F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

“Yes-yes.” Goren looked annoyed. “Christ, I thought you wanted to know what happened in the wreckage.”

“I do. It’s just—”

“Well then, let’s get to it. I want this over and done with so I can get back to Alice.”

Jack sighed. So much film history . . . he’d have to let it go for now.

“Okay. I know the basics. You were part of a team of four—”

“Right. Alfieri, Lukach, and Ratner. Good guys, all of them.”

“And I know that Lukach called up and said you heard voices. ‘Experts’ later wrote that off as some acoustical trick, but I’ve got a feeling you’re going to tell me different.”

His expression was grim as he nodded. “Oh, yeah. Ohhhhh, yeah.”

3

“There!” Lukach said, his voice muffled by the half-face respirator. “I heard it again. Listen.”

Ernie tried but couldn’t hear much past the roaring in his ears.

What was wrong with him today? This was his fourth trip into the foundation of WTC-4 and he’d been fine the first three. But today . . .

Sweat oozed from every pore, soaking his hair under the hard hat, darkening his shirt, fogging his goggles. His heart pounded like a wild animal against the cage of his chest. He felt shaky inside and out, and didn’t seem to be able to draw a full breath. He fought the urge to pull off the respirator mask. The dust down here could be toxic.

Something else was toxic as well . . . something he couldn’t identify, couldn’t smell or touch, but he could sense it. It hadn’t been here yesterday, but sweet Jesus, it was here now.

Or maybe it was because they’d never been this deep—seventy feet below street level now. Like the towers, WTC-4, the nine-story building that had squatted next to the south tower, had six underground levels. No one had wanted to trust the weight of the Trade Center to the sediment and landfill at the site, so they’d excavated down to bedrock for the foundation. That’s where Ernie and the crew were now—level one, the very bottom.

He’d never had a panic attack, but he sure as hell felt panicky now.

Why?

It had started as soon as they’d reached this new search area. A little jittery at first, then building and building until . . .

“It’s coming from over there,” Lukach said, pointing to a pile of rubble. “And—damn! Turn off your lights.”

Alfieri and Ratner doused theirs along with Lukach, but Ernie left his on. He did not want to be in the dark down here. Not today.

“Hey, Goren,” Lukach said. “You deaf? Put it out.”

Ernie couldn’t tell them that, at age fifty-one, he was suddenly afraid of the dark, so he took a breath, held it, and hit the off switch.

Lukach’s voice floated out of the blackness. “See? See what I’m talking about? There’s light on the other side of that mound.”

Light? Any light would be welcome. Ernie squinted through his fogged goggles and saw it. Faint as could be, a dim, barely visible glow lit the upper edge of that pile.

“Got to be another team,” Ratner said.

“Yeah? Last I looked, that’s east of us, and we’re just about as far east as you can go in the foundation.”

“Then who’s there?” Alfieri said.

Lukach turned on his light. “Good question. Especially since there ain’t supposed to be any ‘there’ over there. Let’s go take a look.”

No-no-no, Ernie thought. Let’s not. Let’s not go near there. Let’s turn around and get back up to clean, pure sunshine.

But he couldn’t say that, because he couldn’t tell them why they shouldn’t go there. He didn’t know.

“Maybe we should wait for backup,” he said, holding back as the others moved ahead.

“ ‘Backup’?” Lukach said without turning. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Ernie forced himself to follow, but trailed a good dozen feet behind. When they reached the pile of crushed masonry and began to climb, he hung back, watching, waiting, trembling. He saw Lukach reach the top first and motion the others to join him. Ernie saw them pointing, heard them babbling but couldn’t understand what they were saying.

Finally Ratner turned and waved him up.

“C’mon, Ernie. Y’gotta see this. It’s some sort of tunnel.”

Tunnel? Tunnel to where? The way he was feeling, it had to be a straight shot to Hell.

Steeling himself, he made the climb. When he reached the top he saw what had excited them. Below, on the far side of the mound, near the floor, part of the foundation wall had fallen away, revealing an irregular opening, maybe half a dozen feet across. Light flickered from within.

The fires of Hell. No, not Hell . . . something worse.

What was he thinking? Where were these ideas coming from?

He tried to shake them off but couldn’t . . . right now he wanted nothing more than to turn and run. But he was part of the team. He couldn’t leave these guys.

“Let’s go,” Lukach said.

“No-no-no!” Ernie said. “We should get backup!”

“Fuck backup. I’m going down.”

With Ratner and Alfieri on his heels, Lukach quickly descended the far side of the pile and picked his way to the opening. When he reached it, he stopped and stared, then stepped through, shouting, “Hey!”

Ratner and Alfieri followed.

Raised voices echoed from the opening, one of them unfamiliar. Had they found someone?

Fighting the fear, he eased down the pile and crept to the opening. Every step was an effort. He felt as if he were struggling against a hurricane-force wind roaring through that opening. When he reached it he dropped to his knees and peeked around the corner.

4

“Next thing I saw was the ceiling of a hospital room.”

Oh, hell, Jack thought.

“That’s it?”

“That was it then. The doctors told me I’d been spewing word salad—that’s what they called it—for days. Now I could talk and make sense but I couldn’t answer their questions about what happened down there. I had a hole in my memory running from the instant I leaned in to take a look to that moment in the hospital.

“When they told me that the guys were dead, crushed in a cave-in, I cried. Later I figured that’s what I’d been afraid of. I sometimes get premonitions—little things, you know, like someone coming for a visit—and maybe what I was feeling was one of those, but scary because it involved death.”

“What did they think it was—shock-induced amnesia?”

He nodded. “Something like that. They said I was in what they called ‘a fugue state’ when they found me.”

Pissed, Jack rose from the uncomfortable boulder and brushed off the seat of his jeans as he paced about. This was looking like a major waste of time.

“Well, if you can’t remember, that brings up the question of why someone would try to off a guy who had amnesia.”

“Because my memories of that morning returned.”

Jack stopped and looked at him. “Why the hell didn’t you say so?”

“I’m saying so now. They sent me home on three head drugs that made me feel like crap, but I hung with them, hoping I’d get my memory back. I lived in East Meadow then. That’s a town on—”

“Long Island. I know. Go on.”

“Well, this detective from the city named Volkman kept coming around, asking me questions I couldn’t answer. He told me some people were saying an explosion had caused the cave-in that killed my buds and did I know anything about that, or had I seen any explosives, and so on.”

Something wrong there.

“He traveled all the way from Manhattan to chat with you?”

“Yeah. Lots of times.” Goren shrugged. “Maybe he had nothing better to do, maybe he was trying to make a name for himself. whatever, I couldn’t help him. Until . . .”