A 9/11 Story

I got the full story from Eddie who
lived in New Jersey. On that day I was working in an office building in
Washington D.C.

It was still early and there were
only a few people working. Someone in the office had a TV on. All of a sudden I
heard a scream and I knew that something terribly awful had happened. All of us
got up and went over to where the TV was playing. Someone turned up the sound
and I could hear the announcer saying that they thought a small plane must have
gone terribly off course and hit a side of the World Trade Center in New York.

The picture showed one of the World
Trade Center towers and there was smoke streaming out of the building. At first
the camera must have been pretty far off and there really wasn’t any way to see
how much damage the “small” plane had done. I remember thinking that it must
have gotten lodged in the windows of one of the upper stories and the smoke was
from the fuel of the plane.

Everyone started to talk about how
those high rise skyscrapers were death traps because whenever there was an
emergency they shut down the elevators. The tallest building in the capital is
about eleven stories. That’s not exactly a short climb down but a heck of a lot
better than forty or fifty flights of stairs.

Just as the second person started
to tell their “I-can-do-better-than-you” story about being stuck in an
elevator, there was another scream and the one person who was paying attention
to the TV shouted, “Another plane just hit the World Trade Center!” Of course
no one believed it and we all said it must be a replay of the plane hitting the
tower from another direction. It wasn’t.

I remember looking at the clock on
the wall and it was just after 9:00 a.m. I could feel the waves of panic all
the way from New York. There must have been hundreds of people dying at the
same time to send such a powerful message over all that distance. I almost
fainted from the impact of their deaths. I knew that I had to help and I
started to back away from the crowd around the TV.

I suppose a little background would
be good about now. Everyone has certain abilities. Some of us can throw a
baseball really hard. Some can run really fast, and we all know at least one
person who can see really well in the dark.

Some of us can perceive the
emotions of others really well, and some of those can also broadcast emotions
to others. I belong to that group. We are what some have called “Broad-Cast
Empaths.” Just like any other talent the strength of that talent varies from individual
to individual. No one seems to know why we can do what we can do. And as you
might guess we aren’t willing to shout about it to some scientists who would
want to lock us up and run tests until we died of old age.

It does seem to run in families but
not directly from father to son or mother to daughter. The ability begins to
manifest itself in the teenage years. The strength of the ability doesn’t grow
as the person gets older. Usually by about the time the person reaches twenty
they are as strong as they are going to get. 

The young stand out like a bright
lantern on a dark night. As I said it tends to run in families and usually
there is an uncle or aunt around who detects the young practitioner. They will
take them under their wing and teach them some of the basic controls to make
their lives easier. 

All of us can feel the emotions of
others around us. As you can imagine, that can be pretty scary for a teenager
who is just beginning to have their own emotions begin to go crazy. We have to
learn to limit the emotional input, or at least the strength of those emotions.
In the beginning it’s a bit like a slap to the face. Without any controls
you’re being buffeted all day long. I’ve heard of some sensitives who move out
to the Southwestern deserts to get away from the cacophony that constantly
assaults them.

Most of us learn to tamper down the
reception and that allows us to live in the world as it is. Now the other half
of the ability can be just as problematic. A Broad-Cast Empath can be like one
of those huge speakers they use for those out-door concerts. If the young don’t
learn control they can cause panic. Riots at sporting events have been traced
to some teenager who wasn’t being careful.

Both the practical and the moral
controls must be taught as soon as possible. Imagine an out of control teenage
male who suddenly realizes that he can convince some young beauty that she
feels strong affection for him. Of course there are reasonable uses of the
talent. Self-defense will sometimes mandate that when facing a group of toughs
who are about to attack, they should suddenly have an uncontrolled feeling of
fear. That could explain why no one has ever heard of any of us being mugged on
a city street.

This brings up another point. For
the most part we don’t live in large cities. The constant input can be too
challenging even for the best controlled of us. I, like many others, can work
in the city as long as I can get away at the end of the day. I work in our
nation’s capital but live a good deal south of the city to recuperate at the
end of the day.

Another point that may not be
obvious is that we tend not to intermarry.  The constant need to dampen our emotions would
be a strain on the relationship that few could manage. We actually don’t even make
close friendships, that require being near to each other. Eddie, my friend from
New Jersey, and I went to high school together, but he moved North soon after
graduation. Thanks to the internet we have maintained a close friendship even
though we live hundreds of miles apart.

OK enough background. Back to the
story.

I managed to ease out of the crowd
around the TV and got to my desk. I was trying to get on a plane so that I
could help out in New York. No matter what airline I called the lines were all jammed.
I turned on my computer to try to book the first flight north and then a banner
on my browser said that all planes in the U.S. had been grounded. I was just
about to decide to drive up there when I suddenly felt an enormous pressure in
my head and I must have fainted.

A minute or so later I regained
consciousness and thought to myself more planes must have hit the towers and
more people had died. As my eyes started to refocus I saw that the banner on
the computer had changed. It was saying that a plane had hit the Pentagon.  I learned later that hundreds had died in
that crash.

That decided it for me. I gave up
trying to get to New York and instead aimed for the Pentagon. I stepped out of
my office and saw that they were all crowding around the TV. The announcer must
have reported that the Pentagon had been hit and the panic level right here in
the office started to peak and people’s emotions were boiling over. Fear was
filling the office like a dense fog.

I started to let out a blanket of
calm to slow down the emotions of those right in front of me. Luckily it hadn’t
gotten out of hand yet and I was able to slow it down before it was too late. I
could feel the two other Empaths who worked in the building doing the same
thing and we sort of linked up to increase the power of the blanketing.

While it wasn’t all reasonable in the
building it had moved down from a flight in panic. The phones were ringing and
the office manager called out that we had been instructed to evacuate the
building.

That made it easier for me to leave
without being noticed since everybody was heading for the doors as well. Our
three person panic avoidance team effort was working as people began to grab
their things and head out. I waited for nearly a half an hour to make sure that
panic didn’t flair up again. Then I could sense that there were fewer people
around me and the umbrella of peace that we had set up started to close. The
other two must have sensed the same thing and were powering down their effort.

I got my stuff and walked out of
the office. I noticed that the guards at the doors were remarkably calm
considering that they had just evacuated all of the people working in the
building. One of them chided me for lagging behind after the evacuation order
had been given but we both smiled. I walked out and realized that the guards
were going to stay in the building even though it looked like airplanes were
falling from the sky.

I had taken the train to work so I
didn’t have a car available for the trip to the pentagon. I thought I could
take a cab over there, but as soon as I left the building I realized that
wasn’t going to be possible. The streets were in complete grid-lock. No car was
moving, and the drivers for the most part were giving up. A few had left their
cars right there in the street and were trying to get out of the city on foot.

It took only a few minutes to
realize that the subway, which left from Union Station, wasn’t going to be my
way over to the Pentagon. There were crowds of people sitting on the grassy
areas around the station. I could hear them talking about the trains being
stopped and the subway being shut down.

Ok that decided it for me and I
started to walk over to the crash site. As I recall it was only a three mile
walk but it took almost an hour since the streets were all blocked with cars
that I had to scramble over to get out.  There was no movement in the street and I
realized that they must have shut off the lanes that went to the Pentagon.

There were police trying to stop
those who were walking over the 14^th Street Bridge, but a subtle
command to be concerned about the crowds in the other direction let me get past
them. As I got to the bridge I could feel that same sort of collective that we
had established in my building. Here however it was being powered by hundreds
not just three. I could see the affect in the air around the building as I
entered the parking lot. 

There were several master Empaths
controlling the effort. I hadn’t encountered them before but they must have
been in Washington to have gotten here so quickly. I didn’t exactly hear what
they wanted but I just “knew” that there was a weakness in the area around the
above-ground entrance to the subway at the Pentagon. I walked over to that
location and saw there was a crowd starting to panic at the absence of buses
and trains. I could feel about six other broadcasters nearby and I linked up
with them to quiet the growing restlessness.

As I stood there I could almost
smell something I had never smelled before. Without losing my concentration I looked
around to see if there was a fire here at the subway station. I thought that if
there was a fire we would have to get the people away from the site. There were
several ambulances nearby and I could see a medic bending over several persons
who seemed to be smoking. As I cleared my vision I realized that they weren’t
on fire but the smell was coming from those people. I learned later that they
were Empath broadcasters who had pushed themselves beyond the limit and had
suffered strokes. Apparently when we over extended ourselves we actually
“Burn-out” our power.

Newspapers in the following days
would report that seven people had suffered strokes during the attack on the
Pentagon. Five of those died. I managed to visit the two survivors and found
that both were broadcasters. Neither would recover their abilities.

It would be nearly three hours
later that we finally let the cover of calm collapse. By then most of the
people had been able to get away and the firemen were sure that they had
controlled the residual explosions and fires from the plane that had hit the
building.

I was exhausted. I sat there on the
platform where buses had been taking people away from the Pentagon. One of the
emergency workers had left a case of water nearby and I managed to grab two bottles.
It was warm but I didn’t care. I drank the first one down in two gulps, and
poured half of the other one over my head. I almost thought that I would burst
into flames any minute.

There was a strong sense of
accomplishment coming over all of us who were left. I realized that the Empath
Masters who had been controlling our efforts were sending out the “Word” that
we could leave. I noticed that there were fresh minds operating in the area,
and guessed correctly that they had been brought in at the end to do the
emotional “Clean-up” at the site. 

Eddie filled me in on how things
went in New York. I’m ashamed to say that he was the one who called me. When I
got home and the strain of what had just happened simply took over and I went
to sleep. I slept the clock around and woke up late in the night the next day.
I turned on the news channels and found out just how tragic the events were. 

At the Pentagon where I had been
standing for half of the day they were estimating that nearly 200 people had
died. That included all of the people who had been on the hijacked plane.  They still weren’t able to calculate how many
had died in New York, but the estimates were well into the thousands. I fell
asleep for a second time sitting there trying to imagine how Eddie and the
others who must have gotten to the World Trade Center could have survived the
death of all those people.

I woke up to the sound of my phone
ringing. It was the morning of day three. Three days since the worst disaster
in U.S. history. I was still groggy when I picked up the phone. I thought it
was probably my boss telling me I was fired for missing two days of work. It
was Eddie.

As soon as I realized who it was
all I could say was “thank god you’re alright.”

Eddie answered that “Alright”
wasn’t exactly the word he would have used but he was alive. He told me his
story of what happened on 9/11 in New York.

He had felt the same wave of
despair I had when the first plane hit the tower and all of those people died.
Eddie was in the city for a 10:00 meeting and was looking for a parking place
there in the Wall Street area when he felt the deaths of the people on the
plane and in the tower. He said he almost crashed into the car in front of him
and thought he might have passed out for a few seconds. He knew that something
terrible had happened and it had happened very, very close to where he was. He
said he pulled into a space that was marked for handicapped and got out of his
car. He was still woozy but he could tell from the panic that was swelling over
at the Trade Center which direction to go.

As he got to the Trade Center block
he said there were people everywhere looking up at the North tower where you
could see the smoke from the plane. He said he could tell that it wasn’t a
small plane but rather a very large plane that had hit the tower.

There were several other Empaths
right there and so Eddie and the others tried to start calming down the people
in the tower, so that they might be able to get out of the building and not
panic. Eddie said that he realized almost as soon as he started that some of
those Empaths he was trying to work with were in the World Trade Center. He
would find out later that several of those Empaths who were in the building
were in the floors higher than the ones where the plane hit. They were never
able to get out because the plane had blocked all of the stairways down.

Eddie said it seemed like only a
minute later that the second plane hit the other tower. He knew from reports
that it was actually nearly a quarter hour later. When that plane hit all of
those he was working with shut down. That many deaths so close forced them to
control their input to almost zero.

A minute later they could begin to
start up again. By that time others from New York City were joining the team
already working at the site. Eddie said he felt that same sort of shield
forming that I had felt at the Pentagon. At first they were all trying to do
the same thing and then he felt a sort of controlling force and he too realized
that there were Master Empaths on the scene. He felt that he should move
farther south and he walked over about a block to be where it seemed he should
be to complete the shield. 

By then the place was loaded with
more fire trucks and police vehicles than he would ever have thought were in
the city. In a sea of panic the firemen and police were pillars of calm. Eddie
said he could feel them moving around inside the shield as if they didn’t need
any sort of support from the Empaths. The regular people were another matter.

By then Eddie guessed that there
must have been dozens of Broad-Cast Empaths all working together. As time went
on more and more minds joined the team. Some were directed to move farther out
to assist those who were escaping from the disaster. Bridges and streets were
crowded with escapees, and it was important that they keep moving and not block
the escape of the others.

Edie said that by this time the
Empath’s shield was so strong that it was visible to those he was working with.
It varied from blue to purple and seemed to be composed of waves of energy
going both up and down at the same time. He said that the people were streaming
out of the buildings and the firemen were helping them get out. They couldn’t
see inside the building but he could sense their calm going up into the
building.

More and more people were coming
out of the building and several of the Empaths were working to create aisles of
calm that would draw those coming out of the building away from the immediate
space next to the building. While they didn’t want to stay there, they simply
were exhausted from climbing down to the ground. It was necessary to make them
feel as if they had the strength that they really didn’t have to get them to
keep moving away from the towers.

Eddie said he suddenly felt as if he
had been hit with a sledge hammer. When he got up from the ground he saw that
the South tower he had been standing less than a block away from was gone.
There was smoke everywhere and he could hardly breathe. The shield had
collapsed. It was obvious that a number of the Empaths who had been maintaining
the shield had been in the South Tower. They were gone. The numbers of Empaths
who were coming in to help had grown but all had been impacted by the fall of
the tower.

It took several minutes before they
could reestablish the shield. Eddie had taken his handkerchief and tied it
around his mouth and nose, but it barely made a difference in how hard it was
to breathe.  As the shield began to
reform it wasn’t as strong as it had been before the tower had collapsed. Those
who were left could feel others coming closer but apparently it was beginning
to become even more difficult to approach the World Center site. Eddie found
out later that the authorities had shut all of the bridges and tunnels into the
city. A number of the latest Empaths had to force police to look the other way
to get past. Several of the police would report later that they had been pushed
over by the escaping crowds. Their reports were listed as confused since they
had reported that they had been pushed toward the city and not away from it. 

Control of the Empaths actions was
sketchy. Apparently one of the Empath Masters had been in the South Tower when
it collapsed. Sometime later another Master came close enough to the tower to
exert some control. The shield had to be reinforced at the top as the people
trapped in the upper stories of the North Tower were realizing that they were
truly trapped and weren’t going to be rescued. There were Empaths in that group
but hey just carried on trying to keep those they were trapped with from dying
in panic. It was an act of kindness that will remain unknown.

Eddie said that he thought he heard
a cracking noise over all of the other noises in the area around the towers and
then he died.

I stopped breathing when he said
that. It occurred to me that I was speaking with a ghost.

Then Eddie said that he and a
number of other Empaths who had already been weakened by the collapse of the
South Tower had lost consciousness when the North Tower collapsed. It turned
out that over a dozen of them would suffer that fatal stroke that had befallen
those at the Pentagon. Eddie was not one of them.

He said that he woke up nearly a
day later. After the North Tower had collapsed he and a number of others had
fallen into a near death state. More controlled Empaths were able to shut off
the death screams of those in the North Tower. Those Empaths trapped in the
tower gave their last to subdue the effects of their deaths.

One of those who were able to
control the input found Eddie slumped against a wall. He was almost invisible
and was covered in layers of dust and debris. She dragged him farther away from
the site and got a passer-bye to help her get him to her apartment. When Eddie
woke up he was in such a depressed state that she forced him back asleep to
protect both him and her. Nearly twelve hours later she let him wake up and
this time she helped him to control his emotions

He told me that it was one of the
worst times in his life. Added to that was the fact that the girl who had
rescued him was stunning. It was obvious to both of them that Eddie had to put
some distance between them for both of their sakes. He managed to get back to
his own place in New Jersey and got some more rest. Then he did the same thing
I had done and listened to the reports of what he had been a part of. When he
heard of the attack on the Pentagon he called me to see if I was alright. 

Apparently the shield that he and
the others had created had blocked out the effect of the deaths at the
Pentagon.

We have talked a number of times
since that day but not about what happened on 9/11.