The apartment door crashed back on rusty hinges when Danny kicked it in. The dimly lit room reeked with decaying flesh, animal feces and trash. Two large cats zipped through the open front door and down the stairs, seemingly running for their lives.
"Call animal control," Danny said as he held the collar of his sweater up over his nose.
Sheldon was punching the number into his cell phone, and Danny pulled the door closed again. Lindsey was doubled over, gagging from the horrible smell. She rarely had this reaction to anything, and Danny knew that it must be bad, if she were having problems with the smells.
"I guess we'd better go in," Danny grumbled, and looked around at the others for confirmation.
Grimly, the three stepped gingerly into the apartment, holding their flashlights up and shining them around the room. Several cats scattered, looking for places to hide, and yet another cat raced out the open front door. "Is someone still living here?" Lindsey asked, and Danny shrugged.
"I've seen it before," he said. "People that either can't, or won't clean up after themselves. It's unbelievable, some of the stuff you find." he said.
As if to comfirm his statement, the beam of his light bounced across a heap of cat dung in the corner of the living room floor. The once-cream coloured carpet was sickly yellow in places from cat urine, and the stench was so bad, it caused their eyes to water.
"How can they let it get so bad?" Lindsey asked, not able to grasp the concept of living in a garbage dump.
Empty food and drink containers littered the floors and counter tops, and dirty, stinking dishes were piled high in the sink. A few, no doubt knocked down by hungry cats, lay scattered across the kitchen floor. Piles of trash, boxes of junk, and several feline corpses were heaped everywhere, with just a small path to walk from room-to-room. A loud miaowing from underneath a coffee table caused Lindsey to bend over and look. Staring back at her was a thin, nearly hairless black, half-grown kitten, it's eyes huge in it's skeletal face.
"Poor thing," Lindsey muttered as they made their way down the hall, dodging the cats that ran across their path.
Roaches scuttled along the floors and walls, and Lindsey jumped as one crawled across her hand.
"Damnit!" she swore, and Danny looked around at her.
"You okay Montana?" He asked, and she nodded.
"I hate roaches," she explained, and he grinned at her before leading them into the bigger of the two bedrooms.
Cats, all of various ages, were everywhere. Apparently, the bedroom was their favourite spot in the whole apartment. Seeing nothing but more trash, feces, and cats, the team moved on into the next bedroom as the smell of decomp began to outweigh the all-powerful odor of cat waste. Sheldon was having his own problems, as one cream-coloured, siamese-cross cat was busily winding her way around and between his feet. Another thin grey tabby followed closely behind.
"I think we found something," Danny said, and directed his flashlight onto the twin bed positioned beneath the window. Hawkes and Lindsey peered over his shoulder, their eyes still watering from the atrocious smells. Lying on the bed upon a urine-stained quilt and surrounded by newspapers, an empty juice bottle and several cats, lay the badly decomposed body of an elderly man.