Weirder Tales

By WP aD, Mandy White, Diana Garcia and 15 more

The warped minds of WPaD are proud to present this tribute to the bizarre:

- People who eat Tide Pods turn into detergent-craving zombies

- A gift of a fishing bobber turns deadly

- A woman lost in the desert makes friends with an ancient creature

- A hole inside a closet holds unknown mysteries

- A grieving father consults a psychic to solve his daughter's murder

- Two friends embark on a fantastic adventure during a game of Dungeons and Dragons

- A call for help from an abandoned house leads a man to his doom

- Strange explosions cause terror and speculation about the end of the world

- A meteor falls from the sky, leading a woman on a surreal journey

Enjoy these stories and many more in Weirder Tales: An Omnibus of Odd Ditties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WPaD Publications
• Release date: Sep 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386245773

Book preview

Weirder Tales

An Omnibus of Odd Ditties

By WPaD

(Writers, Poets and Deviants)

Copyright © 2018 WPaD Publications, acting publisher Mandy White, and all authors named in this book.

All Rights Reserved

All stories and poetry in this book remain the property of their respective authors. No individual or agency other than those named may reproduce, copy or publish any part of this book in full or in part, in any medium printed or digital, without the expressed permission of the owner(s) of those works.

Table of Contents

Pod People: Invasion of the Laundry Zombies by Mandy White

Swinesecution by Molly Roland

Community by Marla Todd

Token by Soleil Daniels

The Hole by Lea Anne Guettler

Blow Up by Marla Todd

Goji and the Angel by Diana Garcia

The Day They Nuked Choctaw County by David Hunter

Silver Lake by Mike Cooley

Vegan Meat by Mandy White

Blue Blood Moon by Samantha L Nocera

Romance of the Needles by Marla Todd

The Nebrasquatch Transcripts by Molly Roland

The Goat (poetry) by Michael Merline

Holocaust by Mandy White

Madness in the Above by Debra Lamb

Smack by Molly Roland

Collect Lucky Treasure by Chris Benedict

The Time Travelers by Juliette Kings

The Secret History of Lord John Bathwick by J. Harrison Kemp

A Million Stars by Marla Todd

My Princess (poetry) by Molly Roland

Made in Mexico by David Hunter

Dog Park by Marla Todd

Jim by Chris Benedict

Don’t Enter the House by Michael Haberfelner

A Sim-ple Life by Mandy White

Called Out by Rob Fletcher

Follow the Moon by Mike Cooley

Good Times by Lea Anne Guettler

Cave by R James Turley

Bowling for Braces by Molly Roland

Books by WPaD

Meet the Authors

Pod People: Invasion of the Laundry Zombies

By Mandy White

ERNEST SAT UP IN BED. You hear that?

Louise looked up from her book. What’s that, dear?

There it is again! It’s the basement door. It’s those damn zombies.

Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Just the wind.

Wind my ass! Ernest muttered, glancing at the shotgun leaning against the wall in the corner of the bedroom. These days he kept both barrels loaded, just in case. It’s zombies, I tell ya! I thought I told you to get rid of those fucking laundry pods.

The door rattled again. Ernest had installed sturdy new locks, but they would never give up as long as what they desired lay on the other side of the door.

Dammit, Louise! This is your fault!

Louise peered at him over the rims of her glasses. Seriously, Ern? And what do you expect me to do with them? Just throw them away? I paid good money for those, and I can’t buy them anymore. I’m not going to throw away perfectly good products! Besides, they get the laundry so clean and bright!

Clean and bright isn’t worth risking our lives.

Louise gave him one of those looks reserved for naive children and simpletons. Isn’t it? Stain-free clothes are worth a little risk. Don’t be a coward, Ernest.

Ernest opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He knew when he was licked.

Ok, fine, use them up then. How many are left?

I bought the Mega Pack from Costco. I got in on the sale just before they pulled them from the shelves. It was one of the last ones, and I was lucky to get it. People are so rude. Fighting, clawing, just to save a few dollars.

Isn’t that the same thing you were doing? Ernest pointed out.

Louise shrugged. Well, I got them, so I’ll be damned if I’m just going to throw them away. She sighed. I’m sure going to miss those things. They get the laundry so clean and bright.

WHAT HAD STARTED AS a stupid YouTube stunt turned into a disaster of epidemic proportions. The idiots who ate Tide laundry pods experienced unfortunate side effects from the chemicals contained in the detergent. Brain function slowed. These individuals, clearly short on brains to begin with, became shambling, babbling shells of their former selves. (one still might argue that it was an improvement) The other, more disturbing effect was the hunger. The Pod People craved the colorful packets of toxin and would go to any lengths to obtain them. They possessed an uncanny ability to sniff them out. Stores stopped selling the detergent after the first few weeks of the epidemic to stop the looting. Citizens were ordered to turn their Tide Pods over to authorities. Anyone found with the pods in their possession would not be eligible for police protection in the event of zombie attack. Attacks were the biggest concern, because bites were the way the plague was spread. And Pod People were bitey little fuckers. They were faster than they looked, in spite of their shuffling gait, and inordinately tenacious when focused on something they wanted – that something being Tide Pods, of course. A bite from one of the Pod People would transfer the toxins that flowed through their veins. Victims of bites began to crave laundry pods, overcome with an irresistible urge to eat them. If not apprehended and incarcerated, they wouldn’t rest until they found and ate some of the detergent. Over time, brain damage set in, transforming them from desperate junkies into shuffling, mumbling zombies. Pod junkies were more dangerous than full-fledged zombies because they still retained some of their (albeit limited) intelligence and still looked like regular people, aside from their desperate, pod-craving behavior. They were also contagious; a bite or scratch from a pod junkie was all it took to spread the addiction.

AND NOW SOMEONE WAS trying to open the basement door, attracted by the scent of those godfucked laundry pods Louise was so bloody insistent on keeping. Ernest hoped it was just a zombie and not a junkie. Pod junkies were crafty enough to find a way past a locked door. Zombies just bumped against the door like a trapped Roomba until something else caught their attention. Either way, Ernest knew he was in for another sleepless night. He checked his guns to reassure himself they were loaded, and prayed the locks would hold.

THE NEXT NIGHT ERNEST awoke sitting in his recliner, where he’d dozed off while watching TV. He heard a sound in the laundry room downstairs. He raced to the bedroom to grab his shotgun. The locks hadn’t held after all. One of the bastards had gotten in and from the sound of it, was in the laundry room chowing down on Tide Pods.

A fucking pod junkie.

Ernest cussed silently and crept toward the sound, shotgun at the ready. The hunched figure in the laundry room had its back to Ernest. He raised the gun and clicked the safety off. The junkie stopped munching and turned to face him, streaks of blue and orange running down its chin.

Clean and bright! Louise giggled. Yummy! And they make everything clean and bright!

Louise wiped an arm across her mouth and Ernest saw the deep red scratches on the underside of her arm. The scuffle at Costco had yielded more than just a bargain on detergent.

Join me, Ern. It’s Heaven! Heaven, I tell you!

Stay back, Louise. Don’t make me –

Louise lunged at Ernest and he squeezed the trigger.

SwineSecution

By Molly Roland

IT SEEMED LIKE THE upticks happened all at once. I mean, I could be wrong; it’s hard to tell, really. The changes were slow and fast, like a strong breeze minus the scent of a racing storm. No one noticed the upticks, till they were sweeping through the homes. So, it’s hard to judge a timeline, really.

I remember when they locked down the Internet and all the news sites were taken off line. Anything creative was all of a sudden restricted. You know, games, music, blogs, vlogs, pretty much all of social media, and no downloading of that stuff, either. You could imagine, then, just how many people were totally pissed off. So many of ‘em. Oh, gosh, so many of ‘em.

But, we didn’t really hear about it ‘till later. And even then, at the county meetings, when ole Sam Landers, Tilly Goodrich, and the King family broadcasted their voicemails from New York, California, Florida, and Texas, even then we didn’t think it would spread clear out to us, which it didn’t. Not at first.

Us county folk, well, it just wasn’t the five-alarm fire for us that it was in the cities. We could still do some stuff online. You know, banking, email, shop, stuff like that. Commerce was allowed, but that was about it.

Sam Landers’ brother had called him in the very beginning, when all the gamers took to the streets in Manhattan. Yeah. His message said that SWAT brought out all the gear to gather those crowds, and they were apparently backed up by droves of security cronies. Water cannons, pepper bombs, and aerial chloroform blankets took out most of the folks.

I recall Sam’s brother sounding concerned. I mean, I could hear it in his voice, hell, we could probably all hear it in his voice, but he was safe. He had said so. There wasn’t a one of us at the county meeting that had the gumption to say anything to Sam about the fear in that message. I think we just ignored it.

Tilly Goodrich played her daughter’s message. Her voicemail said the protests in L.A. had shut down most all of the freeways, until they started to buckle. None of us were too sure what that meant, and that message was cut short, so I may never know. I can surmise, though. Yeah. You know, I think about it now, and it just...I can’t...I can’t even fathom. But back then, we were all just thankful we lived out here, you know?

Anyway, so yeah. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, things just happened at the same time. Back before the web crash, in the summer, business had been taking off. The administration had eased up a whole bunch of farming restrictions, which was a good thing for us. We had the hog farm then, and not having to spend so much on litigated feed meant we could double, and then triple our hog count.

We didn’t realize what was happening at the time, but our biggest account had doubled their hog purchases. We were concerned that we couldn’t keep up the breedin’ and feedin’ fast enough to fill all the orders that were coming through. I get it now. I should’ve connected those dots, but we weren’t getting the news fast enough, you know? I didn’t know. None of us really knew. It was so weird.

Well, the whole scenario became a little clearer when Tommy King followed one of the hog trucks, after the county meeting. The Kings had about a dozen kids on their cattle ranch, and they were always nosing around on everyone else’s farms. I’d long known that the King kids were intel operators for their dad. We were selling way more hogs than usual, and the Kings kept tabs on that, let me tell you. More hog sales usually meant more pork demand, which meant less cattle sales for the Kings. Yeah, anytime ole Denny King felt his pocketbook shrink, he just had to know why. He was a paranoid fucker.

So yeah, Tommy King followed one of our loads over a hundred miles into town. How he was never nabbed is beyond me, but, the King kids were oily. Well, I’m thankful he did what he did, anyway. He came back and told us what he saw, down in the landfill outside of town. He told us what he heard, too, but the worst part was what he smelled. He smelled the hogs. Thousands of them. And to think we all thought they were just going to slaughter, to make millions of Sunday dinners. Well, that’s not what happened at all, now was it?

It ended up being too little too late for the Kings, and for Sam Landers, and poor Tilly Goodrich. They were gone two days after we heard the news of Tommy’s findings. Like, just gone. A day later it was Darren and Lorraine, the hobby farmers, and the Swanson family. It was a whole week later when they came for the rest of us. It was horrible. Our hogs ate everyone.

That summer, when our biggest account was buying up our pigs, we didn’t know it was the administration’s fault. But it was. They had already taken over the supply chains, and if they weren’t hauling folks out to the hog pits, then they were starving ‘em out of their homes and businesses. I guess there ended up being about 500 hog pits in total, before the UN finally stepped in and bombed the shit out of the Headquarters.

Keep in mind, each hog pit had thousands of hungry pigs, and pigs will eat anything if you let ‘em. I’ve seen a pig get a taste of fresh blood from a scratched sibling, and it was all over with. That pig tore its littermate apart in mere seconds. I’ll never forget that, so just imagine what a thousand bloodthirsty hogs could do to a crowd of starved, defenseless people. Tommy said the screams were never-ending that day he followed the truck.

Upticks. That’s what I call ‘em. Upticks in control. Upticks in protests. Upticks in missing people. Upticks in hog sales. Upticks in hog pits. You do the math.

Community

By Marla Todd

ALEXA WAS FORTUNATE to have the acceptance and support from her family and community.

She was much taller than most women. She’d had laser hair removal and surgery to soften her face. To soften her voice she’d taken voice lessons, including music lessons from a well known opera coach. She’d taken ballet lessons to help her become more graceful. Since her feet were exceptionally large, she had custom made flip flops that she wore rain or shine.

Life was good for Alexa, who’d become a best selling romance author and outdoor wilderness guide.

Today she drove up I-5 toward her small home community in California’s remote Trinity Alps. The Escalade was packed with hard to obtain supplies: a solar generator, books, pens, paper, Simple Green, apples, silver polish, matches, half a dozen burner phones, and fifty tooth brushes, among other things.

Her Uncle Dave had been the first to leave the community. A few others followed. It was never easy but the rewards were great for those who no longer wanted to live remotely in the mountains.

She’d be bringing her young cousin Trent back with her. He’d been accepted to Stanford University in the fall. Trent would live with her first for a few months and learn how to live among those who were so different from them. She’d transform him into a hip and modern young man.

After a thirty mile drive down a rough dirt road, Alexa stopped and got out of her car. She stretched her legs and took a deep breath of the clean cold mountain air. Then she let out a long mournful howl.

First she could smell them, then out into the clearing they came. It was good to see so many of her family and friends.

No matter where she went, she knew she’d always be at home with her Bigfoot family.

Token

By Soleil Daniels

PAUL STARED AT THE small baggies in his hand. After a fair amount of consideration, he set down the small egg-weight sinkers, choosing the split-shot ones instead. He glanced at the counter, which was still free of an attendant. Shaking his head, he stepped over to pick some hooks for his day out fishing.

Man, guess the shipment’s late again, he mumbled to himself while grabbing a couple packs of baitholders in place of the circle-hooks he preferred.

He walked over to the counter and set the little bags down. After a minute, he tapped the bell that rested on a coaster. The bell sounded sickly, and it looked that way too. Rather than the bright shiny silver of its younger days, it was a grimy brown with rust, and the push button atop it stuck in the down position.

Hey, Chuck? he said, not quite shouting but louder than his normal voice. He went to the door and stepped out, making sure the sign was turned to ‘OPEN.’ Letting the door close behind him, he tried again, Hey, Chuck? You out here?

Nothing. Paul briefly wondered if something had happened the day before that made Chuck forget to close up properly. After some thought and still no response, he walked to his truck and pulled an envelope from the glovebox. He decided to go ahead and take the hooks and sinkers along with a container of Canadian Nightcrawlers. The envelope was so he could leave a note and the money to cover the goods.

Damn it, he said, nearly tripping on the step as he dug through his wallet for the bills. He opened the door before focusing back on the green paper and trying to figure just how much he should leave. Fifteen should be more than enough.

He pulled the ten and five out and went to stuff it in the white envelope.

Good morning! a voice boomed much too joyfully.

The items in his hands fell to the floor as he jumped, startled. What in the! Where did you come from? he asked, meeting the eyes of a frail-looking, little, old man. Paul had no idea how such a tiny and ill-looking person could’ve been so loud.

I was just around back. I didn’t mean to scare you, son, the man said. You seem to be ready to pay.

Um, yeah. Yeah. I just need those and a thing of worms. Paul picked up a container out of the small refrigerator on the counter. He shook and opened it, checking the activeness of the nightcrawlers. "And you didn’t scare