The first thing she knew when she woke up was that it was dark and she was cold – cold enough that she was shivering hard and her muscles were beginning to cramp with lying still. She pushed herself into a sitting position and gasped immediately at the flare of pain that shot through her chest. All right, at least one broken rib, possibly more. Shallow breaths, please, to avoid the possibility of puncturing the lung. Thank you, yes, that's much better.
Her cell phone was digging into her hip. Surely she wasn't THAT lucky. She reached with her left hand toward her pocket and discovered that her hand was chained to the wall. Ah. No wonder she couldn't feel her fingers. That wasn't cold; her hand had fallen asleep. She considered shaking it to wake it up and decided against the idea; no sense in letting anyone who might be listening know that she was awake.
She reached carefully across her body with her right hand, biting down hard on her lower lip to keep from crying out in pain. A bit of scrabbling and squeezing later, and her cell phone was in her hand. She flipped it open. She had service – just a couple of bars, but still. She had apparently made God happy today. She dialed her first speed dial number.
"Gibbs," said a sleepy voice.
"Gibbs? It's Kate," she whispered.
"Kate? It's 0245 – what's going on?"
"I've been kidnapped!"
She could actually hear him spring into action. "Where are you?"
"I don't know," she replied. "It's pitch dark in here, and my cell doesn't give off enough light to see anything. And I can't move because I'm chained to the wall."
"Are you hurt?"
"Yes," she replied, feeling absurdly as though she was disappointing him by saying so. "I think I've got a broken rib or two."
"Okay. Hang on." She heard him doing something on the other end of the phone and realized he was on his land line, calling Tony. "Call Abby," she heard him say. "Kate's been kidnapped. Meet me at the office in ten." He came back on the line with her. "Stay calm," he told her. "I'll have Abby find your cell phone and we'll be there as fast as we can get there. Just stay on the line with me, okay?"
"Okay," she replied. She leaned back against the wall behind her, comforted slightly by his continued presence on the phone. "I'm taking a wild guess here, but this is probably connected to our case."
He laughed at her dry observation. "You think so, Kate?" She heard him crank up his truck. "I was thinking it had something to do with the dead aliens at Area 51."
She laughed softly, then moaned as the action jarred her ribs. "Okay, no jokes."
"What's the last thing you remember, Kate?" he asked her to keep her mind off things.
She pondered. "I went out," she said. "I wanted chocolate and I didn't have any, so I went down to the corner grocery."
"What happened?"
"Um. I remember going in. They had Lindor truffles on sale, so I got two bags. God, I love those things."
"Okay. You got your chocolate. Then what?"
"Trying to remember." The cold was seeping through her thin pants, but for some reason, she wasn't shivering. "Hard to think." She was getting sleepy.
"Kate!" he said sharply.
She shook her head hard, moaning again as her broken ribs poked something. "Ow. What, Gibbs?"
"Talk to me. Tell me about the place where you are."
"Cold," she muttered.
"What else?"
"Dark."
"Besides that, Kate!" he snapped. "What's the floor made out of? What are the walls made of?"
She ran her hand – which was no longer trembling – across the floor. "Smooth," she said, then paused. "Wait." She fingered the thing she had found. "There's a rubber mat on the floor." She reached out carefully, feeling at the wall. "Oh, no wonder I have a signal. I'm right by the door, and it… the walls are really thick, Gibbs, but the door's not."
She heard the distant ding of the elevator through the phone, and Gibbs talking to Abby and Tony, who had somehow beat him in to the office. "I think she's in a freezer," she heard him say. Ah, that would explain it. "We need to hurry… I think hypothermia's already setting in. Tony, go get the car. Abby, find her. Now!"
"Triangulating now," Abby's voice drifted through the phone. It sounded worried. Kate wanted to tell Abby not to worry; she was okay. Just a little tired. And it hurt to breathe. But she wasn't nearly as cold as she had been; someone must have turned the heat on.
"Kate!" Gibbs was yelling into the phone, and she wished he would stop yelling; she wanted to sleep, and she couldn't sleep with Gibbs yelling in her ear.
"What?" she mumbled.
"Kate, are you still cold?" he asked, and it seemed like a strange question for some reason.
"No," she said. "'M warm."
"Shit. Abby, feed into the car. Find her! Kate, keep talking to me! Kate!"
But Kate was beyond responding. She was tired; she wanted to sleep. Her arm had gotten too heavy to keep holding up her phone, and it had fallen into her lap. She could hear Gibbs yelling through the phone, and she wanted to answer, but she was just so tired. The last thing she saw was the green light from her phone illuminating her leg before her heavy eyes slipped closed.
"I've got her, Gibbs!" Abby's voice was shouting frantically when Gibbs climbed into the car with Tony. "Patching through to the car now – it's a meat packing shop on Nineteenth."
"Floor it, Tony!"
They burst into the meat packing shop like avenging Hell. Their suspect was sitting at a card table in the middle of the production floor, three cronies with him, the table covered in dope and money. Three of them were dead within seconds of reaching for weapons; the fourth, their suspect, lay on the floor with a bullet through his kneecap, screaming.
Gibbs knelt down next to the man and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his face up to within inches of Gibbs's own. "You tell me where she is right now, or I swear to God, I will hurt you so bad you'll be begging me to kill you."
"The freezer!" the man screamed. "In the freezer!"
"Where?" Gibbs demanded, shaking him once.
"Aah! Over there!" He pointed to the left across the room, where a huge, rusty door was set into the wall.
Tony headed over at a dead run. The door was shut but not locked, and he pulled it open and flipped the light on. "Boss!"
Gibbs threw his suspect's head back at the floor, not caring if the bastard was hurt, and ran over. Kate lay in the floor, head slumped forward on her chest. Her left arm was chained to the wall, her right lay in her lap, her cell phone still in her hand. "Call 911," Gibbs ordered Tony, moving into the cold room.
Tony headed back across the room. "Where's the key, you son of a bitch?"
"James. James had it in his pocket." The bleeding man on the floor pointed at one of his dead compatriots.
Tony knelt down and rummaged through the dead man's pockets, coming up with the key and running back to Gibbs as he called for an ambulance. He unlocked the cuff around Kate's wrist and stood back as Gibbs lifted her carefully and carried her out into the warmer outer room, laying her down on a counter and beginning to chuff at her hands with his. "Come on, Kate," Gibbs muttered. "Wake up. Come on."
She was still breathing shallowly, but her lips and fingers were blue, and her pulse moved sluggishly in her neck. Tony came around to the other side of her, his cell pinned between his head and shoulder, and began rubbing at her other hand as he talked to the dispatcher. "One with a gunshot wound," he was saying, "and one with broken bones and hypothermia. Nineteenth and H, the Weatherford Meat Processing Plant. Hurry!"
Gibbs pulled his jacket off and wrapped it around Kate, still rubbing at her hand. "Come on, Kate, wake up. Wake up!"
"Boss. Boss!" Gibbs looked up at Tony. "She's not breathing!"
Gibbs leaned over Kate's face, watching her torso. There was no movement in her chest, and no air came from her nose or slightly-open mouth. He immediately turned his face to hers and tilted her head back, beginning rescue breathing. Tony checked her pulse and then hoisted himself up onto the counter, straddling her waist and lacing his hands together above her sternum. Gibbs looked up and nodded once at him, and he straightened his elbows, starting chest compressions. "Come on, Kate," Gibbs murmured as Tony counted out his compressions. "Don't you quit on me!"
"…thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Go, Boss!"
Gibbs applied rescue breaths again, and Tony restarted chest compressions. Then Gibbs breathed, and Tony compressed. Gibbs was breathing again when the paramedics burst into the room. One of them stopped by the bleeding man on the floor long enough to apply a tourniquet and some bandages, the others came running over to Tony and Gibbs, breaking out equipment as quickly as they could. Within moments, they had Kate packed in warm blankets, had a ventilation bag over her nose and mouth and an emergency defibrillator attached to her chest. "Everyone clear!"
Everyone took a step back and Kate's body jerked once, then again. A woman grabbed the ventilation bag, squeezing it. The defibrillator beeped solid for long moments. The man operating it spoke again. "Clear!"
Kate's body jerked once, twice again.
The woman went back to the ventilation bag. The defibrillator sounded its solid alarm. Tony felt his soul begin to crack into tiny pieces as Kate continued to lay there, her skin blue and puffy, her heart stubbornly refusing to beat.
"Clear!"
Kate's body jerked.
Kate's body jerked again.
The defibrillator alarm rang solid for a very long moment and then, quite suddenly, began to beat arrhythmically. "Get a gurney!" someone shouted. The world suddenly lurched into fast forward.
When Kate opened her eyes again, all she could see was white, and at first she was afraid she was dead. Then she rolled her eyes to the side and saw Gibbs, looking exhausted, asleep in the chair beside her bed. A rhythmic beeping sound got her attention, and she looked up to see that she was attached to several monitors and an IV line. Aha. Hospital.
On the bedside table, right in her line of vision, sat a huge wicker basket full of bags of Lindor truffles – all kinds of flavors, plus a couple of variety bags. Kate smiled.
She looked back over at Gibbs, smiled slightly, and cleared her throat. "Gibbs," she tried to say, but it wouldn't quite come out the first time. She tried again, and then a third time, which finally succeeded.
His eyes flew open immediately, and he stood, coming to her side and smiling down at her as he took her hand and squeezed it. "Hey," he said. "How are you feeling?"
"Hurts," she mumbled, "but I'll be okay."
He nodded. "I know you will. You gave us quite a scare, Kate."
"Sorry."
"Not your fault," he replied. "The bastards locked you in a freezer. You had stage three hypothermia by the time Tony and I were able to find you." He swallowed hard. "We thought we were gonna lose you there for a minute."
She tried to smile. "Harder to get rid of than you'd think."
He grinned back at her. "I know you are," he said, smoothing back her hair. "Rest now, okay? The doctor will be back in a little while. She says you're gonna be fine."
"Okay," she said softly, her eyes fluttering closed again. The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor soon soothed her to sleep.
Gibbs moved back to his chair, resuming his silent mantle of watchfulness.
-end-
xxx
Author's note: I do not ordinarily post my stories to this site, as a great deal of my work is rated MA/NC17. If you would like to read more of my work, please feel free to visit me at xdawnfirex-fic (dot) livejournal (dot) com.
I appreciate any and all feedback.