Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

Feeding the Heartless Host

The spider crawls along the gleaming surface, its thousand eyes locked on a sliver of darkness just out of reach. It scurries, its heart pounding, its blood surging, its legs working furiously. Faster. Tighter. Quicker. Closer and closer it comes to the darkness—home, escape—until it is only inches away.

Then the world closes in.

It crashes into an invisible wall.

It recoils and darts in the other direction, only to meet another wall. Left. Right. The same. A barrier of nothingness.

The spider stops. Exhausted. Desperate. Scared. Its body twitches, its tiny heart hammering in its chest—until there is a pop. Its bulging eyes freeze, and it collapses, dead against the unseen wall.

“Told you,” Calvin says, a wicked grin spreading across his face. He takes the small device from the wall, a transparent sheet clinging to its base. The spider’s lifeless body drops into the bathtub, crashing against a mound of corpses—pixelated wings, twitching legs, shattered shells. A graveyard of disgrace and experimentation. Humanity at its most creative. Humanity at its worst. Its destructive hand desperately saving its own kind while destroying another’s forever.

The spider’s body lies still. Silent. Motionless. Another victim.

Then, one leg twitches. Another soon follows.

Its limbs fold inward, then stretch outward with unnatural cracks. Its chest heaves. Its heart begins to beat again as a sea of glistening eyes snap open. The spider slithers into the mound of the dead, vanishing into decay.

Its eyes, ever-watchful, peer back at the humans as they laugh and celebrate. Calvin casts a throwaway glance at the bathtub, and his smile quickly disappears. An emotionless stare replaces it as the blood drains from his face. He grabs the other man’s jacket and tugs on it.

“What the fuck’s got into you?” Mickey asks, pulling himself free from Calvin’s grip.

“T-T-The spider,” Calvin stammers, pointing toward the mound where the spider lies hidden.

“Dude, it’s dead, okay? Like all the rest. It’s just fallen in with them,” Mickey says, reaching down and brushing bodies away.

But then a dozen or more leap onto his bare flesh, biting feverishly. A smear of the dead surges up his arm, and he screams in terror and agony.

Calvin stumbles backward as Mickey is engulfed by the swarm of spiders, bugs, and beetles.

“O-O-Oh my g-god!” Calvin stammers, his voice trembling.

Mickey’s screams turn guttural before falling silent. Calvin catches a fleeting glimpse of what remains of his friend—a fleshless corpse, stripped to bone, nothing left to rot. Nothing wasted.

What he once considered waste—the remnants of his crude experiments—now swarm toward him, intent on feasting upon their unknown father. He scrambles into a protective room and forces the sealed door shut. It hisses loudly as the mechanical lock engages.

He gasps desperate breath after desperate breath, watching as the swarm blankets the glass, pressing, pushing, trying to force their way in. He collapses onto the floor as the light above flickers, the computer screams, and finally, a loud hiss erupts from the doorway. The lock disengages.

His breath catches in his throat. A tear cascades down his cheek. His heart pounds like a drum, erratic and unforgiving.

His eyes widen as the swarm breaches the room.

They rush toward him in waves—thousands of them.

He screams in agony as the first bite tears into his flesh. Then another. Ten. A hundred. Five hundred. Thousands.

Before a minute passes, his skeletal remains drop to the floor.

The swarm blankets his bones in a cocoon-like structure, settling into eerie stillness. They lie dormant, waiting for the next phase of their evolutionary venture to begin.