Free Hoarder by Armando D. Muñoz Page A

the juicy rat. The chase disappeared into the room’s rubble.
    “Don’t pet the kitties,” Keith advised.
    Ian looked at his brother, trying to come up with a comeback to his quip. He could see the sly grin threatening to break on his brother’s face, and he wanted to encourage it. They all needed a laugh to ease the heavy atmosphere over their heads caused by the heavier hoard under their feet.
    Keith saw the rat reappear out of the garbage, coming his way. He took an instinctive step back, but there was no ground behind him to step onto.
    Ian saw the sudden shock on Keith’s face as he fell straight down out of view.
    “Keith!”
    Ian was the only one who saw his brother disappear, and he crawled over the hoard toward him. Dani and Will followed in Ian’s direction, alarmed that their leader had so quickly vanished.
    Keith’s voice rose from the sea of garbage. “I fell in her nest!”
    Ian found the hole that his brother had fallen into, and he got down on his hands and knees to look over the edge. Keith had called it a nest, but the size made Ian think it was more of a crater. The hole was mostly circular, and at least a dozen feet wide and over seven feet deep.
    Keith turned in a circle to get footage of what was held in the hole of this human packrat. The bottom was piled with blankets and clothing and circled with cushions. Littered over the soft surfaces were discarded soda cups and food wrappers. Interspersed with the food waste were plastic grocery bags, many filled with a brown substance and tied in knots at the top. Keith also spotted countless water bottles filled to varying degrees with various shades of lemonade. He saw one bottle without a cap beside him and got a good whiff. He was wrong about the bottles’ contents. They were filled with Missy’s Lady Lemonade, bottled at the source, and they were long past the expiration (expulsion) date.
    Keith looked up and saw that the tilted television on the bookcase across the room was in the perfect spot for viewing inside Missy’s nest. The many human poo-bags and pee-bottles around him now made sense. Missy might miss the results of a particularly scandalous paternity test if she had to climb out of her nest to make waste, and it didn’t look like her television had a pause or rewind function.
    Ian extended a hand down to his brother, who took it, helping to haul him out. Will and Dani arrived at the edge and looked down in amazement.
    “The Vulture’s nest,” Will announced. Only there were no eggs inside this nest, just bird turds. He was nauseous to notice that most of the tied off waste bags were emblazoned with the Mega-Mart logo. He had probably packed some of those bags with her groceries. The bags were partially transparent and light brown, recently packed with dark brown. Despite being tied off, Will could smell their contents, and he had to fight an urge to hurl. He also knew that the Mega-Mart bags were notoriously thin and prone to rip easily.
    “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