The Watchman of Ephraim (Book Club Edition) Read online

  Standing only a few feet ahead of him, a small oriental woman turned and looked at De Niro with an utter look of terror on her face. Just as she did, from behind her, it seemed like the devil himself spewed hellfire from his mouth! Blinding heat came belching out of the elevators and blasted down the corridor incinerating everything and everyone in its path. No one had time to react. The people closest to the elevators were vaporized while others farther away were set ablaze and literally bulldozed over by the tremendous ball of flame.

  The fireball enveloped De Niro, lifting him off of his feet and propelling him backwards with such force that he smashed right through one of the large plate glass windows in the front of the building. When the blistering wind finally released him, the back of his head slammed against the pavement as his body came to rest, and then all he felt was pain.

  Trying to remain conscious, De Niro smelled the sickly-sweet odor of burning clothes and flesh, he was on fire! He started rolling on the ground trying to put the blaze out on his arms and legs. Tearing his suit jacket off and throwing the burning garment, he used his hands to snuff out the flames on his trousers.

  When he finally extinguished himself, De Niro was lying in the street surrounded by chards of glass and debris that had already begun falling from the top of the tower. An ice-cold sensation started spreading over the burned parts of his face and body when he heard shrieking.

  The small oriental lady was rolling around on the floor about ten feet away from him. In agony, De Niro got to his feet and stumbled over to her. The back of her dress was still on fire, so he grabbed hold of it and tore it off of her, scorching his already burned hands in the process. He carried the dazed and badly injured lady over to the curb and sat her down as gently as he could. Both of them were shivering. No words were exchanged by either of them, but De Niro could see the look of gratitude in the pained woman’s eyes.

  De Niro stood there for a moment, trying to regain his senses and catch his breath when he heard the sound of his cell phone ringing from somewhere behind him. As quickly as he could, he made his way to his smoldering suit jacket and ripped the vibrating device out of the inside pocket. It was hot to the touch and looked partially melted and warped, but remarkably, it was still working. Unable to flip the phone open, he used both hands to pry it open. He saw that it was Lisa calling him. De Niro’s heart started racing from a combination of anxious joy and relief as he put the phone to his ear.

  “Lisa!”

  “Cris, it’s me.”

  “Honey, are you okay?!”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. We’re not sure what just happened. I’m here at Cantor with Stacey. We think a bomb might have just gone off in the tower somewhere.”

  De Niro’s heart sank. When the phone rang and he saw it was his wife, he hoped that she might have already gone to breakfast and wasn’t in the building. For the first time, he thought about what just happened. He remembered hearing the sound of a jet flying really low right before the whole world went crazy.

  Is it possible? No reason to tell her a plane may have crashed into the building … or that I’m injured.

  “Honey, listen, can you and Stacey make it to a stairway?”

  “Hold on,” she replied. Then he heard his wife ask, “My husband wants to know if we can make it to the stairs?”

  De Niro heard a number of voices in the background, including at least one male voice, but he couldn’t tell who they were. Finally, she answered, “No, Cris, we’re all huddled inside a conference room with the door closed. There was smoke coming in under it, so someone stuffed their jacket there to try and stop it, but I don’t think we can open that door.”

  De Niro heard the sound of people coughing in the background as one of the male voices was saying something. Then Lisa continued, “Cris, the smoke is getting worse in here. A few of the men want to break the windows to let air in. We tried to call 9-11 but we can’t get through. No one knows what to do!”

  De Niro heard the tension building in his wife’s voice. One of the things he loved about Lisa was how cool she was in pressure situations. Lisa came from a military family. Her granddad and dad both served with distinction, in the army and her brother was a Navy SEAL. One thing was for sure, as De Niro’s dad, a Marine, once put it, Lisa was no “candy-ass.” He knew that conditions had to be dire up there for her to sound that nervous.

  De Niro felt determination run through his veins but he also felt something else, something he never felt before. His whole life, whenever he put his mind to achieving a goal, he accomplished it, without fear of failure or any doubt, no matter how difficult it might be. Looking up at the towering structure before him now, with smoke pouring out of it and his wife’s life at stake, for the first time in his life De Niro doubted himself … he was afraid.

  “Alright, listen, honey, I’m gonna try and make my way up to you. Just stay in that room!”

  “Make your way up to me … Cris, where are you?!”

  “I’m right in front of the building … After I dropped Richard off … I was going to surprise you …” De Niro had to hold back his own tears as he heard the sound of tears in his wife’s voice, “Oh Cris … is it safe enough for you to come up—“

  De Niro waited a moment for his wife to continue but all he heard was silence.

  “Lisa, are you there?! Lisa … honey are you there?!”

  He took the phone from his ear and examined it – there were no lights – it was dead. After popping the battery out and replacing it with no results, he threw the useless device to the ground in frustration. It shattered into pieces joining the rest of the debris scattered everywhere.

  Making his way back towards the revolving front doors, De Niro surveyed the area as he went. It looked like a bomb went off in the lobby of Tower One. Virtually every window was blown out and there was wreckage littered and accumulating all over the street in front of the building. As bad as it was outside, inside was a horror scene!

  As he staggered inside, De Niro heard screams coming from down the corridor. He stood in shock, in the same spot in which he and the oriental lady were standing just minutes before. There were bodies strewn everywhere, all of them scorched, some smoldering, others ablaze. The screams he heard came from a woman who looked like she was trying to run away from the fire coming from the back of her jacket and skirt. As she ran past him, De Niro wanted to help her but he knew he couldn’t catch up to her in his physical state. Besides, all he could think about now was getting to Lisa.

  Realizing that the fireball came from the elevator shafts, De Niro entered the stairwell. He gazed up and took a deep breath.

  Please Father, let her be alive!

  Starting up the stairs in a panic, De Niro overruled the objections of pain that his brain was shouting to him, but after the first few flights it was slow going. As he made it to the 20th floor, he began to see a regular stream of people heading down the stairs. Some were injured while others looked unharmed. He stepped in front of one man who appeared okay.

  “Hey, what floor are you coming from?”

  The man was repulsed by the sight of De Niro, bloody and burned. He tried to push past him without answering, but even in his weakened state, De Niro’s resolve to get to Lisa gave him enough strength to block his way.

  “I asked you what floor you came from!”

  “The eightieth,” the man replied breaking down the stairs the moment De Niro let him pass.

  De Niro bent over resting his hands on his thighs and took a few deep breaths. He was exhausted, his head was bleeding and he was shivering from his burns, but he felt new energy course through him.

  If he was able to make it down the stairs from the 80th floor, maybe Lisa and the others made their way out of that room and I’ll see her coming down the stairs soon, too!

  By the time he made it to the 30th floor, De Niro was climbing at a snail’s pace clinging to the staircase railings, leaving a trail of blood on them. It took him almost an hour just to reach floor thirty and he w
as already drenched in cold sweat that stung the burns on his face and back. People continued filing passed, heading down the stairwell, some warning him to turn around.

  He heard one lady say, “Its hell up there!”

  It was all becoming surreal to him. The people descending the stairs were so diverse; some were women, some men; some old, some young; and some injured while others didn’t have a scratch on them. It also occurred to him that everyone was relatively quiet. The fear and shock on their faces was obvious, but no one was panicking.

  Resuming his ascent, De Niro felt a hand on his shoulder. Fireman Keith Tompkins, a tall dark-skinned African American man, wearing full gear with an oxygen tank strapped to his back was, like him, also drenched in sweat. The fireman was carrying a coiled fire hose and he looked as out-of-breath as De Niro was. Tompkins scanned De Niro and saw that he was badly injured.

  “Hey buddy, you can’t go up there. You need to get out of the building with the rest of these people.”

  De Niro shook his head in defiance, pointing up the stairs.

  “My wife is up there!”

  “What floor is she on?” Tompkins asked.

  De Niro hesitated, “She’s … she’s on the 104th floor at Cantor Fitzgerald!”

  For a moment, the two locked eyes, the fireman’s were filled with regret.

  De Niro pulled from Tompkins’ grasp and took a few steps up when he heard a voice break through the static coming from the fireman’s walkie-talkie.

  “Command post in Tower One to all units, evacuate the building!”

  The two men locked eyes again. Both men knew the evacuation order sealed the fates of everyone trapped upstairs. De Niro’s eyebrows clenched in anger and defiance. The fireman knew this husband would die trying to save his wife. Before he could turn away, Tompkins tried a different approach.

  “Do you have kids?!”

  The question caught De Niro by surprise. Up until then, he was only thinking about Lisa. He felt his eyes swell with tears. People pushed past both of them as Tompkins stepped up close to him and repeated the question, “Do you have kids?”

  De Niro’s throat tightened up so much he couldn’t speak. Tears fell from his eyes as the point of the fireman’s question pierced his heart; all he could do was nod.

  “What’s your name?”

  “… Cris.”

  “Cris, my name is Keith. Cris, it’s time you thought about your kids. What’s your wife’s name?”

  De Niro couldn’t hold back his tears as his emotions overtook him, “… Lisa.”

  Tompkins leaned over and spoke right into his ear, “What do you think Lisa would want you to do?”

  De Niro turned and looked back up the stairs. Blood from the bruises on his head dripped into his eyes as tears fell from them. He bit his lower lip to try and stop it from quivering as he pictured Lisa in that moment, smiling as she always smiled at him, with glittering eyes and her dimpled cheek. Every moment they spent together from the first moment they met, all flashed through his brain. For an instant, everything went quiet and time stopped. He felt his heart beating, pounding … then breaking. As his wife’s image faded, he mouthed the words, I love you!

  De Niro knew he couldn’t make it all the way up to the 104th floor in his condition, but he was content to die trying. That is, until he was reminded of Richard and Louis. He turned back to Tompkins, standing patiently a step below him and nodded in defeat. Understanding, Tompkins discarded the fire hose and put his arm around De Niro’s waist to aid him down the stairs.

  Thoughts raced through De Niro’s mind, too fast for him to make any sense of them as he felt himself descending, mostly being carried by the fatigued fireman. By the twentieth floor, both men were worn out but they pressed on, and by the tenth they were stumbling down the stairs as the last of the people behind them pushed past them. It took them over twenty minutes to reach the lobby. When they finally did, the fireman let go of De Niro and both men collapsed to their knees.

  De Niro noticed Tompkins look over to the far corner of the lobby as they both caught their breath. After a moment, the tall man shot to his feet with a look of grave concern on his face. It occurred to De Niro also that something was very wrong. There was no one in the lobby, not a single living soul and it looked like a dust storm had blown down the corridors since he was last there. Tompkins observed that even the temporary command center had been abandoned. He reached down and lifted De Niro from under his arm.

  “Come on, we got to get out of this building now!”

  Using the last remnants of his will power, De Niro got to his feet and staggered after his rescuer. As they made it to the front doors of Tower One, it was apparent that something very bad must have happened while they were in the building. There was no way for them to know that the South Tower had already fallen.

  De Niro didn’t know if his eyesight was blurry and causing everything to look ghostly, but the chalky taste in his mouth made him know it was all too real. It looked like a nuclear bomb was detonated outside! In the distance, people were wandering aimlessly like those who survive a plane crash sometimes do. You couldn’t tell the color of their skin because they were all covered with a thick white powder. As far as the eye could see … the ground, the cars, everything was coated in a dirty, pallid ash.

  De Niro and Tompkins started to exit the building when a fireman standing across the street waved his hands and yelled, “GET BACK!”

  The two men scrambled back into the revolving doors just in time to hear two loud, horrific thuds. Unsure of what caused them, they wandered out to investigate and realized the situation had turned gruesome. As if in a nightmare, they discovered they were standing amidst the mutilated, flattened corpses of men and women, who had either fallen or jumped to their deaths from high up. Their badly mangled bodies now lay contorted in shallow craters created by the impacts from their fall. De Niro felt sick. He could see that the ghastly site deeply affected Fireman Tompkins too; a man who witnessed his share of horrific things.

  Every one of them was someone’s husband or wife, mom or dad, son or daughter, all who less than an hour ago were alive and well. Please let none of them be Lisa!

  After taking in the total devastation and carnage, De Niro’s strength finally gave out. He couldn’t keep his eyes focused any longer from his head injury and his knees buckled underneath him from his blood loss and exhaustion. Sweat-soaked and near collapse himself, Tompkins strained to lift him up.

  The shell-shocked firefighter lumbered into the middle of West Street with De Niro thrown over his shoulder. Walkie-talkie chatter emanated from all directions as he made his way north through the trashed landscape. West Street was lined on both sides with vehicles of every type, some completely covered in powdery-white cinders.

  De Niro was barely able to lift is head up to look around.

  What in hell happened? This couldn’t all be from a plane crash?

  Tompkins made it less than a half-block, plodding through wreckage strewn all over the usually traffic-infested thoroughfare when the ground started shaking under his feet. From behind him, a sound erupted like a herd of stampeding cattle.

  Twisting around and peering up towards the top of the tower they just exited, Tompkins couldn’t believe his eyes. The once-mighty building was collapsing, its roof, along with its famous antenna racing down towards the ground at a furious pace.

  Grunting and breathing heavily with each step, the lanky fireman did his best to sprint away from the crumpling structure. He only made it part way down the street before the menacing cloud billowing from the mountain of rubble - that only a moment ago was one of the tallest buildings on earth – a pitch black, monstrous fog - overtook them.

  At the last moment, Tompkins threw De Niro in front of a parked car and then fell on top of him to protect him. Immediately, an enormous storm of soot enveloped them. From within it, building fragments pelted the fireman’s heavy overcoat and helmet while paperwork from the desks of people in the tower r
ained down like macabre confetti during a parade, ending up on the ground all around them.

  Blinded, the two men lay in the gutter, coughing and gasping for air as daylight turned to the blackest night. De Niro could feel the cold blackness creep inside his heart as a torrent of wind whistled pass them. The enormity of what just happened and what it meant – hit him.

  Lisa was gone.

  “LISSSAAA …!”

  “LISSAA …!” De Niro shouted again, this time his voice broke down from grief.

  Tompkins lifted himself off of De Niro and kneeled beside him. His nostrils flared as his eyes, too, became watery; the power of hearing a man crying out for his wife, in anguish, overcame the seasoned firefighter.

  Slipping into unconsciousness, De Niro’s last thoughts were a prayer.

  Please Father; let it be that she didn’t suffer!

  Chapter 3

  Dos Escuelas Park

  Henderson, Nevada

  11:30a.m., Saturday, May 14, 2011

  (Almost 10 years later)

  “WAIT FOR A GOOD ONE, LOUIS!” De Niro shouted to his youngest son.

  Both De Niro’s boys played for the same team, the Paseo Verde Yankees. 10 year-old Louis was the team’s catcher while his soon-to-be 12 year-old brother Richard was one of their starting pitchers. Standing at the plate, Louis heard his dad’s advice from the bleachers and nodded in his direction. He smashed the next pitch past the shortstop.

  De Niro jumped to his feet.

  “WAY TO GO!”

  Standing next to De Niro, his brother-in-law, Captain Louis “Mugsy” Ricci USN (SEAL) Ret. used his fingers to emit a loud whistle of celebration. His sister Lisa had given him his nickname when he was very young and it stuck – even his parents called him Mugsy. Formerly Commanding Officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center, where all Navy SEALS undergo basic and advanced training, Mugsy Ricci was just getting used to writing the “Ret-period” after his name.