Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,14
her back against it. The others had risen from their chairs and were trying to gather their belongings.
But Anna stopped them. “Leave everything where it is except your cell phones,” she told them in an authoritative tone. “Place your cell phones in your pockets or your waistbands so your hands are free and head calmly to the stairwell through those double doors,” she instructed, pointing in the direction of the fire exit.
She kept her tone even but strong, her back straight, and her expression dead serious. “Do not run and do not push,” she added when they glanced at her uncertainly, clearly surprised that she had taken over.
A second rumble moved through the building around them, and this time Annaleia heard voices elsewhere in the office raised in fear.
No. Please not again.
She didn’t look old enough to have been more than a toddler back then, but she was. She was a lot older than she looked. At this point, everyone and their dog claimed to have been somehow affected by those infamous attacks. It was cliché and it was considered bad form. Every person on the planet who was old enough desperately wanted to be associated with something so pivotal and important. They figured it would garner sympathy. Or make them seem somehow more wise.
The way Vietnam Vets were now coveted national treasures rather than the soldier scum they were considered in the early seventies. Something like that.
But where Anna was concerned, it was something she never talked about, not ever. For two reasons. One, as far as the world was concerned, she would have been a child in September of 2001. No older than five or six, for sure. And two, in all honesty she really just wanted to forget the entire ordeal. No matter what the tragedy’s motto said one should never do.
On that particular Tuesday, Annaleia Faith genuinely just happened to be in Manhattan, New York. Vacationing, of all things. And she’d flown into Newark from Pennsylvania before hiring a car to take her to Times Square. Within the space of a few hours, Anna had been in two of the three locations where the attacks had taken gone down. She’d had the most amazing luck that day. Not good luck. Just amazing. And she had always sort of wondered whether that luck had somehow rubbed off on the world in a bad way.
Annaleia leaned forward, grasping the closest person by the elbow to hurry them through the door. It happened to be her boss, and he gave her a strange wide-eyed look when she gently but firmly manhandled him out the door. “Let’s go,” she commanded. “All of you make your way to the stairwell right this very second. Once there, descend calmly and hold onto the railing – remember not to run.”
It was ironic, now that Anna was thinking back on it and moving people through the door at the same time. That had been the last vacation she’d taken – until the one she’d planned to begin tomorrow. Two decades without a day off and two decades without any crash-boom-bangs. In another time and place, perhaps viewed from very far away, the coincidence might have seemed almost amusing.
The vacation was going to have to wait. Whatever happened, the cosmetics company she’d pitched to probably wouldn’t go with her ad idea now, since it would likely only bring to mind for them bad things like fire alarms and people screaming in fear. Bad things. Which was also ironic, given that she’d pitched it to cover the Titanic disaster specifically to steer toward traumatic events of the long past rather than the more recent past.
In any case, she knew that whatever this situation was, if it was bad, she was going to have to come up with something else and fast.
In that case, Anna only hoped that the ad would be the worst of her concerns.
“This is important,” she continued to give instructions even as mind internally spun. “Wait until you reach the bottom level and exit the building before you attempt to use your cell phones to call anyone.” Otherwise they would be too busy trying to think of what to say or finding the number in their contacts list to exit the building with utmost care and speed, and their hands wouldn’t be free for balance and reactions. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because the call wouldn’t connect. There was no signal in the stairwells.
She raised her voice just a touch because she knew