Wally and the Jiders

By Jim Riva

For thirty years, growth hormones and genetic transfers were used at a top-secret, military facility in eastern Oregon to create BIGGER and BIGGER spiders that could eventually be used in ground combat.

After finally creating spiders that had abdomens the size of exercise balls, heads the size of basketballs, eyes the size of baseballs, and twenty-foot leg spans, the facility blows up—and a 700-pound female escapes with an egg sac containing two thousand eggs.

In a case of mistaken identity, a discontented owner of a sandwich shop in Des Moines, Iowa (Wally Herbolsheimer) gets handed intelligence about the clandestine operation and creates a blog to slowly release information under the guise of being an old-school, investigative journalist who has been using the sandwich shop as a front.

Everyone turns to the Herbolsheimer Report to get the facts, and Wally milks it for all that it’s worth as the insatiable spiders, called jiders, use their shocking speed and agility to chase people down (both indoors and outdoors), break their craniums with their razor-sharp, two-pound fangs, and suck their brains out.

Catapulted to fame as jiders terrorize towns in the American northwest, Wally refuses to identify his source (or sources) under pressure from the F.B.I. and accuses the president and the military-industrial complex of a cover-up as he gets rich and famous in a cover-up of his own.

A high-school romance that the middle-aged Wally has never gotten over serves as a backstory for this farcical, horror tale that gets more and more horrific.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Riva
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005365790

Jim Riva

Jim Riva was the class clown in his boyhood days. He became a serious student of philosophy at the undergraduate and graduate levels before coming to the philosophical conclusion that the best outlook on life is to take humor seriously.An off-the-beaten-track world traveler who spent the better part of fourteen years in Japan, Jim has written nine novels that fall into the Humor category and more than thirty-five audio sketches that are on The Champion of Reason Podcast.He lives and laughs (and continues to write) in Oregon with his Japanese wife and their daughter.

Book preview

Wally and the Jiders

Published by Soaring Sparrow Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2020, Jim Riva

Cover art by Sofie Levine

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Wally and the Jiders

Chapter One

If you’re ever in D.C., give me a call, Andy Ribalzi told Wally Herbolsheimer halfheartedly at their thirtieth high-school reunion. I’ll take you out and show you around, he insincerely added, and that addition made all the difference for Wally. It wasn’t so much that Wally had never been to the nation’s capital as it was that he felt Andy still owed him for stealing his girlfriend, Jenny Wenzel, back when they were seniors at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

Wally had been dating Jenny for eight months when, out of the blue, she told him that she had met somebody else and that she kind of liked that somebody else and that he, Wally, was a nice guy, maybe the nicest guy in the whole wide world, but it was best that they went their own separate ways and, well, it was all over.

Thirty years later, Wally still had the scars. Jenny was the first girl he ever kissed. She was the first girl he ever felt up. She was the first girl he ever—well, that’s as far as he ever went because he respected her too much. Then she went out with Andy Ribalzi and gave him a blow job, and Andy might as well have posted the news in the Des Moines Register.

Wally never married because he never met anyone who measured up to Jenny Wenzel. He still had dreams about her every now and then, and sometimes the dreams were so vivid that they affected him for days or even weeks. He would look at pictures of Jenny, with her beautiful long hair, in his Roosevelt High Yearbook, as well as in his own pictures of them together at the Homecoming and the Sadie Hawkins, and he would drive past her old house, which had the same old front porch that served as a stage for many sweet good-nights. Sometimes he could even smell the perfume she used to wear.

Wally still lived with his mother. His father passed away a few years earlier and his elder sister was living in Thailand. Their house was just a few blocks away from the family business—an old sandwich-shop on Main Street called the Igloo. The establishment had been passed down through three generations of Herbolsheimers. Wally started working at the Igloo when he was fifteen, back when his grandfather was still running the show. His father took over when his grandfather passed away, and Wally took over when his father passed away.

The Igloo hadn’t changed much since the days when his grandfather was in charge. The sandwiches were the same old sandwiches with the same old bread and the same old ingredients, and the Igloo still had the same old Chicago Cubs memorabilia on the walls. Wally, a huge Chicago Cubs fan who always wore a Cubs cap, added some Cubs memorabilia, but that, along with applying more black duct tape to cover more tears in the red upholstery of the booths, was about the extent of the changes he had made.

Times sure had changed. Now people wanted fancy-shmancy gourmet sandwiches that ran the gamut from low-fat to organic to vegetarian to vegan to gluten-free. So now they got their sandwiches from some other place. Business had gone from bad to worse. In fact, business was so bad that Wally would have had to live with his mother even if he hadn’t wanted to. He was able to make