A/N: I do not own the characters of Criminal Minds. They are the property of the Mark Gordon Company, ABC Studios, and CBS Paramount Network Television. Each chapter is only my opinion and imagination of what might happen to the characters, and not based on any inside knowledge.

If It All Ended Tomorrow

A/N: This story was written after The Replicator episode. It is finished. I hope I captured the characters as we know and love them.

Chapter 1-The Nightmare

It had been the worse mass murder case they ever investigated; and they had investigated many over the years. Even Frank Breitkopf and George Foyet could not compete with the number of dead, and each of them had killed dozens. But this Unsub killed over one hundred people, and all of them children between the ages of five and ten years of age. And to make matters worse, each of the children had been sexually assaulted repeatedly.

Supervisory Special Agents Aaron Hotchner, and Jennifer Jareau, first discovered the hiding place in the basement of the Unsub who seemed eager to show his crimes. But what they found instead, once they descended into the basement, wasn't just a nightmare; they descended into the depths of hell.

The Rhode Island police asked for the BAU's help with a serial killer of children, when the disemboweled bodies of three seven-year-olds had been found. They found them in the playground of the local elementary school which they attended. Police determined the children must have been abducted while enroute to school, as no alarms had been raised by the parents. The school assumed the kids were at home. And the parents assumed their kids were in school. Only when the school contacted the parents of the missing kids, and determined the kids were indeed missing, did they call the police. A search of the playground area found the kids stuffed in a trash bin used by the school custodians in charge of keeping the playground clean. Nobody had seen or heard anything, and they were stumped. So, when a fourth child who attended the same school went missing, the BAU was asked to investigate.

Aaron 'Hotch' Hotchner and his team, arrived in Rhode Island within a few hours and met by Detective Arnold Baxter, the lead detective on the case.

Within the next week, three more children disappeared. Two of the three were found dead within seventy-two hours. Like the others, they had been sexually assaulted and disemboweled, their bodies found inside an empty classroom tossed aside like trash. There was no sign of the third missing child, a little girl of about eight years old. The team promised to find her before she ended up like the others before her. Another three days passed before they found their Unsub. He was a third grade teacher named Randall Kindredge who taught mathematics at the same school. In fact, the three deceased children found in the trash bin, and the two found in the empty classroom attended his math class. The still missing girl attended the class across the hall from his. It turned out Kindredge's real name was Walter Driscoll, a registered sex offender who taught in a public elementary school in his home state of New Jersey. Further checking showed that somebody dropped the ball in New Jersey as Driscoll left the state, and moved to Connecticut first, and then Rhode Island, teaching in elementary schools. He even changed his name after leaving New Jersey to Randall Kindredge. It infuriated Hotch and his team that Driscoll had slipped through the system designed to protect the youngest members of their society and failed so abominably. But they were grateful at least that Driscoll had been permanently stopped with minimal loss of life at least.

The team, along with the police, arrested Driscoll at his home as he got ready to leave for work. It took everything within Hotch not to pummel the man into the ground. Or to put a bullet directly into his brain. How can anybody hurt a child? A search of his home by Morgan, JJ, and Reid, found the missing little girl huddled in a closet, terrified and crying for her mommy and daddy. With a tender motherly smile, JJ coerced the child into letting her pick her up and while rubbing her back, carried her outside the house. The little girl kept her arms tightly around JJ's neck with her face buried in the crook of her shoulder. Rossi and the lead detective proceeded to search the upstairs, while Reid, Morgan, and Hotch searched the main floor and proceeded to the basement. At once Hotch noticed the basement floor didn't appear as old as the walls. It looked newer than the rest of the basement. He instructed the lead detective to have ground-penetrating radar brought in to scan the floor of the basement.

It took several hours to get the equipment to the house, much less into the basement. And what they found would break even the most seasoned law enforcement official.

As the floor was dug up, bodies in different stages of decomposition were found. It later showed that Driscoll had kidnapped children from nearly every county in Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. That was why nobody connected the abductions until now, or connected them to Driscoll. Children had been taken from different states. So no connection had been made until now, thanks to the BAU.

By the end of the day, the number of bodies found neared one hundred. Hotch and his team became sick as an endless line of body bags and covered stretchers, were brought out of the house. They watched them loaded into waiting vehicles for transport to the coroner's office. The team wondered why they hadn't been called in sooner. Hotch cursed the person or persons who didn't do their jobs. As one body was loaded onto a stretcher, Hotch noticed one little sandy-haired boy's body, about six, bore a striking resemblance to his son Jack. And for a moment, cold fear permeated his body before he remembered Jack was visiting his grandparents in Pennsylvania. Only then did he begin to calm down from his earlier thoughts. He made a mental note to phone Jack tonight when he returned to his hotel. He sympathized with the parents whose children would never be coming home again, as moisture built in his eyes.

So wrapped up in his own thoughts, he barely noticed Rossi's hand on his shoulder. He turned and glanced at the older man grimly. His friend understood what was on Hotch's mind without the younger man having to utter a single word. He also felt the same way about people who target children as the others. He hated them with a passion.

"I know what's on your mind, Aaron," Rossi exclaimed with a gentle squeeze of his friend's shoulder.

"That could so easily have been Jack," Hotch replied in a husky voice, his eyes locked now on the stretcher as it passed him.

"But it wasn't," Rossi assured him.

"And I'm grateful for that, Dave," Hotch replied as he swallowed the lump in his throat. "But I'm also thinking of all the families who won't see their sons and daughters again. Tell me something," Hotch's lower lip began to quiver. "Is it right to be happy my child is alive, when so many families' kids are not?"

Rossi let out a deep breath and took a few moments to collect his thoughts. "It's never wrong to be happy for and about your own child, Aaron."

Hotch let out a deep breath. He was happy Jack was safe and alive. But he would never, ever, forget the horror in that basement, and understood none of the others would either.

JJ chewed her lower lip at the endless body bags, and recalled that her son, Henry, wasn't much older than a lot of these children. She didn't know what she would have done if it had been Henry. How would she handle knowing she would never see her three-year-old son again? She was certain Hotch was feeling the same being a single father. Just then, one of the stretchers was brought past her. She gasped at seeing a tiny dirty hand and blond hair sticking out from beneath the sheet. Sensing she was about to lose it, JJ raised her eyes to the heavens and her lower lip quivered as tears sprang from her eyes. She turned to find Spencer Reid watching her with that brotherly look he always saved just for her.

"I understand you're thinking about Henry," he said tenderly. He secretly thought about his godson. But right now JJ needed him. "But there's now one less monster to worry about now."

JJ wiped her fingers across her cheeks. "I know. I was just thinking of all these families who will never see their child again."

Reid pursed his lips. "I know it feels that way. But these families will at least have closure."

JJ took in and let out a deep breath. She faced Reid. "Closure? It's hard to think of having closure compared to not being able to hold your child in your arms again."

Reid could only look at the blond unable to respond. To him, there was no answer.

Morgan and Blake were transfixed at the enormity of the nightmare unfolding in front of them. Morgan never saw anything like this. This was the stuff nightmares were made of, he thought. And Blake, being the newbie, had never seen anything like this either. They saved only one child out of over one hundred. Over one hundred butchered children buried in the basement of a house with cement poured over them. A concrete grave. So many children who would never see their parents again. Would never be with their friends or loved ones again. Would never just be children again.

The trio looked at Hotch and JJ, understanding the impact of so many small bodies, and the effect on the only two parents on the team. But that didn't make the effect on them any less devastating. It didn't matter that they had saved one child even though they were grateful for small blessings. No, the horror in the basement shook them to the core. Over one hundred children of various ages, all sexually molested and butchered by a maniac with no conscience in the worse way possible. At least they didn't have the task of informing the parents. The agents didn't envy the police of Rhode Island, New Jersey, or Connecticut.

This case broke each of them in ways that could never be repaired. They would carry what they found in the basement forever in their minds with no way of ever forgetting or being able to forget with time.