United We Stand by Eric Walters Page B

handed it to James. “You boys don’t need to buy a ticket on the way back, either. If you get stopped by a conductor you just give him this.”
    “Thanks,” James said.
    “No. Thank you, and thank your father. Good luck, boys.”

CHAPTER
EIGHT
    The train went underground as we got close to Grand Central, and the car got dim. I suddenly started to feel anxious all over. My chest began to tighten up, and I could feel my stomach starting to churn. That was stupid. I’d been on this train a hundred times, and a hundred times I’d entered the tunnel leading into the station, but now, today, I just felt unnerved … I couldn’t help thinking about those people who had been underneath the towers when they collapsed, the people in the concourse or in the subway below. Most of them would have been killed, but some of them might have been trapped. Right now, they’d be waitingfor rescuers. I couldn’t even imagine the terror of lying there in the dark. Praying … waiting either to be found or to die.
    When the train glided into the platform and light spilled in through the windows again, the darkness and that anxious feeling went away as quickly as they had come. The doors opened and we went out to the platform along with the other passengers. There couldn’t have been more than twenty of us on the whole train. There was a strange quietness. It wasn’t just that there were so few of us, but also that nobody was talking. There was no noise. I could hear my feet against the platform as I walked.
    Up ahead I could see two policemen waiting at the platform exit, stopping each person who tried to pass. They were looking through briefcases and purses. What were they doing that for? We joined the back of the line and shuffled forward. As we got closer I started to overhear what was going on. They were searching people, looking for weapons, looking for explosives.
    It was hard to argue with that. To a terrorist, Grand Central Station, the transportation hub that connected New York City with every other town and city on the map, would have looked like a promising target. On ordinary days, there had to be hundreds of thousands of people passing through. But did I look like a terrorist? Did that woman they’d just searched, or the elderly man in line next? On CNN they’d said that the terrorists were sixteen men—four each fromthe two planes that hit the World Trade Center, the one that attacked the Pentagon, and the one that went down in Pennsylvania—all from the Middle East. None of the people here on the train looked like they were … Well, that man three up from us did have a darker complexion. He could have been Muslim.
    I watched as he was searched. I was close enough to hear some of the questions and answers. He didn’t seem to speak much English, and I was sure that they were taking longer to search his bag than they did the purse of the lady ahead of him. Finally they let him go. The next two searches took almost no time and we were up next.
    “Hey, boys,” one of the officers said.
    “No parcels or packages, right?” the second officer asked.
    “No, nothing,” I said. I opened my jacket so they could see underneath.
    “Go through,” the first officer said.
    “Thanks.”
    We moved along the corridor toward the big hall.
    “Can you believe that?” James asked.
    “I guess they just want to make sure. I’ve heard that a lot of people are worried about another attack.”
    “Yeah, I know,” James said. “That’s why they grounded all aircraft. They were afraid another plane was going to be hijacked.”
    “Like the four others.”
    “Those people in Pennsylvania, they fought back,” James said.
    “It didn’t help them.”
    “But it did help the people on the ground. I just wish the passengers or crew on the first two planes had fought. Maybe the towers wouldn’t have been hit.”
    “The people in those two planes, especially the first, they didn’t know what was going to happen. Who could have