Dead Man's Footsteps

sky. One massive wall of a structurerose at a precarious angle, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all the glass gone from the windows, which were still otherwise intact, and the forty or fifty floors of offices that should have been beside it gone, collapsed.
    He was stumbling over the roofs of smashed police cars and then across the underbelly of a half-buried fire truck. Every now and then from somewhere under the rubble there was the sound of a mobile phone ringing. Small teams of people were digging frantically and shouting. Dog handlers were dotted around, with German Shepherds, Labradors, Rottweilers and other breeds he didn’t recognize straining on their leashes, sniffing.
    He continued forward, passing a swivel chair covered in dust, with an equally dusty woman’s jacket slung over the back. There was a telephone handset on a cord entwined around it, dangling from the seat.
    He saw something glinting. Looking closer, he realized it was a wedding band. Near it he saw a smashed wrist watch. Chains of people were pulling out pieces of rubble, passing them back. He stepped aside, watching, taking it all in, trying to understand the pattern of what was going on. Eventually he realized there was no real pattern. There were just people in uniforms around the edges, holding huge black garbage sacks that people were bringing things they found to.
    In front of him he saw what at first he thought was a broken waxwork. Then he realized, to his revulsion, that it was a severed human hand. He felt his breakfast rising up his throat. He turned away and swigged some of his water, feeling the dry dust dissolving in his mouth.
    He noticed a sign painted in red on a brown hoarding at the edge of the devastation. It read GOD BLESS FDNY & NYPD.
    Again there were all kinds of drained-looking people stumbling around the perimeter of the site, holding up photographs. Men, women, children, some of them small kids, mingling with all the different uniformed rescue services in helmets, masks, respirators.
    He walked past a burnt cross, having to concentrate to keep his balance on the shifting mass beneath him. He saw a crane bent like a dead T.Rex. Two men in green surgical scrubs. He passed an NYPD officer in a blue helmet with a miner’s lamp, and what looked like mountaineering gear slung from his belt, cutting into the rubble with a motorized angle grinder.
    A Stars and Stripes flag leaned out of the rubble at a drunken angle, as if someone had just conquered this place.
    It was total and utter chaos. And seemingly uncoordinated.
    It was perfect, Ronnie thought.
    He glanced over his shoulder. The long ant-line stretched, never-ending, behind him. He stepped aside, letting it continue past him, and moved further away. Then, surreptitiously, and with some small regret, he dropped his mobile phone on to the rubble and trod it in. He stamped on it and took a few steps forward. Next, he pulled his wallet out of his jacket and checked through it, removing the dollar bills and jamming them in the rear pocket of his jeans.
    He left his five credit cards, his RAC membership card, his Brighton and Hove Motor Club membership card and, after some moments of thought, his driving licence as well.
    Unsure whether he could smoke here or not, he discreetly put a cigarette in his mouth, pulled out his lighter and cupped his hands over the flame. But instead oflighting his cigarette, he began singeing the edges of his wallet. Then he dropped that into the rubble also and stamped it in, hard.
    Then he lit his cigarette and smoked it gratefully. When he had finished, he ducked down and retrieved his wallet. Then he retraced his steps and picked up his mobile phone. He carried them across to one of the makeshift repositories for recovered items.
    ‘I found these,’ he said.
    ‘Just drop them in the bag. All gonna be gone through,’ an NYPD woman officer told him.
    ‘They might help identify someone,’ he said, just to be certain they took notice.
    ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ she assured him. ‘We gotta lotta people missing from Tuesday. Lotta people.’
    Ronnie nodded. ‘Yep.’ Then, to further double-check, he pointed at the bag. ‘Someone’s logging everything?’
    ‘You bet. All gonna be logged, honey. Every damned item. Every shoe, every belt buckle. Anything you can find out there, you just hand it in.’
    ‘All of us got family in there – somewhere,’ the officer continued, waving her hand expansively at the devastation