In what must have been minutes, even though it felt like hours, the dust began to settle and clear away, leaving everything coated in a white powder.
Elisa rose to her feet, even though she urged the others to stay down. Picking her way through the dining room, past a few overturned chairs and feeling glass crunch under her feet.
At some point, the glass in the door had also broken, leaving an empty twisted metal frame behind. Elisa pushed against the frame of the broken door and walked outside.
It looked as if it was the middle of winter. The cars, the pavement, the buildings were covered in the white dust. Even the business signs were covered and barely discernable from each other.
People were starting to emerge from the buildings, most were coughing. Some were crying. All seemed terrified.
"Go to the bridge," Elisa called out, waving at the people that she was seeing. "Get across the river."
A few of the people went back inside the buildings they had just come out of, but most of them simply started moving. Knowing that she had done what she could for the moment, she went back inside the pizza restaurant.
Elisa went inside the kitchen, glancing over all of the people inside. She noticed that the little girl that she had tried to keep covered was still having a hard time. She could hear the deep wheeze of labored breathing and see her little chest expanding as her lungs tried to work harder than they should have.
Concerned, Elisa knelt beside the girl and the woman who was holding the girl's hand.
"Hey," Elisa said, her voice scratchy and dry. "How are you both doing?"
"I am all right," the woman said in halting english. "But my baby…Her asthma"
Elisa nodded her understanding. It was hard for her to breath, so she could only imagine what all of this was like for a little girl. "Does she have an inhaler?"
The mother nodded. "In my bag."
Elisa looked around, not seeing a bag. "Where is it?"
The woman looked around helplessly. "I do not know."
"Alright," Elisa said trying to sound calmer than she was feeling.
"Here," the pizza parlor's owner stood up. He rushed over to the large stainless steel industrial sized sink and started the water. He grabbed a towel and wetted it down. He handed the towel to Elisa, and she began wiping the child's face clean hoping that it would help somewhat to get the dust away from her face.
"She needs her medicine," The mother cried. "I must have dropped my purse when we were running."
"There is a drug store," one of the other employees said. "A couple of doors down."
"I'll go," Elisa said. To the mother, she said, "Stay here with your daughter until I get back." To the others, she said, "You should all start making your way to the bridge if you need to get to the city tonight."
The owner shook his head. "We live here, above the shop."
Elisa looked at the man closely then. He was only a little taller than she was, the kind of older, proudly Italian man that you would expect to see living above and managing a pizza place in New York. "What's your name?"
"Matteo," He said "I own this restaurant. My family and I have an apartment upstairs."
Elisa nodded. "Then, if you are sure, stay here for now, but be prepared to leave if you need to. Stay away from the windows if you can." Elisa looked over her shoulder at the mother and daughter. "Keep an eye on them for me, and I will get back as soon as I can."
The owner nodded again. He was opening up the cooler, and distributing cold bottles of water to those who were still there, waving off the people who were offering to pay for them.
Elisa left the kitchen and made her way, once more, onto the street. She looked one way, then the other, and finally made out the sign for one of those family run, small pharmacies on the corner. She ran, careful to pick her way around the people who were running for the safety of the bridge.
Still not entirely sure what had happened, only knowing that it was bad, she hurried to the store. The people inside were as shaken and terrified as those that she had left inside the pizza place. She ran to the pharmacy counter, and held up her badge to get attention.
"I have a girl, she looks around 9 or 10," she called out to the pharmacist. "She is having an asthma attack, and needs an inhaler."
The older woman behind the counter stood and began rifling through her stock. "Here," she said, grabbing a small white box.
Elisa pulled out a few bills and some loose change from her jeans pocket. "How much?"
"Don't worry about it," the woman said. "You take care of the little girl, and get her to somewhere safe."
"You all should probably go too," Elisa said, tucking her badge and the precious medicine in her pocket.
"I am going to stay in case others need help," she insisted. "I am a retired nurse, and I would like to be here in case others need help."
"Those who can walk, please direct them to the bridge." Elisa nodded her thanks to the kind woman. "Be careful," she warned.
"You too, officer."
Turning, Elisa hurried back to the pizza place with the inhaler.
"Thank you, thank you," The mother cried.
"I have to go," Elisa said, pressing the box with the needed medicine into the mother's hands. "I need to see if I can help out there. Will you all be alright?"
"Yes," the owner said. He grabbed two large 'take out' sacks and filled them with bottles of water. "You take this, and make sure that others get help."
"I will," she said. "Thank you."
With that, she was out the door, and back in the streets. All around her now, there were people wandering. Elisa stopped and handed out a few of the waters to people, pointing them in the direction of the bridge and cursing the fact that nothing in her life had prepared her for anything like this.
She was a detective. Sure, she'd been required to keep up with the first aid and crisis classes, but theoretical classroom situations were one thing. This was something completely different.
Her father had still been on the force when the bombing had happened at the World Trade Center in 1993. Six people had died and over a thousand others were injured. After the bombing, the New York Fire and Rescue teams had created new training scenarios in case of another attack.
Reality was something completely different and so, so much more horrific.
She felt useless.
Elisa had stopped to patch up a young man in a business suit who had a very obvious arm injury. Improvising, she used the man's coat and tie to make a sling. Flagging down a group of passing people, she made sure that they would stay with him and make sure that he was able to get across the bridge.
"Get him to a hospital or get the attention of any passing ambulances if you can," Elisa ordered.
"We got him," A young woman said.
Elisa walked another block, past St. Paul's Chapel, before she realized what had actually happened.
Where there were once two towers, there was now only one.
"Oh, my God," she said to herself.
She found herself walking towards the towers, and started seeing less civilians and more firefighters, emergency medical teams and police. Most were covered in the fine dust. Some were visibly hurt.
All looked more than a little dazed and lost.
Elisa looked into the plastic sack, and found that she was down to her last eight water bottles. She started handing them out to the rescue workers, glad to see that they were able to share amongst themselves and spreading the little bit out as much as they could.
Three blocks from the World Trade Center, Elisa found a firefighter. He was sitting on the curb, holding his head in his hands. Elisa rushed over to him, forcing a bottle of water into his hands.
"Thanks," he said in a gravelly voice that Elisa knew mirrored her own at that moment. He opened the bottle, dumping most of it over his head and face. He took a big drink of the cool liquid, then lowered it to the ground beside him. "It just came down," he muttered. "It just frigging came down."
Elisa put a hand on his shoulder as a hopeful measure of comfort. She hadn't thought about the people that had still been in the building, was trying not to think of it still. To give in to that thought was a frightening thing.
Not to mention the rescue teams that she might have known…
No. She refused to let herself dwell on that. Later, perhaps, but not now.
"I have to get back there," The fireman said, getting wearily to his feet. "There are still people in the other tower. Still people coming out."
Elisa nodded, helping the man to his feet. Together, they walked in silence.
Chaos reigned at the site of the collapse. Rescue teams were hustling around, trying to regroup and come up with a plan. She could almost hear the words, "What now?" in everyone's thoughts.
"There were command centers set up in both towers. But the… the command center set up in Tower 1," The fireman beside Elisa said, "has been abandoned. Most of the people from my team aren't even answering their radios."
Elisa looked up at him.
"I was sent to help out in Tower 2," He continued. It was obvious to Elisa that he was not actually talking to her. She was not even sure if he knew she was still there. "It is my day off, and I got here late. I was in the lobby, and took over for the guy who had been trying to call all of the elevators to see if people were trapped in the cars."
"Were you able to find anyone?" Elisa encouraged.
"Yeah," He said, sighing. "There was this one elevator that had been stuck between the fifth and sixth floors. I was able to get it recalled to the first floor. The doors opened, and the people coming out had no idea what had happened." He looked to Elisa then. "They had been on their way to work when the damn plane had hit, and cut out the power. They had no idea what was happening. I was helping them out of the building when it must have started coming down. We ran…"
He drifted off into silence, and Elisa let him. She was starting to understand. It was finally, unwelcomely, starting to penetrate her numbed brain.
The elevator systems had shut down. That meant stairs. One hundred and ten stories of stairs a piece, between the two buildings.
How many people didn't make it out?
How many people couldn't?
Elisa tried to shove that thought away again.
Later.
There would be time later to think about that.
Groups of uniformed people... men and women, fire and police it didn't seem to matter anymore… and Elisa steered the firefighter in that direction with her. Everyone was trying to regroup, come up with a new plan. Radio Mayday calls were filling the air from every radio, as well as the high-pitched chirp of locator beacons that had been activated.
Elisa and the firefighter were still about a block away, when the sound started again. The sound that Elisa was certain was going to haunt her memories and dreams for years.
"Run!" Someone yelled, to be echoed by hundreds of voices as they all ran.
Even as she ran, she began feeling bits and pieces of debris striking her shoulders, her back, her uncovered head. The sound grew to nightmarish volumes, a roaring sound reminiscent of a mythical dragon, and the ground began to shake with the force of what Elisa knew was the second tower coming down.
What followed was a nightmarish scene. A rain of rocks, a wind filled with dust and loose papers from offices, the sound of metal and glass hitting the ground around her.
Hands roughly grabbed her and threw her to the ground. Elisa hit the pavement, her face inches from the deep tread of a car tire. A heavy weight hit her back, pressing her tightly to the ground. Large hands covered her face and head as more and more debris fell.
Once again, she was surrounded by the thick, choking dust cloud. If the first time felt like it took an hour to clear, this one easily took double that.
She could hear the person on top of her coughing in her ear, and could only be grateful for the person's help. A growing pile of pea and gravel sized rocks were falling all around her, but the person above her was shielding her from the worst of it.
Elisa was gasping from a combination of the dust and the weight on her back.
Finally, the rumbling stopped.
The ground ceased its trembling.
The dust began clearing.
The Earth did, in fact, continue to turn.
But, for the first time in Elisa's memory, the streets of Manhattan were silent. There were no voices, no people hurrying from place to place. No taxis, busses or cars.
The weight lifted from her back, but Elisa still couldn't move. Didn't want to move. The world had fallen apart around her, and she was afraid of what was going to happen next.
"You okay?" came the gruff voice of the fireman that she had helped earlier.
"I…" Elisa trailed off. Was she okay? She honestly didn't know.
Seeming to understand, The fireman reached down and helped her to her feet.
He coughed. "You still have that water?"
Elisa looked around for the plastic sack, finding it beside the tire where her head had been. She pulled out the two remaining bottles, handing one to him.
"Thanks," He said, twisting the top off. "Rinse your mouth out first." He took a deep pull, swishing the water side to side in his mouth to rinse the dust and grit.
He spit it out on the curb, and Elisa followed suit.
Finally taking a large drink of water for himself. He rinsed off what he could of the dust clinging to his face, but was a lot more cautious of the water usage than before. He looked pointedly at her. "You use that last one for yourself, you hear?"
"Yes, sir," Elisa said, rinsing her own face off. She swished a second mouthful of water and spit it out in an effort to clear the remaining grit from her mouth before Elisa finally swallowed some.
"Don't call me sir," he insisted in what seemed like a habit. Like it was something that he said often and without real thought. "My name is Earl. Earl Jacobs."
"Elisa Maza," She answered back. "What do we do now?"
"Now," he said with a heavy sigh, "I go back to the site and see if I can find anyone who has an idea of what to do next."
Elisa nodded. "Let's go."
Earl looked surprised. "You don't have to go," He insisted.
Elisa dug out her badge from her back pocket and showed it to him. "Elisa Maza, NYPD."
He shook his head. "You should go back to your station and see if anyone there has a plan. You may be needed elsewhere."
Elisa looked up at him. "It would take me a long time just to get back there, and I think I would be of better use here," she insisted.
Earl nodded and gestured for her to follow him.