The Towers (7 page)

“Except for the traders,” someone else yelled.

“Except for them. If you go, shut down everything properly and log out. The traders stay. If anyone else wants to leave—”

The bad feeling got worse. She picked up her purse. “I think I'll head down to the lobby. Until the situation clarifies. I'll give you a call from there.”

“But—Mr. Kennedy, don't forget—”

“I don't think we'll be having lunch. Not over there.” She inclined her head toward the burning tower. Noting a thin graphite-gray streaming out of the windows on the top floor, which meant smoke was flowing up through all the floors between. “You don't need to come.”

“You need an escort.”

A gaggle milled in the lobby. The elevator took a while to arrive, but when it did, more had joined them. By no means a lot, though. They all fit comfortably. She blinked at the back of Giory's head, wondering if her jumping ship was making a bad impression.

They stepped out into the Sky Lobby at 78 as a group of Japanese, or Japanese American, executives filed into the express elevator, which promptly closed its doors. They stood waiting in the lobby with about forty others in a subdued hum of speculation. A woman was talking on her cell. “It was a light plane,” she announced to everyone. Blair tried hers again, tried her parents' number, Dan's, but didn't connect. Giory looked put out. The lobby lights shone brightly. Air sighed through the ventilators.

“They're evacuating Tower One,” a man said from the far wall. He was on some sort of intercom console, she saw. “But we're okay here. No need to get excited.”

The woman with the cell yelled, “People are jumping over there. My sister says it's on all the channels.”

Jumping?
Blair's stomach muscles hardened. Should they not be using the elevators? Were there stairwells? She remembered the way debris and then flame had blasted out of the other building. How would those above that impact point get down? Through fire and smoke?
Could
they escape? How would firemen reach them?

But she wasn't over there. She was here, where
everything was normal
. She was overreacting. Not a good signal. If she looked weak, it would get around faster than light.

Above their heads a PA system came on.
“Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen. Building Two is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building Two. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may use the reentry doors and the elevators to return to your offices. Repeat: Building Two is secure.”

She cleared her throat. “Harry? Let's go back up.”

“Ya sure? We can go down to the lobby, no problem. See what's goin' on.”

“Whatever it is doesn't seem to be affecting us. If there was an emergency here, they'd announce it, wouldn't they?”

“Sure. They're always yelling on that PA, during the drills.”

Another local pinged. The doors scooted back. Only two got off, though. The elevators were still running. Surely they'd shut them down if there were any problem.

She hesitated again, then forced herself back through the doors. Giory followed. Two others stepped in with them, a large African-American woman in late pregnancy and a heavyset white man in a gray suit and light blue tie with a blue-and-white lapel pin. They punched their buttons and the doors closed.

They were already at speed and she was reaching to pinch her nose to adjust her ears when the floor jolted to a huge
bang
like an electrical substation shorting out. The car rocked to one side, hesitated, canted there; then seemed to sway back, but reluctantly. The shock knocked them all to their knees. The lights flickered, went off, came on. Dust seethed in the air. The car coasted upward, then shuddered to a screeching stop. She sprawled, head lowered, waiting for whatever came next, flame or blast. When all that followed was an ominous creaking and settling, she crept to her knees, then her feet. “That sounded just like a hand grenade,” the man in the gray suit said.

Giory was shaking. “That was the other building,” he said, swallowing.

“What you saying?” said the black woman. “The
other
building?”

“Only thing it could be. Didn't ya feel the lean? It collapsed, fell over, hit us.”

Blair shook her head. Buildings fell
down
, not sideways. But she couldn't think of anything else but a bomb. Her knees itched. They'd been burned, at the hotel. She didn't want to get burned again. Above everything, she didn't want that.

Giory was jabbing the
OPEN
button, without result. The man in the suit pulled at the seam in the doors with his fingernails, then jammed a pen into them and pried. Its barrel snapped off. “Won't open,” he grunted.

An acridity of burnt wiring tinged the air. She found an emergency phone in the console, but there was no sound on it. Not even static.

The pregnant woman moaned, holding her stomach. When Blair followed her lowered gaze, she saw why. Smoke was bleeding up through the floor. White and thick and slow, gradually rising along the walls of the elevator car.

“It was another plane,” the man said. He had a small handheld, some kind she wasn't familiar with, not a Palm but something else. “Present from my wife,” he said, catching her look. “Like a two-way pager. I can get texts on it even when my cell won't work.” When he held it out she read

2nd plane hit tower 2 - gt out fst as u cn

“That's what—you mean it hit
us
?” She felt sick. A second plane … one was an accident. Two planes … two were something else.

where are u r u ok

She handed it back. He took it and started clicking, then began coughing. The smoke was getting thicker. He thrust the device back into his coat.

She examined the ceiling. Nothing resembling a way out there. But there had to be an exit. A maintenance hatch. They couldn't stay in here, they'd die of smoke inhalation. She reached past Giory and stabbed the door
OPEN
button five or six more times. It was dead.

The lights went out. She had a moment of sheer breathless panic, then remembered: she had a flash in her purse.

When it came on, it only carried a foot or two, the smoke was that thick. They were all coughing now. She pressed a tissue over her mouth. It didn't help. When their hotel had been bombed, she and Dan had gotten through by staying low, below the smoke. But here it was coming up from below.

From
below
. If a second plane had hit below them, they were trapped. Whether or not they could get out of this steel box. She followed the shaking beam to the console and hit the
OPEN
button again. Nothing, and a crackle was growing below their feet and the air was getting steadily hotter.

“There's a fire down there,” the executive said, breathing hard, coughing. “We got to get out.”

Giory was hammering on the door with his shoe. “We're stuck,” he shouted. “Help. Help!” The clamor was deafening, but there was no response.

“We got to pry that door open,” the heavy woman said. “Got to find something to pry with. Or something we can hammer in there, pry it open.”

Blair bent and slipped off her shoe. Wasn't there steel in the heel? In good ones, anyway? These were Christian Louboutins. She set the spike in the seam and hammered it in with the heel of her fist. The edges where the doors met were slightly rounded and with her third blow the spike began to drive between them. The executive took over and with powerful strokes drove the heel deeper, wedging the doors apart till a thin line of darkness swallowed her flashlight's beam.

“We got to hurry,” the woman said.

Blair fully agreed; the metal floor was searing her nylon-stockinged foot. The choking smoke stank of jet fuel, a smell she was more than familiar with. Giory and the executive were trying to lock their fingers in the half-inch gap her spike heel had opened, to pull in opposite directions. The door didn't give, and she bit her lip; if it had buckled, warped, it might not be possible to unseal it. “Let's all get on it,” she suggested, and set her flashlight down to shine where they worked.

They bumped into each other, maneuvering, and got four hands on each door. Giory counted and they pulled for all they were worth and the doors grated and sprung. They hauled again, wheezing in the smoke. Blair's muscles were tearing but she barely registered it, and the gap widened. Four inches. Six. A foot. The car shifted and popped, the metal heating like a cheap saucepan. The woman sobbed and prayed aloud to Jesus. Smoke streamed in through the floor and sucked out through the gap. It was getting thicker, changing its smell from fuel to something darker, more laden. A barbecue stench of charred meat.

Giory slipped his shoulder into the gap and braced. They all pulled again and the doors came apart six more inches and he stepped through, hand stretched into the dark. She slipped her shoe back on and took the woman's sweat-wet hand and went through next, stepping carefully. “I'm Blair,” she muttered.

“Cookie.”

“You work in the building, Cookie? D'you know where we are?”

“Oh, yes, I've worked here five years now. Ninety-second floor, I think. Or close to there.” She was breathing hard through a handkerchief pressed to her face. Her voice came muffled. “I don't walk so fast. Sorry. This's my second.”

“That's all right, don't worry about that. Do you know where the stairwells are?”

“There's three egress stairs. A, B, and C. But there's other stairs between the floors, where they goes between offices. We shouldn't take those, unless we have to. They'll be locked, a lot of them.”

“Harry,” she called to the men, who were some distance ahead down the hallway. “We need to close these elevator doors. Keep the smoke contained.”

“Let 'em go,” Giory called back. “We just need to get out.”

Yes, that was the priority. They were marooned in the sky, with a fire below them. Her skin crawled. In the dimness she pulled Cookie over heaps of what felt like ceiling tile. Doors stood open. “Is there anyone here?” the executive was yelling. They were in the central core, what had been the lobby area on the other floors, but this place was deserted, no one was answering. Around the beam of her light the darkness was impenetrable. Shouldn't there be emergency lights? “This here's a machinery floor,” Cookie said behind her. “Right there, that's the stairs!” she called to the men.

At that moment a phone rang. She heard the sound, knew it had something to do with her, but for a moment couldn't remember what. Then she snatched her cell out of her purse.

It was Dan. They had just a few words, then the connection was cut off. He said it was another airliner. Which confirmed the text message. She stared at the phone, debated calling back for half a second, then thrust it back into her purse. She had to escape, not chat.

When they opened the door to the stairs, smoke poured out with a muffled roar and flickering glow. The executive pushed it closed hastily. His blue tie was smudged and awry. The air was getting hot here too, though not as bad yet as it had been in the elevator. He peeled his jacket off and lashed the sleeves around his waist. “Let's stay together,” he said. “My name's Tommy.”

“Hi, Tommy. Harry.”

“Blair.”

“Cookie.”

“How far along are you, Cookie?”

“About six months.”

“You were saying you knew the building?”

“Yes, well, I been here five years, but I know my office, not this floor. I never been down here. But we got to try to find a way out.”

“Down's toward the fire,” Tommy said. “If we go up, we go away from the fire, and away from the smoke. Then when they put the fire out, we can come back down. I'm from Chicago. That's what they tell us there, in these high-rises. You're safe as long as you're isolated from the fire.”

“I don't think this fire's isolated,” Blair said. “And we don't know how big it is, or how far down it goes. Harry, what can you contribute?”

“Maybe we should try the other stairwells,” Giory said. “If we can go down, we probably ought to. If there's fire in all the stairwells, we'll go up, like Tommy says. Find someplace without all this smoke and wait for the fire department.”

“Sounds like a plan. Is that the other stairwell?” Blair shone her light down the corridor, coughing up what felt like raw pieces of lung. The smoke was streaming up, it seemed, through the carpet. Sucking it in was like breathing powdered flame.

The executive seemed about to protest, but ducked his head, holding a handkerchief over his mouth. They tried other doors, but all were either locked or opened to smoke or roaring flame. Until at last Giory cried, “Over here. Over here.”

When they forced the door open enough to crowd through, it was into a vertical concrete pipe meat-packed solid with terrified humanity. “Close the door!” many voices shouted at once. She pulled it shut behind her, both tremendously relieved and conscious of a new fear: of being crushed, or smothered, by the sheer press of frightened people intent on getting one more step lower.

The smoke was thinner here but still hot and choking. It blew steadily up the stairwell, leaded with that fuel-and-meat stink that made those in the line double and cough until they retched. The emergency lighting was barely enough to make out faces. The bare, painted concrete stair-treads were so narrow only two could stand on each; or only one, if he or she was heavy. No one seem to be making any progress. The stink of fear-sweat was as strong as the fuel smell. Faces glistened as she swung the flash, then turned it off. Better save the batteries. “Let me in?” she pleaded. Faces rigid, two women first refused to move, then crowded in even more tightly to allow her to insert herself sideways. Giory pushed in behind her; Cookie and Tommy squeezed themselves into the vertical queue.