Benny Martinez's second-grade class is reassembling outside on Civic Center Plaza after their field trip to the Asian Art Museum, just under two miles from Ground Zero. They are curious when a sudden intense light streams between the buildings from the
east, and frightened when the ground shakes with a terrible sound like thunder that won't stop. Gusts of wind hurl them about and buffet them with trash and broken glass. Benny is only slightly injured by the debris, but his teacher is killed by a falling power line. It takes his class a few minutes to stop screaming and start crying.
With his teacher dead, Benny and his friends have no one to help them and don't know what to do. A few who are severely injured bleed to death before other survivors can help them. Many start wandering off, but the trip to the museum has taken them to unfamiliar territory, so Benny and his friends don't know how to get home. Benny begins following the crowds of people moving westward, trying to get as far as they can from the center of destruction. A woman he meets on the way lets him use her cell phone, but his mom doesn't answer, and nobody's home. After wandering aimlessly for hours, hungry and thirsty, Benny falls asleep on the street.
He awakens covered in the dust that will eventually kill him. If he could have been treated in time, the dose of radiation he received from fallout probably would not have been fatal. But the attack strained the city's emergency medical services so much that Benny isn't taken to a paramedic for two days, by which time he's dehydrated and suffering from a severe headache and dry heaves from radiation sickness. His family never finds him, and he dies a week later.