DARKNESS
PROLOGUE
As the Godzilla-like cloud engulfed all in its path, what had been a bright sunny day went totally black, covering everything and everyone in thick layers of dust and debris, covering cars, buses, and emergency vehicles.
That morning, September 11, 2001, thousands were staring at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. They had been transfixed since the moment when, at 8:46 a.m., a Boeing 767 passenger plane flew into the north side of One World Trade Center (the North Tower). Millions more would watch on TV as another 767 crashed into the South Tower (Two World Trade Center) at 9:03 a.m. Fifty-six minutes after that second unimaginable disaster, they heard a rumbling and watched as an immense bulbous gray cloud swaddled the top floors of the South Tower before bringing down the entire 110-story building. Less than ninety minutes later, the North Tower too collapsed in on itself, pancaking, one floor crushing the one beneath it, as another enormous cloud grew, enveloping the Tower as it disintegrated, spewing dust and debris through most of Lower Manhattan.
The giant cloud, which can be viewed to this day in dozens upon dozens of YouTube videos, spontaneously expanded in height and girth, producing new clouds as big as buildings. The dust shoved its way down streets and between buildings in Lower Manhattan, gathering speed and volume like a tsunami, pushing debris through glass doors and windows, and sending a plume high into space. People tried to outrun the dust storm, but with little success, while many took cover in doorways or under parked vehicles.
The expanse of this smoldering pyre was so great that astronaut Frank L. Culbertson Jr., was able to photograph it from a window on the International Space Station. The cloud was so large that it seemed to linger in place even as it expanded, and like trying to see in a snowstorm, those engulfed by it could only vaguely make out figures and objects. What mattered, they thought, was getting away from the Towers’ collapse, the falling steel and concrete and glass. They didn’t realize their deadliest attacker was all around them, in the air they breathed…
