Once they were inside, Rick slammed home the bolts on the doors and backed away, raising the Remington to his shoulder as a precaution, but the street outside seemed to be clear. Nevertheless, he held his place for a few seconds more before releasing a shaky breath, lowering his arms and studying their surroundings.
The precinct had been wrecked. There were no signs of structural damage to the reception area besides a few random bullet holes in the plaster, but the floor was strewn with a shallow drift of papers and other debris and much of what hadn't been fixed down had been thrown around the place. Almost as if it were an afterthought, he glanced around at the random splashes of blood, both on the floor and on the walls.
Andrea was also looking around. Unfortunate experience had taught her to tell the difference between human blood and that of the walkers, which was both thicker and darker, almost like tar. Most of it seemed to be the latter kind, so the battle had clearly been largely one-sided, and she hoped that this boded well for the security of the rest of the building, but she had to be realistic and admit that there was a high probability that they'd just locked themselves in with at least one walker, if not more.
As if reading her mind, Rick opened the rifle's bolt with a brisk movement, double checking that it was fully loaded, and looked back up to address the group.
"I don't like the idea of splitting up," he said, gravely, "but someone needs to keep watch up here. Detective," he said, turning to Hoffman now, "you know the layout, so it's best if you go find the armoury."
"I'll go too," said Sidney, quickly, and Andrea found herself wholly unsurprised at this, though the strange, fluctuating dynamic between Sidney and the detective was beginning to make her head hurt. Just when she was beginning to form a coherent theory as to their true regard for one another, she would catch yet another subtle exchange of glances between the pair that completely destroyed her newborn conclusions. She was sure of one thing at that point, though: something had happened overnight that had shifted the balance of power in Sidney's favour.
"I guess so," said Rick, after giving this serious consideration during which he looked as if he had his concerns about the idea, "but get back up here straight away if you hear shootin', and I want you both back in fifteen minutes regardless."
"Rest assured," said Sidney, with a sober nod, and then turned to Hoffman. "Lead the way, Detective."
Hoffman turned on his heel and stepped behind the front desk, making for the door to the offices and, from there, the lower levels, Sidney moving in his shadow. There was a body behind the desk and they spared it a perfunctory glance, but after so long it was impossible to tell whether it was a human or a walker; the skin was desiccated and marked with bruises and bites.
The door behind the desk was closed but hung from one badly twisted hinge, and Hoffman shoved it aside only after some expenditure of effort, raising a squeal from the tortured woodwork. The rooms behind seemed to have been spared the bulk of the chaos in the reception, though there were definite signs of a hasty evacuation and, here and there, further streaks of blood, which he paused to examine.
"Bringing back memories?" said Sidney softly, but so close behind Hoffman that he started. By the time he'd swung around to confront her, however, she had turned away with an innocently preoccupied air to examine a framed photograph on a nearby desk, tracing idle fingers over the glass as she studiously avoided his gaze.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked, irritably.
"As if you're that stupid," she said, upbraiding him with her words rather than her tone, which remained inexplicably good-natured. "Keep moving, Detective. We're here for a reason, remember?"
Hoffman grunted tersely but kept his tongue in check, settling for jerking his head at the far side of the office. Sidney acknowledged this gracefully and walked past him, heading for the door that led to the stairs.
They found another corpse halfway down the steps, this one clearly much fresher. It was a very young woman, hardly out of her 'teens. She was dark-haired and effortlessly pretty, but below her chin that soft beauty ended; her neck had been horribly mauled by what could only have been the animal savagery of a walker's bite. Half of the white skin of her throat had been ripped back, and the ripe, bloody flesh beneath was gored and gnawed. Whether or not she'd died from this injury, however, was impossible to say, because there was a neat bullet hole punched through her forehead and the step beneath her tangled hair was caked with dried blood and brain tissue.
Sidney descended the steps and turned around to study the body, but Hoffman remained where he was, staring at the girl's face, his breath seemingly snared fast in his lungs. He looked like a man desperate to avert his eyes from the atrocity in front of him but at the same time lacking the necessary will to do so. Sidney, hearing this eerie silence at last, adopted a frown born of sudden understanding then returned to the top of the stairs and took him by the arm.
"Come on now," she said, gently. "We don't have long."
Hoffman finally seemed to break from this fugue with his customary transience, and when he snapped back to the present he freed himself from Sidney's grasp with an ill-tempered tug.
"After you," he said, sourly. Sidney watched him for a few seconds more, then stepped carefully around the young woman's body and headed downwards with the detective trailing after her, his steps light but his breathing heavy.
They reached the bottom of the stairs and found themselves in the central corridor that led to the evidence room, the holding cells and, at the far end of the passage beyond a distant set of neon tubes that were flickering and buzzing ominously, the armoury. All of the connecting doors hung open and, though most of the rooms beyond were well lit, Sidney nevertheless fixed both hands around the hilt of the claymore and braced it in front of her at shoulder height as she moved forward, passing the door to the evidence room and glancing through it.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Hoffman had stopped once more, but this time he was broadcasting an air of naked trepidation. Sidney's eyes narrowed and she tilted her head at him.
"So," she said, her voice as sharp and as brittle as cracked glass, "I've finally found the limit of your courage, have I?" She sheathed the sword and turned back, advancing on him. Despite his greater size, Hoffman showed her no fight as she curled one hand into the collar of his jacket and dragged him along the corridor towards the open door. As she shoved him forward, though, he closed his eyes.
"Look," she said, coldly, and reached up to apply a firm slap to his cheek. Hoffman did so, and saw that the room beyond was both spotlessly clean and quite empty.
"She's not there," said Sidney from beside his shoulder as he exhaled in harsh relief. "They took the poor thing to the morgue along with everyone else you murdered. Hell broke loose the day after you were locked up." She pulled in a shallow breath and stepped in front of him, locking onto his gaze. "Diana was right," she said, stabbing her finger into his chest. "You're a very lucky man indeed."
Before he could react, she'd turned aside and stalked off in the direction of the armoury, drawing the sword once more with a whisper that echoed off the cold walls.
The door to the room was in darkness, and Sidney hesitated before edging forward, reaching out to try to locate the light switch. She had just managed to close her hand upon it when the walker stumbled out of the gloom and cannoned into her, driving her back against the far wall of the corridor. She didn't waste breath in screaming, but the creature's rush had shoved the blade of the claymore up against her chest, and she whipped her head to the side as the steel flashed past her eyes and clattered against the wall. Not quite fast enough, though; a cut sizzled across her cheekbone and she hissed in pain.
The walker was snorting like a bull, and Sidney gagged as its cold, stinking breath exploded in her face. She wrenched one hand out of its grasp and managed to fix her fingers under its chin, forcing its head back, but the leverage she required for this had upset her balance. Her feet slipped from under her and she fell, the creature's hands moving from her shoulders to her throat and beginning to squeeze. She reached out without looking as that pressure increased, trying to locate the hilt of the sword, but she was pinned against the wall on that side and her fingers fell upon thin air.
Next moment, there was a small, almost unimportant popping sound, and the walker shuddered on top of her, its hands relaxing at last. Sidney's clouded eyes flared once more but then her vision began to clear, and she sucked in a rasping breath as Hoffman yanked the ice pick out of the back of its skull and dragged it off her, kicking the limp body aside with a slight sneer.
Sidney flopped over onto her stomach and slid her palms beneath her, still hauling air in and out of her bruised throat as hard as she could, and then pushed herself up with an almost inaudible whimper of effort, collecting the sword as she swayed to her feet. She took a few seconds more to recover her strength and her composure and then looked Hoffman up and down.
"You could have let it kill me," she said, and the question – if that was indeed what it was – hung on a fine strand in the air between them until the detective dropped a brief shrug.
"Did you want me to?" he asked, and though there was a suggestion of his habitual asperity in the question, this time it was oddly half-hearted.
"Of course not," said Sidney. In the lee of this she raised her fingers to the wound on her cheek; it was not as bad as she'd feared, but there was a slow trickle of blood oozing from the cut and running down to her chin. She dabbed at it with her sleeve.
"That's not the way I do things," said Hoffman, gnomically, but in spite of Sidney's response, which was to subject him to a deeply analytical stare, he offered no further clarification on this comment and she did not force the matter. She stepped back through the doorway and flipped up the switch, bathing the room beyond in brilliant white light.
As they'd half expected, the armoury had been all but stripped, if not by what had remained of the city's police force then by others; the presence of the comparatively fresh corpse on the stairs was evidence enough that others had already been here with the same idea in mind. There were still a few items, though, and Sidney moved along the racks with a practised air, scrutinising the remaining boxes of ammunition. Her eyes lit up on the second row, and she tossed two boxes of shells to Hoffman across the aisle. "For the Sheriff's rifle," she told him.
Hoffman twitched a startled eyebrow at her. "I thought you said you didn't know anything about guns," he said.
"No," replied Sidney, throwing him one final box. "What I said was that I've little use for them. Different thing entirely." She paused, angled her head and reached out, retrieving a heavy Browning 9mm from the rear of the shelf and weighing it in her hand for a moment. Hoffman watched her eject the empty clip and set it aside before checking the action of both slide and trigger with a precise grace about her movements. Finally, she located a stash of hollow point bullets and handed both to the surprised detective.
"It's more you, I think," she observed, with a wry little smile, watching him load the clip before shoving it home with the heel of his hand. Then he curled his fingers around the grip, found the trigger, raised the weapon and aimed it at Sidney's head at point blank range.
"Give me one good reason why not," he said, evenly.
"I can do better than that," said Sidney, just as unruffled. "I can give you three." She had not even blinked, and now their gazes clashed along the dull black barrel.
"Surprise me," he said.
"Because you're curious in spite of yourself," she said, "because there's nowhere left to run, and most of all because you need me more than you know." She reached up and pushed the weapon to one side with no more concern than if she were batting aside a fly, then turned and grabbed an empty holdall from the shelf behind her, shoving it in his direction.
"Pack up," she told him, coolly. "We've got three minutes to get back."