Jack was on his way to visit his cousin on the highway when his car tyres got punctured by sharp rocks.
Cursing under his breath, he tried to make a call but to no avail as there was no signal. He pushed his car until he came across a motel. He didn't question why a motel was situated in a place this sparsely populated because he was blinded by the idea of being able to call someone.
Before he entered, he saw a young man, dragging a big black trash bag to the garbage disposal bin. He spotted Jack and called out to him, "Hey there, mind giving me a hand?" He had a very heavy Southern American accent. Jack shrugged and together they stuffed the bag into the large bin.
The young boy wiped his sweaty forehead and smiled at Jack. "Thanks, partner," he said, "Name's Billy, manager of the motel. Can I help ya?" Jack wasted no time in making a request. "Do you have a phone I can use or a signal to call someone? My car got punctured by a stupid rock and I need to get it towed."
"Again?" Billy groaned in annoyance, "This is the third time it happened this week; those construction fellas really need to get the road fixed. There's wifi inside that you can use to call and feel free to use one of the rooms." Billy walked into the motel and into a room before Jack heard him locking the door.
After messaging his cousin, explaining what happened, and calling a towing car service, Jack waited to be picked up in Room 34. He glanced at a newspaper with the heading "People becoming irrationally paranoid about the sun" and scoffed. People these days just couldn't handle any slight changes, could they? His eyes were then glued to something moving in the dark dusty corner.
It was an enormous light brown spider, possibly as big as his fist. The old man wasn't afraid of it, however, and started hitting it with a nearby broom. Once, and it hissed in pain. Twice, and it hissed once more. Third and finally, it hissed one final time before Jack stepped on its head, causing the abdomen to be separated from the rest of its body.
He went back to sitting on the bed before his attention was once again drawn to the corner by something shiny. It was a small bright dot, like a star in the night sky. It moved from the spider's corpse and towards Jack, who was staring at it curiously.
Then, he noticed the room getting brighter, as if the sun was slowly entering the room. Hundreds of shiny dots started crawling out of the dead spider and they covered the whole room, blinding Jack. Even with his eyes closed, it didn't help much with the brightness and his eyes were starting to hurt a lot.
He felt the dots crawling up his body. He shook them off, but more just jumped onto him. His eyes were bleeding and his ears were pained by a loud high-pitched whine. More and more dots swarmed him until he was completely covered by them, being bitten everywhere in his body.
Some even entered his body through his screaming mouth, now bleeding ears and almost blind eyes. Before everything went dark, he could make out the shapes of the dots and realised they weren't dots at all: they were spiderlings. They were eating him inside out: he could feel his skin ripping off and blood flowing out of his body like a fountain, he couldn't feel pain because they devoured his nerves, and he felt a big group of spiderlings crawling up to his brain.
He fell to the ground. He couldn't see or feel anything anymore, not even the crawling sensation or the fuzzy feeling in his brain. Maybe that was the best way to die: a painless death. He bid a silent goodbye to his family before his brain shut off.
Billy entered Room 34 and saw a spotless skeleton inside. It almost looked like the props in the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Another one? he thought. He'd taken a short nap and Jack's car had been towed earlier in the afternoon, so he must've left and given him...a skeleton prop? This was the third time a guest left him a fake skeleton. Was it almost Halloween or something? Shrugging, he stuffed the skeleton prop inside a black trash bag and dragged it outside, thinking he didn't need any decoration.
Outside, he saw a black muscular man swearing loudly outside his car. "Really? A fourth one? You've got to be kidding me..." Billy muttered under his breath before calling out to him, "Hey Big Guy, mind giving me a hand?"
Billy wondered if this one would leave him another useless Halloween prop.
