Chapter 9

As he was digging through a pile of rubble trying to determine if the person on the other end of this foot was alive or dead, Gibbs heard his phone trill in his pocket.

He knew who was calling. Knew it was his team. Knew they had news on Abby, but was not sure he wanted to hear it.

He excused himself, allowing Officer Seward in to take his place as he pulled out his phone.

"Gibbs." He answers with a little less surety than he normally does as he noted the caller ID is Ziva.

He doesn't have to wait long before he hears, "Gibbs! Gibbs! Gibbs!" from the other end of the line and gives a silent sigh of relief.

"Good to hear your voice, Abs." and it really was, especially after how many lifeless bodies he had pulled from under the piles of debris that littered every floor. "You're with Ziva; can I get a Sit-Rep? What's going on out there?"

"I'll put you on speaker." She said and he instantly heard the ambient background noise become louder.

"Sit-Rep?" he repeated.

The silence that greeted him was a sure sign that the agents were looking each other over, trying to decide who would go first.

Finally, he heard a small sigh of frustration followed by Ziva detailing the organization of the ambulances and the enlistment of Ducky and Palmer to play a part in shuttling patients to the hospitals.

She detailed her findings on the triage area and finished, "There is still much to do about organizing things over there."

"I got word from Vance that until a higher up in the FBI or homeland security comes along and takes over we're to coordinate the local rescue operation. So, you're in charge down there."

He heard what sounded like the phone being jostled as it was passed away and assumed Ziva had headed off to get to work.

"I got the results on the license plate." McGee began and Gibbs shook his head, frustration for his commands being disregarded would have been the normal order of things, but he knew he wouldn't have been able to keep Tim away from the scene. "It's a dead end, reported stolen this morning."

Gibbs wondered, "Got anything else?" which was met with a moment of silence.

"Not yet," Tim finally responded, "I started the facial recognition on the cleanest picture I could pull up of the driver and rerouted Abby's auto-alert to my cell phone, since hers was out of commission."

"Is Tony with you?" he hadn't heard the man yet and usually he was the most talkative.

"Here, Boss." DiNozzo responded, his voice sounded rough and gravelly.

"You and Tim, East stairs of the Hoover build, we're on the seventh floor."

"On it, Boss." He heard more shifting and then the background noise faded.

"They're on their way, up." Abby said, obviously having taken the phone off speaker.

"You alright?" he knew he was asking more than just her physical condition and from the long silence that followed he discerned that she had understood.

"I'm good, Gibbs, minor injuries. I'm feeling more lucky than anything." He heard the quiet tone and felt his heart break a little that any of his team had to experience this shocking situation, but more that it had to be Abby. "Lots of people aren't."

"Do you need to go back to the lab? Take some time?"

He didn't know how he formulated the mental image from the sounds he heard through the earpiece, but he just knew she was shaking her head back and forth, "No, I'm staying. We need every able pair of hands we can get down here."

Gibbs knew she was stubborn, so he fought the instinctive reaction of ordering her away in an attempt to shield her from the sights she was sure to witness.

Instead of directing her to leave the area, go back to the lab where she was safe, he threw her straight into the deep end, "Take Ziva's phone back to her and see what you can do to help her organize the outbound patients down there."

As he finally got off the phone with Abby, he saw DiNozzo and McGee approaching him through a long hall.

"We're clearing the last area now." Gibbs glanced back to where the workers had stopped digging through the rubble and moved away without a survivor, "We're moving up to eight." He said, loud enough for the other rescuers to hear. As he headed down the hall with his two agents, he heard the tired footfalls of the men following, after having dug for twenty minutes to find another lifeless body.

As he rounded the corner and stepped into the stairwell, he pulled out the marker to write the now familiar message across the wall.

They had been making good progress. His small band of rescue workers had grown to nearly two dozen and they were able to make their way through each floor quickly and efficiently.

He passed the marker to Tony once he had finished writing and filled his agents in on the progress they were making and pertinent details.

As the other rescue workers passed them, Gibbs put two fingers in his mouth and gave a loud whistle. He had their attention as he literally and figuratively passed his baton to Tony, "This is my Senior Field Agent Anthony DiNozzo. Tony is going to be taking my place while I go down and find evidence on the bastards that did this."

The others nodded and mumbled in agreement, as they began filing up the stairs again.

As Gibbs finished a brief run down, he turned to his agents. "None of this is pretty. It's getting less severe in these upper floors, but it is by no means going to be easy to stomach. Can you two handle this?"

He watched both men's backs get just a bit straighter as they nodded and started up the stairs. He would never be able to put into words the sense of pride he had in those two boys.

Gibbs knew they had seen and witnessed death on a daily basis in their jobs, but this was not the same as a single murder victim.

This was hundreds of people, Federal Agents, just like his team, who had been taken out in a single blow.

This was digging through death to find that small glimmer of life.

This was holding a hand and feeling it relax in your grip as death won out before you could get them free of the ruins, before you could stem the flow of blood, before you were able to do anything, leaving you feeling helpless and empty.

This was evil in its purest form and it evoked a special kind of helplessness that grew in the pit of your stomach until it overwhelmed every sense and rational thought you had.

He had a feeling the two men thought they knew what they were getting into, but no amount of mental preparation can equip a person for the overwhelming feeling of helpless in the face of extreme brutality and senseless violence.

xoxo

Ziva and Abby got into an easy rhythm, working together to get the triage area more clearly defined. Organizing the more critical and getting them ready for transport, keeping them stable.

Ziva took on the uncomfortable job of finding a few volunteers to move the people who didn't make it out of the area. As she noticed fear crossing the faces of the others still in that area she pulled Abby and the other couple people that were assisting aside and they set up a system.

As the critical passed away, they would take the discarded square wrappers from the gauze pads and place them discreetly over the left ankle of the deceased. This seemed to help as it gave the others an impression that the deceased were merely unconscious and after less than an hour, they realized that it was having a very positive affect on morale.

As people were carted out and hauled over, Abby kept inventory on the supplies at one point she borrowed Ziva's phone and called Ducky to see if he could bring some more from the hospitals.

The response was not favorable. The hospitals were keeping a close watch on their supplies because of the number of injured people overflowing into the hospitals.

Abby used Ziva's phone, found several pharmacies in the area and sent Ducky and Palmer to get supplies retail using Ducky's NCIS expense card.

As Ziva gave Abby her phone she moved to help in the less critical area where people were relegated if they had minor or non-life threatening injuries.

As she grabbed a fresh set of gloves and a box of equipment, her mind began to drift back to mission medicine. She was as talented as any nurse with a needle thanks to far more practice than anyone should ever experience. As she scanned the injured in this area of the triage, she was confident there was plenty of need for sutures.

She took a mental inventory before deciding on the heaviest bleeder and approaching the man. He was sitting on the grass, holding the sleeve of his dress shirt, ripped from the garment he was wearing, against the largest gash on his forehead.

"Can I take a look at that?" she asked and he obliged. Yep, he was definitely going to need stitches and probably more than she could give. "You have two options. I can butterfly that closed with some Band-Aids and you can hold your shirt on it a while longer; or I can put a few stitches in. It will help stem the flow, but you may need more stitches when the emergency rooms clear out a little bit."

The man looked to his side where a woman was lying down and she gave him a nod. "I need to get back in there and help. Stitch me up."

Ziva glanced at him, taking in his appearance and was certain this was the epitimy of the American Spirit she had heard about all her life. Willing to run back into a burning building because it was the right thing to do, regardless of the repercussions. She once again felt pride in her new homeland. Where her old homeland had been full of people who were always looking out for themselves first, this attitude solidified her choices to stay in America.

She let her gaze finish her inspection, "You do not even have shoes." She said in a matter of fact voice as she began readying her supplies.

The man called out, "After they stitch me up I need to go back in and help, anyone got a left shoe?"

There were several requests for a size and before she even had everything ready, he was holding a pair of shoes in his hands. They were passed through the group from someone who definitely wasn't going to be needing shoes for a while if the swelling in his knees was anything to go by.

"I do not have anything for the pain."

The man shrugged, "Just wash it up and get it over with. I'll close my eyes and pretend I'm back in the battlefield."

She smiled at him then, "That is exactly what I have been doing all day."

They shared a knowing smile and then she set to work. It was a lot easier than most of the people she had put stitches in today, or even in previous emergency battlefield situations.

He seemed to squeeze the woman's hand a little tighter at a few points, but otherwise he remained completely still and let her work.

Ziva taped the gauze pad on his head, placed butterfly bandages along another wound on his jaw and checked him over.

Satisfied that he was as bandaged up as he could be, and at least wouldn't bleed all over the people he was intent on helping to rescue, she packed up her things.

"Booth, is this a good idea?" the woman asked as he stood with a slight waver and began heading back towards the building.

"Probably not, Bones, but I can't just sit here."

Ziva watched the woman consider her friend before giving him a slight nod. He leaned down and kissed her head before disappearing into the chaos surrounding them all.

Ziva hadn't been simply agreeing with the man as she sewed him up, she really had reverted to a mission medicine mindset. That wasn't the only thing in her mind reverting back to her former mindset thanks to this tragedy.

She felt herself putting back up the barriers that she had worked so hard to break down up.

Old doubts and long buried notions of life had resurfaced and she felt herself fall into the old ways so easily that she wondered if she had ever actually left that part of herself behind.

She worked through the area, cleaned up and sealed any serious gashes, eventually noticing that she had a shadow. The woman she had met while tending to the shoeless man earlier had taken an interest in what she was doing.

"Is there something I can help with?"

As Ziva looked around, she reconfirmed there seemed and endless amount of things that someone could help with.

After making introductions, Ziva got the woman, working on taking care of this section of the triage. She had been slightly disappointed to hear that the title Doctor in front of the woman's name was not medical.

She gave Dr. Brennan her cell phone number in case she came across anything that needed stitches instead of more minor remedies and then headed back to grab her phone from Abby.

She reached the disheveled lab tech just as they saw Ducky and Jimmy pull up in the NCIS van.

With a sigh that was inspired more by frustration with her own brain than the actual work that lay ahead, she flagged down a couple of people to help them.

They needed all the help they could get to unload the bags of medical supplies Ducky had purchased from the local pharmacies and start restocking the various areas where supplies had started to run dangerously low.

Watching the number of injured, dead and dying grow with every passing minute, she couldn't help by feel the need to lock her heart away just a little bit more. Ziva knew she couldn't risk her real feelings coming to the surface or even acknowledging them in this situation, but she also couldn't help as her mind drifted to Tony while she packed supplies in the empty and nearly empty bags and distributed them to the various emergency staff.

Her chest hurt, though she was logical enough to know that wasn't where her actual feelings came from.

This day was too vivid, too real, and entirely too familiar.

Seeing the disorganized chaos and intolerable violence brought up all she had been ignoring about life and the indecency of people. Not all people, of course, but enough of them to screw life up for the rest of the world.

This day was not only a tragedy; she found it to be a disturbing wake up call.

She had been allowing herself to become attached, to feel normal, and to act as if she was just any other citizen living the American dream.

She was far from the normal person witnessing this tragedy.

She felt in a trance of automatic movements as she helped with the injured and watch loose debris fall off the building. She felt as if she were going through the motions and then a sudden thought struck her as she realized how easy doing these tasks came to her.

Perhaps the other parts of her life were just going through the motions. Doing the things, she thought she should be doing because they were the things other people did.

Perhaps this devastation and destruction was the only place she really was herself and the rest of her life was a lie she lived each day.

She felt her throat tighten as she realized that she wasn't supposed to do all the things everyone did and that's why the acts felt unfamiliar and strange as she tried them.

She wasn't supposed to love and be loved, she wasn't destined to settle down and have a house with a couple of kids and a dog. She wasn't the right kind of person to let anyone get close enough that what happened today would tear her apart as it had done.

She knew they hadn't lost Abby, she was looking at the woman right now, but at the same time, it was the thought that they could have.

They still could lose any member of their team on any given day and it would be one more death to weigh heavy on her soul.

What if it was Tony that she lost? Would getting so close to him this past month only cause her irrevocable harm if something were to happen to him? Moreover, what would come of his life if something were to happen to her?

She knew the man, had known him for so many years. She knew that he was quick to joke and easy to please, but he was hard to get to know and he kept people at a distance. Tony had lost his mother so young that he, much like her, had built up walls around his heart. How much longer before he was so wrapped up in her, in them, that he would be utterly lost if something happened to her?

She knew the man, and knew he loved deeply. As she set her mind and locked her heart away, she wondered if it was already too late for him to get out of this without adding further damage.

She knew it would hurt him, knew it would make her wish she had never said the words, but at the same time she set her sights on what would be the best bet for the long run.

She knew what she had to do, but it broke her heart just to think the thoughts, actually saying them aloud wouldn't only crush his spirits but her own as well.

xoxo

A/N: Ok, not my best work, but it has succeeded in moving us forward. Hope you are not as disappointed as I am right now, or perhaps I am just a little tired.

I will probably have the next chapter out later tomorrow; we'll get some facts about the bomb and the case next chapter as clean-up progresses. Update: Family just came into town, so unless I can get this written and edited in the next four hours I won't be getting the next chapter up until late tonight, possibly tomorrow. Sorry.