Disclaimer: I don't own ER characters and I'm years too late to the party for ER fanfiction. I'll take all kinds of liberties with the ER timeline, medical descriptions, and descriptions of Chicago at the time it's set. I'm writing this because it's a story I'd like to have fun telling and I hope anyone reading it enjoys coming along for the ride.

Chapter One: The Second Bomb

Elizabeth walked down the hallway to the fourth-floor elevators. She was exhausted and desperately wanted to go home and rest. Earlier, some maniac had blown a clinic sky-high and surviving clinicians, patients and passers-by poured into the city hospitals. Firecrews and paramedics fell and were crushed under burning debris as they pushed in to rescue the survivors. The city was on high alert for the next attack. Worse, for Elizabeth, one of the paramedics was Alison Beaumont, her wonderful former tib-fib transfer patient. Alison was trapped under a fall of rubble and rushed to County in a desperate fight for her life.

On the trauma table, Alison slipped between life and death. Elizabeth compulsively replayed the scene in her mind. Romano ordered her to call it, but she threw everything at Alison, refused to call time of death and pulled her back from the brink. "Why don't we also give her a heart transplant while we're at it?" Romano had asked sardonically as Alison struggled for existence. "Why don't you stop being such a prick?" she snapped back. Now Alison lay in Recovery, stable but critical, and Elizabeth battled a nagging expectation that Romano would find a way to retaliate.

Speaking of the devil, there he was. She tried to escape to the elevator, but he hurried to catch up. Her heart sank. Was he going to haul her away for a private savaging or was it going to be a public attack?

'Lizzie, I wanted to apologize for the way I spoke during the Beaumont surgery. I know she means a to you and uh, I just hope you'll forgive me.'

Well, that was a shock. Evidently, attack was the best defence with Romano, she deduced. Twice now, she had stood up for her patient's best interest, and twice he had backed down. She'd have to store that away for next time, but she had no patience for further conversation tonight.

'Of course,' she replied as graciously as she could. 'It's been a crazy day for all of us.' Please just let me go home.

She stepped into the elevator, but he leaned forward to hold the door open. Before he could say anything, the dull crump of an explosion shook the building. Their eyes met for an instant, startled.

'What the hell was that?' Romano demanded of no-one in particular. He let the elevator go and dived for the stairs. The doors shut between them before Elizabeth could follow him.

The damn elevator stopped at each floor, driving Elizabeth wild with impatience. Everyone had questions, but no-one had the answers. People from the first floor reported shattered windows and screams. By the time the elevator plodded down to the ground floor, the momentum of the ER was rising as the staff swung into triage. She caught Chuny by the arm of as the nurse hurried past with an armload of blood bags. 'What happened?'

'They're saying someone bombed the ambulance bay!'

'Oh my god!'

Doctors and nurses burst through the doors with the first casualties, Romano amongst them.

'Lizzie! You're with me! Trauma 2. Probable ruptured aorta; got a liter of blood in the thoroseal, we need to get in a chest tube, let's move.'

She grabbed a plastic gown and ran to follow. Patient followed patient. Romano disappeared to the ER with the ruptured aorta and Elizabeth ran traumas with Benton, with Mark Greene and on her own.

'Mult lac in Trauma 1! Hang 2000 in the thoroseal and keep the blood coming!'

'Hang a unit of packed red cells. Sinus tach on 120.

'-Second liter's in-'

'-Pulse ox is down, 90. Hang a third.'

She whipped her patient up to the OR where Dr Kayson awaited her.

Several hours later, she stepped out to splash cold water on her face. If there was time, she thought she might be able to get a quick coffee. So much for going home tonight. Donald Anspaugh was at the nurses' station making notes on a chart. He looked exhausted too.

'Dr Corday! Thank you for staying on.'

He was such a polite man. She knew he would much rather be at home with his family while his son was so sick.

'Dr Anspaugh.' She gave him a tired smile. 'How could I leave?'

'Leave? What's that?' he joked ironically. He reminded Elizabeth very much of her father. The chief of surgery never escaped emergency overtime.

He signed the chart and handed it over the desk to Kit. 'I hate to ask it, Elizabeth, but could you scrub in with me on a bowel resection? Peter and Rocket were called downstairs for some kind of question, and I need to make a start.'

She mustered up all of her energy. 'Bowel resections,' she said brightly. 'Right up my street.'

As Elizabeth scrubbed in, Romano and Benton stood in the rubble-strewn ambulance bay, staring at the crushed edge of the underground parking lot. Fires burned and jagged concrete slabs tilted crazily against each other. The two surgeons listened impatiently to the fire chief as the bitter April night wind whipped their surgical gowns around them.

'…far as we can make out, we got two adults, a kid and baby trapped in a pocket down there. Trapped from the start, but we got responses from all four back then. Fall of some loose rubble just now, we got mom not responding and what looks like grandma with a compromised airway, could be a crushed jaw…'

'So, get in there and trache her before you lose the airway,' Romano interrupted. Benton agreed.

'Yeah, I want to get one of my guys in and do that, but here's the thing. The angle of the slabs down there, I can't get any of my paramedics in. We got a firefighter and a camera down there to get a look. No-one over 5' 8'' got a chance and they got to be on the skinny side with it. I got a team opening the walls from the other side, but they could be an hour on that.' He took a deep breath. 'So I'm gonna have to send in someone else. I need a procedure that's safe to do untrained and I need it now.'

Romano looked at the thin tunnel between the fallen slabs.

'5' 8''? he checked.

'Yeah. Hernandez here-' the chief indicated a helmeted figure behind the camera screen '-put in a prop while she was down there. It's stable enough to get her in there again. I need treatment she can do on her own down there.'

Hernandez looked to be scraping 5' 7'' which was his own height. Romano visualized a total rookie trying to put in a field trache. They might as well kill the old woman on the spot. Some reward for coming to hospital to visit her grandkids or whatever she was doing. Get trapped in a falling building then get your throat cut open by a firefighter. 'I'll do it,' he announced.

'No, I'm not permitting-'

'Shut up and listen. You just said there's a patient down there going to die if she doesn't get an airway in right now. There's no way in hell I am going to stand here and watch while some old woman kicks the bucket on hospital grounds just because your paramedics couldn't hold off the donuts. I'll be back out in 2 minutes, and I am going down there.' He spun on his heel and plunged back into the ER to grab supplies. Bandages, gloves, gauze, scalpels, a bag mask, epi, morphine, fentanyl...he checked off everything he might need. Jamming them in the pockets of his gown, he swung around and almost ran into Peter.

'Dr Romano, are you sure about this?'

'Yes, I'm frigging sure, Peter. Now get the hell out of my way.' As he charged through the doors, he delivered a parting quip over his shoulder. 'If I'm not back in the next couple of hours, you can send in a search party.'

The chief hesitated but thrust a jacket and hard hat with a head torch at him. He threw them on, crawled down between the slabs and dropped blindly into darkness. It was a pocket between slabs, too cramped and low to stand, choked with concrete dust. Working by touch and the thin beam of the head torch, he made out three patients. A woman out cold, blood pooling under her head from a scalp laceration. A little boy, wide-eyed with pain, lying at an awkward angle, leg disappearing under concrete. An older woman, mouth and nose buried under rocks with agonal breathing. There was a baby crying weakly somewhere in the darkness, but a crying baby was breathing. The old woman was his priority.

He swept back the dirt and rubble from her face. Underneath it, her jaw was shattered, and her nose and mouth were swollen closed. Crap! I need to get her into an OR now. He worked with practised speed, sedating her and cleaning the throat. It was almost impossible to see in the semi-darkness. He slid his finger down to find the bulge of the cricoid cartilage by touch and sliced neatly in with a flick of the wrist. A tube he hastily pulled from the used syringe, made an airway into her throat. Finally, he pulled apart a bag mask, fitted the bag over the edge of the trach and wrapped the join closed with surgical tape. Would it hold? He squeezed air in carefully and felt a flash of satisfaction as her chest began to rise and fall more steadily again. He checked the pulse. Hovering at 70 bpm, weak and thready, too slow, but not bradycardic.

There was the distant whine of a drill on the far side of the wall, and he suddenly realized he was committed to bagging her for as long as they took to break through. A thought crossed his mind that his car might be crushed if the damage went further into the underground parking lot. Also, he still had three more patients. Damn! It was time for some delegation.

He stretched across and squeezed the boy's shoulder. 'Hey there. How are you doing?' The kid looked about seven or eight, as far as he could tell in the dark and dirt. Robert had a soft spot for kids. The trouble was that the news looked pretty bad for this kid's family, and he didn't have a lot of experience in breaking bad news to kids. In surgery, he usually left that to the family.

He started with the first problem. 'Does your leg hurt?'

The boy blinked back tears. 'Yeah, it hurts…aargh!' He tried to move and cried out. 'It hurts really bad. It's stuck.'

'Well, stop moving it.' Romano directed. 'I'm a doctor and I'm going to give you something for the pain, OK?' He sorted through the syringes in his pockets by touch, pulled one out and squinted at it in the feeble light. The right one first time, luckily. He estimated the dosage; tried not to lose the rhythm of bagging with his other hand. 'Hold really still for me.' He eyed the kid. 'Stiller than that...stay like that!' He shot in the injection. 'O-kay. You're gonna feel better in a few minutes.'

'Really better?' the kid asked hopefully. He reached up to wipe the tears out of his eyes and smeared dirt across his face.

Romano resorted to honesty. 'No. Just better than you are now.' He wanted to check the other two out. The baby's cries had died down again to a muted whimpering. Personally and medically, he had very little experience with babies. He wanted to get that one safely out of here and into the hands of experts.

'Is Mom OK? Is Grandma OK? What did you do to Grandma? Are you going to give them something too?' The boy was trying to look around.

Right, it was time to get this kid on board with the plan. Romano took charge of the questions. 'What's your name?'

'Rob.'

That was a lucky break. 'Yeah? That's the same as mine.' He could feel the boy's pulse under his hand. Nice and strong. 'See, Rob, I have to keep helping your grandma breathe. But I want to check your mom and the baby. You've got to help me. Can you reach really far over to me?' He lowered the bag valve carefully into the boy's hand. 'Feel this? This is helping her breathe. I want you to keep squeezing it just like I'm doing now until I take it back. Can you do that for me?'

'What if I get it wrong and she dies?'

Romano almost answered Wouldn't be your fault. She's screwed unless we can get her inside soon and she's got less than one in ten odds then. He managed to suppress it. It wouldn't help to have the kid bursting into tears. He said instead: 'I'm not going anywhere, am I? I'm watching.'

Young Rob took over bagging as best as he could, and Robert was free to check out the other two. The baby was sheltered in the mom's arms and there were no signs of obvious injuries. Still, the dust inhalation and cold air alone could be fatal to a baby that age. He really needed to get the baby out of there. The mom was unresponsive. He shone his penlight into her eyes. Her pupils were reactive but dilated, symptomatic of severe concussion. Consistent with the obvious mechanism of injury. The rockfall left her hair white with dust. The unsterile environment and lack of equipment irritated Romano unbearably. It went against twenty years of experience. Snapping on clean gloves, he cleaned the head injury and fixed a gauze pad across it to keep the dirt out. It was the best he could do for the moment. Now for the baby. He turned the headtorch on the thin tunnel between slabs. Yeah. Should be able to use the broken slabs there and there – he turned the torch on them – as a foothold and get back to the surface for a minute.

He checked on the grandma again. Her pulse was no better and her skin was cold and clammy. She moaned incoherently, deep in her throat, and he administered a shot of morphine. What the hell was taking the firecrews so long? He that he hadn't heard the drill for the last five minutes. Did they need someone standing over them to make them move their asses?

'Hey Rob. You're doing a good job.'

'Is Grandma going to be OK?'

Romano hesitated over his answer. While it didn't help to give families all the grim details, giving relatives false hope went against his ethical code. Plus, it generally backfired to let families believe doctors could cure anything. 'She's been hurt very badly,' he said carefully. 'I've given her morphine and she's not in pain.' He touched the boy's shoulder to steady him for the difficult answer. 'There's a big chance that she won't be OK.'

The boy lay trapped on his back, staring up at the unseen concrete slabs above him in the darkness and blinking very fast to ward off tears. 'You mean she's going to die?' he asked bluntly.

'Yes,' Romano answered simply. 'She could die.' He gave the boy a few moments to process that before moving on. 'Is this baby your little brother?'

'She's, my sister.'

'Well, she's really cold. I need to climb up there and give her to the doctors to look after him in the hospital. So, you need to keep helping your grandma breathe for a bit longer. OK?'

'No, don't leave us! You have to look after Grandma. What if I can't do this?'

The kid was clearly terrified, but there was a principle of triage, and the baby was more likely to survive even if the woman arrested before he could get back. He leaned over to look young Rob in the eyes to drive home the point. 'You have to do this.' He gathered the baby carefully up in one arm and scrambled for the tunnel.

Stretching and crawling back up through the broken slabs while keeping the baby safe was a nightmare. Not a term he used lightly. He pulled himself up and forward with his free hand, grazing it bloody on the rough slabs. At last, there was the floodlit open air just above his head. He hauled himself up in a single-handed grip on the edges of the slabs, shoulders shaking with the effort.

'Hey!' He thrust the baby at the nearest EMT. 'Get the kid to Pedes and tell them do a full work up.' The chief lunged over, but he let himself drop back down as soon as the child was out of his arms before the chief could grab him and drag him out.

Down below was a waiting game. The sounds of the drilling started up again, louder this time. Concrete chipping and loose debris showered down around them. Romano swore furiously, snatched off the thick coat and flung it over the boy to keep him from the worst of it. He stretched himself across his most critical patient and braced against a rain of sharp stones which pummelled his shoulders. Dust choked the air and he repressed a primal urge to get the hell out of there.

Nearly an hour later and four floors up in the hospital, Elizabeth closed up the patient by herself. She wheeled her out while Dr Anspaugh took an urgent phone call. As they passed the nurses' station, Elizabeth heard him say, 'He's doing what? Tell him to get the hell out of there. We're not covered for this!... Oh for heaven's…..tell him to come and see me the moment he gets out.'

He slammed the phone down and pinched the bridge of his nose. 'Do not ask what Rocket is up to now.'

'I'll get our patient set up in Recovery,' she promised.

'Thank you Elizabeth. I know I can rely on you. When you've done that, could you stop by the ER for a rule-out appy? It's probably not a surgical case, but I want someone to take a look at it.'

I'm never going to get out of here. 'Yes, Dr Anspaugh,' she answered dutifully.

'Good woman. Now I need to find out more about this.'

When she stepped out of Recovery, she spotted Peter in the small scrub room. Well, there was someone who made her feel better. She smiled up at him tiredly. 'Hello Peter. Has your day been as long as mine?'

His expression should have given it away. It was so kind and composed. Exactly the way surgeons were supposed to look before they delivered bad news. 'Elizabeth, do you remember Alison Beaumont?' He looked at her carefully. 'Your tib-fib transplant patient. Paralysed vocal cords.'

A wave of cold dread rushed through her. 'Yes, I know Alison. Peter, tell me what's wrong.'

'I'm sorry, Elizabeth,' he said gently. 'She arrested twenty minutes ago and we couldn't get her back. She'd been through too much. I'm sorry.'

'No! No, bloody hell, no! Where is she?' Elizabeth spun around, ready to plunge into the OR and pull Alison back from the brink again.

Peter caught her by the shoulders and held her. 'You can't, Elizabeth. She's gone. She wasn't in pain at the end,' he reassured her. 'It was her heart.'

She broke away from him and leaned against the wall. Tears burned behind her eyes, but they wouldn't fall. Brave, vibrant Alison was dead, and she would never speak to her again.

'Dr Benton?' Shirley stuck her head around the door. 'Punctured lung coming up for you to OR2.'

'I'll be right there.' He waited until she disappeared. 'Are you going to be alright, Elizabeth?'

She wiped a hand over her dry, burning eyes; kept her voice steady by an acute act of will. 'I'd like to say goodbye to her. Then I have a rule out in the ER.' Oh god, I can't bear it. Peter was still standing behind her. Somehow, she couldn't bear to look at him. She needed to hide her agony. 'Aren't they expecting you in OR2?'

'Yeah, I'm going, just…. talk to me if you want, OK?' He disappeared to scrub again, and Elizabeth departed to say goodbye to her friend for the last time.

Meanwhile, Romano was on the verge of digging his way out with his bare hands if it would get his patients out sooner. His young namesake lay shivering weakly in the cold and dusty rubble. Head facture mom moaned periodically, movements disjointed, and pupils still dilated. All bad signs. Finally, his critical patient, the old woman, was on her way out. He set out a couple of rounds of epi in preparation for an arrest, but it wasn't a survival scenario. To make matters worse, the light scrubs he wore were no protection against the cold. He was shivering slightly himself, his hands cramping from steadily bagging the patient. His shoulders ached from the rain of sharp debris earlier. He switched hands yet again and flexed his free hand to work out the cramp.

He checked the old woman's pulse automatically. Crap! There was no pulse. He snatched up the epi and gave her a shot, alternated between chest compressions and bagging her. The odds of her surviving were dropping by the second.

The fire crew finally broke through the wall with an ear-splitting whine of drills and a hail of chippings. He flung his free arm across his face to block out the dust and fragments.

'What the hell took you so long?' he coughed. 'Get them out of here now! She's in arrest, down about four minutes, had 10 of epi. I want CT and X-ray head and neck for mom, stat, X-rays for the kid and get him on a spinal board. Move it!'

As they clawed away the rubble and rushed the patients out, a camera crew blocked their path. Romano barged straight through them, forcing them to scatter. 'Get out of my way!' He took the other side of the grandma's trolley with a paramedic and barrelled into the ER.

The ER staff swung into action as they crossed the threshold. 'It's OK, we'll take her from here.'

He stood back and watched his three patients go.

A nurse caught up with him, obviously taking her life in her hands. 'Dr Romano, Dr Anspaugh wants to see you right now. He said as soon as you get inside.'

'Where is he?'

'He was at the desk.' She disappeared with relief.

Well, shit. It wasn't likely Anspaugh wanted to give him a gold star and a pat on the back. His shoulder stung and he reached back to touch it. He looked at his hand and it was covered in blood. Damn! This was going to be a full liability issue for working in dangerous conditions. He needed to clean up and get his shoulder sorted out quickly before he spoke to Anspaugh. That might help the conversation go a little better; give him some plausible deniability about the danger. Anspaugh was still at the main desk, on the phone, with his back to Robert. As unobtrusively as possible, he slipped past, looking for a doctor whose stitches and discretion he could trust. It ruled out most of the ER, but there…. Lizzie! Just stepping out of a curtain bay. Excellent! The one good part of a crappy evening. He caught up with her.

'Lizzie!' He caught her by the elbow. 'I need you to do something for me and I need you to keep quiet about it. Can you do that?'

She jerked around, scowling at him. 'No, I'm not bloody well doing something unethical for you, Rocket.'

He let go of her and stood still, staring at her. It suddenly hit him with all the force of a bucket of icy water thrown straight on his core. Coming on top of today's disastrous resuscitation in the ER it was clear that his protegee, his perfect partner couldn't stand him.

She must have realised her mistake because she began to backtrack. 'I'm sorry, Dr Romano…I didn't mean-'

'-You did,' he interrupted. He felt increasingly drained as the adrenaline rush from the resuscitation faded away. The betrayal opened up a wound in his chest and it ached. 'We'll discuss this tomorrow. I'm not in the mood to deal with this crap now.'

'Look, I'm really sorry –I can explain – what did you want to ask me?'

'Forget it,' he said coldly. 'I'll find someone else.'

'No, please tell me. I'm sorry, I really am.'

He could never resist her asking for something. A habit he'd have to unlearn in future. He gestured to his left shoulder and winced involuntarily. 'I want someone I can trust to put a few sutures in a cut. And I need Donald not to hear all about it, so I don't catch hell for working under frigging falling concrete while I was trying to save four lives. But clearly, that's unethical so I'll find someone else.'

'No, I can do that – please let me.' She was desperately apologetic now.

Time was running short. 'Fine,' he agreed curtly. He stalked into the suture room, with Lizzie trailing uncertainly behind him. 'Here.' He pulled the collar of his scrubs away from his shoulder.

'I can't suture through that,' she said matter-of-factly. 'You'll have to take it off.'

A quarter of an hour ago, he would have not-so-secretly enjoyed a chance to show off his bare chest to Lizzie. He was pretty confident about how his well-honed muscles appealed to women. Now, he suspected bitterly that it would be something else she couldn't stand about him. But she was waiting so, with a scowl he pulled the top stiffly over his head.

She laid a hand tentatively on his shoulder. 'You're freezing!'

Her warm hand was burning against his skin. He wanted her to take it off instantly and he wanted her to keep it there forever. 'I hope you never leave the medical profession, Dr Corday. It would be a sad loss of diagnostic skills.' His voice was a touch strained, but it was a reasonably biting response under the circumstances. It shut her up which was his aim.

She cleaned and sutured his shoulder in silence. For his part, he sat as still as possible, trying not to let his muscles jump under her touch and betray his tension under her touch.

'It's done now.' She stepped back.

'About time,' he said ungratefully. He pulled his top back on with difficulty, careful not to overextend his sore shoulder. His scrubs were filthy, but they would do until he could grab a shower and something clean. 'If Anspaugh wants me, tell him I'm checking on my patients. We'll speak tomorrow, Elizabeth.'

He strode out of the room, leaving her standing there.