Cacophony [ONC 2023]

6

Not quite down to her underwear, but close enough, leading to Henna shuffling through the tiny gap of the window with little protection at all, save for her ear defenders and the instant she dropped to the floor inside the police precinct, they tumbled from her ears. The screams almost deafened her, echoing from the thick, reinforced walls of the building that were intended, when built, to keep noises out.

She scrambled for the ear defenders, the intensity of the screams within the building bringing her close to vomiting. Even with them secured back over her ears, she still heard more than she wished to and she soon found out why. At an initial count, she saw around half-a-dozen police officers, all stopped in their tracks, heads turned to the ceiling, screams rending the air like nothing Henna had heard since it had all began. The screams bounced from concrete walls, funnelled through areas broken up by reinforced glass booths and the rest of it open spaced.

The first cop she neared, she removed their belt, fastening it around her waist and checking the gun. A full clip, and that felt like a win from the beginning. She made her way around the other officers, taking their belts and dangling them over her shoulder, but she still had to find the armoury and that would prove the mother-load for Cas, probably giving her more than enough ammunition to last for years, let alone until she reached an extraction point that had now almost reached mythical proportions.

After Cas had dragged an industrial waste dumpster, climbed on top and broken the window, she had hauled Henna up and through. She couldn't stay outside waiting for Henna, the dozens of Screamers in the vicinity making her jittery, Cas had said she would circle back every five minutes, keeping on the move and checking the perimeter at the same time. That meant Henna still had time to search further into the precinct.

She soon found the cells, where she encountered another five Screamers and one dead guy. He looked as though he had starved to death, but not before he had ripped every fingernail from his hands trying to claw his way out through the locked bars. Not even forgotten by the cops that had turned their heads skyward and started screaming. They never got the chance to forget.

By the time five minutes had almost passed, she still hadn't found the armoury, but she managed to toss the gun belts out of the window, hoping that Cas found them and not any roving Silents, or worse. More searching came up with a set of keys and, testing them, she learned the ones that opened the cells. After a thought, she left the cells open for now. A door to the garage yielded better results.

As she entered the garage, she couldn't remember the last time she had seen so many cars together that weren't burnt out shells. A board, inside an office off to the side, held keys clearly marked for each cruiser, a couple of motorbikes and one tactical van. And there, at the other side, sat the cage behind which Henna saw the largest collection of firearms she had ever seen. Whatever Cas needed, this place had it.

Her next five minutes were about up and she raced back to the window, a piece of paper in her hand after writing down what she intended doing. There were too many guns, magazines, cartridges and bullets to keep tossing out of that window. She needed to act smarter. And, for that, it would take longer than five minutes and would take some effort. Cas needed to rest and she couldn't do that out on the streets, not even with Henna watching over her.

It took some time, but she managed to push the Screamers around. Like when people had tried to lie them down, the Screamers only ever moving to return to their feet, they also automatically stepped when pushed, keeping themselves upright. Doing that, Henna managed to 'walk' the cops into one cell, then the prisoners all into another, locking each cell door and placing the key within arm's length of the police cell, should they awaken.

Taking the thin mattresses from the cells, she closed the door piling the mattresses up against it, using tape she had found in the garage. It helped. Not a lot, but muffled screams were better than nothing and, if Cas slept downstairs in the garage, she would hear it even less. They might even get the chance to talk and Henna hadn't really talked to anyone in months. Even an awkward conversation with an ex looked far better than doing nothing but listen to screams day-after-day, night-after-night. Cas needed a rest, but so did Henna.