” Richard told him. “Get to my house. We can call your dad from there. My family will be there. You can stay the night with us, and … well, we’ve got some things to work out, but you can stay with me and my family for as long as you need to.”

  Brandon cried. He crie
d because Richard was being so nice to him, and because he didn’t want to think about what would happen if his dad really did die in the North Tower.

  An EMT wearing a white surgical mask hurried up to Gayle and took her by the elbow to sit her down on the curb. Another EMT ran over to Brandon, Richard, and Pratik and handed them little white masks like she and the other EMT wore. The masks were flimsy and thin and wrapped around your ears with an itchy elastic band, but they filtered the awful, gritty air.

  “Don’t breathe the dust!” the EMT told them. “It’s toxic!”

  The EMT found the bloody shirt wrapped around Brandon’s hand. He stood like a zombie as she peeled it away and treated his wound. Brandon’s eyes fell on a banged-up, cylindrical piece of machinery sitting right in the middle of the street. It was as tall as he was, and looked like a crumpled soda can. Brandon struggled to grasp what he was seeing. Was that an airplane engine from one of the planes that had hit the Twin Towers? Could one of them have really shot out all this way?

  The EMT put something on Brandon’s hand that made it sting, and he hissed in pain. She had it wrapped and bandaged in no time though and gave him a quick examination to see if there was anything else that needed patching.

  “Can I move this to look at your other hand?” she asked, pulling at something Brandon didn’t know he was holding.

  Brandon looked down. In his left hand, he carried the little stuffed animal he’d picked up in the wreckage in the underground mall. It was the Tasmanian Devil, a character from the Warner Bros. cartoons. Brandon stared at the wild, silly look on its face. It was like something from another planet, one where airplanes didn’t crash into buildings and skyscrapers didn’t fall. Why was he still holding it? He’d been so focused on surviving that he hadn’t even realized he’d picked it up and taken it with him.

  Richard put a hand on Brandon’s shoulder. “You should keep that,” Richard told him. “It brought us luck.”

  Luck? thought Brandon. How could anybody think he’d been lucky?

  There was a sudden CRACK from high above, and somebody screamed. Brandon looked up. The tall red-and-white antenna on top of the North Tower was just visible, sticking out through the cloud of gray-and-black smoke that billowed from the upper floors. Brandon watched as the giant antenna tilted, leaned, and then disappeared down into the smoke as the top floor of the North Tower fell in on itself.

  THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

  Brandon felt each boom in his stomach as the top floors of the North Tower collapsed, one by one, under the massive weight of each new falling floor, and then it was a rushing, expanding avalanche. Concrete crumbled to powder in an instant, exploding outward like a blooming flower, and giant pieces of rock and steel came shooting out like fireworks.

  The North Tower was coming down.

  “No no no no no” was all Brandon could say, all he could think. Then the sound of the individual floors collapsing became a rumble, a tidal wave, a static roar, and Brandon’s heart stopped as he watched one hundred and seven stories, along with five hundred thousand tons of concrete and steel and moldy carpets and computers and human beings, come straight down. All around him, the cars on the street shuddered and bounced. The gray cloud from the tower expanded out, out, out, and then the cloud of dust and rock and glass came blasting across the plaza and down the narrow streets between Manhattan’s surviving skyscrapers like a living thing, coming to swallow Brandon.

  Like it had swallowed his father.

  “Run, Brandon!” Richard cried. “Run!”

  Brandon ran. He had never been so scared in all his life. Not when he had been trapped in the elevator. Not when he had almost fallen off the edge of the 89th floor. Not when he’d been battered and blind in the underground mall. The thing that had killed his father was coming for him, chasing him like a giant monster through the streets of Manhattan, and he ran in a wild panic down Vesey Street, straight away from the thing that hunted him. Car alarms went off all around him, honking, beeping, flashing, like they were yelling at him to RUN. RUN. RUN. Then the sun went out in the sky and darkness surrounded him, and the air turned to ash in his mouth despite his white mask.

  I’m going to die, Brandon thought.

  He was just to the little old church called St. Paul’s, halfway down the long block to Broadway, when the full force of the blast caught up to him. FWOOMPH. The wind picked Brandon up and threw him down the street as though he weighed no more than a leaf. Brandon tumbled, skidded, bounced, rolled. Everything was a blur of asphalt and ash and pain, and then he slammed into a honking car and bounced off, sliding to a stop in the middle of the street.

  Brandon wrapped his battered arms around his chest and tucked his head down as the monster roared over him, past him. Paper and ash fluttered in its wake, and then it was gone and Brandon lay alone in the street, covered from head to foot in white dust.

  Brandon’s arms and legs shook as he got up on all fours to look around. Everything was covered in another coat of fine white dust, including the lump of a body that lay in the street a few yards back.

  “Richard?” Brandon cried.

  Brandon stood, staggered, limped back to the unmoving form, his feet leaving drag marks in the soot and ash. Manhattan was quiet again, silent as a grave. That’s what this place was now—a giant grave for the thousands of people who hadn’t been able to escape before the towers fell.

  Brandon just prayed Richard hadn’t joined them.

  Brandon fell to his knees next to the body of his friend. Richard lay facedown on the road, motionless. Brandon put a hand to Richard’s back and shook him gently.

  “Richard?” he whispered. “Richard, please be alive.” Brandon couldn’t take it if Richard had died too.

  Richard’s fingers twitched, and his arm slid out across the ash-covered asphalt, looking for something. Brandon didn’t know what Richard was looking for, but he was alive. Richard was alive.

  Brandon put his hand in Richard’s, and Richard squeezed it. Richard relaxed then, stopped looking for whatever he’d been looking for, and Brandon took Richard’s hand in both of his and wept, the tears carving tracks down the white dust that covered his face. Because Brandon knew then what Richard had been looking for when he’d put his arm out.

  He had just wanted to know, like Brandon, that his friend was all right, and that they were together.

  Reshmina blinked awake in the bright sunshine. She lay on the ground by the river, near the fields with their corn and barley and rice that had yet to be harvested. Her ears rang and her body ached, but she was alive. So was her mother, who was sitting by her side.

  Her mother wrapped Reshmina up in a hug so tight it hurt.

  “That was a very brave and very foolish thing you did,” Mor told her.

  Taz stood behind them both, smiling.

  “What happened?” Reshmina asked him.

  “A big boom,” Taz told her. “That wall you hid behind took the worst of it. The mine blew a hole in the outer wall just big enough for us all to climb through. Too tight for me to make it with my battle belt on though.” The belt he had worn with all the pouches on it was gone, and he tucked his thumbs into his beltless pants. “Had to leave it behind.”

  One more artifact for the shrine to failed conquerors, Reshmina thought.

  She sat up suddenly. “What about the others? Zahir, Marzia, Anaa—”

  “They’re all right,” Reshmina’s mother told her, and Reshmina saw now that there were other American and Afghan soldiers among them, treating the survivors for cuts and bruises. Taz was bandaged up too. Reshmina put a hand to her aching head. How long had she been out?

  “Your eyes—” Reshmina said to Taz. He was cleaned up and looking directly at her, and for the first time she saw that his eyes were a brilliant blue.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said with a smile. “I’m beginning to see the light.”

  Anaa, Marzia, and Zahir crowded around her. Reshmina’s grandmother, sister, and brother squeezed her hands and
touched their heads to hers.

  “Baba!” Zahir cried, waving at someone behind Reshmina.

  Her heart leaped, and she turned. Coming around the bend in the road was her father, along with other men from the village. Baba was alive! Marzia and Zahir ran to hug him, and after Reshmina was able to get to her feet, she and her mother followed.

  “Baba! I was so worried about you!” Reshmina cried, giving him a hug.

  “And I you, Mina-jan. We couldn’t find you, but then we heard the explosion.” Baba looked around. “Where is Pasoon?”

  Reshmina felt the blood drain away from her face. Pasoon. Had he been with the Taliban during the gunfight? Was his body lying on a hillside somewhere, filled with American bullets?

  “Pasoon went to the Taliban,” she told her father.

  Baba sagged against his crutch. “Yes. I worried he might.”

  “I tried to stop him, Baba. I followed him. Tried to talk him out of it.” Reshmina fought back her tears. “Nothing I said would change his mind.”

  Baba put a hand on her head. “I know, Mina-jan. I know.”

  “I wanted to do the right thing,” Reshmina said, “but all I did was lead everyone to their deaths! Everyone in the village is dead because of me!”

  “No, no, Mina-jan,” Baba said. “Come and see.”

  He took her by the hand and led her around the bend, where dozens of villagers had come out of the front entrance to the cave. The cave-in had only separated Reshmina and the others from the rest of the villagers, not killed everyone on the other side!

  “A few died, yes,” Baba told her. “To God we belong, and to God we return. But many more survived, and thanks to you.”

  Reshmina buried her face in her father’s tunic to hide her tears.

  “We are safe now,” Baba said. “The Americans are clearing the village of the last of the Taliban.”

  Reshmina turned around. Taz had been standing off to the side, and now three more American soldiers came over to join him. One of them playfully swatted the little brown stuffed animal strapped to Taz’s vest. The white strip on the soldier’s vest said his name was CARTER. He wore his body armor over a jacket with the sleeves cut off, and Reshmina saw the word INFIDEL tattooed on one of his muscular arms. Infidel was what the mujahideen called anyone who didn’t follow Islam.