07:55:00 AM

The label on the pill bottle was blank, the print having worn off long ago. Each morning for David was the same: stop the alarm, get up, brush his teeth, take the bottle from the medicine cabinet.

Three months ago he had an unfortunate collision with a bike messenger. The cyclist had yelled at him for not looking before walking into the street, more concerned about their single-speed than the pedestrian they had run over, but that’s the city. Everyone’s always too busy to care about anyone but themselves. In the last ten years it never thought to change. Work, and home to his shoebox of an apartment in the West Village. Work, home. Work, home. A good neighborhood to live in was his greatest achievement. He had no great loves, no great tragedies to look back on, and no great wealth. Forty-Six years of boredom. Forty-six years of forgotten dreams. Forty-six years alone.

He hadn’t needed the pain meds after the accident, a couple of Tylenol doing him just fine, but the ER doctor prescribed them and so he picked them up from the pharmacy. He ran his thumb over the worn label again, feeling the familiar smooth paper that covered the orange plastic. It would be so easy.

He sighed, opening the medicine cabinet again and placing the bottle on the center shelf next to the toothpaste. Maybe later.

08:30:05 AM

The basement where he worked was quiet, but not totally silent. Craig got here before him, as usual.

“Morning, Craig,” David said.

“David,” the other man responded with a nod.

Craig had been working here since the sixties, having helped to build it. An old man with dark leathery skin that was laced with a maze of wrinkles. He had thick glasses on the end of his nose, and a hunched back, as if he had been fighting for the last fifty years being pulled into the pit that would be his grave.

“Did you see the game last night?” David flipped through the morning’s maintenance requests.

Craig let out a frustrated grunt in response and the corner of David’s lips rose. He knew without having to ask. The old man never missed a chance to watch the Giants play. David wasn’t much for sports, only watching so he could tease Craig whenever his team would lose, and last night the Broncos beat the Giants thirty-one to twenty.

08:45:58 AM

“Hey, Craig!” David’s voice carried down the stairs to the next level, echoing off of the painted concrete walls. Craig had disappeared into the depths of the basement a few minutes earlier, in a hurry to start the daily checks on the water systems, while David was preparing to replace a faulty thermostat on one of the floors above. It wasn’t the most pressing matter in the building, but the thing had been on the fritz for a week already, and he was getting tired of the complaints from the offices on that floor. “Have you seen my drill?”

“Yeah!” Craig’s disembodied voice called out before he appeared from behind a large tank, hobbling toward the stairs, a drill in his hand.

David started down the stairs to meet him—the other man too old and slow to wait for—but he stopped when the cold metal railing shook in his grip. They looked up at the ceiling as they heard a distant rumble above their heads. “Earthquake?” he asked, turning his attention back to his coworker.

Craig shrugged his shoulders. “Could be.”

They looked back to the ceiling, and then Craig was rushing for the stairs as a large chunk of concrete broke loose above him. The old man jumped forward as the rubble crashed to the floor, but he wasn’t able to clear it.

09:05:27 AM

“Hello! Help us!” David’s fist slammed against the door that led into the ground floor of the building. He had been trying to open it for several minutes without success. A whisper of faraway sirens could be heard if he pressed his ear against the metal, but nothing else. No one would hear him unless they happened to be in the back hallways that led to the basement entrance. He pulled his cell from his pocket, flipping it open and extending the antenna, but the pixelated words were still there: no service. He slammed his fist against the door again, feeling the bruise forming on the heel of his hand. “Hello! Can anyone hear me?” After another minute of pounding the door, he made his way back down the stairs to the office.

“Anything?” Craig asked. He was propped in a wheeled chair in front of one of the two large tanker desks that filled the cramped room. A first aid kit lay open on the metal top, white bandages cocooning Craig’s leg where the hunk of concrete had landed on him. Red was seeping to the surface of the white cloth in several places.

David shook his head. “It’s no use. No one is close enough to hear us. I could hear sirens, just barely. Someone must have called 911 after the quake. I can’t imagine what the upper levels are looking like.”

“The building can take a quake,” Craig said.

“And yet they had to call for help,” David added.

Craig frowned at the floor. “Well, they better hurry. It’s getting warm in here. The air must have stopped when the quake hit.”

“Yeah…” David wasn’t so much worried about the heat. The red on Craig’s bandages was spreading.

09:25:21 AM

He hated to admit it, but Craig was probably right to worry about the air. The two of them were soaked—undershirts and pants sticking to their skin—having already shed their thick uniforms. The hundreds of machines in the lower area of the basement were generating too much heat.

David had spent several minutes shoving their coveralls into the space below the door that led further into the basement, as well as taping up the edges of the frame, but the effort didn’t help much. Nothing looked amiss through the window in the door, outside of the rubble and blood from the piece of fallen ceiling, but the office was sweltering. The door to the main floor was just as stuck as it had been twenty minutes earlier.

09:59:00 AM

The floors and walls shook violently as a great rumbling came from all around them. David was on his feet in an instant, heaving Craig out of his chair and kicking it aside. He shoved the old man under the desk, scrambling across the floor to the other one once Craig was secure. Objects crashed to the floor all around them, and their screams were drowned out by the symphony of stone and metal that echoed from deeper in the basement. They could do nothing but hold onto their respective shelters, and pray that their own ceiling would remain in one piece above them.

10:20:37 AM

“Are we going to die down here?” David asked.

Condensation gathered on the walls of the office, hot droplets racing down to the floor when they grew too heavy. The window view to the deeper basement levels showed nothing but a hot dense fog. Steam. To breathe the thick humidity felt like drowning. The last quake must have broken some pipes.

“Maybe,” Craig answered with honesty. He was sitting on the floor, propped against his desk, injured leg stretched out in front of him. The white netting of his bandages was gone, red blood soaking into every inch of the fabric. His glasses, fogged and useless, were abandoned beside him. “I’m sorry,” he sighed, closing his eyes. The old man’s chest moved in a jerky motion with his heavy breathing.

“Heh,” David grunted, the corners of his mouth lifting.

Craig opened one eye to glance at him. “What?”

He cleared his throat, “Sorry, nothing.”

Both of Craig’s eyes were open now as he stared at him without amusement. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing…” David said, taking deep breaths as he fought the air. “It’s just…” He covered his smile with a hand, but it didn’t stop the giggle that bubbled up from beneath his fingers.

“Well… Now you have to tell me.”

“It’s just… You know…” He took a few deep breaths before continuing. “For some time now… I thought I might… like to die.” The last words were brought forth with a laugh, followed by another deep breath. “But now that we’re here… I’m not so sure.”

Craig’s brow furrowed.

“Kind of ironic… don’t you think…” David continued, “to find the will… to live… at a moment like this?” His smile faltered as Craig continued to stare at him in silence, and he cleared his throat. “Sorry… It’s not funny.”

They stared at each other for another minute, their heavy breathing the only sound in the room, and then the corner of Craig’s lips twitched. Their hoarse laughter bounced off of the wet walls—reigniting each time they looked at each other—until it devolved into fits of coughs punctuated with their quieter chuckling.

Craig let out one last hacking cough, his hand over his stomach as his laughter died off. “Only you…” he said, “could have luck like that.”

“Yeah,” David said, wiping his eyes. He cleared his throat, all traces of laughter leaving his face. “It’s something isn’t it?”

Craig looked at him, and they broke again. The wheezing, hacking laughter went on for another minute before being interrupted by a sound at the top of the stairs.

“Is anybody down there?” a voice shouted from above, followed by the sound of the door slamming shut again. Wide eyes stared, and this time there was no humor in them.

Jumping up, David wrapped his arms around Craig’s chest, lifting him from the floor before pulling one of the man’s arms over his shoulder. Craig grunted in pain at the sudden movement. “Sorry,” he said, pulling the older man over to the doorway that led to the stairs.

The journey up the stairs took several minutes with Craig’s injured leg, droplets of blood left behind on each step like a trail of breadcrumbs. When they reached the door at the top, it looked the same as before, only this time it opened when David turned the handle. They pushed through it, finding broken pieces of the building to the side of it. That must have been what was holding it closed before.

The back hallways were empty aside from them, whoever had unblocked their door long gone. They hobbled as fast as they could, growing slower the heavier that Craig’s weight became, until they entered the lobby. They stopped.

“God almighty.”

In contrast to their quiet basement sauna, the ground floor was a hell of its own. The large open space that was usually all sunlit windows and gleaming marble was now filled with a dusty grey light, the glass from the windows littering the floor along with other debris. The sounds of shouts and emergency vehicles could be heard outside, and a crash made the both of them jump. David couldn’t see where the noise came from.

Through the empty door frames at the front of the building appeared a company of firemen, heading for the stairs that would lead them to the upper levels.

“Hey!” David called out, struggling to hold his colleague’s weight any longer. Two firemen broke off from the group, jogging over to them. They pulled Craig out of his grasp, transferring the old man’s weight to themselves as they pulled his arms over their shoulders. Craig was barely able to stand anymore. The rest of the company of firemen continued into the stairwell.

“We’ve got him! Go!” one of the firemen yelled.

David coughed, the dust in the air coating his lungs. It was coating every surface. “What happened?” he asked.

One of the firemen shoved him in the direction of the street entrance. “Go!”

He stumbled and slid over lighting fixtures, glass, and rubble as he hurried across the lobby, his boot catching on the frame of the doors when he stepped through them. Glass embedded itself in the palm of his hand as he fell to the sidewalk outside, and someone pulled him up again. A policeman shoved him away from the building as soon as he was on his feet again.

“Keep going!”

More police and firemen urged him to keep moving as he ran, and so he did. He stopped to catch his breath and look around once he was behind the emergency vehicles that filled every available space near the building. Clouds of dust suffused the air here just as much as it did in the lobby, accompanying the yells of the first responders, and the screams from people that he couldn’t see. The grey was all around him, raining down from the sky. Ash? A paper floated past his head, and then another. Looking up, hundreds of papers floated down through the haze, and then something else caught his attention. Ice trickled into his veins as he looked through the small pockets of clarity that drifted in and out of his view between the dust and smoke. Something was missing—open air where it shouldn’t be—and he began to wish that he had died in that basement instead of having to face reality. There, close to the building he had just exited, was the smoldering remains of what used to be the south tower.

He looked back to the north tower, still standing. Two firemen emerged from the entrance, carrying Craig between them. Several other first responders rushed forward to help them, grabbing Craig’s legs and lifting him from the ground entirely, and then they all looked up in unison. A deafening roar erupted from the sky, and the ground began to quake. The first responders started running, as much as they could while carrying Craig, before disappearing from sight as pieces of the building crashed down around them.

The spot they had just been was nothing but dust and rubble, with more following it. A hand from an unseen person wrapped around David’s arm in a crushing hold, pulling him along as they raced away from the tower. Debris crashed behind them like a tsunami, threatening to rupture his eardrums, and he could no longer see anything for the thick white cloud that had engulfed the street. The stranger kept holding onto him, kept running at full speed despite being unable to see where they were going. A side mirror clipped David’s hip as they wove between parked cars along the street, and for a moment all he could think about was whose cars these were.

The stranger didn’t let go until they made their way into one of the many buildings that lined the street. It was a restaurant, packed shoulder to shoulder with people who were all painted with the same grey dust from head to toe. The person who had saved him was a policeman. Tears were carving paths through the dust on the officer’s cheeks, creating a muddy mixture that landed in a puff on the front of his uniform. A hand slid into David’s—he didn’t know whose—but he held it tight as they listened to the world ending outside, wondering if their lives would end with it.

10:42:23 AM

The street was a mess, covered in pieces of rubble as large as the abandoned cars, and as small as his fingernail. People walked through it—stumbling and blank-faced in their business attire—walking to anywhere that wasn’t here. Blood soaked through on the skin and clothes of some, a shot of color in defiance of the grey veil that had washed over their world.

Pulling out his phone, he flipped it open and looked at the screen, still nothing. Who would he call anyway? Craig’s face haunted his mind—eyes wide in shock just before it had disappeared under the falling building—his final resting place only feet from where they had thought they were going to die in the basement. A bar appeared on the screen of his phone. His thumb hovered over the button for his address book, and he hesitated. After a moment the bar blinked out of existence again. Past his phone, on the ground, was a burnt wallet laying on its open face.

He nudged it with his foot. “You’re dead,” he whispered. “Like Craig.” He looked at his phone again, another miniscule bar of service on the screen, and slipped his wallet from his other pocket. The leather was smooth under his thumb, much like the label on the bottle at home. “Like Craig.”

The wallet slapped the ground with a plume of dust—mingling with the rest of the debris on the street—the phone following a second later. The battery separated itself as the device bounced off of the asphalt with a crack, skittering under a half-crushed car. David followed the rest of the crowd as they walked away from now defunct the center. He didn’t bother to look back.

Buy Me A Coffee

This story was based on a 2012 Post Secret that I read once and, much like the events of 9/11, could never forget. It featured a picture of the Twin Towers burning before they fell, and it read: Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I’m dead. That message haunted me for over a decade, filling my head with speculation on who wrote it, if it was true, if they’re ok now, and why they would fake their death on that of all days.

I finally sat down and wrote about it at the end of 2023, trying to imagine what it would be like for someone to go through that event, and then disappear. An early draft of the story was passed to a few people in a zine I put together, and was read aloud to a garage full of actors and writers by local Las Vegas actor, Brandon Alan McClenahan. (If you would like to see that rendition, you can find it on his Youtube channel: Art Hard Studios. He was amazing, even my writing was not.) It never went further than that.

I’ve since rewritten and edited this short to better reflect my current skill level as a writer, and I’m posting it now because I’ve been afraid to share any of my writing outside of my few circles of friends.

Thank you for reading. If you liked the story, please share it with others who may want to read it too. And whether you loved it or hated it, please feel free to leave a comment to let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

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