Thank you Jenjoremy for beta'ing. I can't overstate how much it means to me that you give up your time week after week (and now year after year) to help me post something readable out of the mess I send you. Thank you also Gredelina1 for holding my hand every time I need it.


Chapter Fifty-Three

Sam wanted to turn away, to hide from the sight in front of him, but his feet were frozen to the ground and his eyes fixed on the tower as it fell. It happened faster than he remembered. The tower sank, leaving behind a pillar of smoke. At first it looked as though the new smoke had just obscured the tower, and then his brain caught up to what his eyes were seeing. The South Tower was gone, reduced to rubble.

"Dear Lord," the woman said.

Sam reached out and took her hand. There was something he was supposed to be doing, he knew, but he couldn't think what it was. He was consumed by what he had just seen. It took a moment, long enough for the cloud of dust to start towards them, before Sam remembered.

"Inside!" he shouted, shoving the woman at the door to the cafe. "All of you, inside!"

The people on the street that had watched in horror with them suddenly seemed to see what was coming. Sam jumped aside to let them pass as they ran into the café.

"In! In! In!" Sam shouted.

The dust cloud was only feet away when he darted inside and closed the door. It whooshed past the window, casting darkness inside. There was a click and an overhead light came on above them. The dust continued to billow past the window, making Sam think of the demons the night the Devil's Gate had opened, how they had radiated menace. The dust seemed to do that now. If felt to Sam that it was coming for them, wanting nothing more than to choke the life out of their lungs.

"What the hell is happening?" the man in the apron asked.

"The South Tower collapsed," Sam said.

"But all those people…" the woman that Sam had come out of the tower with said. "All the people behind us on the stairs."

Sam had no words of comfort to offer; there was nothing at all he could say. He bowed his head, and when she started to cry, he took her in his arms and held her. She shuddered against his chest and Sam stroked her back. His thoughts were with hers. All those people, the hundreds still trying to escape from the South Tower, were dead. There would be miracle stories from the rubble, people pulled out, but so few; a tiny number compared to the number that were lost. So many dead on this September morning.

He allowed himself a moment just to feel that shock and pain, and then he forced it down and locked it away. There were other things for him to do. He turned to the man in the apron and said, "What's your name?"

"Marco."

"Well, Marco, we're going to help people now. We need as much bottled water as you have, and bowls, buckets, cups, whatever you've got that's clean to hold water. Then we're going to need cloths, paper towels, napkins, anything we can use to clean people up."

"Clean them?" Marco asked.

"That cloud will have coated people in ash and dust. We need to clean their eyes and get them to drink to clear their throats."

Marco nodded. "I can do that."

"Good," he turned to the woman with him. "Can you help us?"

"Yes. Tell me what to do?"

"I have many bowls," Marco said. "They are in the kitchen."

"Get them and fill them with clean water," Sam said. "Save the bottled water for drinking. People aren't going to care what we use as long as we help them." He looked around the room at the handful of other people that had come in before the cloud had hit. "You have three choices. You can help here, come out with me, or stay out of the way."

"I'm coming with you," a man said, and the woman with him nodded.

"Find as many people as you can and bring them in here," Sam said. "Cover your mouth and nose if you have something. Don't go back to the Tower though."

"Why not?" a girl asked, she looked as though she was college age, but it could have been the fear on her face that had stolen years from her. "We can help them."

"Because one tower is down," Sam said. "How long do you think the other will last?"

"You think it'll come down, too?" Marco asked.

"I'm reasonably certain," Sam said. "Do what you can here. It's the safest way."

He didn't look to see if they agreed.

"I have things you can use for your faces," Marco said. "My waitresses wear aprons. Will that work?"

"Perfect," Sam said. "If you're out there and another dust cloud comes, try to get in here. If you're too far away, use whatever you can for shelter. Keep your eyes closed and mouths and noses covered. Understand?"

The people that had offered to come out with him nodded, and Sam reached for the door. He braced himself and opened it.

It was like stepped out into a different world, one that had been leeched of all color. Everything was coated with dust. The ground, the walls, the fire hydrants, they were a uniform grey from the dust that coated everything and still clouded in the air. Sam tried to imagine how it would have felt to be outside when it happened, and he shuddered. It would have been like standing in the path of a volcano.

He saw two people struggling along the street, their clothes and hair as coated with dust as everything around them. The man's mouth and nose were clean from where he had surely covered them with his hands, but his eyes with filmed with grey.

"Hey," Sam said, jogging over to them. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

"I'm not hurt," the woman said in a choked voice and the man shook his head.

"Come with me," Sam said, extending a hand to the woman. "We'll clean you up a little."

She took his hand without hesitation and Sam led her to the café with the man following. He got them inside and said, "Sit down. I'll be right back."

In the time he had been gone, Marco and his helpers had been busy. The counter where people would have paid for coffee before was stacked with bottles of water, and a little further along, where you would have collected your drinks, were clean white bowls of water. Sam grabbed two bottles of water and then called over the counter, "Marco, I need a bucket, and one of you come help me."

Marco came to him with a steel pail in his hand. Sam took it and set it down in the place the two people were sitting. The woman Sam had come out of the tower with appeared at his elbow and said, "What can I do?"

"Copy me," Sam said.

He uncapped one of the bottles of water and handed it to the woman. "I know you want to drink, but you need to clean your mouth first or you're going to be putting all that muck in your stomach. Rinse around and then spit it into the bucket."

He had read an article not long before he came to 1978 about the aftermath for people involved in the clean-up of the World Trade Center. They had been breathing in all kinds of chemicals and substances with the dust and smoke, including asbestos. People were getting sick and dying, and they'd traced it back to what they had done that day. Sam didn't want people ingesting more of the dust than they already had.

The woman rinsed her mouth thoroughly three times and then looked up at Sam. "Can I drink now?" she asked hopefully.

"You can. I'm going to clean up your eyes."

She nodded gratefully as Sam went back to the counter to get a bowl of water. He grabbed an espresso cup too and clean cloth. As he made his way back to them, he saw the man they'd brought it rinsing his mouth, too, under the tower woman's instruction.

"We're going to clean around your eyes first," Sam said. "And then we'll rinse them out."

He dipped the corner of the cloth in water and said, "Do you want to do it yourself?"

She nodded and lifted a shaking hand to take the cloth.

"Start in the corners and wipe outwards," Sam said. "Don't press too hard or you're going to grind more into your lashes and then it might get into your eyes."

She closed her eyes and carefully wiped the cloth across each eye one by one. When they were clear of the dust, Sam saw they were red and irritated, though she said, "That feels better."

"Good," Sam said. "I'm going to rinse the eyes themselves now. Tilt your head back and close your left eye."

She obeyed and Sam filled an espresso cup with water and tilted it over her right eye. "Here goes," he said. "Nice and wide."

She stayed still as he trickled the water over her eye and wiped it away from her face as it slipped from the corner. When it was clear, he gave the left eye the same treatment, and then handed her a clean cloth to wipe her face.

"Thank you," she said gratefully.

"You're welcome," he said. "I'm going out again now. Drink the rest of your water. Maybe see if you can help other people as they come in."

He turned as the door opened and three dust-coated people came in. "I've got to go back out," he said to the woman helping the man clean his eyes. "Will you be okay?"

"We'll be fine," she said.

She seemed a very different woman to the one that had come out of the tower with him, shaking with fear. It seemed helping other people was helping her as much as it was Sam.

He checked his watch and saw that he had fifteen minutes until the North Tower fell. He would help as many as he could until that had happened, and then it would be time to return to Ground Zero.


As Sam walked toward Ground Zero, a place that had been two famous skyscrapers only hours ago, he tried to prepare himself for what he was about to see.

He had waited until the North Tower had fallen and the dust cloud had passed its worst before leaving the café in the charge of Marco and his helpers. Now it was time to go back.

They had brought many people in off the street, and the cafe was crowded now with people recovering and others standing up to take care of those that needed help. It was unlike anything Sam had ever seen. He was used to hunters taking care of others, all assisted by knowledge and experience of the dangers out there, but these people were civilians. They had all been through something terrible to one extent or another, but they were helping each other as best they could. It was incredible to see, the real strength and resilience of the American people.

He didn't feel the same strength as he approached the fallen towers. He had seen the site so many times on TV, but it was nothing compared to being there in person. It wasn't a pile of rubble the way he'd expected; it was a mountain.

When he was close enough to take in more than the shape, he saw it was formed of concrete rubble, steel beams and dust, so much dust that coated everything. The mountain was smoking from the fires that burned beneath, the fires Sam knew would burn for nearly one hundred days.

What was worse was the part Sam couldn't see—bodies, over two thousand of them. Two thousand people were hidden beneath the rubble, over two thousand people that would never get home, leaving two thousand families mourning.

The closer he got to the pile, the more people he saw. Some were just standing and staring at the disaster zone while others were clambering over the rubble and trying to dig down. There were firefighters, police officers, EMTs and paramedics, civilians and men and women in military fatigues all gathered there in the zone.

Sam was momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what he was facing and what he could do—who did he help first? A woman stumbling past with blood dripping down her arm made the decision of what to do next for him. He took her hand and looked around for a place to take her for help. There were paramedics but they all seemed to be working already. There was a man in army fatigues with a megaphone in his hand, but he seemed occupied with the crowd of uniformed people around him. She needed Sam's help, and he needed supplies.

He was leading her towards one the of the ambulances he could see, thinking he would use their equipment to do what he could, when he spotted a crowd of people in t-shirts that had been drained to dull pink from the red they would have been by the dust. They were working under an American Red Cross banner that had been hastily tacked to a building. There were folding tables with chairs beside them and a smattering of proper gurneys. Sam led the woman there and sat her down in a chair. She was crying, and she didn't seem to notice that Sam was there, even when he positioned her bleeding arm to rest on the table and said, "Okay, I'm going to help you now. I'll be right back. Stay here."

Sam went to a stack of white boxes with a red cross on them and opened one. It was filled with medical supplies: scissors, bandages, gloves, packages of suture kits and butterfly bandages, hand sanitizer, pods of sterile saline and a box marked emergency medication. Sam took it back to the table and set it down. He untied his jacket from around his waist and used the clean inside to rub as much of the dust from his hands as he could. When he was done he slathered his hands in antibacterial gel and shook them as he waited for it to dry so that he could put on the gloves.

"What's your name?" Sam asked the woman.

"Casey." she whimpered.

"Nice to meet you, Casey. I'm Sam. What are you doing in the city today?" He was babbling to distract her as he snapped on his gloves and cut away the cloth of her bloody sleeve.

"I'm on vacation," she said. "I wanted to see St Paul's Chapel, and when it all started, I was too scared to leave. A lot of us were. We got even more scared when the tower fell, thinking the chapel would fall down, too, so we came out, but then I was hit by something."

Sam peeled the cloth away from the wound and said, "Whatever it was, it was sharp. It's not too deep though, just quite long. I'll be able to take care of it for you."

"Thank you," she said.

Sam tipped some sterile saline onto a gauze pad and wiped around the wound to clean it. The bleeding seemed to have stopped now that she was still, and it would be an easy fix, using strips to close the wound and a large bandage to cover it.

"I came for a business meeting," Sam said as he unpackaged some sterile bandage strips. "Never made it there."

"In the tower?" she asked.

"Yes, the South Tower," Sam said. "I got out after the plane hit."

"You got out?" she asked, sounding awed. "How?"

Sam hid a shudder as he remembered his time in the tower. "By sticking together."

"Did more people come out?"

"Yes," Sam said, stopping his work and looking her in the eyes. "A lot didn't, but some of us did. It wasn't everyone. People were saved as well as lost."

She looked past him at the pile of rubble. "So many though. Look what they did to us."

"Yes," Sam said. "But this is not the end. They hit us hard, and we lost so many, but we're not broken. They can't break us. We're going to keep fighting."

"You really think?"

"I know," Sam said confidently, thinking of the many things that would follow this day. "America is stronger than the monsters that did this."

He turned his attention back to her arm and fixed the last strip in place. When it was sealed, he unwrapped a clean dressing and covered the wound.

"There you go," he said. "Keep it clean and get it checked out properly when you can."

"Thank you, Sam," she said, getting to her feet. She started to walk away and then stopped and turned back to him. "You really think we're not broken?"

"I know it," Sam said. "We can get through this and we'll be stronger for it, the whole country."

She nodded and walked away again. Sam watched her go, wondering if he'd reached her. He knew they would make it through strong as he had seen it, but he understood her uncertainty. He would feel the same doubt if he was here, surrounded by the debris of what had happened.

Almost as soon as she was gone, another woman took her place, brought to Sam by a dust-coated friend. Sam sutured the wound on her temple from where she had been hit by falling debris and then advised her to get out of the immediate zone and home if she could. She was replaced by a man, and soon a stream of people were coming to Sam with minor wounds to be treated.

It was on a short break between people needing help that Sam stopped to take in what he was doing—helping people. This was why he had come. He had wanted to save lives from the towers, but he had only saved one. He was doing something now though, and people were being helped by him. He was making a difference in a small way.

His thoughts were interrupted when two men caught his attention and called for help. They were supporting a half-unconscious man between them. He was bleeding heavily from the abdomen. Sam rushed over to them and lifted the man hanging from their shoulders into his arms. He rushed back to the table he'd claimed and set the man down on it. Without missing a beat, he cut open the man's t-shirt to expose the wound and sucked it a breath. It was bad. A deep bloody mess that no amount of stitches or sterile strips from him were going to heal. It needed a hospital's care, a surgeon's skill, equipment Sam didn't have.

He grabbed a wad of gauze and pressed it over the wound and addressed the man that had been helping him.

"Find a paramedic now."

"Can't you help him?" one of them asked.

"I am helping," Sam said. "But he needs more that I can do for him. Get a paramedic."

The man ran away and the other came closer to the table. "Can I do anything?" he asked.

"Talk to him," Sam said. "Keep him awake if you can."

"Rich," he said. "It's me, Franklin. Hang on, okay? This guy's helping you, and Sol's gone to get a paramedic."

The man on the table nodded slightly, though his eyes were still only at half-mast.

"We came to help," Franklin said to Sam. "We're construction workers. We were working uptown on a site when we heard what happened. We thought we could do something, so we came here, but then the tower came down. I got knocked out, and when I woke up, Rich was gone. We found him at the edge of the pile, but he was bleeding like this. We just lifted him out and came looking. We saw the red cross sign and brought him here."

"You did the right thing," Sam said. "It's better for him to be lying still, and I am doing what I can for the bleeding." He looked down at Rich and said. "Hey, Rich. I worked construction, too. What were you working on?"

Rich licked his lips and whispered, "Apartments."

Sam nodded. "I like the high-rise places best. Working in the sky is a hell of a thrill, right?"

Rich didn't answer, but Franklin said, "You're better on the ground, right, Rich? It's me and Sol that like the high stuff."

"I'm the sane one," Rich whispered.

Sam laughed softly, a sound that didn't completely hide his fear. "You're missing out. When you're up high watching the world happen beneath you, you feel incredible."

"See, Rich, he gets it," Franklin said.

Rich smiled slightly. "You're both crazy."

Sam pressed harder on the wound and forced a smile for him. The gauze was soaking through under his hands and Rich's breaths were growing shallow. He needed real help real fast.

Thankfully, at that moment, Sol came over waving a hand behind him. "Over here!"

A paramedic ran behind him with a gurney. He came to a skidding stop beside the table and fixed his eyes on Sam. "What do we have?"

"Open wound to the lower abdomen," Sam said. "I've tried to control the bleeding." He was apologetic that he hadn't done more, but there was nothing he could do. He could sew small wounds and pluck a bullet out, but he was no doctor.

"Okay." He addressed Sol and Franklin. "Can you guys help me get him on the gurney? We need to get him to the wagon."

They both grabbed him and eased him up and over to the gurney the paramedic was sliding under him. Sam leaned across the table to hold the gauze in place and then leaned back as his hands were replaced and they wheeled him away without a backwards glance.

Sam stopped and took a breath, just taking in what was happening. He had no idea if Rich was going to make it with his awful wound, but he had a better chance since Sam had controlled the bleeding a while. If he'd been left unaided much longer, he would have bled to death. Sam hoped he would be okay.

"Hey, you," a voice said.

Sam turned and saw a man in a red and white Red Cross shirt coated with the same dust that coated Sam. He was pulling off bloody gloves and looking at Sam speculatively.

"I've been watching you," he said. "Who are you with?"

"With?" Sam asked dumbly.

"Red Cross?" he suggested. "Military?"

"Oh. No, I'm a construction worker," Sam said. It was easier to explain that rather than say he was a hunter.

"You've been helping people," he stated.

"Yeah, uh, sorry. I didn't mean to get in the way, but I saw a woman that needed help, so I grabbed some of your stuff and went ahead. People kept coming, so I kept helping."

"You seem pretty good for a construction worker, calm and careful."

"I've dealt with a few injuries before. I'm designated first aider on our site," he invented wildly. "Do you need me to go?"

"I need you to stay," he said. "There are too many people here for us to handle, and we need to let the paramedics take care of the serious injuries." He walked to the pile of supplies and pulled out a red and white tabard emblazoned with the red cross logo and name. "Put this on so people know who you are with. If you come up against something you can't handle, call for help again. I'll be close. I'm Alan."

"I will," Sam said, taking the tabard and pulling it over his head. "Thank you."

"No, thank you. Mess like this, we've got to come together to help, and you've stepped up."

A man came close leading a woman with him. "Can you help?" he asked.

"Looks like you're needed," Alan said, walking away.

Sam thanked him again and turned to the woman that had just been helped into the chair, another person he could help.


So… This was an easier chapter for me. Sam was able to help some people – as so many did that day – by doing little things. I didn't feel I was taking away from someone else's story and strength by having him help like this.

Until next time…

Clowns or Midgets xxx