Hoarder (8 page)

Chapter Ten

The three surviving kids looked toward the foyer and thought they were fucked. This had been their original worse case scenario, only things had changed.

When Missy’s voice first reached them, their alarm increased. It wasn’t the proximity of her voice, but her booming delivery that startled them. It sounded so directed and personal. For Missy, even the smallest statement had to be announced at the top of her lungs. She spoke as though she were addressing the back seats of a theater.

Would Missy greet them with a “
Hello sweeties!
”? Keith thought not.

Will was right, Ian thought, Missy did speak in an annoying kiddie voice. How could Will handle that annoying voice week after week at work? Then, like a punch to the soul, Ian realized Will didn’t work at the Mega-Mart anymore. Will wouldn’t have to hear Missy’s ridiculously voiced demands, now that her hoard had issued him his pink slip and death certificate.

Keith pulled Ian and urged Dani to the bottom of Will’s corpse, so they could huddle and talk in whispers. They heard the front door slam, but they were too far to hear the locks engage. Their freedom and possibly their lives depended on the next few seconds. Keith had to think clearly and avoid panic, while his bladder threatened to betray him and unleash a flash flood in his pants.

“We hide Will and go back out below.” It was the first plan Keith thought of, and thus the only one he had time to formulate.

Dani and Ian offered no alternatives. Ian nodded in lieu of verbal confirmation. Dani heard Missy say the name Fittle Fattle and she silently mouthed “
Fittle?
” in outrage. Was Missy referring to her Fiddlesticks? Her cat’s name was on the tags.

“If we get split up, we meet at our bikes,” Keith added to the plan.

Dani saw a cat clawed and rat gnawed fuzzy blanket nearby, and she pulled it toward her, careful that its passage didn’t cause any collapses. Once it was fully in her hands, she threw the hole riddled covering over Will’s upper half, leaving only his legs below the knees exposed.

Ian saw what was left of Will to hide, located his own fabric, and pulled on it. The sheet pulled taut and upset a tower of VHS tapes, stacked an unstable forty-two tapes high. As the tower of tapes tipped toward him, he noticed that all forty-two collapsing stories were romantic comedies. He hated romantic comedies.

Ian lunged over and leaned his whole body against the tipping stack, barely preventing their noisy collapse. Keith moved in to help Ian straighten the tapes back into position.

Would Missy notice if some of the side titles were turned the other way? Keith hoped Missy wasn’t that anal retentive, but considering her whole life revolved around product worship, he was pretty sure she was. It didn’t matter, since there was no time to turn any tapes around.

Dani looked back at the foyer. Missy was still talking to her cats and out of sight.

Keith located a dress in the mess and used it to cover Will’s lower half. Ian thought that Will’s camouflage didn’t work. It looked just like a shrouded body.

Ian grabbed an open pizza box and placed it over the head of Will’s death shroud. Now he looked a little more like garbage. What a disgrace this was to Will. Ian had looked up to him almost as much as his brother. He could feel the shock of losing Will starting to numb his thoughts and slow his actions, and he had to push it away.
Move. Now!

“Why can’t Mommy hear her TV?”

Rustling began in the foyer, which meant Missy was on the move. Ian, Keith, and Dani maneuvered as quickly and quietly as they could over the hoard, and they were neither quick nor quiet.

“Okay, follow Mommy now!”

The lightest and most lithe of the group, Ian pulled a distance ahead of the others without realizing it. Keith was glad to see Ian moving so far ahead. He hoped his brother would get out first.

Keith and Dani had a difficult time navigating over cushions littered with empty glass soda bottles. One bottle falling or knocking against another was enough to give away their presence. They had to grab rolling bottles as they traversed the hoard. Keith couldn’t help thinking that Missy could become a millionaire if she only turned in her cash back recyclables.

Ian paused to look back and was surprised to see Keith and Dani far behind him. He waved at them to hurry.

Keith waved at Ian to hurry on without them, then that hand grabbed a rolling bottle. They made it off of the cushions and had to crawl over a landscape of constantly shifting boxes. At least these boxes were full and didn’t collapse. It felt to Keith like they were filled with books. He looked nervously back.

Missy’s high hair rose into view over the mountain of junk at the living room entrance. She was seconds from seeing them, and they had some distance to go to get out of the living room.

Keith spotted Will’s fallen backpack, lying uncovered near the shrouded body. There was nothing they could do about it now, and he hoped it would go unnoticed by Missy, or be accepted as more garbage or treasure in her house.

Ian had nearly reached the edge of the slope down to the dining room when he risked another glance back.

Keith and Dani were completely out of sight. Meanwhile, Missy rose across the room, carrying multiple shopping bags. She was looking down at her feet as she climbed, so she hadn’t seen him yet.

Ian dropped down behind stacks of newspapers and tall speakers with torn covers. He could not risk moving through her field of vision now. He hoped she wasn’t making a beeline to the kitchen, but since she was carrying so many groceries, he knew it was a fool’s hope. He was glad Keith and Dani had made it into hiding, but he was stuck in a seriously screwed position. Escape down the slope into the dining room was so close it was within spitting distance. Only so close was still too far.

Ian saw the twitching, beady snout of a rat protruding from a tear in the speaker next to his nose. He could deal with it. Having Missy’s snout in his face would be a lot worse.

Keith and Dani were not out of the living room. They were deep in it, down inside Missy’s nest. They were hidden for the moment, but they couldn’t risk being out in the open in case she came their way.

Keith grabbed onto a tall wall mirror and tilted it over him, crouched down between the reflective side and mangy cushions. Glancing into the mirror, he was startled at the wild-eyed teen staring back at him and he quickly averted his eyes.

Seven feet away and facing Keith’s hiding place, Dani crouched against the side cushions and pulled up a food and fecal stained sheet as a smelly shroud.

Missy did not head for the dining room or her nest. She headed for her fallen television. There was no rush. The television was obviously past the point of rescue.

“Poor, poor TV! Why’d you jump?”

Missy crouched over the busted television with some sadness. She had lost a great many TVs over the years, which wasn’t a surprise considering once they went on they never went off. It always made her sad-sad. Every TV she had ever lost remained in the house, most in this room within the layers beneath her feet.

Hearing that Missy was distracted with the television’s demise, Ian risked a peek. His eyes rose over the stack of newspapers yellowed by time and urine.

Ian’s risk was rewarded with a view of Missy’s backside. She was across the living room, turned away as she observed the television that was suicidal to her and lethal to his friend. He saw with alarm that Missy was positioned directly against the mound that hid Will. Missy bumped the empty pizza box that sat over Will’s head, jostling it. Little did she know that she was pressed up against a not yet room temperature teenager who was less than three minutes dead and still bleeding out. Ian hoped that the blood from Will’s fatal wound would not saturate through the shroud and reveal his whereabouts.

Ian could do nothing more to hide Will. He knew this was his chance, and he used the moment of Missy’s distraction to crawl down into the dining room.

“You’re no Humpty Dumpty. I can’t put you back together again,” Missy told her TV. “R.I.P. TV!” She guffawed. Missy was full of funnies like that, and she always cracked herself up.

There were no more sparks from the broken television, but wisps of white and black smoke continued to rise in thin corkscrews. It never occurred to Missy to unplug the busted appliance. Little insignificant things like safety precautions rarely entered Missy’s mind. Those things were boring, and Missy only had room for fun things in her life.

Missy turned away from the fallen TV, and her eyes fell on Will’s camera cap, sitting on a nearby box. Will’s backpack was also in her field of vision, but went unnoticed.

“Well look at that funny hat! I don’t think I’ve worn you before!”

Truth be told, Missy could not remember buying this particular hat, which had a device on the bill that looked like a camera. How cool was that? While she couldn’t remember the purchase, it gave her
the giddies
and was something she would purchase if the sale price was right. She didn’t question its placement in her house.

Missy picked up Will’s cap. The adjustable band on the back was set on the furthest snap, and the cap just fit onto Missy’s big head, flattening her high hair. She was unaware that the camera on the bill was on. Missy’s POV was being recorded onto a drive inside Will’s backpack.

Missy looked at the brown and white cat that had taken a seat on top of the box where the cap was found.

“You like it, Cookies-N-Cream?”

Cookies-N-Cream meowed, demanding food. Missy squealed in response, taking the meow as a vote of approval.

“I like it, too!”

Missy turned around, the dining room entrance passing her view. Ian was no longer visible as he made his way through the kitchen.

Missy stopped turning when her nest was directly ahead. It was a good thing that Ian was gone and Keith and Dani couldn’t see her, for they would have screamed if they’d seen what happened next. Grocery bags in hand, Missy climbed over the pizza box and blanket covering Will’s head and upper body, knocking the pizza box askew. There was a moist crunch underneath the cardboard, but Missy was used to such sounds coming from the lower levels of her hoard, and she took no notice.

When Missy climbed off of the body, the pizza box remained dented. The corpse was left behind as Missy climbed forward. The shroud saturated with blood where she had crawled over it. The bloodstain took the shape of a face.

Hiding in the nest, Keith and Dani could hear the rustling of the hoard as Missy headed their way. They looked at each other, frozen in fear. Three plastic bags full of snacks and soft drinks dropped near the center of the nest, startling them.

Dani’s eyes opened wide, afraid to even blink. More junk food bombs landed in the trench. A shadow fell over the nest momentarily, and Missy followed, climbing down backward, with her ass to the center. Dani closed her eyes, not wanting to see her approaching doom’s descending backside.

Keith gulped and hoped that Missy couldn’t hear it. It sounded as loud as a toilet flush to his ears. The tall mirror shielding Keith bowed toward him as pressure was applied on the other side. He pressed himself into the skanky cushions he was leaning against. The mirror pushed in further until it pressed against the side of Keith’s face. He closed his eyes, hoping he wasn’t about to suffer the same fate as Will and get a shard shoved into his skull.

When the mirror broke against Keith’s left cheek, the sound in his ear was sharp and like a lance to his brain. Over a dozen cracks in the mirror extended like a web around his head. Despite cracking, the mirror did not shatter or reveal Keith’s whereabouts to the hoardowner leaning against the other side.

Keith and Dani silenced their breathing while they heard Missy’s breathing loud and clear, heavy from the exertion of climbing her hoard. Then they heard rustling from a plastic shopping bag, followed by the crinkling of foil or cellophane packaging. There was a moment where Missy and her movements went completely silent. Even her horse-heavy breathing seemed to stop.

POP! The sound of the potato chip bag being slapped open was unmistakable, and severely startling to the hidden kids.

Keith flinched hard from the sudden sound. His head hit the cracked mirror next to his face, making it bounce out an inch. The sheet shrouding Dani jerked, but made no sound.

Missy was surprised at the sudden movement beside her.

Keith’s eyes opened wide in fear and locked with one of Dani’s, as she peeked out from the side of her sheet.

The cracked mirror was pulled away and Keith was revealed, cowering in Missy’s nest. He didn’t move from his spot, instead he cringed back against the cushions, in the hope he might be absorbed into them like a stain. Missy set the mirror aside with the broken side facing the center of the pit. She did not notice the cracks in the mirror. All of her attention, and surprise, was on her strange guest.

As Missy leaned down over Keith, he noticed her face was spotted with bright red sores, at least a dozen, and many of them were seeping. These were the kind of sores that he would expect on a crack head, or somebody living a seriously toxic and unhealthy lifestyle. Will had been right about her horrid complexion, and its possible source. Crack had nothing to do with it. Cockroach shit did.