I decided to be evil and make y'all wait the whole day for this update! But, the next installment:

With the subject in custody, there was little Jules could do. She assisted the rescue men when they could use it. She informed the paramedics all she knew of what they could expect. At this point, there was very little information to give. She called out occasionally into the com to see if it could rouse anybody. Beyond that, she felt helpless.

And if there was one thing Jules really, really hated, that was to feel helpless. She was the only woman on a team with six men. She knew how to hold her own. She put herself in situations where she was in charge to insure that everything went the way it was supposed to.

And nothing was going the way it was supposed to.

It started with Sam, she supposed. She ended it, but there was no way to end the way she felt, even if she tried to think of other men the same way she did him. There was no comparison. If she hadn't lost control, maybe she would have been less distracted by the sound of his voice. She hoped that wasn't the last time she heard his voice. If she hadn't been concentrated on the pause he took between words, she would have been able to get through the tips faster, maybe reach the only important one before it no longer mattered.

But that's not what happened. Jules had to resign herself to the fact that she had lost complete control of the situation. She knew something was going to happen at two, but she was powerless to prevent it. She tried, she tried. She might as well have been doing nothing in the end, for all that it did her and the team. For all that it did Sam, and Spike, Wordy, and Lou, and those six men still in the collapsed shell of a building.

Jules felt really helpless standing next to the paramedic's trucks waiting for the rescue men to come out with news, good or bad. They brought in tools, ones that Jules could probably name if she was in a better state of mind, but there was no hope at present.

At least they could still enter the building. The suspect, Ben Murray, had done a fine job of disintegrating the building with what he had. Minimal firepower for the structural damage it caused. Whole sections of the building were simply left as rubble, no recognizable floors remaining.

The conference room, the one where Wordy and Lou had camped out with the rest of the men, it still had some walls remaining, according to the first reports. The ceiling had collapsed, but they found signs of life.

As for Sam and Spike, she didn't know. Nobody knew yet. They were searching around the area, but two men in an already collapsed filing room was a little harder to find than eight in a conference room four times the size of the initial filing room. Still, the men were searching. They had not given up hope yet. Jules didn't want to ask if they were searching for bodies though, too afraid of the answer.

It was almost risible- the idea that Jules was afraid of simple words- but in this case she wasn't afraid to say that was completely and utterly true. She was terrified at the idea.

Just the thought made her hand automatically move to the com system to call out the names of her missing teammates again. Another hand stopped hers.

"They're gonna be okay," Ed said with a nod, so sure of himself that Jules felt obligated to agree. She found herself nodding as well.

"I know, they're going to be okay," she repeated.

"It's strange, releasing the scene to another team."

"Yeah, feels like we're not needed, right?" She tried to joke.

Ed turned to her and gave her a serious look, one that seemed like he was looking at the real her, the terrified girl in place of an SRU member at the moment.

"You're always needed," he said in a low voice. "Sam knows that, I know that, Sarge knows that."

"I just wish there was something more that we could do," Jules replied honestly, knowing that Ed felt the same way. They were less than half a team, doing nothing.

He had nothing to say to that. Instead he nodded in agreement and stood by her side as they waited for a verdict. It was possibly one of the hardest moments in her life, and though that sounded dramatic it didn't make it any less true. At least with Ed there, they shared the moment.

Sarge joined them from the van after everything he could do had been finished. He moved to where the two of them stood and joined them without a word. Jules could only assume that Murray had been put into custody. She knew the who, the how, and the when, but she still had no answer for the why. At the moment, nothing would satisfy her. Nothing would be even close to rationalize why someone would do this to the members of her team. To her.

. . .

When he became aware of his surroundings, he couldn't help but let out a groan. This was the second time today he had woken up in the same building from an unnatural sleep. It was… unnatural. The groan turned into a hacking cough with all of the dust in the air. He pulled his hand up from underneath him to try to push it away from his face. When he thought the coast might be clear, he opened his eyes and saw the dust.

He also saw the rest of his surroundings, most importantly, the others who also occupied a close space to him. Lou was on one side of him, unconscious. On the other side was a man with gray hair and wrinkles. He didn't look good. Wordy used the hand that had attempted to push away the dust to reach over and feel for a pulse. There wasn't one.

He often found himself in the proximity of bodies. Their job called for it. He had never found himself with one arm trapped beneath a corpse. Wordy had to hold back the urge to puke at the sight of what was left of the man. He turned his head and looked to Lou, who hadn't moved.

Seeing him for the second time reminded Wordy of the rest of the team. His earpiece was still in his ear, after everything that day, so he turned it on and called out. He felt a strange sense of déjà vu. This time though, he didn't feel the need to ask what happened. He knew about the first bomb, the ploy to evacuate the building, about the second set of explosions that served as the first line of attack. He was currently experiencing the aftereffects of the last bombs, the ones that were set with the one intention of bringing this building to the ground.

"Sarge?" He asked into the com, knowing there would be an immediate answer.

And there was, three voices clambering for a second before the Boss took over. "Wordy? Is that you?"

He could help the small smile that lightened his face. Stuck under a table that had probably saved his life, he could hear his team and how worried they were. He didn't want to think that he could be the man next to him, that this could have been the end. He had already spent too much of his day ruminating on the concept.

"I'm okay, I think," he answered the obvious unasked question. "Lou's here too, he's okay I think. His pulse is good."

Wordy took a breath, thinking of the other man.

"We have at least one casualty. There isn't much room to move, but I'll check out the others."

"That's a negative. Stay where you are. The building is compromised. We don't want it all coming down on top of you."

The Boss could probably sense the protest that he was about to spit out.

"There's a rescue team nearby. They are picking up on your vitals. We'll have you out of there real fast, buddy."

Sarge didn't lie. Wordy found himself manhandled out of the crevice less than ten minutes later. Lou had woken up by that point, and was arguing about the stretcher they had him on. The older man was on a stretcher too, a blanket covering his body and face. He didn't overlook his death, or the death of one other man from their group. Wordy was sitting in the back of an ambulance, a blanket over his shoulders. He hadn't gotten over the shock of this all yet.

Lou found his place next to him after they allowed him to stand up. He was still grumbling about the damn stretcher as he pulled a blanket around himself. It was easier to think about how they were okay, how they were out of the building, than entertain the idea of where the final two members of their team were.

Jules had joined them, as with Sarge and Ed. She looked the worst though, barely holding it together. Her and Sam were close, just as Lou and Spike were close. They were all here for each other, but Wordy knew how hard it was for her.

Ed left to go check on the progress of the rescue team, to see if there was any news, however little. Wordy watched him go as he felt the aches and pains the day had brought him. The paramedics had more than requested he be brought into the hospital. He had hit his head twice in the period of an hour. His adamancy to stay with the rest of his team was the only thing keeping him there.

He didn't know how the long the team stood together, waiting. Ed came back a little while later, running. Wordy looked up at the sound of his boots hitting the pavement. Being a member of the SRU kept them all physically fit, but Ed crossed the space faster than he could have ever imagined. Jules stood up to meet him.

"What's wrong?" She got out before Ed could say anything.

"They found the room. They're excavating now."

"Sam and Spike?"

"They're working on it, should be soon."

. . .

He had been awake for a while, maybe ten minutes, maybe two hours. There was little to go off of. Where it had been dark before, no light entered the room now. If what they were in could be considered a room. Spike felt pressure on him. He thought it might be the entire building. The fake bomb had quite a bit of firepower.

His thoughts were muddled, like someone took a stick and mixed up coherency with a bit of mud. He felt like he wasn't in his own body. There was no pain, no worry. He just remained still under the great pressure that didn't hurt, merely inconvenienced him.

Like he said, he didn't have that much of a grasp on time, only the passing of it. So when sometime later, a bright light illuminated his face, he had little idea of how long it had been. He did know that the light was painful. His pupils were completely dilated and ill-prepared for the onslaught. There were faces behind the light. And with them came the hands. They touched and prodded and moved the pressure above him, turning him and lifting him.

He would have been better before, back when it was just him in the dark. With the light came the introduction of pain. Everything hurt. This wasn't like the headache from before. This was everything. He closed his eyes off against it, but even that didn't stop the light. Before long hands pulled his eyelids up and shown a light into them. He wanted this to end.

He finally stopped moving, but the damage had been done. He felt woozy and confused and he had little idea of where he was. Then, another hand touched him. Only this time, it was not the insensitive, near cruel hands from before. This one touched his hand lightly, and it was accompanied by a voice that was just as soft and just as much of a break from the scrambling of before.

Spike allowed himself into the present, opening his eyes and becoming aware of his true surroundings.

"Lou?"

It was quiet, quieter than he intended, but his friend's head popped up like he had shouted, a smile breaking across his grimy face. There was a large scrape over his right eye, but he didn't look too bad. "Finally decide to return to us?" Lou kept his voice light, but that didn't mean Spike, in his confused state of mind, didn't pick up on the true emotions.

Spike had to think for a moment, rewind the day's awful events until he was back to the filing room, with Sam next to him and Wordy and Lou still trapped in the building. He cringed, this time not from the pain.

"Sam?" He asked. "Wordy?"

"Wordy's alright, you should worry about yourself right now. I heard you bumped your head pretty bad," Lou tried to keep the smile in his voice, even with the serious expression on his face.

"Sam?" Spike asked. He didn't miss the fact that his friend had skimmed over that.

"He'll be alright, too," Lou said. Spike also didn't miss the silent I hope at the end of his statement.

There's only one chapter left. All questions shall be answered. Maybe. =) please review?