Dead Man's Footsteps

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 tohis 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