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ironic that he had started this mission with the intent to always lead, and here he was bringing up the rear. Keith didn’t mind, so long as his changed position brought added safety to the crew.
     

     
    Had any of them known what was in store for them in the room they had entered, they would have aborted their noble cause and backtracked out of the house. They would have crawled back the way they had come if that’s what it took.
    The good thing about living with regret was at least you were still alive to enjoy it.

Chapter Eight
    The four invaders in Missy’s house needed a minute to study the living room before they could cross it. Keith’s head tilted up and he noticed this room had an unnaturally high ceiling, which made for a more majestic mess. The higher the walls, the higher the hoard.
    Since Ian had first stuck his head inside Missy’s house, he knew that she was what the experts called a level five hoarder. Apparently, five was the highest level that hoarders could be graded. Ian didn’t think that was right. Even Hell had seven levels. With what Ian was now faced with, he considered Missy a level fifty hoarder.
    How does one become an expert on hoarders anyway, Ian wondered. The high-risk journey so far through Missy’s house was hands-on education, he reasoned. He hadn’t earned a merit badge here; he’d earned a degree. His diagnosis of Missy’s exceedingly high hoarder level stood. His remedy would be a lit match, but only after all of the cats were cleared from the premises.
    Ian realized that the stink in this room was the worst yet, and had been worsening with every room they passed through. The basement was noxious with dust, decay, and mold, while the kitchen was a smothering sea of food rot. The smell that dominated the living room was shit, and not just from vermin and cats. This was worse than the leaky sewer pipe in the basement, this was much more pungent. The solids were worse than the soups.
    Ian couldn’t see any shit from where he stood, which meant that the irregular ground ahead would be full of stinky surprises. He felt his eyes starting to burn, and he recognized a growing scent of ammonia, the likely culprit. He was right, but he didn’t know that the source was the exceedingly high concentration of cat urine. It was so bad that he feared if he stayed in this room long enough, the ammonia would burn his trachea and lungs.
    The label living room hadn’t occurred to Keith as he observed their latest lair. He saw this as the entertainment center of Missy’s house. He would have thought entertainment hub, but hub implied some degree of technology, and this was strictly a low-fi affair.
    Among the modern media, the kind that required electricity, were innumerable VHS tapes and vinyl records, in piles and towers. Keith was amazed by one leaning stack of VHS cassettes that had to be over fifteen feet high. Upon closer inspection, they looked held together by a sticky combination of rat splat and spider webs. Missy’s music included mounds of cassette and eight track tapes, piled by the hundreds, maybe by the thousands. He noticed a lot of crooners, like Johnny Mathis, Rod Stewart, and Elvis. The kind of guys that get horny old broads wet , he crassly thought. Some of the audio and videocassettes had all of the tape from the inside coiled in tangled blobs on the outside. Missy was not willing to let a good song or movie go, whether it was playable or not.
    Keith also took notice of the modern gadgets that were missing. Missy had not yet reached the DVD or computer age. If she ever got on the Internet, Keith thought she would hoard Likes and become addicted to online shopping. And her house would fill up even faster.
    Haphazardly mixed in with the media were the broken media players. Dead televisions numbered in the dozens, a few which had their screens shattered. More than a few TVs had their broken antennae replaced with crooked foil facsimiles. Keith was amused to see one hollowed