"Shit." The Collector's head muttered, mirroring her master's thoughts without the Collector even needing to put her on or tell her. Shit, indeed. How could this have happened? "How could this have happened?" The head said, this time preempting the Collector's thoughts.
The two watched a blue and black sea of police officers, search and rescue operators, deputized members of the local populace, news crews, and even an FBI agent swarmed into and around the Collector's ostensibly abandoned cabin, which served as a front for her main base of operations and home to her lair. Nearly her entire collection was stored there, nearly 500 heads of all ages, races, classes, and from several decades.
Now, however, those 500 heads were slowly amassing in a heap outside, the deputies stacking them in rows while a few officers went to work identifying anyone they could. Some heads were laughing and praising the men and women who'd finally saved them, others were crying out for the Collector to come and rescue them from their rescuers, others still were silent, either in shock or simply not sure what to make of this turn of events.
The collector wanted to scream. She might have screamed, had she been wearing her head when she got back to her cabin. How could this have happened? How could they have found out her hiding place? What was she going to do now?
All was not entirely lost, she still had about 20 heads scattered in hidden locations around the forrest, as well as a much smaller collection of about a dozen heads hidden away in the cellar beneath a second cabin, located FAR away from this one, which she had started building once she realized that she couldn't excavate any more space beneath her current dwelling without risking a cave-in. Plus, she had a few 3-4 head stashes in other countries, hidden for when she took international trips and found heads that struck her fancy, but which she couldn't transport back to her neck of the woods until the heat died down.
But this was her home. These were the majority of her heads. And they were getting reclaimed. "What are we gonna do now, ma'am?" the Collector's head asked. The Collector pat the thick mop of turquoise dyed hair belonging to Chloe, one of the Collector's most loyal heads. She was one of the only heads that the Collector ever allowed to take temporary control of her body, and had always considered her a sort of adviser. She was lucky, if nothing else, that she hadn't lost her. "I mean, I hate to say this, but there's way too many of them down there. Even if you tried to pick off the stragglers one by one, eventually you'd get caught and catch a bullet. Or they'll call in back up before you can get all your heads moved to some place new."
The Collector observed the scene before her. At least two dozen people were buzzing around her cabin, police officers surrounding the place with weapons drawn and floodlights scanning the forest for the Collector while deputies ran into and out of the cabin carrying armfuls of heads and rescue teams tried to comfort and identify them as they were laid in heaps on a series of large blue tarps spread out around the building. A young newslady was speaking to her camera wielding crew about the massive find, and was holding up the head of Heather Jueves, a beautiful thirty year old hispanic news anchor that the Collector had swiped back in the late 90's and who was now giving her first televised interview in over twenty years. In short, there were eyes everywhere, and the chances of the Collector getting in unseen, incapacitating every able bodied person around her home, and getting all of her heads to some place safe and discreet (which she did not even know where that would be) was, as Chloe had pointed out, impossible. That said, running wasn't going to be easy. Without her, these heads had no way of getting their bodies back, even if they could be found and not many of them could. They would be looking for her, and if she ran back to her secondary cabin they might get on her trail and find that one too. That said, what if one of the heads told the police where the cabin was? She only gave that information to her most trusted heads, but what if they had blabbed it to some of the less good ones, or what if they cracked under interrogation? The Collector...