Chapter Two
A/N: I would like to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for this overwhelming response to Strong's first chapter, and while I would like to go wild with excitement, this is not the time or the place, as I would like to be as respectful as possible while dealing with this type of tragedy. The chapter below you deals with the aftermath of 9/11, and while Mac's story outside of the Towers could have been plausible, Stella's story from within remains strictly fictional. Only twenty people were rescued from the rubble of the Towers, and I cannot stress enough the importance of remembering the people who died in the World Trade Center's collapse. And so while I am placing Stella within the rubble, I am certainly not counting her among the twenty people who actually survived. Again, I mean no offense to anyone regarding my portrayal of September 11th, 2001. If any mistakes were made, please tell me so that I can correct them. I would like to be as factually accurate as possible.
A/N 2: I would like to apologize at how late this chapter is. While I have excuses, I will not make any—I should have made time to finish this chapter before last weekend started, knowing how busy I would become. And so I present chapter two to you with no further ado!
"Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror . . . This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."
-President George W. Bush, September 11, 2001
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
08:41:01 AM
It's a nice day, considering that Hurricane Erin is whipping up a storm out on the ocean. It won't hit New York, and so she enjoys the crisp autumn air while she can, before the changing leaves fall and winter sets in.
It's a little early to be thinking about winter, but in New York it was harsh, and the murders are no less frequent. She readjusts her grip on the carryout bag's handles and opens her mouth in a small, soundless yawn. The day seems so lazy, set out before her. Granted, before long she would probably be called to a crime scene, and then the real work would begin. No time for being lazy in the city that never sleeps!
She was running late, again—it had to be at least half the hour by now: she was supposed to be on Claire's floor twenty minutes ago, and so she hurries along the street to the South Tower. The windows are gleaming today, and she's willing to bet they've just been washed. She enters the building in a rush, jostling the bag of food. If they were going to have any time to eat this morning, she had to hurry!
It's bustling inside the World Trade Center. Workers flit here and there, and she groans as she realizes the elevator is packed. Deciding to wait for the next one, she leans lightly against the wall, tapping the paper bag with her fingertips. Her badge is hooked to her belt, and her gun beside. She gets a few gazes, but they pass over quickly.
Every Tuesday, she and Claire have breakfast together on the observation deck, if weather allows. If not, her desk or even two chairs pushed together in a corner suffice well. Claire has to get up much earlier than she, and together they break the monotonous routine of the week to have a meal between friends. They were close, closer than what they would usually be (a CSI's wife and said CSI's coworker) but they had never been exactly normal people, and they enjoy their time together, so why not?
Her phone buzzes, and she picks it up with a smile. "Claire!" she greets, and receives her own name back.
"Stella! What have you brought to eat today? I can't smell it from here."
"I'm downstairs, waiting for the elevator," Stella says, picking up on the subtle 'where are you' and looking at the elevator to gather what floor it was on. "And I'm not telling you. You got to pick last week, and today it's my surprise."
"You knew what it was!"
Stella's laugh rang through the lobby, causing eyes to flicker to her. She quiets, a grin stuck on her face. "It's good, I promise."
"Are you sure?" Claire's half-dubious, half-amused voice hangs in the air. "Last time you promised something good, you discovered an acid."
"How was I supposed to know it would eat through Tupperware?"
Claire laughs melodically. "Never get your recipes off of suspicious internet sites?"
"But however else were we supposed to get Mac out of those ridiculous shoes?"
Claire had taken Stella's vile 'breakfast' concoction home, and when Mac asked Claire how it had gotten all over his favorite shoes, she had declined to answer, citing 'intestinal trauma'.
And how Claire and Stella had laughed, into the night and for the following week, until Mac gave up his fight and threw the clown-like shoes away.
"You have a point there. Pancakes?"
"Why is that always your first guess?"
"Because they're delicious. Aren't you a fan of delicious flavor?"
"You sound like a man I met once—gave the NYPD a tip on one of our homicides and a pineapple to boot."
"Was he cute? Stella, tell me you got his number."
"Claire—"
"Stella?" Claire interrupts her, tone changing from teasing to serious in a microsecond. "Stella, there's a plane outside the window."
"There are always planes outside the windows. It's New York," Stella says, more to herself than Claire as she moves toward the window herself. If she's learned anything as Claire Taylor's friend, she's learned to trust her.
"No, it's way too close! Stella, I think it's going to—"
08:46:31AM
The ground rocks, the windows shake, and suddenly Stella's on the ground, ducking to the tile with well-trained ease. It had happened so quickly that she had had no time to find cover or even attempt to help someone.
She doesn't scream, and Claire doesn't either, and now all they can hear in the phone is each other's loud, nervous breathing and an equally loud explosion-like noise only slightly muffled by the arching windows of the South Tower.
"It's hit the North Tower," Claire says in a tone of finality that's completely and utterly too calm for the situation.
Shock permeates their conversation until Stella finally spoke: "Son of a— Claire, I need to call you back."
"I know," came the quiet answer of a wife resigned to a policeman's work, or in this case, a policewoman's. "Be careful."
"Remember what Mac and I taught you?"
A nervous chuckle. "I was hoping I'd never need to use Building Evacuation, Mac and Stella style. See you in the lobby, I guess."
Stella doesn't say that she might leave to go help the North Tower if there's a chance, but Claire knows her well enough to know that Stella might not be in the lobby when she gets down.
"Bye, Claire."
"It's never goodbye, Stella, it's always 'until next time.'"
Then the line goes dead and Stella reluctantly pockets the phone, feeling for all the world she shouldn't have hung up with her.
And it's silent for a second, after Stella and Claire have stopped talking, for one very long moment in the midst of the day, all hubbub ceasing for a time in which the South Tower goes dark with the smoke starting to billow outside the window.
The screams erupt, tearing out of the mouths of the businessmen and women, the aides and interns, their minds reeling with confusion from one side of the lobby and horrified knowledge from the other. Stella's jaw trembles slightly, but she's trained to be a police officer, and a police officer she becomes. "Get away from the windows! Get away from the northwest side of the building!"
Some respond directly to her order, while others need the flashing of her badge to respond. She corrals them all away, setting her jaw with pain but not letting herself become emotional. She'll kill them all if she's not careful—smoke inhalation can be deadly, and she's not sure if any debris would break the glass. The best thing to do right now is to stay put.
Isn't it?
She's vaguely aware of the crying, the screams growing hoarse around her, as she fights her own tears back and sets to work. She takes a moment to pull her long hair up into a ponytail as people start spilling down the staircase and out of the South Tower. From the opposite side of the room, people start to scream that they can see people hitting the ground outside.
Jumpers?
08:49:50 AM
There isn't any room for doubts or second thoughts now, and 2 World Trade Center is so close to whatever is happening that she can't play with lives. She's about to call for an evacuation when the Public Address system goes online. "Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen. The South Tower is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building 2. As some of you may know, an airplane has struck the North Tower/Building 1. While this is a tragedy, the incident has occurred in the other building. All tenants of this building must know that the South Tower is safe. You should remain in the building and return to your offices and floors. Thank you."***
That was it. The decision was made for her. But why did it feel so… wrong? Her police radio spat static and frantic voices. All called this a horrific accident, and it was, and it had to be, but people were dying by the moment and she was standing in the middle of the South Tower, not doing anything.
She sprints to the exit, into the overwhelming smoke without a thought for her own safety—or for those she left behind. Immediately, she begins to cough in the black air and wraps her elbow around her mouth. As she heads toward the North Tower, she begins to trip and stumble over debris and mutilated, bloodied bodies that looked as if they had imploded on contact. Ash and heat wafted through the air, and the once cool day became excruciatingly hot. Live bodies pushed past her, running the opposite way from the North Tower. Tears
Suddenly, a hand grabs hers and places a flimsy mask in it. She blesses small miracles as she looks up at the grizzled old policeman that had handed it to her and straps the thing on. And then, as the debris gets hotter and hotter and the twisted metal scrapes her legs, she falls over a dead body, blood splashing up her pants.
08:53:19
She asks the corpses' forgiveness as she gets back up, as she runs, forgiveness that she's so callous—she can't see them until it's too late, she explains to the already dead around the black smoke in her lungs. She never makes it to the North Tower, never even sees the doorway, because then a hand grips around her shoulder and pulls her back.
Stella could never be called scrawny, and the fact that she was pulled back by tiny Heather Moore must owe to her present exhaustion, because Stella's broken away from her before, in anger and frustration that was usually not directed specifically at the older CSI. Either way, Heather's pull drops her to her knees in the soot, throat working on coughing out the smoke she had inhaled while her eyes tear out the ash.
Heather's only a few years older than Stella, but much more mature. Her skin is pale and her hair is usually a medium blonde that is somehow her natural color. Today they're both ash gray, and her soft-spoken demeanor turns into yelling over the plight of the North Tower. "What are you doing out here?"
Stella takes that as a 'aren't you supposed to be somewhere else' and shakes her head. "The South Tower announced that it was safe—"
"You were in the South Tower? And you took an announcement as a sign to leave? Stella, you left panicked people that could riot to do what? Save some lives? You could have done that in the South Tower!"
Thoroughly chastised, but undefeated, Stella looks back towards where the South Tower should be, but can't see it due to the smoke. "I was doing what felt right," she yells to her superior officer, whose scowl almost looks laughable under layers of soot. She would have chuckled merrily with Heather's own bell-like laugh joining in if this was real life, but the fact that people are losing their lives around them as they speak makes this a nightmare, makes nothing funny.
Heather motions Stella to follow her, making a tsk, tsk sound and moving through the rubble with grace even with her gimpy leg. "I can't do anything to help the North Tower," Heather yells in all seriousness, gesturing to the weak leg that she refused to let slow her down. She coughs once, twice in the overbearing heat and debris and then turns to look at the now vague outline of the huge building. "But we can calm the South, keep people relaxed as possible. We don't want any civilian lives risked, Stella," she continues, almost patiently in the madness. "We're sworn to protect and serve."
08:57:04
Stella's mouth forms an expletive that she doesn't spit out. Instead, she looks angrily toward the North Tower and clenches her hands in fists, nails biting into the skin. She's aware of the pain, but disregards it—feels that the only way she can relate to the North Tower's suffering denizens is experiencing the pain herself. But she's already experiencing it, as she watches shape after dark human shape tumble through the air. She can almost hear the splatter of the body on concrete, and she wails inside of her head, but outside the only indication of her state of chaos are tears making hot tracks down her face. Damn it, she needs to get in there! But they're walking away—why are they walking away? Stella makes a break for it, but Heather's there again, telling her forcefully that something needed to be done in the South Tower, that they'll be saving people from a distance, but Stella's not buying one moment of it. "I—"
Heather deflates a bit and pats Stella's arm as they stop in their tracks. "Truth is, Stella," she says morosely, "I need you."
"But—but the people are dying, Heather. New York is dying!"
"Stella. I'm not asking you to come, I'm telling you. We have citizens that are going to try to get people out of the North Tower's rubble—not just citizens, Stella, civilians. And if the North Tower falls, the people of the South Tower will panic. We're preventative measures."
Stella opens her mouth to protest again, her brows sweeping downward and her eyes squinting in anger, but the fight goes out of her as her superior's gaze drives into her own, and Heather sighs, rapping her fingers against the leg in sadness for the loss of it. If her leg had been stronger, she wouldn't have to move Stella off from what she really was needed for and wanted to do. Together, the pair, both defeated by the world they lived in by one way or another, move to the doorway that leads into the 2 World Trade Center's lobby. Heather's eyes are pale and sad, and Stella notices that she massages the old injury in her leg that kept her from being able to participate in normal police work. "Stella," she says briefly, ignoring the look of hurt on the other woman's face, "If you'd been truly following your gut, I think you would have stayed within the South Tower. But that's for another day. You're smart, you'll learn."
Stella gives Heather a sad frown as she considers the injury that had taken her out of the job for months. She had kept her job, was allowed at crime scenes, but Stella knows it hurt her to have to remain when a chase went down or a shootout started. Her gun is a seemingly useless tool of her belt, and even her pants leg seems to sag with the knowledge that she'll never walk the same way again, will never get down to the true nitty-gritty work she once loved.
09:00:05
Stella's sorry for her, though she knows Heather would never want her to be, as she limps into the South Tower. However, Stella can't even think to pity when Heather uses her gifts of speech to quiet the scene in the South Tower, along with grateful security guards, who are in over their heads. Stella helps a young woman get to the elevator and joins Heather in soothing frazzled nerves, all the while glancing to the north, imagining death and destruction, the heat of fire and the screaming of the building as it weighed upon itself. Within two minutes, the lobby seems to start to return to a state that isn't right, will never be right, but it isn't a riot scene, and that's all they can do for now.
Until the public address system goes back online with a buzz and a calm announcement to evacuate in a similarly calm and orderly manner makes its way down the floors and hallways of the South Tower.
They begin to usher the people out of the building, while some wail and others cry. Heather disappears into the crowd as Stella begins to climb the stairs to the second floor, beginning the arduous process of evacuating a building, passing and jostling people on her way up, urging people down, assisting those who needed assistance, and above all, keeping an eye on the cell phone nearly welded to her hand. In the dim light created by the cell phone's glow, she can only just see the outline of a six digit number, climbing as the seconds wear away.
09:02:58
09:02:59
09:03:00
09:03:01
09:03:02
And then the world (at least as Stella Bonasera had known it) ends.
Questions of the Week:
Would you like to see Aiden, Danny, or both appear in additional past chapters? (If both, which one would you like to see more or first)
How was Heather's leg injured?
A/N: The second chapter of Strong… I apologize for the abrupt entrance of Heather Moore. In case you were confused (and I confuse people easily), Lance Wheatley is the Dayshift Supervisor, in Mac's future position. Heather Moore is his second-in-command. Following are Allison Greener, Mac Taylor, and the newest member of the team, Stella Bonasera.
This chapter took a lot of research. I watched videos, read articles, and found timelines to support what I was writing. This does not mean, however, that I was completely right. If you find anything of issue, please tell me so that I can change it. Thank you.
*** There was, in fact, an announcement given over the PA system in the South Tower that stated that the building was secure and for people to go back to their offices and floors. It did not, however, follow protocol or correspond to any instruction known to have been given. Most believe it should have never been given in the first place.
09:03:02 was the exact time that the South Tower was hit by flight 175.
