Hoarder (7 page)

“Did you have a snack while you were down there?” Ian asked Keith.

“She has bags of her shit down there, right next to her dinner plates. You want some crap on a cracker?”

“No thanks, I’m cutting back.”

Missy’s nest didn’t hold any cages or cats, so it was abandoned. They crawled toward separate cages.

Dani reached the next imprisoned cat. What she saw through the bars was heartbreaking, but it wasn’t a surprise. The cat shivered in fear at the sight of her. Its fur was missing in patches, the exposed skin covered in sores. Whatever diseases afflicted these cats Dani hoped would spread to their caretaker, not that Missy took any care of her pets. She realized those sores could be bug bites, and that was somehow even worse, that these hungry cats provided the food for the overfed pests that could pass through the bars of the cages.

Dani opened the cage and extended a hand to the sick animal inside. Claws swiped at her. Dani was prepared for that reaction and had her hand out of the cage quickly.

“I’d hate humans, too.”

Dani went in search of the next cage. She heard the unobserved animal escape its confines behind her, and she was relieved to know it had claimed its liberation.

Will spotted another cat trapped in a cage high above his head. This cage was on the top shelf of the teetering bookcase, right below the television. With his height, he figured he was the one responsible for the high level rescues. How the television, with its warring families, or the cage, with its restless feline, could remain where they were while everything else had fallen off of the shelves was a mystery to him. Perhaps they had extra adhesive holding them up, as in an extra layer of rat and cat turds.

Will stepped up onto the pile of garbage bags against the base of the leaning bookcase. He failed to consider that those bags were the only things keeping the bookcase from collapsing. Will didn’t see the subtle shifts in the one hundred eighty-five pounds of stained oak towering over him.

Will didn’t need to hoist Ian to reach the door and open this cage. He let the cage door fall open and turned away as the cat leaped out to the hoard below. Hearing a scraping sound beside him, Will looked up as dust drifted down into his eyes. He could hear but not see a studio audience laughing above him.

The cage had shifted from the feline’s speedy exit, cracking the ancient crap that had kept the metal pen glued in place (Will had been correct on that count). With the seal broken, the cage let gravity have its way, and it slid off of the high shelf.

Ian, Keith, and Dani all heard the noise and spun toward it, eager to avoid the next potential avalanche.

Will flinched back while trying to keep his feet solid on the slope of slippery garbage sacks. The sliding cage caught on a hanging black power cord. The cord pulled taut and gave a jerk to the antique television on top. The cobwebs that had held it in place for years burst into dust. The studio audience pitched off of the top ledge.

Will looked up, and he registered that the audience on the screen coming down at him were actually jeering, probably at him to move out…

The television screen, which was flesh blistering hot due to its constant use, smashed into Will’s upturned face. The jeering stopped the moment the screen shattered with a resounding pop. He heard a crunch of bones all too loudly, since they were inside his head, likely his nose or teeth, if he was lucky.

Will pitched to the left and the broken television rolled off of his head, stripping him of his camera cap.  The smoking television landed shattered screen up in the garbage. Will’s camera cap landed upright atop a cardboard box, unharmed.

Will stood hunched over with his head hanging navel level, yet miraculously he stood. As he slowly pulled himself up, the falling cage hit him in the right shoulder. The cage bounced off but did not spill him. He wavered with his back to his friends.

“Will!” Dani cried.

Will’s friends worked toward him, from the sides and behind. Keith and Dani slipped their handheld cameras into their front pockets as they made their way, wanting their hands free to help him. Dani worried that the teetering bookcase might collapse next and flatten Will. If they moved fast enough, they could catch it if it fell.

Ian saw a burst of sparks from the shattered TV tube, and he hoped that none of them hit the brittle newspaper stacks. They were lucky the television had landed screen up. This room could light up like flash paper in an incinerator. Getting out of a fast moving conflagration in here would be a challenge to the quickest of them. Ian thought it would be wise to unplug the shattered television, but the end of the power cord disappeared into the deep hoard. It could take minutes, maybe hours to clear the hoard away and find the hidden plug.

Will remained with his head down, his back to his friends.

“Will, are you okay?” Keith asked with little hope that he was. From the impact of television to head that he’d seen, Keith was convinced that the least damage Will had sustained was a severe concussion and lacerations. A hospital visit would definitely be required.

Will finally pulled his head up and stood rigidly upright. His friends couldn’t see his face but they heard his warning to them. It was a lot easier to hear in the room now that the commotion from the television had been silenced.

“Careful.”

Will turned to his friends. His nose was bleeding and split, and his teeth were bloody and chipped. Those injuries went practically unnoticed, as everyone was looking at the one-inch shard of thick glass sticking out to the left of his nose. Blood dripped from the hooked end of the sliver.

Dani gasped and looked into Will’s eyes. She realized that he had not yet seen, was not even aware of, the shard sticking out of his face.

It was the fear in Dani’s eyes that made Will finally worry that he might be seriously injured. His eyes looked down and focused on the dripping tip of the glass.

Will pinched the end of the sliver with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. He pulled the splinter an inch out, then two, three, four inches, and more. The glass had a curve to it, widening the injury as it slid out. A white-hot feeling grew inside his head as the wound was emptied of the foreign object. On the seventh inch, the splinter pulled free from Will’s face.

Will stood with his eyes locked on the shard in his fingers, colored with his blood. Only
shard
seemed too minor a term for a piece this size. This was a bloody glass knife, maybe more of a scythe. The glass dropped when his fingers opened.

Blood finally erupted from the wound beside Will’s nose in a fan. Dani had to stop her advance to keep out of the spray.

“No!” Dani cried.

Will’s last complete thought was an ironic one -
I’ve been served one of Missy’s Omelets
. Then he dropped into deep dark unconsciousness, which was fine because the burning agony inside his head was too much to cope with. Sleep would ease the pain, only this was the kind of sleep he wouldn’t wake from. Will slumped down onto the hoard.

Dani moved in on Will’s side, no longer caring to avoid the spray of blood. The drops that landed on her hoodie could not be seen against the dark fabric, they were discernable only by their wetness. Keith and Ian arrived on Will’s other side. The shattered TV sparked again beside Ian. He no longer cared about the sparks, which landed on the arm of his hoodie.

The fan of blood exiting Will’s face slowed to a steady pulse. Dani put a hand over Will’s wound, but his blood escaped between her fingers. Dani knew her action was not helping Will, but she had to do something. At the same time, she knew there was probably nothing they could do to prolong his life. They weren’t professional lifesavers, and they lacked first aid supplies. Dani didn’t think the CPR certification she had earned at camp a few years ago would make a bit of difference. Will was not Resuscitation Annie. There were no second chances if she didn’t get it right the first time. Besides, she couldn’t breathe life back into a victim of blood loss. She also didn’t think she could tie a tourniquet around his face.

“We have to call for help!” Dani pleaded to her friends.

“We didn’t bring our phones! That was Will’s idea!” Keith reminded them with a voice high-pitched in distress. Will’s suggestion about their phones had seemed logical earlier. No phones or wallets, no identification to name them if lost or seized, no tracking chips to reveal their coordinates. Keith considered their safety for this expedition entirely his responsibility. He didn’t know how he could live under the weight of Will’s death. It would probably break his back, and his spirit.

Dani wasn’t willing to accept the inevitability of Will’s death yet. Not while his blood was still pumping through…
Oh God, oh shit!
Dani no longer felt a pulse of blood on her palm from Will’s wound, although blood trickled through her fingers.

“Well she has to have a phone!” Dani shouted with anger, not at her friends, but at their vulnerability. Will began full body convulsions beneath her. Dani reluctantly removed her hand from Will’s face, her palm dripping generously with his blood.

Keith looked around helplessly and shouted with exasperation. “Where do we even begin looking for a phone?” His hands gestured to encompass the whole hoard.

Ian knew his brother was right to doubt finding a line out. He remembered seeing a phone on the dining room table, only the hand piece had been removed, the rotary dial had been ripped off, and the cord had been cut. Finding another phone in this hoard could take hours or days, and if they were so lucky to find one, it probably wouldn’t work anyway. Ian thought they could summon help faster if they ran down the middle of the street screaming for it. Except maybe not on this dark street, where the populace hid with their lights off and left screams for help unanswered.

They were on their own.

Will’s eyes rolled up as his convulsing abated. Dani’s head tilted tearfully beside Will. She made no move to wipe her eyes. Dani had never felt so helpless in her life, as she watched her friend’s life bleed out before her.

“We’re losing him, guys.”

The guys could do nothing about it. They all watched silently as Will’s body became still. The brothers looked at each other. Neither tried to hide their tears, nor mock the other for being a crybaby. When they looked back at Will, they knew he was dead.

“We can’t leave him,” Ian said.

“We’ll carry him out the front door, lay him by the bushes, and go for help.” Keith accepted that his plan had been fatally flawed, and he had to adapt to its unraveling. The cats would have to wait as they dealt with their fallen friend.

Dani’s sorrow evaporated, and she flared with anger. She welcomed it. Her outrage gave her focus, purpose, and motion. It was also preferable to the grief, which she found paralyzing. Dani did not damn Keith or their mission. The house and the hoarder were the recipients of her rage. She had wanted Missy to feel pain for the agony she had inflicted on the cats, but now with one of her best friends dead, she wanted Missy in a grave.

“She’s gonna pay. This place is a death trap.”

They froze as they heard the front door open.

Chapter Nine

The front door pushed open one foot, four inches before it butted up against the hoard inside and came to a solid stop. Missy’s grocery bag draped arm reached in and wiggled the front door key out of the lock, since there was no way to gain passage through the limited opening with the key in the way.

Missy entered the only way she could, sliding in sideways, holding three plastic grocery bags in her hand. When her body passed through, her considerable breasts and muscular thighs pressed against the doorframe, which had been worn smooth and without paint from years of her curves’ tight passage.

Missy looked in as she entered so she could greet her friends.

“Hello sweeties! Mama’s home early!” Missy cooed in the voice she used with everyone, like they were children and she was on their level. She acted five instead of fifty. She spoke to her pets, dolls, and people the same way.

Missy’s sweeties were the many cats that came out of hiding upon her arrival. Missy loved how her cats came running out to greet her when she came home from shopping. The meow-meows sure loved their mom-mom. Sometimes though she suspected her cats were greedy fat cats that were only coming to her for the yum-yums in her shopping bags.

The front door was the only working door for passage in and out of the house. There was a door to the garage in the dining room and a back door in the kitchen, but they had for years been abandoned of their purpose and covered completely by the hoard. The hidden kids in the house had passed the back doors without noticing they were there.

The real reason the cats came running when Missy arrived never occurred to her; the animals were trying to escape the house. Missy never opened the windows, and she had never considered installing a cat door. The front door was the only exit, and some weeks her Tuesday Mega-Mart outing was the only reason her door opened at all. The cats knew how slim their chances for escape were, and as a result the foyer was the most populated room for loose cats in the house. At least one cat a week would slip out around Missy’s ankles when she was squeezing through the door. Meanwhile, Missy brought in new cats all the time, so their numbers never thinned within her walls despite the frequent escapees. Plus, they bred like bunnies.

As for why a great number of cats were imprisoned in uncomfortable steel cages instead of comfortable crates, Missy’s reason was callous. Most crates that held pets kept them concealed from view. Missy wanted her locked up cats on full display for her constant amusement, even if the cats behind bars did not appear amused.

While the cats entered Missy’s house domesticated, they became part of the feral pack in no time. Life was always a desperate fight for survival amid the squalor. The survival rate among the kittens was the lowest.

“Hello Calicoco! Cookies-N-Cream! Tiddilee Winks! Mr. Fittle Fattle.”

Whether Calicoco, Cookies-N-Cream, Tiddilee Winks, and Mr. Fittle Fattle were among the cats coming to Missy, she didn’t know. They were simply the pet names she liked to say the most, what Missy called
happy-happy
names.

Missy’s other arm slipped in through the doorway, holding three more plastic bags of chips and punch. She let the bags hang off of her wrist as she engaged the door lock and deadbolt. Missy was always careful to make sure her fortress was locked and fortified. With all of her collections and cool stuff, she was convinced that everyone wanted to rob her of her riches. Who wouldn’t find, in bulk, what their heart most desired inside Missy’s house? She obviously lived in the lap of luxury.

Directly next to the front door was the only spot where she could stand on the floor. The next step was a step up onto garbage, the beginning of a three-foot climb onto the foyer hoard. The foyer was not much different from most; it was only obscene in its excesses. Shoes, sandals, and boots numbered in the high hundreds. A pile of coats rose over chest high. The garbage bags by the door needing to be taken out were stacked to the ceiling. Crawling over everything were the cats, over fifteen circling around their keeper. Everything was seasoned with cat turds and shellacked with cat piss. This being the room the cats nested in the most, every surface was covered in a layer of fur. Some hairballs were bigger than the cats they came from.

When Missy was not coming and going in the foyer, the cats avoided loitering against the closed door. The bottom foot was caked in dried blood and fur, where others of their kind had been killed during failed escape attempts. Every cat that hadn’t made it out remained in Missy’s house still, alive or dead.

Missy climbed up onto her hoard with a graceless ease and odd athleticism. When she had to put a hand out for balance, she used a fist. Calloused patches on her knuckles were a result of this. Her thick, muscular legs were well earned. She came to a stop so she could enjoy the welcoming committee circling her. She knew that they were surprised to see her back so early on shopping night.

From where Missy stood, over her shoulder, there was a sliver of the living room visible. The hoard in the next room was over four feet higher, and from her vantage point, if she turned around, she would see none of the invaders in her house.

“My meow-meows miss their mom-mom? You want some of Mommy’s milk?”

Missy giggled at her generosity. The cats that circled her were not content. They meowed for mercy. They had not been fed or given water or milk for many weeks. She did not know that a few of their number were near the point of turning traitor and making a meal-meal of their mom-mom as she slept. A few felines had already turned cannibal. The babies were easiest to eat, and the juiciest.

As Missy enjoyed the ritualistic mewling of the cats, she noticed that something was very wrong inside her house. It was
Tuesday Night at the Fights
on Channel 5. She should have heard fighting, cheering, or a commercial, but instead she heard only meows and her own breathing. It was never this silent inside Missy’s house. She found silence too loud and lonely.

“Why can’t Mommy hear her TV?”