FICTION BY DARK RHODES

Dark Rhodes holds a doctorate degree in accounting. He’s worked in public and private practice for over ten years. Having spent his youth writing songs and performing in various bands, he merged his creative skill-set with those refined during his doctoral research to begin writing horror fiction in 2022. His first publication, Rituals: Thirteen Tales of Terror, is set for release in September 2025. 

He lives in South Florida with his wife, son, and two cats.
Instagram: darkrhodes.author

DEAD WOMAN
by Dark Rhodes

They took a left on Poplar Street. It was dark here; the tired streetlights were in need of new bulbs or a cleaning of the plastic films that protected them. The night was punctured by flashing blue and red lights.

Tim Redford gripped the steering wheel and braced himself for whatever waited ahead. He glided the ambulance down the desolate off-road and pulled to a stop behind the lone squad car parked in front of their destination.

Beside him, his co-worker and friend, Jack Barber, turned off the GPS. Jack was a string bean turned gym rat, tall and muscular. He stretched a pair of disposable gloves over his spidery fingers. Neither man said a word as they stepped into the brisk, fall night.

The responding officer was Terry Shaw, and he greeted the paramedics with a handshake. Terry was the opposite of Jack, short and compact; solid. Tim encountered Terry on more than one of these late-night calls, but he didn’t know him well. He didn’t need to be Terry’s best friend to decipher the look on his face as one of discomfort.

“Evening, gentlemen,” Terry said, and instinctively placed a hand on his holstered revolver.

“What do we have tonight?” Jack asked, bypassing niceties and getting straight to business.

“I don’t envy you two tonight because you’re going to need my help,” Terry began. “There’s a woman up on the second floor. She’s dead but she’s gotta be over four hundred pounds. I don’t know how we’re going to get her out of there.”

As Terry filled them in, Tim glanced at the house. It was old, one of the many blighted properties in the area. The siding was light in color, perhaps yellow or faded white, but it was difficult to tell in the dark. The house was two stories, and a single light was on, shining through a window on the far-right side of the second floor. The front lawn was a mixture of dirt and weeds, some of the vegetation spreading onto the cracked pavement that led to the porch.

“I’m going to need you to take a look. Her death looks natural to me, but I want to be sure before we bring anyone else in,” Terry said to the EMTs, who nodded and followed him towards the house.

The front door was jammed as if something was holding it shut, and Terry had to put his shoulder into it. When they got in, Tim realized why. There was stuff everywhere: cardboard boxes overflowing with junk, wasted food containers, and old newspapers stacked as high as Tim’s six-foot frame. It was like a garage sale had vomited inside a house.

What was worse was the smell. The air was thick with mildew and feces and then, as they moved up the stairs to the top floor, there was the unmistakable stench of death.

“Fucking lady was a hoarder,” Terry said in disgust.

At the top of the stairs, they took a right and squeezed down a hallway constricted by piles of musty clothes. There was a room at the end—open ajar—that spewed dim light onto the crusty carpet. The smell intensified, and Tim’s stomach clenched, threatening to regurgitate his dinner.

The three men entered the bedroom, and the sickening odor grew so strong that Tim had to shield his nose with his forearm. The sight that accompanied the grotesque smell was even worse. The room was small, eight-by-ten feet, and filled with garbage. Across the sea of trash was a full-sized bed tucked into the back corner.

On the bed, propped against the wall in a sitting position, was a woman of enormous size. Her hair was a greasy nest, and her skin bore a yellowish tint. Folded layers of fat and skin spilled down onto the bed, her extremities buried in it. Anatomically, she looked more like a triangular blob than a human.

Her eyes were wide open and trained on the men as they entered the room.

“Jesus Christ,” Jack said. He wasn’t one to react—nothing ever seeming to faze him—so to illicit a response said something about the scene.

“That’s about what I said.” Terry sounded muffled because he, too, covered his nose with his arm. “Check her then let’s get the hell out of here. We’ll have the fire department come and move her out.”

Neither man protested. Jack kicked away food wrappers and unopened mail as he trudged towards the dead woman. He cleared a spot in front of the bed and kneeled as he set down his kit. Tim reluctantly followed.

There were no visible wounds on her, no blood or bruising, and Tim suspected that Terry was correct in assuming her death was natural. Jack checked her pulse and put a stethoscope to her chest for good measure. He confirmed she was dead and stood back up.

“All right,” Jack said, “let’s flip her over.”

Even though he had gloves on, Tim didn’t want to touch her. As was the case with most things in life, he knew he just had to do it. He gritted his teeth and grabbed one side of her while Jack hoisted the other. It took all their strength to roll her over on her side. When they did, there was movement on the bed beneath her.

It was more than Jack could take and he turned away to retch on the floor.

Underneath the woman was a heaping pile of shit, some solid and some trickling into the crevassed mattress, pooling there in a foul puddle. Insects, mostly spiders, scattered when they moved her as if they’d been nesting beneath her impossible girth.

“What the fuck!” Jack shouted when he’d recovered enough to speak. He wiped vomit from his chin and shook his arm out on the floor. “How the fuck could someone live like this?”

The question was a good one that none of them could answer. Tim loved his job, loved that it allowed him to help others, but on nights like this he hated it. In the cracks of the world, beyond the peripheral of society, there existed some unimaginable things that haunted those who witnessed them.

They managed to flip her onto her stomach. Folds of fatty flesh hung from her body like an epidermic set of clothes. They’d sifted through most of the oily tissue, when they discovered a raw wound, circular in shape, on the lower part of her back.

More spiders scattered, the dim glow of the bedroom evicting them from their hiding place. Tim could have sworn that he saw one of the arachnids—one bigger than he was accustomed to seeing in this area—crawl inside the open wound.

“I think we’ve got something here,” Jack said. “Looks like a nasty bed sore. Definitely infected.”

Terry crossed the bedroom but kept his distance, peering at the lesion from behind Tim. He held a handkerchief to his nose and mouth but gagged when he saw the mess on the bed. “I can’t fucking deal with this shit,” he said, his words muffled by the fabric that remained glued to his face. “If you think it’s just a bed sore, let’s call it in and get the hell out of here.”

That’s certainly what it looked like and although the presence of spiders made it unusual, Tim also wanted to leave. He wasn’t going to hold them up. He nodded at Jack and Terry, his curiosity conceding to his repulsion. “There’s nothing more we can do for her. If you want to call in the coroner to be safe, then do it. To me, it looks like a bad case of neglect and some poor health choices doing her in.”

They respected Tim’s opinion because he was the oldest of the three. His blessing was all they needed to close the case.

“I’ll call the coroner as well as the fire department, but I’m doing it from outside,” Terry said, handkerchief still clinging to his face like an upturned funeral veil.

There was no arguing with that, and the three men left the bedroom. They retraced their path through the cluttered house, the pungency of death diminishing as they moved further away from the body. Still, all of them could smell it on their clothes.

Tim was last in line, and he’d just reached the bottom step when there was a loud crash above them. No one said a word. They glanced at each other, a shared look of confused inconvenience passing between them, then silently climbed back up to the bedroom, their civic duty getting the better of them.

None of them were prepared for what awaited them there.

The dead woman was back in a sitting position, her eyes still wide and focused on them. A low, guttural moan emitted from her partially open mouth and more spiders crawled from it and up her face, a visual representation of the steady tune.

“She was dead,” Jack’s words were a breathless whisper. “How…?”

“She’s still dead,” Tim reminded him firmly. He wouldn’t let them lose their wits. The dead stayed dead and that was that. This had to be some kind of postmortem bodily function, her rotting organs reacting to whatever had depleted them.

None of the three were bold enough to inspect her up close. They stood, backs against the far wall, and watched the woman. Finally, after minutes that felt like a condensed eternity, Tim approached. He raised a shaking hand to her thick neck, testing her pulse once again.

There was movement there but not what he’d been expecting. It wasn’t the steady pump of blood through expanding arteries. It was the scurrying wave of a thousand tiny legs: the frantic scattering of bugs. In isolation, you didn’t pay much mind to insectile migration. You squashed the crawling thing and moved on. This swarm was different, though, because they moved as one and they congregated beneath the flesh.

Tim ripped his hand away as if scalded by the unnatural. As he did, the woman jerked her head in his direction. The low moan became a growl. Tim fell backwards, losing his balance on a cardboard box filled to the brim with books.

He felt Jack’s strong hands hook into his armpits and lift him back up.

They retreated to the door, needing to run but unable to look away. They watched in horror and disbelief as somehow, the woman rolled off the bed and then rose unsteadily to her feet like bipedalism was a foreign concept. She wobbled a bit, then dropped down on all fours, her head remaining upright as she growled at them. Drool hung from her cracked yellow teeth. She came at them.

All they could do was run. The narrow hallway, filled with its boxes of junk, was impossible to navigate under such duress. Halfway down it, Terry, who was looking over his shoulder, toppled a tower of pots and pans. The rust-covered steel nearly landed on Jack, but he’d managed to pump the brakes in time. Tim ran into his shoulder blade, hard. The way was blocked, reminiscent of films he’d seen in which the fleeing protagonist was blockaded in a tunnel by a landslide of heavy rocks.

Tim looked behind him for the woman, but the hallway was empty. A scurrying sound above drew his eyes there and that’s when he saw her, all that weight crawling across the ceiling.

She looked down at him and Jack, her stomach hanging like flabby stalactite. She hissed at them, a deep menacing sound, then rushed ahead. Over the pile of cookware, they saw her leap from the ceiling and flatten Terry who had just reached the stairs leading down to the bottom floor. Terry screamed, his squeals competing with the horrid sound of tearing flesh, like someone was ripping out old carpet. Blood and sinew spattered the walls.

“Holy shit!” Jack yelled in panic.

When the woman had finished off Terry, she stood and faced them, blockading their exit. Her face was vacant, devoid of humanity. Jack snatched a steel pan from the pile. Tim clutched his friend’s shoulder and began to back away. The woman rushed them.

They ran back to the bedroom and shut themselves inside. They pushed a heavy dresser in front of the door but knew it wouldn’t be enough. The woman began to throw herself against it. All her weight concentrated on the warped wood. The door wouldn’t hold. It buckled on its hinges.

Tim spotted a trowel on the floor. Why it was in the bedroom, he didn’t know, but he was grateful for it. He picked it up and stood to the side of the shaking door. Another powerful slam and the door collapsed, angled upwards on the dresser like a makeshift ramp. The woman crawled up it and zeroed in on Jack who’d backed all the way to the bed.

This was Tim’s chance.

He lifted the shovel over his head with both hands and brought it down like an axe, splitting the woman’s head as if it were a piece of firewood. The blow stopped her.

Through the tangles of her wild hair, Tim saw that he’d severed her scalp and even her skull, a wide gash appearing that exposed her brain. He figured she had to be dead this time—really dead.

Blood began to spill from the wound, pouring down her face and back. At least, that’s what Tim thought he saw. But the movement of the discharge was too fast and frantic, and it traveled too far. It wasn’t until the spillage reached his feet that he realized it wasn’t blood but thousands of spiders, billowing from the woman’s brain matter.

He screamed and stomped his feet, crushing as many insects as he could. There were too many and they climbed up his pant legs. He could feel them on his knees.

“Tim!” Jack screamed but his eyes weren’t on the floor. They were on the woman.

Tim looked up as he swatted more bugs away. Her flesh, that which surrounded the cut he’d made, began to fold and peel downward like the skin of a rotten banana. Her bones cracked and disjointed. More spiders sprung from the widening orifice but something larger was emerging. One long, hairy leg—as thick as a baseball bat—protruded and was followed by seven more. The woman’s neck and torso split in half, falling to the cluttered floor like discarded clothing.

Standing atop the carcass was a huge spider, bigger than a Doberman, its bulbous abdomen twice the size of Tim’s head.

Dozens of eyes surveyed the room. Two drool-speckled fangs clacked together in menacing applause, a frantic chittering. The massive arachnid’s assessment of the room stopped on Jack. It reared back on its hind legs and leapt at him.

Jack shrieked wildly, using the pot as a shield to deflect the snapping pincers. Tim chopped at the spider’s backside, beating the thing until the head of the shovel snapped off. His attack did nothing but piss off their foe. Its fangs clamped down on Jack’s forearm, and in one swift motion, his arm was on the other side of the room, the pot clamoring to the floor beside him. His friend was defenseless.

“Run, Tim, run!” Jack screamed.

The agony in his voice hit Tim like a jaw-shattering left hook. He had a decision to make and no time to contemplate it. He ran.

Tim made it as far as the staircase and Terry’s mangled body. Terry’s throat had been ripped out, gore spewing from a hole in his neck the size of a softball. The expression on the cop’s face was one of pure terror and it made Tim’s skin crawl like there were still bugs in his clothes. Maybe there were.

Tim had to make another decision—a better one this time. He apologized to the dead man, knowing his words would not be heard, then unholstered his pistol and sprinted back to the bedroom.

Tim clicked the safety off then fired three times, praying with each squeeze of the trigger that he didn’t hit Jack. He connected at least once, and the spider made a noise that sounded like a high-pitched gurgle. It sprung through the bedroom window in a shatter of glass and was gone.

Tim rushed to his friend, afraid of what he might find there. Jack was still breathing but he was losing a lot of blood. It didn’t look like there’d been any friendly fire.

“Hold on!” Tim bellowed. “I need you to stay with me, Jack!”

Tim ripped his shirt and belt off and tied them around Jack’s severed wrist, hoping like hell it would be enough to staunch the bleeding. He sprinted back down the hallway and used Terry’s radio to call for backup. When he’d gotten a response, he returned to the bedroom and sat on the floor next to his friend.

There were spiders everywhere, their mere presence inciting the sensation that they were crawling all over him. Tim didn’t care. These were tiny, squashable things, nothing in comparison to the horror they’d survived that night.

He spoke to Jack, telling him things he’d always been too bashful to mention throughout their years of friendship. Anything to keep him awake. Tim watched his friend fight to keep his eyes open.

Ten long minutes later, the first sirens pulled to a stop in front of the house. Help had arrived.