A women, voice breaking from terror, screamed in the otherwise silent night. She sounded like she was sobbing pleads...or crys of help for her mother.
Several men, their curses blending into a jumble of angry syllables, rang loudly, more so than the lone women's voice. They were angry at something...someone.
Bitch!
An unrulely teenager, forgetting time (once again)from playing Ragnarok Online, froze in front of her computer next to the window, fear growing as she listened to the women scream and sob perhaps not even half a block away. Her character died, unnoticed. She thought about not doing anything about it; afterall, someone must had to have called the police or something, right?
The sounds began to quiet a little.
But what if nobody did anything? Psychology, afterall, had taught her the danger of "diffusion of responsibility" within a group or a community.
The voices calmed a little more.
She went into her parents' room and woke her father up, relayed what happened, waited while the father dressed, and they opened the front door.
The group of voices, still talking loudly (the women's voice have disappeared sometime after the teenager decided to wake her father), passed by the family's gate. Under the cover of a long, unlit driveway and an unlit living room, the father watched the group pass by. There was a child in the group. The daughter dared not to look out; she was still absorbing the fear and terror the last 10 minute caused.
Then one, two, three, four police cars drove past their gate.
The mother, woken up by the bedroom light, joined the father, but soon went back to sleep. The father walked out and to the open gate, silently closing them, and saw the whole group detained by police officers a few houses down.
Two more police cars arrived for backup.
Keeping the motion-sensing outdoor lights on, the daughter, a little less frightened and a little more curious, watched the father walk back, learning the initial screams that alarmed her woke the surrounding neighbors up.
Were they trying to silence her? Or did a fight broke out? Or...?
It's been one hour since I heard the screams.
