By the time Charlie broke for lunch the sun had come out and the dreary morning had turned into a fine day. There was a gentle breeze that chilled in the shade, but the sun was warm and there was a sense of spring in the air. Charlie strolled the two blocks to the sandwich stand, buoyed by the turn in the weather and the sheer joy of getting out of the store for an hour.
Ever since going to work at Gaston & Grey, Charlie had gotten into the habit of buying his lunch at the sandwich stand on the corner of State Street. This little French girl—she couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty—worked there on Mondays and Tuesdays. She had a crooked nose and oil slicks for eyes and she had a habit of tucking her stained tee shirt into her apron in such a way that her breasts were … well, it was just great. One day he’d paid with a credit card, and ever since she had called him “Sharlie.”
The problem, of course, was that Charlie, in the midst of the confusion with the weather and whatnot, had forgotten that it was Wednesday, not Tuesday. There was no little French girl at the sandwich stand; instead Charlie’s pastrami and goose liver pâté sandwich was prepared by some anonymous teenager with bad skin and braces. Charlie watched him put on too much horseradish and too little pâté but he just couldn’t bring himself to argue. There didn’t seem to be any point to it.
The seat of the bench was made out of fiberglass, and felt slick and cold under Charlie’s backside. It had a powdery look to it, and Charlie knew he’d have scuff marks on his trousers when he got up, but that was nothing new. He unwrapped his sandwich and took a heroic bite, causing a teaspoon of horseradish to spurt from the end and land with a plop on the sidewalk between his Florsheims. Charlie didn’t even know why he bothered going to that sandwich place on any day other than Monday or Tuesday. That little French girl knew how to make them, but nobody else there ever seemed to. Or maybe he was just more forgiving of her because he liked looking at her tits. He was that honest with himself, at least.
Suddenly Charlie heard a funny, screaming, whistling noise that caused him to turn his head skyward, a sound like a jetliner coming in too low overhead. His first thought was: Plane crash. His second thought, which surprised even him, was: Thank God.
Immediately the noise faded. No plane crash. Charlie took another bite of his sandwich. Just as he did, he heard a distant sound: crump. Then two more, in rapid succession: crump crump. Before he even had time to react, he caught a flash out of the corner of his eye, and when he looked up the building across the street seemed to be collapsing from within. The concussion hit him across the bridge of the nose like a Louisville Slugger being swung for the bleachers and knocked the bench, with Charlie on it, clear over backwards. Debris—paper, mostly, but also some fist-sized chunks of something that looked like drywall—rained down. Charlie spit out a mouthful of bread and meat just as the next explosion came. When Charlie looked up he saw half a dozen buildings in flames, smoke pouring out of shattered facades. Taxicabs were screaming down the street in all directions, most of them making it just a few feet before running into another car or a person or a piece of a building that hadn’t been there a fraction of a second before.
Hail Mary full of grace
His eyes stinging from the thick, black smoke, Charlie noticed that he didn’t seem to be hearing things the way he would have expected to. Everything sounded like he was underwater.
the Lord is with thee
He seemed to be lying in a pool of blood. He felt a hard lump under his breastbone, and when he rolled over he discovered that it was a fist, an actual severed human hand clenched in a fist, with a lot of the forearm still attached, the skin yellow like chicken skin, the damn thing still warm—and the source of at least some of the blood around him. As the rain of debris intensified he squeezed his eyes shut. A sharp pain tore through Charlie’s throat, and it was several seconds before he realized that his throat hurt because he was screaming.
blessed art thou among women oh God oh God oh God oh God
A few seconds later things stopped falling on Charlie, and he opened his eyes and looked around him. The entire block across the street from the park appeared to be on fire, black smoke pouring up into the sky. For that matter, the blocks adjacent to that block seemed to be on fire as well, except for the parts that had become craters. Further down the street were more fires and more craters, including one huge crater right in the middle of State Street that appeared to intersect a water main. Purely by coincidence he happened to be looking in just the right direction when he saw something that looked an awful lot like a bomb, just like out of a World War II-era Bugs Bunny cartoon, plunge through the roof of a six-story building.
pray for us sinners
For a fraction of a second it seemed like nothing was going to happen, then the building exploded, spraying the street with glass and bricks and dust. He felt the explosion more than he heard it, and he clenched his fingers around handfuls of grass as the ground shook beneath him.
now and at the hour of our death
At that precise instant the second wave of bombs began to fall, and Charlie’s world became a red haze of agony,
amen
then silence.
Throughout the city, bombs fell like deadly hailstones. High overhead, long-range strategic bombers glided silently, delivering their payloads of fire and molten metal. The vast majority of those weapons were what people knowledgeable about such matters called “dumb bombs,” some as large as a ton. The bombers scattered these weapons on the breeze, scores of them at a time, and they fell indiscriminately. They landed wherever the wind and gravity happened to carry them. A few of the bombs were guided. A pilot cruising in air-conditioned comfort at seventy thousand feet placed his cross-hairs on a building, or a truck, or a person, and a few seconds later whatever the pilot was pointing at ceased to exist. A tiny minority of the weapons were “brilliant” bombs—the nomenclature had long since moved past the hopelessly outdated term “smart.” These so-called brilliant bombs were able to identify and engage targets of opportunity with no human intervention whatsoever. A brilliant bomb, once released into the target area, took matters entirely into its own hands. A brilliant bomb was roughly as smart as a dolphin, a creature to which the bomb bore more than a passing resemblance. This was no coincidence, of course; the laws governing laminar flow are the same whether you’re a fun-loving sea creature or a multi-million-dollar killing machine.
The most lethal—military types would have said “effective”—bombs released that day were the guided penetrators. Bombs, as every child knows, explode on impact. Drop a water balloon from a tall building. See the splash? That’s how a bomb works, only on a slightly larger scale and with hellish fire and molten steel instead of water and rubber. But penetrators are different. A penetrator isn’t designed to explode when it hits something. Oh, no, penetrators are much more sneaky than that. In the tip of a penetration bomb is a tiny piece of circuitry called the fuse. The fuse in a penetration bomb isn’t particularly smart, much less brilliant. It would be pale in comparison to an average ATM, for example. A penetration fuse is about as smart as the tiny switching computer that controls a traffic light. For all its deficiencies, however, a penetration fuse is absolutely outstanding at one task, and one task only: void detection. A penetration bomb falls freely from a truly staggering height, fifteen miles up or more. By the time it reaches the ground it’s falling at an astounding speed, so it has a tendency to burrow deep into whatever it hits, just like the tip of an ice-pick driven with great force burrows deep into an anonymous stranger’s spine. If the pilot high above has chosen his target wisely, there will be something buried there, something big and empty like a bunker or a tunnel for the penetrator to burrow into. When it does, the fuse wakes up and notices that it’s no longer crunching through earth or concrete or solid rock, but rather falling through an empty space: a void. That’s my cue, the fuse says to itself. Kaboom.
On this day the pilots high overhead chose their targets very wisely. One bomb in particular burrowed through sixty feet of concrete and soil and emerged in the middle of the Monroe Street subway station at the peak of the noon rush. The fuse ticked over and two tons of tritonal—a high explosive consisting of TNT enriched with powdered aluminum—detonated. The blast wave killed one thousand and fourteen people instantly, many of them crushed to death inside subway cars that were flattened by the over-pressure like beer cans under the wheels of a pick-up truck. The expanding gases of the explosion followed the blast wave by only the tiniest fraction of a second, but by that time the deed had been done. No one was burned alive that day, though the space did make a surprisingly effective crematorium. This scene was repeated all over town, indeed, all over the country.
And so it went, hour after hour, well on into the night.
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