From the Indie Side (37 page)

A girl jogged past with a dog on a lead.

“Which way to Central Park West?” he
cried.

She was already well past him, but she turned
and pointed on an angle as she continued.

“Thanks,” he called after her, running in the
direction she’d indicated.

Kareem ran on, but he was lost. He should
have reached the other side of Central Park by now. He was just
about to turn around when a gentle rise led him up toward the
familiar stone wall encircling the park. With renewed vigor, he
jogged on, following the slow curve of the path and coming out
directly across from the museum.

There was the delivery van, exactly as he
remembered it, parked directly in front of the steps leading up to
the museum entrance. Four lanes of traffic whipped by in front of
him, two lanes in each direction. Kareem looked for an opening,
wanting to cross to the middle, but this was wrong. He hadn’t
crossed here. This wasn’t what he remembered. A taxi raced past.
Someone honked their horn, yelling at him as he stood just beyond
the curb.

“Get off the road, ya bum!”

It was the hot dog stand. He was on the wrong
side.

Kareem ran around the stand. This was better.
He remembered this. It was impossible to time the motion of four
lanes of busy traffic, but he knew he’d made it across the road in
once swift motion. Cars and trucks raced by. In spite of the heavy
traffic rushing past, he stepped out, trusting his memory, timing
the first vehicle, knowing there would be an opening.

Brakes squealed, cars skidded, horns honked,
but as he ran across the road, Kareem never took his eyes off the
terrorist sitting in the front seat of the delivery van. Somehow,
he made it across.

The terrorist locked eyes with him. The man’s
eyes were cold and uncaring. Dark hair covered his jaw. Not a
beard, but new growth, a sign the man hadn’t shaved in a couple of
days.

Kareem was standing in the middle of the
final lane. A taxi honked, wanting him to get out of the lane. A
gun pointed out of the delivery van at Kareem, and the taxi’s horn
fell silent. In the distance, police sirens broke through the
autumn chill.

Kareem wasn’t afraid. He was staring down the
barrel of a nine-millimeter Glock, but he remembered what happened
next.

The passenger side door of the van opened and
the second terrorist jumped in.

“Drive. Drive!”

The driver lowered the gun, popped the
clutch, and roared out into traffic.

Kareem should have been shaking, but he
wasn’t. He had known the terrorist wouldn’t fire, and he knew what
was coming next. Fragments of his shattered memories crept through
into the moment, giving him direction. He had two, maybe three
minutes before the bomb detonated. He had to save as many people as
possible.

The taxi driver came up beside him. The
elderly driver had hopped out of his taxi after seeing Kareem
threatened with a gun.

“Hey, buddy. Are you okay?”

Kareem ignored him. He ran up the stairs of
the museum, recognizing the bomb beside the entrance, just past the
disabled ramp to one side of the building. To anyone else, the bomb
looked like a Coke machine, but Kareem knew different.

“Get everyone out of here,” he yelled,
bounding up the stairs two at a time.

A security guard standing by the entranceway
responded, crying out, “What?”

“There’s a bomb! You’ve got to get everyone
out of here.”

The guard turned his head to one side,
grabbed at a microphone clipped onto the shoulder board of his drab
blue uniform, and spoke rapidly into his radio. His other hand
unclipped the cover of his holster. From his defensive posture, it
was clear the guard considered Kareem the immediate
threat. 

Kareem didn’t have time for this. He leapt up
the steps, pumping his arms, accelerating rather than slowing. The
guard pulled his gun. Kareem lashed out with his right leg, kicking
the revolver from the guard’s hand. The gun flew through the air.
Kareem dropped his shoulder, colliding with the guard and sending
him flying backward, sliding across the polished marble in the
entranceway.

The attendant behind the counter raised her
hands in surrender. Kareem didn’t have a gun, but that didn’t seem
to matter. As far as she was concerned, this was a holdup.

Kareem jumped over the counter and landed
beside the young lady. There was a fire alarm on the wall by the
cash register. With a single motion, he punched downward at the
alarm, breaking the thin, brittle glass and activating the switch.
An alarm sounded throughout the building, pulsating through several
frequencies.

The girl stood there stunned. She couldn’t
have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old, and she looked
terrified.

The security guard staggered to his feet,
clutching at the back of his head. Blood pooled on the marble floor
behind him.

There was an intercom. Kareem adjusted the
microphone, holding down the large transmit button as he spoke.

“There is a bomb in the foyer. Please leave
the museum through the emergency exits to the rear.”

He hoped there were exits to the rear. The
sound of his voice over the intercom echoed through the museum.

Police cars screeched to a halt outside,
their sirens blaring.

“Do not panic,” Kareem said into the
intercom, getting a little too close to the steel mesh covering the
microphone. His voice boomed through the vast, lofty entranceway,
sounding malicious.

Who was he kidding? He should have been
telling them to run like hell. His Egyptian accent had probably
scared them half to death. If there was one way to get people to
take a bomb threat seriously, it was to speak English with a Middle
Eastern accent, he figured. And from the fleeting glimpses he got
of people scrambling for cover on the mezzanine floor, the message
seemed to be getting through.

The attendant was still standing there with
her hands raised. She was in shock. Tears streamed down her cheeks,
causing her mascara to run. She was shaking.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” she whimpered. The
poor girl was in a state of shock. Kareem had seen this before, but
normally due to injury. Her mind wasn’t processing information
properly. From what he could tell, his words over the intercom
hadn’t registered with her. 

“Run!” he cried, but she just stood there.
“Run!” he repeated, stamping his foot in front of her and waving
his arms, making like he was going to push her over. Kareem never
touched her, but his jarring motion was enough to break through the
shock. She turned and ran.

Kareem vaulted over the counter and back into
the foyer. The security guard was barely able to stand. He leaned
forward on his knees. Blood dripped from the back of his head,
marking where he’d struck the marble floor.

How much longer was there before the blast?
As far as Kareem could remember, there were just seconds left, not
minutes. Out on the street, police officers crouched behind their
vehicles or leaned over the hoods of their cars with their guns
drawn.

“Kareem Hadee Rafid,” a bullhorn cried over
the sound of the alarm. “Come out with your hands raised above your
head.”

Kareem looked at the Coke machine and then at
the guard. He couldn’t remember what happened next. He knew he
survived, or at least he thought he did. But did he survive because
he bolted out of the museum? Should he risk saving the guard?
Helping the guard could cost him his life, but he couldn’t leave
him.

The guard shuffled over and braced himself
against the counter, trying to stop himself from collapsing back to
the floor. No, Kareem couldn’t leave him. Being a paramedic, he
couldn’t turn his back on this man, regardless of how much his
self-preservation instinct demanded otherwise.

He grabbed the security guard, hoisting the
man’s arm over his own shoulder.

The guard was disoriented. He’d suffered a
major concussion. His uncoordinated stagger and slurred speech
indicated significant brain trauma.

“I need to, have to. I should,” the guard
mumbled as Kareem hurriedly dragged him down the stairs toward the
police. Even in his groggy state, the guard seemed to be wanting to
help others. Kareem understood that selfless drive.

The guard didn’t recognize him. It was
possible he too was suffering short-term memory loss, Kareem
thought, understanding how disorienting and confusing that could
be.

The police officers kept their guns trained
on Kareem as he hurried down the broad steps with the guard. The
officers were shouting at him, waving at him, wanting him to stop
where he was, but he couldn’t. Kareem knew what came next. He
remembered. He had to get as far down the steps as he could to make
sure he and the guard got below the blast.

Kareem’s memory came back to him in waves.
There were times, like when he was running through the park, where
he barely remembered anything at all. But as he dragged the guard
down those stairs, Kareem remembered precisely what would happen
next. He knew which stair his foot would touch when the bomb
exploded. The blast may have taken everyone else by surprise, but
Kareem was ready for the wall of superheated air that threw him
into the side of a police car some twenty feet away.

Most of the blast was directed through the
foyer, coming out level with the top of the stairs, sparing Kareem
and the guard. The deafening boom shook his bones. Rock and dust
billowed through the air. Surprisingly, those slightly farther away
from the stairs were worse off; they had been hit by shrapnel.
Kareem and the guard had been in a dead spot, partially sheltered
from the blast by the fall of the stairs.

Cars rocked with the shockwave. Several
pedestrians over by Central Park were knocked off their feet. Tiny
shards of plastic and bits of torn metal pelted the police cars
along with the trees lining the avenue. Smoke billowed through the
air. A dark cloud mushroomed into the sky.

At first, Kareem thought the aftermath of the
blast was silent, but then he realized that his hearing had cut
out, replaced with an incessant ringing in his ears. Slowly, the
screaming became audible. Kareem helped the security guard to sit
up against a car door that was peppered with shrapnel.

“Stay here,” he said. Although he thought
he’d yelled, his voice sounded like a whisper. The only noises he
could hear were muted and dull. The guard nodded.

Several ambulances pulled up from both
directions. Paramedics began tending to the wounded. A few more
police cars arrived, and the officers began administering first aid
to the victims of the blast, tending to bystanders and fallen
police officers. Kareem slipped quietly back into Central Park.

“Oh my God,” Deb said, sliding into the booth
next to him. “Are you okay?”

Kareem was shaking. Using two hands, he
raised a coffee cup to his lips, struggling to sip at the dark
drink. He put the cup down, spilling some coffee on the table.

“Kareem, what happened to you?” Deb
asked.

His eyes darted around the inside of
O’Malley's coffee house. Following the blast at the museum, barely
three blocks away, the streets had cleared. Most of the customers
had left, but an elderly couple sat by the door, apparently
oblivious to what had happened. Police cars, fire engines, and
ambulances rushed past, but the couple didn’t seem to notice. They
laughed and chatted loudly as they ate breakfast together. Oh, to
have not a care in the world, thought Kareem, staring
absentmindedly across at them.

“Kareem?”

Kareem blinked. He hadn’t even noticed Deb
walk into the restaurant. The plush leather seats had felt so soft
and comfortable when he arrived. The waitress had asked him if he
knew what was going on, so he told her about the blast at the
museum. She could see he was shaken and had given him a cup of
coffee on the house.

Deb put her arm around his shoulder. She ran
her fingers through his hair, moving down from the long locks into
the freshly shaved hair on the side of his head. She was looking at
the stitches.

“They did a good job.”

Kareem still hadn’t spoken. He turned to her,
trying not to cry.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she said, resting her hand
on his shoulder. “You’re safe.”

Deb was like that, expressing herself through
physical touch. When he’d first joined her crew he’d thought she
was coming on to him, but it was just her way of communicating. Deb
was from an Italian background. Well, as Italian as a
fourth-generation Italian American could be. Kareem doubted she’d
ever been to Italy.

Deb ran her hand along his forearm, gently
stroking the hair on his arm.

“Talk to me,” she said. Her dark hair was
pulled back into a ponytail. Kareem had always thought she was
beautiful, and never more so than now. He felt as though he’d died
and gone to hell, but that some dark-haired angel had come to
redeem him.

“They... They think I did it.”

“What?” she asked. “The bombing?”

Kareem nodded. For a moment, he wondered if
she was going to ask him if he’d played any part in the terrorist
attack, but Deb was kind. They’d worked together for eighteen
months. Pulling an injured mother from the crushed remains of a
car, or resuscitating a junkie that had overdosed on heroin, forged
a bond between them. There was something about the raw, unscripted
pain they saw daily that demanded camaraderie. Such bonds seemed
like the only appropriate response to the carnage they witnessed.
Without them, Kareem would have gone crazy. There was only so much
blood and gore he could deal with on his own. In some ways, he
wondered if Deb’s desire to touch was her way of dealing with the
anguish, her way of connecting to reality. For him, her touch was
soothing.