When I got into the elevator at the Castleton, others piled in too. We were stuffed side by side when the doors closed but then the elevator started to shake, then tip, then free fall.
I was standing on top of others so it would be ok; I would be cushioned once we hit the bottom. And the fall was quite slow, the side of the elevator scraping metal against the walls of the elevator shaft.
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Once it landed, the force wasn’t as bad as expected. No one was hurt, but it was from the movies that I remembered: the cable comes next.
I shifted to the side. And when the cable did come, it fell in a soft puddle of thick wire, and it too, did not hurt anyone. We piled out and I returned to my hotel room.
But the shooter was still looking for me.
I hid under the bed, under a pile of sheets and checked my angles of vision for when she would arrive. Then when she did come, an Indian woman with short straight black hair, I could see her ankles move around the bed.
I threatened her to leave. “Maybe I have a gun!” I cried out from under the sheets.
And perhaps she did leave, because when I turned I saw Pawan under the bed with me, but I could no longer see her movements.
It was Pawan’s wife who came in and said “We got to get out of here, because of the terrorists.”
She pulled away the top sheets even though we were under the bed.
“Pawan too.” she continued.
It was the second time that I had averted death, so there would be a third.
Pawan and I slid out from under the bed to go to the airport.
I was by myself, but Pawan had his family.
His wife asked when is our flight and I said we booked it for 5 am the following morning. She looked at me with that look, trying to save money again, but I said I will try to move the flight earlier instead of having to spend most of the night in the airport.
I dialed the airline number from a blue airport desk phone in a bank of telephone kiosks. Others had the same idea. And I feigned confidence that I was going to get through, even with the on-going emergency, with everyone trying to leave, despite the phone line busy signal.
And then I heard someone pick up.
Photo by Justin A. Wilcox, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
