The floor was covered in junk from one end to the other, there was not a single square inch of floor that was not covered in something that wasn’t garbage of some variety.  Several cats walked through carefully picking the spots where they stepped, looking like they were trying to avoid the land mines that they themselves had laid.

The place stank horribly.

Two men, Chris Stillman and Bobby Hanes walked like storks, legs kicking high through the heaps of garbage trying to walk over rather than through it and they were making faces and covering their noses with a free hand as they did, forgetting their masks were around their necks.   Both men held shovels.  They knew what they were getting into before they even walked in, but that never prepares you for the stinking messy reality of it.

“How could anyone have lived like this, Bobby? How do people do it” Asked Chris, the tall thin angular faced man with short black hair and large beaklike nose.

“They didn’t, or I should say she didn’t and that’s why we are here, Chris. to get rid of all the shit so some new buyer can come in and make a fresh new mess and die in it in themselves in thirty years”  said Bobby.  Bobby was bald, fat and short, a stocky heavily tattooed guy, the kind that when you looked at them you thought “Dockworker”  or “Mover” or “Garbage man”

And you’d have been right.  He’d held all three jobs at some point in his life.  Here he was garbage man.

Both men put on their thin paper dust masks and their rubber grip gloves, and tools jangling on tool belts, made their way to the back of the house, closest to where Gene the truck driver for the carting company had put the 30 yard dumpster.

“Kitchen or back room first, Bobby?”

“Kitchen.  I’m hungry and I wanna see if they got any food.”

That got a blank stare from Chris.  Then Bobby laughed out loud and smiled big, noticeable even under the dust mask and said “C’mon!  The power has only been out for a week!  The food in the fridge is probably still good!  What could possibly happen!”  And roared with laughter.  He had that kind of a sense of humor.

Chris shook his head, seeing as he had an actual sense of humor or so he thought and said “What I don’t get is why animal control hasn’t gotten these animals out of here.  These bastards could have rabies and I for one don’t want to get all those shots and have to pay thousands of bucks for it.  This shit ain’t safe.”

“Ya.  Like the rest of this shit is perfectly safe, and that is our only concern!”  His thick Italian New York accent accentuated with and punctuated by dripping sarcasm that rolled off of his tongue like lava flowing down a mountain side.  “Grab some crap and start heaving it.  Let’s make a path through this shit first, then we can clean the rest of it out as we go… And Chris? We work around the little bastards till Georgy gets here, he’s the boss, let him make the call, we do our job until fucknut shows up, Got it?”

“Got it.”

The pile of crap in the kitchen was not as tall as it was in the living room, where the old woman supposedly died.  It made up for not being as tall by being much more virulent, covered as much of it was by cat shit, cat piss and old rotted food.  Flies and bugs were everywhere.  And this room was the one in the house that they had seen that, at least for the moment, was cat free.

…