Phobias Read online

  PHOBIAS

  Copyright © 2017 by Ryan D Horvath

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  Stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Cover design and interior format by the author.

  Cover font is AR Carter.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

  ~~1~~

  Marcia woke up slowly. Her head hurt. Her shoulder throbbed against whatever hard surface it was pressed to. She also couldn’t see anything. But her vision wasn’t inhibited. Wherever she was, it was dark.

  But none of that was the worst thing. She was naked and she acutely realized she was moving; moving fast. Much swifter than she ever cared to move. Her heart raced in her ribcage.

  Marcia suffered from tachophobia, the irrational phobia of speed or going too fast. She never understood why she acquired this fear but it started when she was fifteen and visiting Cedar Point amusement park in northern Ohio. She and several of her friends went to the park for a weekend of roller coasters, water rides, sugary sodas, and various artery-clogging foods. Things went fine for Marcia at first. She rode two roller coasters and loved every second, as she always had in the past. But when her group decided to take on the Magnum XL 200, one of the tallest, fastest, steepest roller coasters at the time, something snapped in Marcia. After she and her friends wound their way through most of the serpentine paths, Marcia watched a chain of coaster cars as it reached the summit of the initial two hundred-foot hill. As the screams of the riders started to dance into her ears, Marcia felt her heart flutter, then speed up. Sweat formed on her brow, upper lip, and under her arms. Her skin started to crawl and shivers scurried up and down her spine. The screams of the riders intensified in her ears until they became deafening to Marcia and she started to visibly shake. At that point, it was time for her and her friends to advance in line but Marcia didn’t budge. One of the boys she was with tried to take Marcia’s arm and move her along while other people waiting in line shouted for Marcia to keep advancing, but she stood petrified watching the coaster cars plummet down the steep steel slope. Tears slid uncontrollably from Marcia’s eyes and, without meaning to, she let go of her bladder. People behind her started to point and shriek with laughter while Marcia’s friends tried to get her to move. Marcia soon added her own shrieks to the mix and it took two security guards to essentially carry her out of the line and away from the coaster.

  After she got cleaned up and changed into a fresh pair of shorts from her backpack, she sat on a bench with her best friend next to her. Marcia wasn’t able to explain what happened. She could only tell her friend the thought of travelling at such a speed suddenly and violently overwhelmed her. Marcia hadn’t been able to ride any more rides and wasn’t even able to look at any of the faster ones. Things got worse the next day when they went to leave. The boy whose car they were traveling in took a right turn to enter Ohio State Route 2 and, before he even got the speedometer up to thirty miles an hour, Marcia was in a full blown panic attack. It took her and her friends seven times as long to get home to Minneapolis than it normally would have because they were forced to use routes where the car didn’t exceed twenty-five miles an hour. Even at that speed, Marcia held onto her best friend and shuddered most of the way.

  Twenty years later, her phobia was relatively unchanged. In twenty years, she’d never been on a freeway. She’d not flown on a plane either. She lived within walking distance of her job and the few stores she needed to keep her and her husband in a stocked house.

  Her husband tolerated her phobia. They’d been married for eight years and in that time, he’d never tried to get her to face her phobia. Marcia often wondered why in the beginning of their marriage, but when she came to realize the fact that Chad was a full blown alcoholic and wrestling with a few fears of his own, she stopped wondering.

  But now, something was very wrong. Marcia tried to remember what happened. She’d been on her second glass of pinot grigio after work. She sat by the open den window reading a magazine and listening to her headphones when she felt a sharp prick in her neck. She turned to look at what might have bitten or stung her and saw the window screen had been cut. An arm was retracting through it and the hand at the end of it held a syringe. As she looked up to see who owned the arm, the world swam out of focus and she passed out.

  Awake again, she was aware of the motion around her. Devastatingly aware. She started to whimper. She tried to move her hands but found her wrists restrained where her hands rested on her thighs. She immediately began to sweat. Not a light misting but thin streams worked their way across her forehead, into her eyes, from her arm pits, and from behind her knees. She moved her head around, trying to see anything.

  “Ah! You’re awake!” a mechanical voice said from somewhere in the dark speeding place.

  “Wha…Wha…Wha?” Marcia stammered. Stammering was all she could manage. She became aware she would piss all over herself if the motion didn’t stop very soon.

  “How you feeling, Marcia?” the voice said. “Scared?” There was a taunting tone discernable even though the voice was obviously coming through a microphone.

  “Wh…Wh… Where…?” Marcia managed.

  Without answering, the voice said, “Tachophobia? That’s a good one, Marcia. Unique. And with such a low tolerance threshold! I gather you’re feeling pretty uncomfortable right now.”

  Marcia trembled. Do I know that voice? she asked herself.

  “Yes, Marcia. I can see you’re pretty fucking scared right now. And you don’t know the half of the shit you’re in,” the voice said. “I’m sure your wondering. I have a camera on you. It has night vision on it so I can see you even though all you see is darkness. You do look pretty fucking spooked. Want me to fill you in on the rest?”

  Marcia quickly shook her head. As she suspected, she began to urinate when whatever she was in shook violently. Waves of indignity washed in to join her boiling anxiety.

  “Too bad, so sad,” the voice goaded.

  Marcia instantly took control of her urine stream and was able to stop it. The phrase the voice just said was more than familiar to her. “Ch… Ch…. Ch…,” she stuttered. Chad? her mind clearly said. Too bad, so sad was a line her husband said somewhat frequently.

  “Right now, Marcia, you’re in the trunk of a car. It’s night time. And we are cruising at about…” There was a dramatic pause. “Seventy-three miles an hour on Interstate 35 W.”

  When the voice said “seventy-three miles an hour” Marcia couldn’t hold herself anymore and her bladder let loose again. In spite of the warmth of the fluid, she felt ice cold. Every muscle became rigid.

  “And right about… now, I suspect the stimulant I forced down your throat while you were knocked out is kicking in gear,” the voice said. “It’s a special pill. One of my own concoction that the FDA would surely not approve of. How do you like it?”

  Marcia’s tears burst free. It was true; whatever he gave her was taking affect her. Impossibly, her heart seemed to speed up even faster. Why is this happening to me? she asked herself.

  “I can see you don’t like it one bit,” the voice said and began to laugh. “Ah. We’ve got the highway mostly to ourselves now, Marcia. Would you like to see what I’ve done with this car? It’s special just for you.”

  Marcia tried to shake her head in the negative but felt paralyzed. The stimulant in her blood, whatever it was, was working fast now. Blood pounded in her ears. Sweat poured from her. Her stomach felt sour. She could smell her urine as it soaked into the floor of the trunk.

  “Chec
k this out, you fearful bitch,” the voice said.

  There was a click from somewhere around her and then to her right, Marcia saw the trunk lid open up. The night was dark but not as dark as the inside of the trunk and she could see other headlights in the distance behind them.

  A millisecond later, the speed hit her. The wind rushed in and slid across her exposed skin. The landscape raced by at an alarming page. The red taillights glowed in anger and warning. Marcia began to panic. Her eyes went wide; her heart thundered; she started to make a guttural choking sound mixed with sobs. Rational thought left her.

  Then the trunk lid slammed closed on its own instantly cutting off the air and making the enclosed place seen stifling. But Marcia couldn’t care about that. She was too aware of the speed. With every sound the car made against the pavement, she felt herself slipping closer and closer to the edge.

  “That was fun, right, Marcia?” the voice teased. “I’m kinda proud of the modifications I made to the car. How about another glimpse?”

  The trunk lid flew up again and Marcia was powerless but to look out into the maw of the night as it sped by. This second dose of speed made her mind step right up to the edge of a very deep chasm. She would rather die than endure this any longer.

  And then the trunk slammed closed again.

  “We’re going to test the limits of your little phobia, Marcia,” the voice said. “Who knows? Maybe when were done, you’ll finally be over it. If you are, great! But I’ll still kill you.” A pause. “We’re doing eighty miles an hour now, Marcia,” the voice said with emphasis on the eighty. “Want to have a look?”

  But Marcia was unable to react. She heard the word “eighty” and her mind fractured.

  The trunk lid opened.

  With no sane thoughts left, Marcia stared into the night. Death would be preferable to this speed and the devastating effect it had on her. She shifted, rolled, and shimmed herself to the edge of the trunk.

  “What are you doing, Marcia?” the voice said with obvious surprise. “Get back in the…”

  But it was too late.

  Marcia climbed out of the trunk and rolled away from it. She smacked onto the pavement and it began to shred her flesh and rend her bones. The last thing she saw was a pair of rapidly approaching headlights. The last thing she smelled and heard was tires burning and screeching in an attempt to stop. The last thing she felt was the hot rubber of the tires of the eighteen wheeler that ran her over.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  In the driver’s seat of the car, a man looked into the rearview mirror and watched his prey’s body bounce across the highway after she threw herself out of the trunk. He was furious she got away like that but he couldn’t go back for her.

  But he was somewhat successful. Her phobia had killed her. Or at least caused her to kill herself.

  Tachophobia he said to himself. That’s a good one. And at least now that whiny bitch is finally dead. He returned his eyes to the road and then took the next exit and doubled back. The police would be on site soon and he knew of a good place to watch while they scraped her corpse off the interstate.

  ~~2~~

  Chad Dean crawled up from the drunken haze he fell into a few hours ago when he got home from his shift. Somewhere, something was pounding. A good part of him was sure that, after four beers and five shots of bourbon, the noise was coming from inside his own head.

  He rolled over on the bed. He didn’t recall coming into the master bedroom but that was no surprise. He realized he was on top of the bedclothes and that he was naked. He didn’t mind. His side of the bed was near an open window and a breeze blew in and danced across his bare skin. The breeze found his exposed manhood and he felt it stiffen with arousal.

  He blinked his eyes open just as another session of the pounding ended and looked beside him where Marcia should be sleeping. He meant to rouse her and see if she would be up for a middle-of-the-night quickie. But Marcia wasn’t there.

  “Marcia?” Chad said aloud. When Chad got home from his shift, Marcia had been sitting in her usual chair working on some wine and reading. They kissed, chatted for a few minutes about their days, and when it was clear Marcia wanted to get back to her magazine, Chad did what he always did when he got home. He started to drink.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Chad’s path to addictive drinking started nine years ago after a night he would never forget. He was twenty-seven at the time and thinking that his life couldn’t be any better when it suddenly changed. Chad was a beat cop then, often working the rougher area of north Minneapolis. He was relatively new to the police force and knew, on his way to detective, he had to start somewhere. One night, he and his partner were on patrol two blocks off of Fremont Avenue. In the passenger seat of the cruiser, Chad happened to look out the window when he saw something that alarmed him on the side of one of the many abandoned homes that were popping up everywhere due to the recession. If he was looking any other direction at that second, he would have missed it and maybe several lives would be different. He directed his partner to stop and they got out of the patrol car. On the pedestrian sidewalk, they slowly walked until they could both see what Chad saw; and out of the car now, they could hear as well. There were four people there and the sounds from each of them would haunt Chad’s thoughts for at least the next nine years, if not forever. Three of the people were men, one white, one black, and one east Asian, and all appeared to be in their twenties. All three of these men had T-shirts on but pulled up over their heads and around their necks so their heavily tattooed chests were exposed. They all also had their pants down around their ankles. The white and Asian men had their sides to Chad and his partner so their faces were partially in view. They were slowly stroking themselves while they watched the black man who was obviously copulating with the fourth individual. But as Chad and his partner neared even closer, it was clear that this was not consensual sex. The black man was aggressively raping the fourth person and Chad quickly saw it was a boy around fourteen years of age. He put his hand on his holster and undid the safety strap at the same time as shouting “Hey!” His shout startled the three men and the black man withdrew from the boy. He also moved what he was holding in the boy’s mouth. A pistol, and Chad recognized it as a simple Beretta. The pistol had been responsible for the muffled squeals that emanated from the boy which Chad would never forget. Chad shouted to his partner and fumbled with his gun while the black man whirled on them. The other two rapists quickly yanked their pants up and drew their own guns and, before Chad could do anything, bullets were flying in his direction. He slammed to the ground and eventually worked his own service revolver from its holster and started to return fire. The firefight was over in less than ten seconds but it felt like ten years to Chad. The rapists fled but not before making some of their shots count. Chad’s partner didn’t get down fast enough and, even though he wore Kevlar on his torso, it did nothing to stop the bullet that entered his skull through his eye. His corpse lay splayed in the weedy lawn and stared one-eyed up at the stars.

  Chad called for backup with his radio, explained the situation to the dispatcher, and gave a brief description of the perpetrators. He stared at his lifeless partner then. Just minutes ago, they were talking about where to grab some chow and now his partner was dead. He started to shake where he stood before he heard strained whimpers from behind him. He realized he had forgotten about the rape victim and spun around. He hurried through the high grass and his heart sank as he neared the boy. Closer to the victim now, Chad quickly realized he was wrong about the boy’s age. When the investigation was over, Chad learned the boy had only just turned eleven. But turning eleven didn’t make him immortal and he lay, mostly naked, with a few tatters of his clothing hanging off of him, half in the weeds and half on a crumbling sidewalk. A bullet hole was in his neck and blood gurgled from it. Chad fell to his knees beside the boy and tried to comfort and assure him while he radioed for a second ambulance but the pallor of the boy’s skin told Chad it would be too late. And it
was. The boy died less than a minute later still trying to call for his mother. The investigation would also later reveal that the boy had died as a result of a bullet from Chad’s gun. When he learned this, Chad was devastated. His intention was to stop the crime and bring justice to the criminals and, instead, he had killed an innocent victim and lost his partner. The rapists were eventually caught and given life sentences for the felonies they committed but that didn’t stop Chad from assuming his fair share of the guilt. After the crime scene was cleared around dawn the next morning, Chad was dismissed to go home where he immediately grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels and without meaning to, set himself on an alcoholic’s quest for redemption at the bottom of a bottle.

  Chad was put behind a desk after that. Six months later, he met Marcia and the pair started dating. It wasn’t long before Chad realized Marcia was laden with her own demons and a rather unusual phobia but he figured as long as she didn’t get in the way of his drinking, he didn’t care. They married a few months after that. Shortly after their wedding, Chad went to recertify for his marksmanship. In the firing range, he quickly became unnerved by the cacophony of gunfire. But he didn’t want to been seen with a weakness. He un-holstered his own firearm. It, of course, wasn’t the same gun he had accidentally killed the eleven year old with. It was the first time he held a pistol since that fateful night and while the gun weighed no more than a couple pounds, it felt like a boulder in his grip. He managed to empty the clip with eyes pressed closed and a shaky hand and when he was done, he quickly dropped the weapon on the counter in front of him. He stared at the lethal metal and it taunted him; mocked him; reminded him of his failure. Days later he couldn’t even look at his gun, let alone touch it. He actually became terrified of it. He learned it was a phobia called hoplophobia. It the months that followed, the intensity of the phobia waxed as did his alcoholism. The latter he couldn’t care less about but the phobia had to be quashed if he was ever going maintain a career in law enforcement.