"A horrific new type of organism is spreading wherever enough trash has accumulated for it to breed."
Reviewed by Tanzey Cutter
Posted October 18, 2012
Horror
In rural Kansas, elderly widow Anna Grish is a hoarder who
won't allow anyone in her home, not even her son and his
family who live nearby. When Anna is injured, her son finds
her and forces her to recuperate with him, especially when
he sees the deplorable condition of her house. Fighting him
all the way, Anna just wants to be left alone in her
squalor. It's the only place she feels she belongs. That's
because a horrific new type of parasitic organism has
infected her many cats -- as well as Anna -- and is breeding
in the piles of junk and filth. After Anna flees back to
her home and barricades herself inside, Adult Protective
Services is called in to force her out. This just provides
the sinister organisms more host bodies to infiltrate and a
vicious cycle takes hold to spread them even further. If you've been putting off cleaning out that old junk
closet, nothing will motivate you to do so more than
reading THE HOARD. This short, fast-paced story full of
creepy, evil parasites and the appalling things they made
their host bodies do had be mesmerized from the first page.
However, the ending left me craving more information about
the final resolution. I hope it means a sequel is coming.
SUMMARY
A new breed…a new evil… Hidden deep beneath its landfill lair of trash and filth,
a strange new organism has come to life. When an
accidental fire drives it out, the mysterious creature
escapes across the drought-blasted Kansas prairie and
finds the home of elderly hoarder Anna Grish. In desperate
need of shelter, it burrows in, concealed amidst the
squalor and mess.
When Adult Protective Services force Anna to vacate her
junk-riddled home, she moves in with her son and his
family. But there is something wrong with Anna, something
more than her declining mental condition and severe
hoarding disorder. Something sinister has taken hold of
her, and it’s not only getting stronger, it’s spreading.
Amidst the wide-open Kansas plains, with endless blue sky
above and flat, open vista stretching from one horizon to
the next, there is nowhere to hide from…THE HOARD.
ExcerptCHAPTER 1
Jed Baker drove his little Bobcat track loader through
the landfill over well–travelled paths. His job was
moving trash and monitoring temperatures at the county
landfill, and while most people weren't capable of standing
such things, he actually loved his job.
The early–summer sun blazed down on the little cab
as the Bobcat bounced over garbage, but Jed didn't bother
with the AC. He liked the heat, figured he was built for it.
He'd been whip–thin since the day he was born. In
fact, his dad still liked to tell the story of looking
through the nursery window on the day of Jed's birth,
running his eyes over the rows of fat little babies in their
cribs before spotting Jed, long limbs stuck up in the air,
looking like some sort of scrawny circus monkey, big ears
and all.
Still, even Jed had to admit it seemed like this would be
another brutally hot summer, even hotter than the last,
which had nearly killed a couple of his co–workers.
As a result, the county not only provided them with
unlimited Gatorade, but also strict orders to drink it.
Jed monitored heat in the landfill. With all the decaying
matter, the landfill was already hotter than anyplace else.
But deep down, chemicals could mix and do strange,
unexpected things, like combusting without air. Gases could
ignite. As dry as it had been the past few years, they'd
barely been able to contain the fires that had started. With
no rain anywhere on the pale–blue horizon, an
unexpected fire would be disastrous.
Jed liked the heat just fine, but the smell took some
getting used to. He liked routine too, and drove along the
same routes, leaving the tiny cab every so often to shove a
sensor into the ground. The day was going smoothly, and
everything was looking good.
Until he found one of his regular paths blocked.
A big pile of junk had sprouted up in the middle of it,
as if the landfill had awoken with an angry pimple. For
some reason Jed couldn't explain, the pile made him nervous.
He sat and stared at it for some few minutes. Then,
realizing it wasn't going anywhere on its own, he grabbed
the track loader's control levers, dropped the bucket, and
charged.
But when a big, wild–eyed creature emerged from the
heap, Jed stomped the brakes. It took a moment for Jed to
realize that the man–sized creature actually was a
man, and another to realize that it was Dumb Darren Higgens.
Jed never called him Dumb Darren, at least not to his
face. The others acted like because the guy was slow he
didn't have feelings. He lived by himself in a wreck of a
single–wide not far from the landfill, and
supplemented his government assistance by scrounging up
useful junk and selling it. No matter how often they chased
him off, he always came back, dragging that big garden wagon
behind him. Some of the guys would confiscate his finds, but
Jed could never bring himself to take the poor guy's junk.
He knew that he should, that to do otherwise was to
encourage Darren to come back and dig through the dangerous
landfill time and again, but he couldn't do it. The poor guy
was just trying to get by.
Jed unfolded himself from the cab. "Darren, what the heck
are you doing here?"
Darren didn't reply. He was an odd fellow, but was acting
even weirder than usual.
"Did you pile this trash up?"
No reply.
"As nice as I am to you, you go making extra work for me.
You need to get out of here."
But Darren didn't go. He sat atop the heap and stared at
Jed, and the sense that Jed had originally had of not
understanding the situation returned. The world seemed
strange, and his senses not fit to perceive it.
He got back into the track loader and put it in gear.
Enclosed in the familiar cab and performing familiar
motions, Jed's confidence returned. Darren would move.
Jed approached slowly, but Darren just watched. His eyes
grew larger, the tension clearly building in him.
"Move," Jed mouthed slowly and dramatically, scooping air
with one hand and waving it off to the side.
Then Darren did move. Or more like, then Darren wasn't there.
Jed still hadn't comprehended what he'd seen when the
roof of the cab dented down and the thick windshield
cracked. Hands reached through the open side, and the next
moment, Jed was dangling over the landfill, staring into the
angriest, most deranged and horrifying face he'd ever seen.
As Darren drew his head back, all Jed could think was that
he'd always been so nice to the stupid sonofabitch. Then
Darren slammed his lumpy forehead forward, and Jed's world
went dark.
CHAPTER 2
The rat scurried through the dry, tall grass. It had swum
across silty creeks and flopped through muddy beds. It had
run across black asphalt roads, something normally
unthinkable. It needed a new place, and it was desperate.
It had run for three nights straight. During the day it
burrowed into the earth, but the shallow, dry holes were
nothing like its previous burrow. Moist, over–ripe,
squirming with life: just right.
Then the fire came.
Now, it ran through dust at night, watching the sky for
owls. It dug into the horrible, cracked earth once the sun
rose to avoid the sharp eyes of hawks. It no longer feared
them, but it must survive.
The earth sucked the moisture straight from the rat's
flesh. The horrible, dry heat of the sun penetrated its
temporary burrows, but not its dreams. It dreamed of a
moist, fetid womb to finally curl up in.
Then it awoke, and it ran, until it smelled something.
It smelled a den. It smelled the mold and fungus and rot
that the electric shocks in its brain demanded of it. They
spurred the rat on. Inside its veins, they squirmed. It felt
their pleasure as its own.
The rat crawled beneath the den. It wasn't underground,
but it smelled like its old, perfect burrow. It also smelled
like cats. Lots of cats.
A tiny part of its brain knew fear, but the strangeness
in its veins welcomed the natural enemy. The rat wouldn't
need to hunt far.
It crawled up into a wall, then chewed through the weak
drywall. In less than a minute it had squirmed through the
hole and into glorious filth.
The sour juice of rotten food soaked its coat, and it
immediately felt the dryness subsiding. Its trip had ended.
The squirming in its veins intensified. Pressure built
behind its right eye until it finally ruptured.
Something crawled out of the socket, unfurling.
Grabbing it in its front paws, the rat pulled, but then
stopped as shocks pulsed through its brain. Once the long
creature had crawled out of the rat's skull and into the
garbage, the rat continued on. Its veins still throbbed,
because though its trip was over, its work was not.
Tunneling through the garbage, the rat emerged into open
air.
A thin cat crouched low on its front legs, poised for
ambush, its tail stirring the air and its hind end twitching
back and forth as it shifted its weight from paw to paw.
It sprang.
The rat did not retreat. It sprang as well, biting the
cat on the nose and gripping its wide head with its front
paws. It flipped around, aided by the cat's jerking of its
head, and landed on the cat's back with its long incisors
still buried in the short snout.
This was no junkyard monster, born in gasoline and rusted
nails and accustomed to fighting rodents its own size. The
rat could kill this soft little domesticated cat. It could
eat it. But again shocks pulsed through its brain,
commanding that it release the cat. So it did.
The yowling feline retreated a few feet. Other cats
approached. Circled. When the rat didn't move, they pounced.
The rat remained motionless as the cats ripped it open,
only flopping back and forth as one cat tore at its body,
and then another. Along with blood, slender creatures
spilled from its veins, their long legs unfurling. Some
escaped into the trash heap. Others began immediately laying
eggs in the moist filth. The perfect filth, the rat thought.
But when the final parasite had escaped its veins, and
when the shocks in its brain subsided, for just the moment
of life it had left, the small part of it that had shrieked
in pain and primal terror grew very large.
CHAPTER 3
A cat twined its way between Anna Grish's ankles. Its
whiskers tickled the outside of one calf; the tip of its
tail the other. She looked down over her crocheting at the
tiger–striped feline. Most of her cats didn't have
names, but this was a particular favorite: Little Lady. Many
of her cats hid from her, only coming out to eat after she'd
left the kitchen. This silent little mother cat stared up at
her through gummy, red–rimmed eyes.
Anna reached down and scratched her pretty little head.
"Out of food already, eh?" she said, but she didn't
precisely remember when she'd fed them last. "Okay, let's
get you something to eat."
She pressed herself carefully out of her armchair. Her
seventy–three–year–old knees ached. Bone
ground on bone as she stood. Her quack of a doctor wanted to
put metal and plastic in there, but they always wanted to do
a lot of crazy things. She hadn't been back.
Anna took a moment to steady herself. After sitting for
so long, her lower back grated and clenched in protest,
forcing her to mince all the way around, set her yarn and
hook down, then carefully turn back without disturbing the
waist–high stacks of knitting, crocheting, homekeeping
and country–interest magazines that surrounded her chair.
Just as she took her first step towards the kitchen, the
little gray cat bolted ahead of her, slipping between her
legs and almost tripping her.
"Darn it..." Anna barely managed to catch herself on a
wobbly popcorn tin stacked atop some quilts on an ottoman.
"Little Lady, I can't feed you if you kill me first."
Shuffling towards the kitchen, she noticed a more recent
pain. Her feet hurt. All her life, she'd gone barefoot in
the house to spare the carpeting. Her feet were swollen such
that her toes barely touched the ground and her ankles
didn't bend. They looked particularly bad contrasted against
her bony legs. Almost like cartoon feet.
Getting old was a terrible thing.
"Don't get old, kitty," she said.
The cat turned its head to gaze over its slinky body at
her, blinked its gummy eyes, then turned back and pranced ahead.
Anna held her arms out and caromed from one stack of
possessions to the next. Over time, she'd determined which
items were most stable, and which she enjoyed touching the
most. A little old television stacked on some books atop an
end table provided a solid handhold. She enjoyed cupping the
silky head of a large antique doll seated atop a pile of
mail on a television dinner tray, so that while it did
little for her balance, it became one of her constant
handholds. A locked wooden box of her children's baby teeth
attracted her arthritic hand for both reasons.
In the kitchen, she scooted along her narrow path. Though
the items here were softer, they were piled more solidly,
had the counter tops as a firm foundation, and offered good
support if needed.
Another friendly cat joined Little Lady and began to yowl
as Anna took the bag of food from the cupboard. It once held
dishes, but it was now the only place to keep the food where
the cats couldn't get to it. They certainly tried, though.
She'd become used to the noise of wood lightly slapping wood
as a cat sitting on the counter top pried the door open a
bit with its claws, then lost hold and let it bang shut. At
one time she would have smacked a cat's behind for getting
on the counter. Anymore, she'd given up. They moved too fast
for her. Even if she weren't coming to swat them, most
didn't let her touch them.
A stab of pain jolted through her lower back as she bent
to pour the dry food onto the floor. She held the position,
afraid to move in either direction, and breathed sharply
through her clenched jaw.
The cats began to eat immediately, weathering the shower
of kibble on their heads.
For just a moment, a strange thought entered Anna's head.
She saw the filth around her. She saw the old food plastered
to the ground, too moldy even for the mostly–feral
cats to eat. She saw the dusty cat feces piled higher than
her ankles in places. She saw the bugs. Usually, she didn't
let herself see these things. She saw the maggots, the
grubs. Most white, but some a strange shade of reddish
purple. She imagined grabbing Little Lady and hurting her.
Not killing her, but biting little holes in her side, then
pressing her down into the filth, into the bugs.
It was another sharp stab of pain in her back that
awakened her to the fact that she wasn't only imagining, but
was actually reaching down for the oblivious cat.
She shook her head, and the filth disappeared. Then she
unbent at the waist very slowly, until the pain in her spine
was only a dull throb.
Anna returned the bag of cat food to the cupboard and
mixed up a pink glass of Crystal Light before turning to
shuffle back to her crocheting.
Behind her, cats hissed and growled.
With only one free hand now, she touched her treasures as
she passed.
As she placed her palm on the silky head of her favorite
old doll, a cat bolted out from a hidey–hole burrowed
through a stack, hissing as it went by. Anna jumped. The
doll tipped and toppled with her.
She held up the glass so that it wouldn't spill. It did
anyway, when she collided with first one stack, then bounced
into another, and finally hit the ground. The narrow
passageway collapsed in. Magazines and mail. Storage bins.
The old television. The wooden box.
The world went dark. Above her, items shifted as they
settled. She knew she should be in pain, but she wasn't. She
felt a small twinge of panic, but then a small hand took
hers. Her son Victor lay beside her. Then the darkness got
darker.
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