Dead Man's Footsteps (9 page)

11 SEPTEMBER 2001

Ronnie had been running for maybe a minute when day changed into night, as if there had been an instant, total eclipse of the sun. Suddenly he was stumbling through a choking, stinking void, with the sound of thunder in his ears, thunder that was rising from the ground.

It was as if someone had emptied a billion tons of foul-smelling, bitter-tasting black and grey flour into the sky directly above him. It stung his eyes, filled his mouth. He swallowed some of it and coughed it back up, immediately swallowing more. Grey shapes like ghosts swirled past him. He stubbed his toe painfully on something – a fire hydrant, he realized – as he tripped over the damned thing and fell forward, hard, on to the ground. Ground that was moving. It was vibrating, quaking, as if some giant monster had awakened and was breaking free from the belly of the earth itself.

Have to get out of here. Away from here.

Someone trod on his leg and crashed down on top of him. He heard a woman’s voice, cursing and apologizing, and smelled a fleeting whiff of fine perfume. He wriggled free of her, tried to stand up, and immediately someone slammed into his back, hurtling him forward again.

Hyperventilating in panic, he scrambled to his feet and saw the woman, looking like a grey snowman clutching a pair of court shoes, get up. Then a huge fat man with mad hair crashed into him, cursing, punching him out of the way, and ran stumbling on to be swallowed by the fog.

Then he was knocked over again.  Got to get up. Get up. Get up!

Memories of reading about people being crushed to death in panicking crowds swirled in his mind. He struggled to his feet again, turned, saw more snowy figures lumbering out of the gloom. One knocked him sideways. He searched through the oncoming legs, shoes, bare feet, for his bag and his briefcase, saw them, ducked down, grabbed them both, then was barged over on to his back again.

‘Fuck you!’ he screamed.

A stiletto heel passed over his head like a spiky shadow.

Then suddenly there was silence.

The rumbling stopped. The thunder stopped. The ground wasn’t vibrating any more. The sirens stopped too.

For an instant, he felt elation. He was OK! He was alive!

People were walking past more slowly now, more orderly. Some were limping. Some were holding on to each other. Some had glass in their hair, like ice crystals. Blood was the only colour in an otherwise grey and black world.

‘This is not happening,’ a male voice near him said. ‘This is so not happening.’

Ronnie could see the North Tower and then, to the right, a hill of twisted, lopsided wreckage, rubble, window frames, broken cars, burning vehicles, broken bodies lying motionless on the stained ground. Then he saw sky where the South Tower should have been.

Where it had been.

The Tower was gone.

It had been there minutes ago and now it wasn’t there any more. He blinked, to check it wasn’t some kind of trick, an optical illusion, and more of the dry stuff got caught in his eyes, making them water.

He was shaking, shaking all over. But mostly he was shaking deep inside.

Something caught his eye, drifting down, flapping, rising for a moment – caught in an updraught – then continuing its descent again. A piece of fabric. It looked like one of those felt cloths you got when you bought a new laptop, to stop the screen being scratched when you closed it.

He watched it fall all the way to the ground like a dead butterfly, landing just yards in front of him, and for an instant, amid all that was going on in his mind, he wondered if it was worth picking up, because he had long ago lost the one that had come with his laptop.

More people trudged past. An endless line, all in black and white and grey, like an old war movie or documentary showing refugees on the march. He thought he heard a phone ring. His own? In panic, he checked his pocket. His phone was still there, thank God! He pulled it out, but it wasn’t ringing and there was no missed-call sign. He tried Lorraine again, but there was no signal, just a hollow beep-beep-beep, which was drowned out after a few seconds by the chop of a helicopter right above his head.

He did not know what to do. His thoughts were all jumbled. People were injured and he was OK. Maybe he should try to help people. Maybe he’d find Donald. They must have evacuated the building. They would have got everyone out before it came down, for sure. Donald was back there somewhere, maybe wandering around looking for him. If they could find each other, they could go to a café or a hotel and still have their meeting …

A fire truck blasted past him, almost running him down, then was gone in a blaze of red flashing lights and sirens and honking.

‘Bastards!’ he shouted. ‘You fuckers, you almost killed—’

A group of black women caked grey, one carrying a satchel, one rubbing the back of her dreadlocked head, glided towards him.

‘Excuse me?’ Ronnie said, stepping into their path.

‘Just keep going,’ one of them replied.

‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘Don’t go that way!’

More emergency vehicles blasted past. The ground crunched. Paper snow beneath his feet, Ronnie realized.  The paperless society, he thought cynically.  So much for the bloody paperless society.  The whole road was covered in grey paper. The sky was thick with falling sheets, zigzagging down, plain, typed, shredded, every shape and size you could imagine. Like a billion filing cabinets and waste bins had tipped their contents from a cloud.

He stopped for a moment, trying to think clearly. But the only thought that came into his head was,  Why today? Why fucking today?

Why did this shit have to happen today?

New York was under some kind of terrorist attack, that much was blindingly obvious. A dim voice inside his head told him he should be scared, but he wasn’t, he was just fucking angry.

He marched forward, crunching on paper, past one bewildered person after another coming from different directions. Then, as he approached the mayhem of the plaza, he was stopped by two NYPD cops. The first was short with cropped fair hair; his right hand was resting on the butt of his Glock, while his left was holding a radio to his ear. He was shouting a report into it one moment and then listening the next. The other, much taller cop had shoulders like a padded-up footballer player, a pockmarked face and an expression that was part apologetic, part  don’t fuck with me, we’re all fucked enough.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the tall cop said. ‘You can’t go past here – we need the space right now.’

‘I have a business meeting,’ Ronnie said. ‘I – I – ’ he pointed – ‘I have to see—’

‘I think you’d better reschedule. I don’t think anyone’s meeting anyone right now.’

‘The thing is, I have a flight to the UK tonight. I really need—’

‘Sir – I think you’re gonna find your meeting and your flight have been cancelled.’

Then the ground began rumbling. There was a terrible cracking sound. The two cops turned in unison and looked up, straight up the silver-grey wall of the North Tower. It was moving.

OCTOBER 2007

The lift was moving. Abby felt the floor pressing against her feet. It was rising, jerkily, as if someone was hauling it up by hand. Then it stopped sharply. She heard a thud, following by the sloshing of liquid.

Shit.

Her boot had fallen over. Her latrine boot.

The lifted swayed suddenly, as if it had been given a massive push, and boomed into the side of the shaft, throwing her off her feet, against a wall, then slamming her on to the wet floor.  Jesus.

There was a massive bang on the roof. Something struck it with the force of a sledgehammer. The sound echoed, hurting her ears. There was another bang. Then another. As she tried to scramble to her feet, the lift lurched violently sideways, striking the shaft with such force she could feel the shockwave running through the steel walls. Then it tilted, throwing her across the small space, thumping her into the opposite wall.

Then another bang on the roof.

Christ, no.

Was he up there? Ricky? Trying to smash his way into the lift to get her?

It rose again a few inches, then swung wildly again. She whimpered in terror. Pulled out her phone, pressed the cursor. The light came on and she could see a small indent in the roof.

Then another bang and the indent grew larger. Dust motes swarmed crazily.

Then another bang. Another. Another. More dust.

Then silence. A long silence. A different sound now. A dull thudding. It was her heart. Pounding.  Boomf … boomf … boomf.

The roaring sound in her ears of her blood coursing. Like a wild ocean racing inside her.

The light on her phone went off. She pressed the cursor and it came back on again. She was thinking. Desperately thinking. What could she use as a weapon when he broke through? She had a canister of pepper spray in her bag, but that would only stall him for a few moments – maybe a couple of minutes if she could get it in his eyes. She needed something to knock him down.

Her boot was the only thing. She picked it up, aware of the wet, soft leather, and touched the Cuban heel. It felt reassuringly hard. She could conceal it behind her, wait until his face appeared, then swing it up. Surprise him.

Her brain was all over the place with questions. Did he know she was in here for sure? Had he been waiting for her on the staircase, then somehow stopped the lift when he realized she had taken it?

The silence continued. Just that fast thud of her heartbeat. Like a boxing glove pounding against a punchball.

Then through her fear she felt a flash of anger.

So close, so damned close!

So tantalizingly close to my dreams!

I have to get out of this. Somehow I have to get out of this!

Suddenly the lift began to rise slowly again, before stopping with another sharp jerk.

The grinding sound of metal against metal.

Then the angular tip of a crowbar screeched in through the crack between the doors.

SEPTEMBER 2007

The grinding whine of the winch. The rattle of the idling diesel of the R&K 24-Hour Rescue tow truck.

Lisa batted away a whole bloody cloud of flies. ‘Piss off!’ she shouted at them. ‘Just go away, will you!’

The rattle turned into a roar as the steel hawser tightened and the guy in the cab accelerated, giving more power to the winch.

She was intrigued to know what would happen next. To find out what the car was doing there in the first place. No one drove three klicks down a dirt track and then into a river by accident, MJ said. Then he’d added, ‘Not even a woman driver,’ for which he had received a kick on the shin from her.

One of the local Geelong cops who had turned up, the shorter, calmer of the two, told them the car had probably been used in a crime and then dumped. Whoever had put it here hadn’t reckoned on the drought causing the water level to drop so much.

A fly landed on her cheek. She slapped her face, but it was too fast for her. Time was different for flies, MJ had told her that once. One second to a human was like ten seconds to a fly. It meant that the fly saw everything as if in slow motion. It had all the time in the world to get away from your hand.

MJ knew all about flies. Not surprising, she thought, if you lived in Melbourne and liked to go out in the bush. You’d become an expert faster than you could ever have believed possible. They bred in dung, he had told her last time they went camping, which meant she would no longer eat anything once a fly had landed on it.

Lisa stared at the white cop car with its blue and white chequered band, and the white police van in the same livery, both with their racks of blue and red roof lights. There were two police divers in wet suits and flippers, masks on their heads, standing down below her in the shrubbery at the edge of the water, watching the taut steel hawser steadily rising out of the water.

But flies performed a service as well. They helped clear dead things away: birds, rabbits, kangaroos and humans too. They were some of Mother Nature’s little helpers. They just happened to have lousy table manners, such as vomiting on their food before eating it. All in all, they didn’t make great dinner guests, Lisa decided.

Perspiration from the heat was running down her face. MJ stood with one arm around her, the other holding a water bottle which they were sharing. Lisa had her arm around his waist, fingers tucked into his waistband, feeling the sweat in his damp T-shirt. Flies liked to drink human sweat, that was another nugget he had given her. Sweat didn’t have much protein in it, but it contained minerals they needed. Human sweat was the fly world equivalent of Perrier, or Badoit, or whatever bottled water floated your particular boat.

The river just ahead of where the hawser had entered became a sudden mass of whirlpools. It looked like it was boiling. Bubbles burst on the surface, turning to foam. The taller, more panicky officer kept shouting out instructions, which seemed unnecessary to Lisa, as everyone seemed to know what they needed to do. In his early forties, she guessed, he had brush-cut hair and an aquiline nose. Both he and his younger colleague wore regulation open-throat shirts with epaulettes and a woven Victoria Police shield on one sleeve, navy blue trousers and stout shoes. The flies were enjoying them too.

Lisa watched the rear end of a dark green saloon car breaking the surface, water tumbling off it, which she could hear above the roar of the winch and the bellow of the truck engine. She read the number plate, OPH 010, and the legend that was written beneath it:  VICTORIA ON THE MOVE.

How long had it been down there?

She wasn’t an expert on cars, but she knew a little about them. Enough to recognize that this was an older-model Ford Falcon, a good five or maybe even ten years old. Soon the rear windscreen appeared, then the roof. The paintwork was shiny from the water, but all the chrome had rusted. The tyres were almost flat, flapping on the arid, sandy soil as the car was hauled backwards up the steep slope. Water poured out from the empty interior through the door sills and the wheel arches.

It was an eerie sight, she thought.

After several minutes, the Falcon was finally up on the level ground, sitting motionless on its rims, tyres like black paunches. The hawser was slack now, with the tow-truck driver on his knees under the tailgate, unhooking it. The grinding sound of the winch had stopped and the tow-truck engine was silenced. There was just the steady splashing of the water pouring from the vehicle.

The two cops walked around it, peering warily in through the windows. The tall, panicky one had his gun hand on his gun butt, as if he expected someone to jump out of the car at any moment and challenge him. The shorter one saluted away some more flies. The bowerbirdyoo-hooed  again in the new silence.

Then the taller cop pressed the boot release button. Nothing happened. He tried again, exerting leverage on the lid at the same time. It lifted a few inches with a sharp screech of protest from its rusted hinges. Then he raised it all the way up.

And took a step back, in shock, as he smelled what was inside before he even saw her.

‘Oh, strewth,’ he said, turning away and gagging.