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Ministry, “Corrosion” from the album
Psalm 69. Click button below to play the song!
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[Excerpt from City of Pillars: Voices from Manhattan. Collected and Edited by Solana Mitchell and the Manhattan Memorial Project. Published by Random House, 2003.]
Cressida Hovanic, 29, now living in Kansas City, KA, is a marketing coordinator for an online computer software retailer. In early 2001, fresh out of college with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from CalTech, Cressida took a traveling representative job with the computer security firm InSoc Digital Defenders in San Francisco because she wanted to travel around the country. She’d grown up in southwestern Pennsylvania, always dreaming of a job that would let her experience “all the places I saw on TV as a kid and fell in love with.” Her first assignment for InSoc was the inaugural Waters Financial Technology Congress being held on September 11, 2001, at the renowned Windows on the World Restaurant, on the 107 Floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
On December 14, 2002, we meet at the Starbucks next door to her new business’s office. When she comes in out of the light snow, I notice that she walks with a faint limp, but it’s otherwise impossible to tell that she has an artificial leg to replace the one she’d lost on September 11. She is a bubbly, vivacious young woman who says she has told this story “about a thousand damn times already to family, friends, reporters, whatever,” but as she begins to tell it to me, I notice that her eyes get moist and dart around frequently, and she nervously bounces her leg—her real one—underneath the table, sometimes shaking the table so badly that she apologizes when our coffees overflow.
I woke before dawn that morning despite the jet-lag because I was so excited. The night before, when our plane landed, it had been storming something awful, but you could already tell that today was going to be clear and sunny and warm and…just perfect. The sky was clear as far as you could see. I could almost see the Statue of Liberty from my hotel window, and I kept thinking about how I’d promised my mom I’d email her some pictures of Ellis Island. “This is a business trip,” I kept telling her, “not a sightseeing tour: I’m only going to be there one day”—but she just said, “That’s where your Grandfather Hovanic first set foot in America, Cressy. You know I’ll never get out of this house to see it for myself and blah, blah, blah.” So I figured I’d make time that evening for a quick jaunt out to the Bay if the conference didn’t run too late—that is, if I even made it through the conference. I was as nervous as I was excited—this was my first official gig out of InSoc boot camp. As I was getting ready for the day, I started feeling a bit queasy and lightheaded and I kept thinking, Oh, God, what if I pee myself? What if I have a friggin’ stroke on the convention floor? I got myself so worked up thinking about the thousand and one ways I could possibly screw up in front of some billionaire potential investor that I wasn’t sure if I’d even make it to the convention.
We—that is, me and Raj [Pavinder] and Ray [Lenck]: I was there with two of InSoc’s more experienced technology reps—we had to be at the convention center at WTC 1, the North Tower, by 7:30 to set up our display and catch breakfast before the thing got under away at 9. I was bathed, brushed, perfumed, wearing my best grey dress-suit, and ready to puke my guts out by the time Raj came by to make sure I was even awake. When he saw me already dressed, twitching and twittering about my hotel room like a chicken, he laughed and laughed, then he sat me down for a bit on the bed and said, “The first thing you need to do is just chill out, girl. Ray and I will be doing all the heavy talking; you just need to answer basic questions, ask people to sign up for the newsletter and hand out the demo CDs. Your mission is to look pretty for the very, very rich old men and the very, very rich bull dykes and you’ll do fine. Maybe you’ll even find a sugar daddy…or, uh, mama. Make sure you tell ‘em to show you the money first, though; you don’t wanna come across as cheap.” I slapped his shoulder—hard—but he just laughed it off and hugged me until I didn’t feel like puking anymore. Then he left to get Ray.
Raj had that kind of sense of humor that a girl could easily mistake for sexual harassment if it weren’t for the fact that he was very openly gay and always tried to be everyone in tech sales’ Big Brother. He’d taken on and supervised so many new reps on their first live gigs in the five or six years that he’d been with the company that they’d actually written it into his contract. He was our department’s official Big Brother. An like any Big Brother, just before we’d left California, he’d taken me out to dinner—at a Hooters, of all places—and got me riotously smashed on margaritas and tried to sell me to some big, hairy commodities broker from London, but that’s a whole different story….
I’ll never forget what he said that night, though, when he dropped me off back at my apartment. “The world’s a scary place, Cressida”—he never called me “Cressy” like most people do—“and the more you see of it, the scarier it becomes. I’m not even gonna try to protect you from it, because no one can do that, but I’ll always do my best to make sure you know how to handle it.” Raj knew I hadn’t gotten around that much before I joined InSoc, and he wanted to be certain that I learned how to live on the go—to live out of a suitcase, he called it—because this job was eventually going to take me from coast to coast and all up and down the entire country, maybe even overseas. I had always wanted a job that would take me all over the world, but the one thing they couldn’t teach you in tech-rep training was how to survive the world. When he was only eleven years old , Raj had travelled alone from India to Dallas, Texas, by way of China and two or three other countries so he could live with some relatives. Never said why he left India, and he would never talk about that trip, but it had taught him a lot, “and a lot can hurt you if you’re not prepared,” was all he would say about it. He promised to teach me everything he knew.
Anyway, our hotel was only a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center, on Christopher Street, but Raj and Ray were your typical alpha tech-geeks: why walk or do anything physical when you can spend a few bucks to have someone else do it for you? We could’ve walked to the North Tower in ten, fifteen minutes, tops, but instead we caught a cab that took nearly a half-hour to get us there through the morning rush-hour. Those two bastards spent most of the ride making fun of my wide-eyed gawking, but everything we passed was just so fascinating to me: I’d never seen anything like downtown Manhattan before in my life. I had to take a picture of everything I saw—even the diamond fire hydrants! The city glittered like it was jeweled. All those windows and structural diamond. I kept looking around in the air and on the streets, too, hoping to see a real live alien, like a Yuggothian or even a Mounder, but everywhere there were just people, you know, Humans, but from every corner of the planet, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow. Some of the streetcorners were so packed, you could’ve hidden a whole flock of aliens in the crowd and no one would’ve spotted them. So much life, so much activity—and it was just after seven in the morning! “Manhattan is the world’s crossroads,” Ray said, and it was true. Why bother to travel around the whole world when you could just spend a few days in Manhattan? You’d meet people from every corner of the globe. I even saw a guy who must’ve been from one of the Moon bases: he was really tall and pale and had a sort of framework—an exoskeleton, right—on over his suit.
So we finally got to the Center and the cab let us out at the plaza on Vesey Street. I just stood there in all that bright white reflected sunlight staring up at the towers, thinking, I have never seen a building so high. And we’re going to the very top of it. I was staring straight up and it was like the Tower was actually infinitely tall, like the sky was just a blue-painted ceiling and the rest of the building kept going up on the other side of it, all the way to the Moon, for all I knew. That thought made me so dizzy my knees actually gave way; luckily Ray was there to catch me or I would’ve fallen right into one of the flower beds! The Towers were just amazing to look at. Honestly. Especially with that new diamond lattice exoskeleton the fungs had donated when they opened their embassy in the South Tower. The towers looked like they were covered in glass lace. It was so beautiful.
“Look, Ray!” I suddenly shouted, pointing. “Look, it’s one of them!” And there it was: a real, honest-to-god Yuggothian flapping in the air near the middle of the South Tower. When I first saw it, I thought it was just another seagull or pigeon or even a peregrine falcon—I’d read somewhere that there were hundreds of them living in Manhattan—but then I recognized the clumsy, moth-like way it flapped its wings and caught a glimpse of its red shell. I grabbed for my camera but by the time I got the damn lens cap off the Yugg had disappeared behind the building.
Ray grabbed my shoulders from behind and squealed, “Oh my god, watch out, they’re gonna cut your head off and take you to Pluto!” He startled me so goddamned bad I almost dropped my camera and pissed myself. I wasn’t even in the Trade Center yet and I’d already nearly fallen on my ass in the flower bed and pissed my pants. What a rube, huh? I smacked him good for that, but it only made him laugh harder.
Honestly, I could’ve just stood there in the plaza outside the North Tower all day long just watching people come and go and keeping a look out for Yuggs or Mounders but we had to be up on the 106th floor in just a few minutes, so the guys dragged me into the building and bustled me into the first elevator that opened for us. I wanted some pictures of the mezzanine but we had to get booking: tourist-time would come later; we had actual work to do now.
It seemed like it took forever to reach our floor. I swear we must’ve stopped at every single floor between 10 and 96 to let people on, let people off. We even changed elevators twice. Eventually the only folks left on the elevator with us were other conference attendees wearing laminates around their neck. Raj had run into a “con buddy” in the elevator—a guy from some other firm whom he knew from various past conferences like this—and they were just yapping away about encryption codecs and fleecing the gullible old millionaires. Ray was chatting up some young lady writer from Forbes Magazine. And me? I was squeezed into a corner, feeling queasy every time the elevator lurched up and stopped, all the way up to 106.
Luckily, all of our booth materials had been delivered yesterday to our spot in the Horizon Suite, which was the be the con’s showroom. All we had to do was set up the display and the laptops in our booth and take a few minutes to go over our presentation notes one last time before we headed across the hall to the Windows on the World ballroom, where a huge continental breakfast had been laid out. Once again, as soon as we entered that ballroom, I was glad the guys were there to prop me up. The Horizon Suite was mucho impressive itself, but with all the cubicle walls set up and the presenters’ tables laid out it pretty much looked like any typical IT convention showroom—but the ballroom was like….
It was like the ballroom of the Titanic—in the movie, that is. Everything was golden and gleaming in the sunshine pouring in through the windows. There were waiters and waitresses in black-and-white uniforms laying out donuts and jellies and these huge tubs of scrambled eggs and hash browns. There were giant pots of gourmet coffee and hot water for tea. The room was so nice and warm and smelled of smoked salmon and eggs, coffee and a thousand different aftershaves and colognes and perfumes. It was really quite overwhelming, but even in a golden ballroom like that the smell of breakfast will keep your centered, keep your head level. I started calming down a little. The last thing I’d eaten had been a bag of peanuts on the flight. I was starving.
But then “Look around you,” Raj just had to whisper in my ear. “These lucky bastards could buy and sell you.” My stomach immediately knotted up again. He was right, though: the amount of money in human form in that room was just incredible. Seriously. Raj pointed out some bigwig from Schwab, the CIO of Federated Investors New York, the National President of the Sytrex Interspecies Technology Exchange, and a hundred other celebrities of the Information Technology and Finance worlds—people that most folks would never recognize even if one of them came up to you and said, “Hello, I’m Irving Wechsler from United Defense.” I mean, who is Irving Wechsler, right? He was just a little old fellow in a grey suit about a size too big for him. He looked like an old retired dentist. But, see, that oversized suit was worth at least eight thousand dollars—it was an Italian original—and that little old retired dentist was Chief Financial Officer of the number one defense contractor in America. Ray said the guy was worth at least three billion dollars. Billion. When a waitress came by to freshen up his coffee cup for him he tipped her a hundred-dollar bill—I was right there, I saw him do it. I mean, a hundred bucks for a guy like him was just…that wasn’t even pocket-change to him.
When I was in college in California, I’d met a couple of celebrities, here and there—there’s no way you can avoid them, really. They’re everywhere. I’d seen Bill Gates give a talk on commercial software security and met him afterwards, and I’d gotten to hang out with Chelsea Clinton, the ex-President’s daughter, for a weekend—she was lifelong friends with my sophomore-year roommate. I’d even won a ticket to a special luncheon with Madonna and Guy Richie and a number of other big names in the music and movie industries for the dedication of the new Arts Academy at CalTech. But none of those people, not even Madonna, had the same air of…massiveness that the men and women in that ballroom had. Madonna might sell a million records, but that lady over there who looked like my old Aunt Sheila was Investment Manager for Yuggothian Prime Technologies Brokerage. She was the one who actually brokered the deal for their structural diamond manufacturing process. All that diamond you saw in New York and everywhere these days? She was the one who got the fungs to teach us how to do it. And then that guy over there? President of some investment group that bankrolled New York City’s entire arts budget. There’s a CIO, there’s a CIO—everywhere you looked, there was a Chief Info Officer. I later learned that a number of top New York City officials—the guys who ran the City—had been there as well, having a breakfast meeting on the floor above us. Some of them kept coming down to hobnob with the other power brokers. Hell, there was even a Kennedy mingling with the bigwigs. I swear whenever one of their shadows fell across me it felt like I’d had a blanket thrown over me. When they walked the floors shook. These were the titans of industry who literally made America run. Several of them were well over a hundred years old but didn’t look a day over forty thanks to K’n-yan rejuvenations…which weren’t strictly legal, of course, but do you think everyday laws apply to people like that?
But you should’ve seen Raj and Ray moving among them as though they were merely statues, tugging me along behind them like a frightened pet. They were totally used to dealing with people like this. They’d worked these kind of conferences a hundred times. As Ray said, “These people talk and act like they’re Great Old Ones or the Other Gods themselves, but after you’ve seen them nod off during a boring presentation or come across one of them suffering from explosive diarrhea in the men’s room…well, you realize that they’re just people. People with a fuckload of money and power, but no more nor less Human than me or you.” Raj added, “Even though some of them ain’t all Human. No, really. There’s a lot of K’n-yan blood, here. Look for the really big fiveheads, that’s a dead giveaway. Plus, most of these old fucks have Yugg-made replacement organs keeping their decrepit asses vertical. But like Ray said, they still eat and sleep and shit like regular people, so you can’t let them intimidate you. Most of them have never even been off the planet, even though they act like they own it.”
Regardless of the guys’ “kind” words, I still felt like a mortal wandering around on Mount Olympus, afraid of being accidentally stepped on by Zeus’ ten-thousand-dollar Italian wingtips. I watched the guys load up plates with gourmet breakfast foods—one of the first lessons Raj ever taught me was never turn down free food—but all I had was a cup of some fancy coffee. I was still so nervous I couldn’t even drink it.
We ended up over by the windows with their panoramic view of the city, away from most of the big name players, and finally I felt like I had the room breathe again. The fake smile I’d clamped onto my face was making my cheeks hurt but I couldn’t let it go for fear someone would see. So I looked out the window at the sunlit city skyline and forced myself to forget my jitters and just act like a tourist again. Luckily, a number of other “booth monkeys” from the showroom had found us and were checking out the view as well. Many of them had been to New York City numerous times, they said, but this was almost everyone’s first time at the very top of the World Trade Center, in one of the swankiest locations in the entire city. People were pointing out landmarks and again, I saw the Statue of Liberty. It looked so little from way up there: like a little plastic action figure out there in the river, with miles and miles and miles of City stretching behind it all the way to the horizon. City, everywhere you looked.
The biggest city I’d been to prior to New York was Los Angeles, which is absolutely huge, but I didn’t get to see much of it—some college friends and I had just driven up to see Hollywood one day, and that was it. From the top of the World Trade Center, you could see all of New York City. All of Manhattan. Well, and New Jersey, but it all looked like New York, New York to me. This is really the capitol of America, I kept thinking. This is where all the real economic decisions were made. This is where everything gets started. There was just so much City out there, so many people, so much to do….
And while I was standing there, I spotted a couple more Yuggothians flopping around the South Tower. I knew they had an embassy somewhere in the building, somewhere near the middle—then I spotted one of them jump out of an open window or a door or something in the side of the tower. Then more of them came out, too, and now everyone at the windows had spotted them and were pointing and laughing at the aliens’ funny flight. I couldn’t tell one from another, so it was hard to count how many there were, but there had to be at least twenty or thirty of them, and more were jumping out of those doors or hatches all the time. They looked like bees pouring out of a hive, like something had agitated them. They were circling the building, all of them flying in one direction. “Boy, something’s got them all riled up,” I heard somebody say.
I got out my camera and took some photos of them, but the way they were flying around and around the tower was making me kind of uneasy—kind of dizzy, too, to be honest. A lot of people were standing around now, watching them, talking about how you never saw that many aliens in one place, even in New York. An older man standing next to me was telling some others that there were usually only a handful of Yuggs at the South Tower embassy; most of them never leave that mountain of theirs in Vermont. He said maybe they were performing some kind of “ritual” or something.
[For a detailed account of the Yuggothians’ activity at the South Tower, please see Michael Ondaatje’s account on pages 139-47.]
Anyway, once Raj and Ray had eaten their fill, we all went back to our booth in the Horizon Suite. It was now just after eight in the morning and most of the exhibitors were now open for business. The first panels had just convened around the corner and we were all ready to go. I had even begun to relax a little. I’d gotten some great pics of the Yuggs and the view that I knew mom would love. Some of the big money players were already chatting with people at other booths.
And then—THUD!
The floor jumped up beneath us, knocking a lot of people down, and everything shivered, like we were having a small earthquake. Raj was lying on the floor; he’d knocked down one of the walls of our booth. I was still on my feet, though I’d dropped all the CDs I’d been holding. “What the fuck was that? ” Ray said. All the exhibitors around us looked confused—not scared, just…puzzled. Then someone on the other side of the room shouted, “Oh, shit!” and the lights flickered out and the fire alarms started blaring. There was a huge, deafening explosion in the lobby and suddenly the air was full of thick black smoke. There were voices coming through the PA system but you couldn’t hear them over all the screaming and coughing and this roar—like a train going by beneath us. All of this happened in less than a second, by the way…but thinking about it now, it feels like two or three hours.
The emergency lights came on and immediately everyone started picking themselves up and heading toward the red lights flashing on the opposite side of the showroom. The smoke was horrible—and hot: it was like breathing in fire. People were choking, wheezing. I pulled my blouse up over my nose but that didn’t help at all. The floor felt wobbly, so I kicked off my pumps—I was afraid I’d break an ankle in those heels if I tripped—and the floor tiles under my feet were warm.
And then the shockwave hit us.
[Due to features of the North Tower’s construction, the force of the plane’s impact between Floors 96 and 98 had primarily traveled down the length of building before encountering the foundation and reflecting back up.]
Everyone was thrown to the ground and everything went black. The air was full of smoke and fire; it was shooting up through the emergency stairwell and the air conditioning vents and was just everywhere. There were people trying to scream all around us but no one could get their breath; all you could hear was coughing and the roar of fire—so loud it actually hurt, like someone was jamming fingers in your ears. Somehow Raj got me and Ray back on our feet and said, “Come on, we’ve got to find another emergency exit. There’s one on the other side of the building.” We all linked hands and Raj started pulling us through the crowd.
You couldn’t see a foot in all the smoke, and everyone was milling about, running into one another, knocking each other down…but no one was really panicking just yet. I kept hearing people say it was a bomb—somebody had set off a bomb somewhere below us, maybe in the elevator. That both terrified me but, oddly enough, calmed me down at the same time. I remembered the first World Trade Center bombing, in ’93. I was in grade school when that happened, and I’d done a research paper on it. As a result of that disaster, the Towers both had gotten these brandnew fire alarms and warning systems. The bomb obviously hadn’t gone off on our floor, at least, so as horrifying as the idea of being in a hundred-story building where something had just exploded beneath us was, I knew that if we made it to an unblocked emergency stairwell, we’d get out safely. It didn’t matter if one of the stairwells was blocked—there were supposed to be exits all around the floor. We’d be fine. I was scared to death, but I kept telling myself, “They planned for this. It’ll be okay.”
In the lobby outside, though, the smoke and heat were even worse than in the showroom. It was like an oven; there were even little glowing flakes of ash blowing around, and we had to keep our hands over our eyes so we wouldn’t get ash in them. My eyes were burning so bad, though, I just kept them shut. You couldn’t see anyway. I had my suit’s handkerchief over my mouth but it was just a flimsy little decorative thing; it did nothing to filter out the smoke. My lungs felt like they were full of burning dust. Every time I would cough I tasted blood.
But we made it to a corner where the smoke, for some reason, wasn’t all that bad. We could at least catch our breath. There were some men there, crouching down to get below the smoke. They all had their cellphones out and were trying to call 911 or the police. One of them said, “A plane? A fucking plane hit us?!” and I tugged at Raj’s shoulder, telling him what I’d heard. He had his own cellphone to his ear. I started digging for mine in my jacket, but then the smoke closed in and Raj said, “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here now.”
We linked hands again and Raj led us back into the smoke. We were close to the elevators and that’s where most of the smoke was coming from. The elevator doors were all blown out and there were flames gushing out of them. It was so hot I started to feel faint but I slapped myself across the face to keep awake, keep walking. If I got separated from Raj and Ray I wouldn’t have any idea where to go. We were shoving our way through the crowd when up ahead of us somebody shouted, “The stairs are on fire—shut the door, shut the door!” and the people around us started surging back. Now they were panicking. All the exits were blocked. We were suffocating and we were being baked alive.
Raj got us turned around before we got caught in the stampede and started leading us back toward the conference room but a man with a burnt face and a fire extinguisher—empty—ran into us, screaming, “Don’t go down there, everything’s burning—we got to go up, get higher!”
“Where?” Raj gasped. “Is there a clear stairwell anywhere?” But the man was already gone.
Raj kept pulling us and somehow we ended up in the ballroom again. It was just as smoky and crowded but the room was so much bigger it seemed a little easier to breathe. I saw the guy from Schwab lying in a corner, his head pillowed on his thousand-dollar suit jacket, coughing so hard it sounded like he was strangling. It looked like he’d been by the elevators when they exploded. There were suits and techies and wait-staff banging around and everyone—I mean everyone—had a cellphone clamped to their ear. I finally pulled mine out of my jacket and speed-dialed the first number that came to mind: my mother.
I didn’t think I’d get through, but I did, though the signal was weak. Mom answered immediately: “Cressy, what’s happening in New York?! The TV just said an airplane hit the World Trade Center—where are you?”
“I’m right above it,” I said. “It hit below us, I guess.”
“Oh my god, are you all right?—is everyone all right?” She started babbling and crying and I could barely hear her with all the noise around me.
“I’m all right, mom,” I told her. “I don’t know if we’re trapped up here or what but they’re gonna come get us soon.” I told her, “I love you! Everything’s gonna be okay.”
One of the bigwigs I saw earlier was trying to get everybody quieted down. The man with the burnt face was next to him talking on his cellphone and I remembered then that I’d seen the two together earlier; they were both representatives from the same security firm, I believe. “We need to get up higher,” he yelled just like before. “The plane hit somewhere in the nineties and it looks like all the stairs are blocked below us, so we have to go up, you understand? We have to go up to get away from this smoke—get to the roof. They’re gonna have to land helicopters to get us out of here. Go up, get to the roof.”
There was a stairway somewhere outside the ballroom that went upstairs to 107, the second floor of the restaurant. Ray said he knew where it was; we’d actually passed it, twice, but didn’t see it because so many people were pushing and shoving their way up those stairs like cattle in a chute, climbing over each other. Raj tried to lead us over there but it was a horrible mess. A woman was trying to keep everyone calm and orderly but no one was listening. Everybody was panicking by now and the stairs were completely blocked up. There were people on the floor and the others were stepping on them, kicking them out of the way. It was unbearably hot and the smoke was like acid in my eyes. The elevator doors were just a few yards away and there were bright orange cinders in the air. I felt like I was going to pass out again.
“Here,” Raj said after he tugged us back toward the ballroom. He handed Ray and me wads of paper napkins that he’d soaked in water. We plastered them over our noses and mouths like he had and breathing became a little easier. “Fuck this—we can just go up the emergency stairs,” he said.
“But that’s where the fire is, you idiot!” Ray snarled.
“They’re blocked below us,” Raj explained, “but they’re clear above. We just need to go up one floor—we can hold our breath that long. Or do you want to get trampled into the carpet down there?”
I’ll admit, none of us—nobody there whatsoever—was thinking straight. This was a completely stupid idea. Just…stupid. But I saw the people literally fighting their way up the restaurant stairs, punching and kicking, and I thought, I can do it, I can hold my breath and run up just one flight of stairs. Ray kept saying “This is crazy, you’re fucking crazy, Raj,” but we started pushing against the crowd toward the nearest stairwell.
We weren’t the only people who’d had that idea: there was a knot of others at the stairwell, too—booth monkeys like us. The door was open and smoke and ash were billowing in. It was impossible to see inside. Just smoke and a dull orange glow from below and the grinding sound of metal breaking. A man in a green CISCO jacket was the “leader,” the person getting the crowd ready. “On three!” he shouted. “One, two, three!” and the clump of people, who were all holding hands, too, began to run into the stairwell, vanishing into the smoke. Raj grabbed the hand of the last woman in line and we plunged in as well.
It was like jumping into the stairwell that goes straight down to hell. The heat was murderous and you couldn’t breathe at all because the heat would literally ignite your lungs and you couldn’t open your eyes or they’d bake in your skull. You just had to close your eyes and make sure you kept hold of the hand in front of you and the hand behind you and you kept one shoulder to the wall so you knew when you’d reached the landing and the stairs changed direction. It was so horribly loud: all you could hear was this monstrous roaring below. Oh God, oh God, I prayed, just let me make it to the next floor. Just the next floor.
I made it to the landing and Raj was squeezing my hand so hard it ached and somehow…that’s when Ray’s hand slipped from mine.
We were all drenched in sweat and his hand just slid right out of my grasp. I heard him make a gagging sound behind me and I almost opened my mouth to scream for him, or my eyes to see, but I couldn’t, I knew I couldn’t. If I did…I would die. He was just behind me, though: he just had to keep going up, keep his hand on the guardrail. He would make it if he just kept moving. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.
The only way I knew we’d made it out onto the 107th floor was the noise of people suddenly coughing and screaming all around me again, and the heat and smoke were a little less horrible. I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t see anything through the tears and the burning, and Raj was right there, asking me, “Where’s Ray? What happened to Ray?”
“He let go,” I choked. “But he was right behind me!”
There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, no, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate, and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door but Raj said, “Stop it, goddamnit, I got him! I got him!”
And then Raj just disappeared.
One second he was there, the next…gone.
One of the men at the door went in after him—I guess they thought he’d gone back into the stairwell for Ray. We all heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?!”—and then the…the worms came through the door.
Well, they looked like worms. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. And covered with ash—there was ash all over them, like they’d come out of the fire…and I think I even saw one of them still burning.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Two of them whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say anything—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door! There’s more of them!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. Hard. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.”
I was shoved aside and two boys in black-and-white waiters’ uniforms came through the smoke carrying a metal desk. They threw it up against the door but the…the worms—or something—on the other side were still pounding, pounding so hard it sounded like someone was using a jackhammer on the door. People were standing on each side of the desk holding the door shut while the waiters and some others went back and forth dragging dining tables and chairs behind them, heaping them up in front of the door and I just stood there, watching. Numb. “Get out of here if you ain’t helping,” someone said to me, so I just…wandered away into the crowd.
People immediately started asking me, “What was that? What’s going on here?” but I couldn’t tell them anything. What had just happened? Where was Ray? And Raj? I’d know Ray only a few days, but I’d known Raj since the day I interviewed at InSoc. And now they were… gone? What, just like that? I kept seeing the worms in the smoke and how they’d latched on to that man by the door—they must’ve had claws or mouths in their tips, because they just locked onto him. They pulled him away so fast I don’t think he even had an idea what was going on. I was sobbing for breath and every gulp of smoke I swallowed seemed to go straight to my head. I couldn’t think. Everything was just a hot grey blur. I was going to pass out and I didn’t care. The crowd was so thick, if I went out, the pressure of their bodies would keep me upright until I snapped out of it.
“To the windows!” I heard then. “They’re breaking the windows!” And shattering. We were on the restaurant’s main floor: there were windows all around us. Windows on the World, right? People had taken up chairs and tables and were smashing them against the diamond panes but the diamond was too tough to crack. They didn’t even make a scratch. But something was shattering. “Over here!” I heard. One wall, the windows were still glass, and they’d knocked them all out to let in air.
[Almost all of the glass windows in WTC 1 and 2 had been replaced with structural diamond at the same time that the diamond ultrastructure had been added to the Towers in 1987, but New York City municipal safety codes mandated that any building that adopted unbreakable diamond windows after commercial SD production began in 1980 must still have at least 10% of its windows made of breakable glass to allow for escape.]
The whole crowd surged toward the wall where the windows had been busted out, and it carried me along We could hear wind howling and the smoke thinned a little, but we were still packed in like crackers in a box. Millionaires, billionaires, waiters, waitresses, janitors—you couldn’t tell one from the other in the smoke and the darkness. I watched an older man in a fancy suit struggling to help a pair of girls who I think were trade journalists behind him but they were both burned pretty badly and kept slipping to the ground. I…stopped thinking. I pushed and pushed into the crowd—no clue where I was going, I just wanted away from the stairwells. I kept hearing “Keep the doors shut! They’re coming in!” behind me people were trying to pick up tables and chairs and desks to pile up in front of the doors, and made the rest push even harder toward the windows. There were people screaming and gasping because they were being squashed. I was jammed in so tightly I could hardly breathe. I hadn’t even gotten ten feet from where I’d been.
Suddenly, the crowd sort of broke around me and I saw a woman being carried between two men who were shouting for everyone to get out of their way: her blouse was completely soaked in blood and it looked like one of her breasts had just been…torn off. Torn. Off. I just stared. “Move,” the men said. “One of those things bit her.”
I turned around to try for the windows again but I tripped over a man—a young black Muslim guy in a waiter’s uniform—who had bundled up a tablecloth into a prayer rug and was kneeling next to a giant potted plant, praying and sobbing. People couldn’t see him and they were kicking him, stomping on him, but he kept praying and praying, pressing his head to the floor.
I was pushed into a table near him and I managed to crawl under it. All I could see now were legs kicking and shuffling. The Muslim kid was right there, next to me. I reached out and tried to pull him to me. “Get under here—it’s safer.”
He looked up at me and I reached out and grabbed the edge of his tablecloth prayer rug and tried to pull it toward me. “Get under here,” I said. “You’re gonna get trampled!” He got the idea after another tug and jumped forward under the table. His rug vanished into the forest of legs instantly. As soon as I got him under the table he asked me, “Do you have a cellphone, miss? Please, can I call my family?”
I handed him the phone and then I just lay there, curled up in a ball, with my face on the carpeting, choking for breath. We’re good as dead, I kept thinking. How’re we going to get to the roof if the stairwells are full of fire and…worms? I remembered seeing an old man in a wheelchair downstairs, with a tube under his nose and an oxygen tank strapped to the back of the chair. Was he still down there? Right then, I would’ve ripped the oxygen tube right off of his face just to take one real breath.
I could hear the boy talking to someone on my phone in, I don’t know, Arabic or Swahili or something. He could barely speak; he kept coughing and sobbing for breath. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old.
And then the real screaming began.
There was…not exactly an explosion—like a slow-motion explosion. Like the sound of a bulldozer knocking down a shed. There was wood splintering and metal tearing, and then…this shrill howling. Louder than the screaming—louder than anything. It was so loud even under the table, even with people packed in all around me, it hurt my ears and made my teeth hurt and it made my head spin. It was like that weird electric buzz that locusts [cicadas] make, or every cricket on earth chirping at the same time. When he heard the sound, the Muslim boy’s black skin turned grey as ash and he dropped my phone. He hugged his knees to his chest and started repeating something, over and over and over again. It sounded like “Allaseef, allaseef, allaseef.”
[The boy was saying the Arabic word “Al-Azif.” It is doubtful that he was referring to the Al-Azif, the “holy book” of Cthulhu cultists and Azifist terrorists. More likely, he was using it in a colloquial fashion: even today in northern Africa and the Middle East, it is common for Arabic-speaking peoples to use “Al-Azif” to refer to the sound of night insects, which folklore holds to be the shrieking of the djinn, the demons of the deserts.]
The legs by the table started thrashing around; people were fighting just to move—and over it all, that horrible high-pressure squeal that just kept on and on. I couldn’t even hear screaming anymore, just that sound, and the floor shaking like the building was collapsing. The table we were under jumped up from us as somebody grabbed it and next thing you know I was being trampled under all these feet.
Everything next is a blur. I can’t say it has any accuracy at all, because I was lying on the floor most of the time, half-unconscious from being unable to breathe and from being kicked in the head a few times, but….Take it as you will.
I looked up and saw men flying through the air, tumbling, flailing. I saw one of them hit the ceiling, smashing the tiles next to a chandelier and then…just his legs were hanging down. More people flying, like they were being thrown. The Muslim boy was gone. I tried to get up by grabbing someone’s belt and pulling myself up when—WHUMP—a man landed right in front of me. Part of a man. He was still alive, his face nothing but blood, his suit half-torn from his body, but his legs were both gone. He was squirting blood and was crying, trying to say something but I couldn’t hear him. He grabbed my hand and held onto it and closed his eyes—I think he died—but his hand was locked on mine like a handcuff. I had to pry his fingers loose once I got my wits back.
Someone next to me screamed, “I got it! I got it, it’s down!” but then the floor jumped under me and threw me down and people fell on top of me. I heard a roar like a really strong wind blowing through a window and felt the most unbearable heat envelop me—I could feel it blistering my face, and my hands. The people who’d landed on me were thrashing and screaming and I could smell burning meat. I reached up to push them aside and felt slick, burnt flesh slipping off under my hand. It was so awful, I puked all over myself. The people lying on me weren’t moving anymore. I shoved them off of me and somehow made it to my knees, and…I could see them. They were all blackened and burnt, some of them screaming and curled up into little balls. All around me were burnt people. It…looked like they’d been hit by a flamethrower.
And then three men carrying a table in front of them like a shield appeared, backing out of the smoke. I could see flames flashing on the other side of the table. They stopped a few feet from me and put the table down, still holding it up like a shield, and they all crouched behind it.
“What is it?” I cried. “What’s going on?”
“Keep your head down—it spits fire!” one guy yelled back. He was wearing a chef’s jacket that was covered in blood and ash, and he held a huge carving knife in one hand. “Go to the windows—we’re trying to keep it back. Go toward the windows!”
I turned in the direction he was pointing and started crawling away. Crawling over burnt people writhing in agony. They were begging for someone to help them, and I wanted to help them, but….I could see a wall of people emerging from the smoke, people with overturned tables in front of them. A woman in a bright yellow pantsuit was picking the flower pots out of a decorated fountain and hurling them into the smoke. There was a flash of purple and she was pulled over the table onto the floor. The worm was huge, twice the size of the ones I’d seen at the door, and it wrapped itself around her like a python.
Something big moved in the smoky dark behind me. It sounded like a truck being dragged across the floor. I finally got to my feet and ran a few paces and threw myself into a huge potted rubber tree. Behind me, I could hear another whoosh of flame and heat on my back. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the chef ‘s table was on fire but the men were nowhere.
I crawled into the plant and just…sat there, behind the trunk. For a few minutes. Watching. More worms came out of the smoke, biting into the crowd. Tables and chairs were thrown. Something gigantic was in the smoke, where all the worms were coming from: when it moved, the everything shook, and that noise. It was moving toward the crowd of people pressed up against the windows. The smoke suddenly parted and I saw this thing…a huge, deep red thing: it looked like a crane-arm—I mean, a mechanical crane, with all these joints, and there was a gigantic red worm coiled around it, and the end of the arm a big round ball of…it looked like bubblegum. Honestly. A big wad of someone’s chewed-up bubblegum stuck to the end of the arm. As I watched the bubblegum opened up like a flower, petals peeling back, and then whoosh—it blew a gigantic cloud of fire right into the crowd. People fell. Worms came crawling out of the smoke to drag them back toward the thing in the smoke. Then it slid forward again and the shaking was so bad I fell out from behind the tree.
I saw bodies being flung through the air again. Pieces. A hand still wearing a thousand-dollar Rolex landed in the plant next to me. I could smell the foulest, most sickening stench I’ve ever smelled. I gagged but I had nothing left to throw up. I just turned and threw myself into the crowd.
After the thing had sprayed the crowd with flames, a lot of people ran away from the windows toward the other side of the restaurant, I think. Somebody next to me was saying that the kitchen was safe, everybody run for the kitchen, and I was kicked to the floor again as the crowd surged that way. All I could feel were people’s shoes kicking me in the head, the chest, everywhere. This is it, I thought. I’m going to be trampled to death. Better than being burnt alive, I guess—or being hauled off by the worms. But that saved my life. Being on the ground, I mean—because there was this loud boom, like something had exploded above me in the crowd, and suddenly I was sprayed with blood and bodies just fell all around me. I have no idea what happened. My nose was bleeding and my head was ringing and all you could hear that goddamned locust screeching the thing was making, so I lay there. Waiting.
But I did notice it was easier to breathe now. I sat up after a moment and looked around and there—it was just a few feet away from me—was a broken window, with a bunch of people clinging onto the frame, hanging halfway out of the window, holding on for dear life. Smoke was boiling out around them. There were still people crowding by the windows and now I heard a loud, wet slapping sound coming nearer. Screams. The thing was coming closer.
So I picked up a big metal vase that was rolling around on the floor and got up and started beating my way toward the nearest open window.
I just…started hitting people. Knocking them out of my way. They were out of their minds with fear—I was out of my mind. Everyone was. No one knew what to do; they were just surging around left and right. But I had to get them out of the way so I could get to a window. I didn’t look at them, didn’t look at anything around me: I just swung the vase at anyone that came near me and kept pushing toward the window. Every now and then a gust of wind would stir the smoke. It felt like heaven, like a nice cold towel pressed to my blistered face—and I could breathe. I could see flashes of blue sky but all I wanted was to breathe. I smashed in someone’s face with the metal vase and there—I was almost there—
And that’s when the window went dark. I saw something red and spiky, dark red plates, and then this harsh, electronic voice—honest to god, it sounded like one of the robots from that old show my dad used to like, Battlestar Gallactica, I think—saying, “Hold on to me. Do not let go.” And then the window was open again, and one of the women who had been holding onto the window frame was gone.
Oh my God, it’s outside, too, I thought, and that woman had just jumped to get away from it.
Of course, later on, I saw the pictures of people jumping from the North Tower. When the thing came out of the stairwell or wherever it came from, and everyone was pushed up against the windows, a lot of people just…jumped. To get away from the thing. They didn’t want to die like that. Better a long fall and then—poof. It’s over. Anything’s better than being eaten alive. Or torn to shreds. Burnt alive.
If I could get to a window…what was I going to do? I was going to jump, too. I was. I remember thinking that so clearly. I couldn’t face what was in the smoke. I was smashing a metal vase into people’s faces—innocent people’s faces—just so I could get away from that thing.
And I made it. I made it to the window. I don’t know how, though I remember climbing over several unmoving bodies. There were six people crowding the frame, hanging out, screaming, “Come here, get us!” Was there a rescue effort underway? It didn’t matter—I could feel a bit of fresh air blowing in between them, so I threw myself at the window, sucking up the air by the lungful. My God, it was heavenly.
But someone was pushing me away. I swung the vase at him but he blocked it with his elbow and shouted, pointing, “Go to the next window, the one on the left. They’re going from window to window that way.” He was saying this to all of the people who were trying to climb up into the windowframe, trying to keep them back or stop them from mobbing the window—but then he was gone. I think he had been pushed out of the window.
I instantly awoke from whatever daze I was in. There was a rescue attempt happening! Again I heard, over all that noise, a loud, mechanical voice saying, “Hold on. Do not let go of me.” It was somewhere to the left of me. So I kicked some old man in a fancy suit away from me and pushed toward the next window, pushed and pushed, swinging that vase at anybody in my way. Just as I was going to swing at her, the girl in front of me was jerked away into the crowd. I don’t know what happened to her. She was just there, and then she wasn’t.
But she was the last person in my way. I made it to that window. I hurled myself at it.
Everything becomes crystal clear now. This I remember perfectly. When the wind hit my face it blew all the smoke and craziness out of my head. It was so cold but, dear God, I could breathe again. I was looking down the side of the Tower, straight down toward the ground. I was half-hanging out of the window; my legs were caught on something, or else I would’ve just tumbled out. There were flashing lights everywhere on the ground below—fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, you name it—and the sheer height….Everything below was reduced to tiny little specks of light. Directly below, at the bottom of the tower, there were little black shapes moving around, and some that weren’t moving. And there was the flower bed I’d almost tumbled into, the streets, crowds of people beyond the firetrucks and ambulance—firemen, policemen, onlookers, I couldn’t tell: they were just smears and dots of color. None of it looked real, but still, vertigo hit me right between the eyes. I was still holding the vase, but I let go of it. It fell so fast it just…disappeared. And then I let go of whatever I was holding onto, and I started to slip after it.
I closed my eyes and just let my body go limp. It would be quick. It would only take a couple of seconds for me to fall all that way….
But someone grabbed the back of my blouse and pulled me back, hard. My ribs caught on the windowsill and almost broke. I was acting entirely on instinct at this point, so I got a hand on the window frame and pushed myself up. I managed to get one leg out the window so I could just wrap my body around the frame, holding on so tight I thought my knuckles were going to pop through the skin.
But I could breathe! And I could see again. There were people wedged in all the broken windows, shadows flapping past them, and then I saw them: the Yuggothians. They were everywhere, filling the sky above the blaze below. Some of them were diving in and out of the smoke, but most of them were flying up to the windows and grabbing people. As I watched, one of them flapped up to the farthest window with people in it, at the corner of the building. It fell away from the window with a person, an older guy, clutched tight in its legs, flapping its wings hard to get away from the building. As soon as it was clear, another Yugg flew up to the next window down and the same thing happened.
“Here! HERE! Over here!” I was screaming at the aliens—but everyone else was screaming the same thing, even though it was clear the aliens were following a strict plan. Oh, God, please let them get me, I prayed. Behind me, I could hear another roar of flame and felt the heat singe the back of my neck and there was a terrible THUD that made the entire building shake. Below me I heard the most horrendously loud cracking sound and I swear the building tilted. Diamond cracked and fell away in big chunks—one of them almost hit me as it was falling from above. Behind me, the thing’s buzzing suddenly stopped and I thought, Is it gone? Did someone kill it? I looked into the room but I couldn’t see anything for all the smoke and there were people shoving up against me, arms reaching out the windows, desperate….I tried to kick at them with the leg I had inside but they were pressed so tightly against the window I couldn’t move. I could’ve thrown myself from the ledge right then and would’ve just hung there, because my one leg was pinned.
Then a man in the window one down from me—one of those billionaires I’d seen below not even half an hour ago—screamed and pushed himself off the window frame. He fell, screaming all the way. I watched him plunge right through the cloud of aliens circling below. A few of them folded their wings and dived after him, but I don’t think they were agile enough to catch him. In a second he was just a dark speck among all the specks below.
“Oh, dear God, no,” the man clutching the other side of my window frame said. “No! No. NO!” And then he was gone. He had thrown himself out the window, too. And there were screaming people battering each other to follow him. A terribly burned girl vaulted through the window as if she’s been thrown, and behind her came others, drenched in sweat and blood, all fighting to get through.
“What are you doing?!” I was screaming at the top of my lungs. “The aliens are helping us!” But people were leaping out of the windows on both side of me. The Yuggs flapping up toward them grabbed for them—I saw them actually catch one guy—but I saw a woman hit one of the aliens as she fell. I don’t know if she killed it or broke its wings or what, but they just folded up together and tumbled away. I got my right leg free and began kicking at the people near me—
And I felt something hot and…pulpy, like a rotten banana—soft and mushy—curl around my ankle then there was a blinding pain behind my knee. I screamed and lurched back, away from the pain, and I slipped out of the window.
For an eternity—but probably no more than half a second—I saw nothing but sky. Sky and the hard white edge of the Tower above me. I felt cold, clean air all around me. I didn’t feel like I was falling—I felt like I was flying, like I was falling up into the sky….And then—BAM!—everything turned upside-down as I smacked into the side of the Tower. Hard. Hard enough to break bones. My back had hit a knuckle in the diamond ultrastructure and I cracked all the ribs on my right side. I was lucky I didn’t break my back. But there I was, hanging upside down against the side of the North Tower, almost blind with pain, seeing only flickering shapes and colors above…below me. I saw one of my shoes tumble past my face—everything was happening in slow-motion—and I looked up.
One of the worms had my right leg. It was coiled around my ankle and had bitten into my calf just behind the knee: there was a mouth, or maybe a ring of sharp hooks, at the end of it. I could see blood on my skin and felt flesh ripping. I don’t know how I stayed awake with all that pain, but….I could see it tugging me back up toward the window. A man was in the windowframe stabbing at it with a chunk of broken glass in his hand, slicing it open—orange blood was spurting from it—and I just watched him do it with the most complete…detachment I’ve ever felt in my life. He raised the chunk of glass to take another stab and there was a purple blur and he was gone. A young African-American girl in a waitress’s uniform immediately took his place and threw herself out of the window.
She’s going to hit me! I thought as I saw her arcing down toward me, and….I will never forget her face. I’d never see such a look of utter horror in my life. Her eyes were blank, mindless. She had her hair done up in thick black dreadlocks, but they weren’t dreadlocks—her hair was just matted like that with blood. She had her arms stretched out in front of her and they were all bloody or black with ash.
And then she stopped. In mid-air, she stopped. And just like that—so fast I didn’t even see the worm that grabbed her—she jerked back up through the window and all I could see in the window then was worms and red, boiled-looking flesh and it was all spilling out towards me.
But then a shadow fell on me and I heard the leathery whop, whop, whop of a Yuggothian’s wings and then I felt all these bony legs fold around me, claws clamping down painfully on my arms and legs, and the Yugg’s voicebox saying, “Hold on. Do not let go.” I instinctively wrapped my fingers around one of the legs and held on for dear life.
The Yugg tried to fall away from the building, maybe thinking the worm would pull loose—but it didn’t. It still had an iron grip on my leg. My hip dislocated and it felt like my knee exploded. I could literally see the bones popping and splitting beneath the skin. Then there was a bright flash of light and the pain shot straight up into my head and burst like fireworks and then everything went black.
Everything I know about what happened next came from the Yugg who saved me. He told me what happened once we were safely away from the building and I’d woken up.
The worm hadn’t only bitten my leg, but had started sending some kind of…roots up into my leg as well, digging into the bones and the muscle. The Yugg saw this, somehow, and used a “cutting tool” of some kind—something from its toolbelt—and sawed my right leg off at mid-thigh, above the “contaminated region.” After my leg was separated, the Yugg simply fell away from the building, opened its wings, and glided away.
I came to about halfway there, awakened by the pain as it was tying an improvised tourniquet around my thigh. My face was crunched up against the alien’s carapace, and I didn’t want to open my eyes. The pain in my body was incredible. Sickening. I could actually feel the blood spurting from where the alien had sawed off my leg. The Yugg’s shell felt like rough plastic beneath my cheek and I remember feeling something pulsing, really fast, beneath it—one of its hearts, I guess—and it smelled like burnt cotton candy and smoke. I don’t know how it realized I was awake, but as soon as I was the Yugg told me about my leg and then said it was taking me to Liberty State Park over on the New Jersey side of the river, where there were ambulances and EMTs waiting.
[When the Yuggothians had volunteered to rescue Humans trapped above the impact zones in both towers, they had demanded that a triage center for rescued persons be set up across the Bay in Jersey City. The Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and the Port Authorities of New York and New Jersey quickly designated Liberty State Park as the location and EMT services were dispatched. For a more comprehensive account of the OEM and Port Authorities’ actions, please see pages 158-175 and 210-240.]
The alien landed in the park and immediately I was surrounded by EMTs. They put me on a gurney and started an IV, then hauled me off toward the nearest ambulance. I could just see the Yugg leap back up into the air as another one was landing with a person clutched in its limbs.
As they were loading me into the ambulance, the South Tower collapsed. The back of the ambulance was pointed toward Manhattan and I saw it all. I hadn’t even know a plane had hit the South Tower too until then. For a second I could see both Towers still standing in the distance, great black plumes of smoke trailing from them, the little black dots of Yuggothians swarming around them, and then there was a soft, far-off rumble like heat thunder. “Oh my fucking God!” the one EMT said, and everybody just…stopped what they were doing, and stood there. The sides of the tower above the long gash where the plane hit blew out and in the smoke and flame and dust you could see—at least, I thought I saw—a huge purple mass, writhing and churning. The Tower fell straight down into a gigantic cloud of grey dust.
Everyone was immobile for a moment, frozen. Just…staring at that grey cloud billowing up across the river. No one made a sound. Then they all sprang back to life as one. The EMTs slammed the doors of the ambulance and we started toward the hospital. One of the guys in the ambulance with me was asking me my name and address and what day it was, but the other one was crying and swearing viciously in Spanish as he worked on my leg. The pain was so intense it was making my vision go dark and I knew I was going to pass out again. But right before I did, I heard the ambulance driver shout, “Jesus Christ, they say that thing in the South Tower is still alive.”
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