Phobias

by Ryan Horvath

  Tim had no idea of the identity of the man who set this all up; the man who called him that day in the pharmacy. He briefly flirted with the idea that Miedo was a woman but quickly put that idea to rest. Women didn’t have such violent sexual thoughts and desires. He felt shame for having them himself; even if the thoughts were with him only a short time.

  Tim thought back to the video… the horrible video where the young football player savaged the girl Tim loved. At one point he thought he wanted Heather subjected to that but he soon realized it was far from what he wanted. He wondered where Heather could be and cursed himself for bringing her into this situation.

  He continued walking, keeping to the alleys, brooding, and thinking.

  Suddenly it dawned on him.

  “I didn’t bring Heather into this. He did,” Tim said aloud. “He came to me and he knew about her… about us already… He knew details.” Tim’s mind started working quickly. Miedo certainly knew a lot about the relationship Tim and Heather had. Things, it would seem, that he would have had to hear from either Tim himself or Heather. And since Tim didn’t divulge any details, it had to have been Heather who did.

  Who would she talk to about us? Tim asked himself. He kicked at a pebble and sent it scuttling across the concrete until it bonked against a recycling cart. It couldn’t have been her parents. If she’d told one of them, then Tim would be over in Oak Park Heights prison taking it up the ass from some giant named Tiny. If she’d told her friends, then half the school would know and Tim would have been called in front of the school board, fired, and then probably criminally charged resulting in the same ass-fuck situation as if Heather had told her parents.

  No Tim told himself. She told someone bound to secrecy. Someone in confidence he deduced. Her priest. A doctor. Maybe a shrink.

  Each of those ideas was plausible.

  Even better, now he had a lead.

  Time to dig a little into what Heather has been doing since I last saw her. Who has she been talking to? Tim said as he stepped up his pace. His stomach started to rumble. He needed to find a place to eat. He was far enough out of Minneapolis to risk going to a McDonald’s, but he didn’t have any money. Fortunately, Tim did have a friend; a friend who owed Tim some money that Tim had been gracious enough to lend when he got the inheritance. A friend who lived nearby and who was so wrapped up in video games and science fiction books that he wouldn’t have a clue that the police were hunting for Tim.

  Tim went to his friend’s house. The friend didn’t have the full amount Tim was due but Tim managed to get four hundred thirty dollars from the guy. It was a good start. Before he left, he spotted a ball cap with the St. Paul Saints logo on it and asked if he could take it too.

  He found a McDonald’s and was able to get in just before they closed their dining room. He was grateful to find it empty and ordered two double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a water and accepted the food in a to-go bag. He made his way to Lee Park and ate on a bench under a canopy of tree branches. He wanted to take his time, but he felt exposed.

  And exposure wasn’t nearly as bad as what was coming up.

  Next, he had to dance into the lion’s den.

  He needed to get into Heather’s house.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Chad saw Holly glance in his direction with a strange expression on her face. He’d been a cop long enough to recognize suspicion.

  But Chad didn’t have time to worry much about what she might be thinking. The arrival of the EMTs heralded the arrival of more police officers. More police officers meant more guns. Amid the visual cacophony of flashing squad car lights, over a dozen officers walked around and, strapped to each one of their waists, in plain view and easily accessible, was a service gun of some kind. Chad could tell most of the deadly weapons were Glocks, but he also recognized a Ruger, an HK P7, and a very shiny M15.

  Chad wanted nothing more than to be out of this situation. He wanted to slink away and, once out of sight, run as fast and far as he could. Then he would find the nearest bar he could and do his best to max out his credit card getting wasted to the gills. Then he could slip into the haze he was growing so accustomed to and forget that he’d been surrounded by gun metal.

  But a rational part of Chad’s mind told him to stay put. It seemed, with everything that was going on since the police came banging on his front door, that the rational part of Chad’s mind was making more frequent visits. Chad wondered if it was because he hadn’t had any alcohol. The rational part of his mind confirmed the wonder as true.

  However, as much as Chad wished it would, the rational part of his mind wasn’t doing anything about his fear of guns. Every time an officer got near him, Chad had to quickly shift away. His heart rate was akin as to if he was running. He could feel perspiration pouring out of his underarms and getting soaked up by his shirt, and more sweat seeped out from his more personal areas. And he was grinding his teeth; a habit he’d broken in high school. Chad tried desperately to relax.

  His thoughts turned to Marcia. There was no doubt that the road-ravaged body in Holly’s morgue was his once beautiful wife. If Marcia was still alive then she surly would have called Chad’s phone by now, and it had been silent in his pocket. Marcia never hurt anyone in her life yet someone felt the need to cruelly subject her to what she feared the most. Looking around at all the shining weapons, Chad knew Marcia had thrown herself from that car. Death was her only escape from her fear and Chad fought against falling into the same mindset and grabbing one of the nearby guns and feeding himself a bullet to end his suffering. Death would be better than a life lived with the phobias cuffed around his wrists.

  The rational part of his mind told him he was better than that. Stronger.

  Chad wasn’t so sure. He turned away from Holly’s glances and walked outside the perimeter of police cars. At least there, the guns were somewhat out of sight. When he sat down on the small slope of the yard of the house they were in front of, the weapons were completely blocked from his view.

  It made Chad feel a little better and the teeth grinding, at least, stopped. He propped his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. Doing so, he became aware that the smell from his underarms was bordering on offensive; but he didn’t care about that at the moment.

  Whoever took Marcia, it wasn’t the coach. Chad knew that without a doubt. The coach was running. Not killing people. The coach was a pawn in all this as well. He had to be in spite of the evidence that was apparently piling up at his home. The coach couldn’t have done it because the coach had no connection to Marcia. The only man connected to all of this, to all of them, was Dr. Andrews. But Chad thought, much like Holly did, though he didn’t know it, why hadn’t he been taken when Marcia was? He wondered if it was because his phobia wasn’t intriguing enough to the doctor. But the doctor could have been planning on taking Chad at a later time and never got the chance because Chad wound up with the police.

  Chad thought next about a way to get more information on Dr. Andrews. Chad and Marcia did their research on the doctor before they started seeing him, and he seemed like a model member of society at that time. But that had been a few years ago and Chad was no stranger to how quickly things can change in five seconds, let alone a few years.

  Chad wanted to get away from here and start digging on his and his dead wife’s psychiatrist. From where he was sitting now, no eyes could see him. He could easily slip away alone; crawl on his hands and knees along the line of squad cars until he was far enough away to stand and make his leave. And he could finally get a fucking drink in his stomach. His mouth salivated and his heart slowed a minute amount at the thought of some bourbon or tequila passing through his lips. He released his knees and started crawling to the right.

  He got about a foot before he remembered something. Something Terry suggested and Walt alluded to.

  Chad could be a target.

  “Fuck!” Chad quietly spat out as he stopped crawling. He knew he couldn’t go anywhere. The safest place for h
im was with Terry, Walt, and Holly. He’d have to do his research on Dr. Andrews with them. Four heads would be better than one, after all. He returned to a spot on the far side of all the cops and their guns and took up the same seated position.

  All he had to do now was wait. Wait for the armed battalion to clear out of here with the guns and take his hoplophobia with them.

  Chad signed. His drink was still going to have to wait.

  He felt a vibration in his pocket and pulled out his phone. He looked at the picture mail that came up.

  He wished he hadn’t.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Calvin’s dreams were nothing short of horrifying.

  And he’d never felt so lucid while dreaming. A part of him knew he was dreaming. It kept him aware of this as if to accentuate his phobia of dreaming. But another part made it feel like everything was occurring in reality. Every sound he heard was real. Every taste he was subjected to lingered in his mouth and every odor hung in his nostrils. Each hateful thing that touched him left a lasting impression on his skin and every deplorable creature he saw burned an image of itself in his consciousness.

  Calvin didn’t know it, but his captor had engineered a powerful drug that made certain Calvin stayed dreaming his horror dreams and that certain senses were stimulated enough to believe it was all happening in reality.

  The first thing that Calvin encountered was unlike anything he’d ever seen. A Gorgon-like beast slithered up to him only, instead of being like the fabled Medusa and her sisters, this creature was male which was easy to tell because it wore no clothes. It took Calvin with incredible speed and forced him against a slimy, cold, hard wall and savagely raped him with an organ that felt like it had barbs on it. When the monster was finished with Calvin, Calvin cried when he looked down to see his own erection which so many boys had either envied or teased him about since puberty. He didn’t think he’d enjoyed the violation, but it seemed his body had.

  Seconds after the first monster left, Calvin heard heavy strained breathing from behind him. He turned and saw a behemoth inches away; a woman easily five times Calvin’s size with half of her face swollen in pus-oozing warts and acne. One of her eyes was buried in the mess of her face but the other looked at him with hungry anticipation. A fat purple tongue slipped from her bloated blue lips and danced across them. Calvin opened his mouth to scream and she opened hers as well. But before any sound came from Calvin, a stream of white, writhing, wriggling worms came out of the ghastly woman’s maw and landed in Calvin’s open mouth. Calvin fought against doing so but he knew he swallowed some of the unctuous creatures. After, this woman turned her back to him and hefted a gigantic leg. A cloud of unthinkably vile flatulence seeped out of her and encircled Calvin, choking him. He tried to move but several of the worms that fell around his bare feet burrowed into his legs and the ground and held him fast. The farting, pus-dripping woman made her lumbering departure leaving the sound of gloating laughter in her wake.

  Calvin hoped the worms would leave with her, but they held on to him. The ends that were buried in his flesh started to itch, but he dared not scratch at them.

  Then he heard the sound of metal scraping together behind him and turned to see what detestable thing was coming next. Calvin was genuinely surprised by what he saw. It was another woman. But this one was normal. In fact, she was the most beautiful woman Calvin had ever seen. It didn’t hurt things that she was naked. Her breasts were perfectly shaped, rounded, and had no trace of the effects of gravity. Her abdomen was pleasantly hourglass-shaped. She was free of any pubic hair and Calvin could see the femininity between her legs was the most aesthetically appealing of any woman he’d ever seen. But the metal she was holding and scraping together was a pair of knives. And she was either sharpening them against one another or dulling them. Calvin tried to remember which way was which when her face changed into something demonic. She struck quickly with one knife and Calvin looked down to see she freed him of his penis. She wasted no time and slashed again with the other knife and his testicles fell to the strange floor to join the rest of his manhood. He let out a horrible howl, which he did in the waking world as well, chilling the other captive in the room. The demon woman stepped close and whispered in his ear. Relax, baby she said. I’ll put it back on. And she did. Only she crudely stitched them on in the wrong position and upside down. When she finished and stepped back to admire her handiwork, Calvin couldn’t make heads or tails out of which way he’d be pissing in the future if he ever even gets that opportunity again. She laughed and agreed with him by giving vocalization to his thought with her raspy voice.

  The demon woman was still chuckling when the next torture arrived. A hulking pair of creatures arrived and snarled. They resembled wolves, if only in the fact that they were covered in hair, stood on four legs, and had mouths full of well-honed teeth. The nude castrating woman bade the beasts to attack Calvin and they lurched toward him. He saw the saliva, if it could be called that, that dripped from their jaws leave smoking sizzling spots on the floor as they approached him. Then they were on him. The demon woman cheered on her hounds and they tore into Calvin with tooth and claw. Calvin felt himself torn to shreds as the creatures devoured him. He felt his body move through their unnatural digestive tracts before he was expelled from their foul anuses in the form of a noxious brownish mush. In time, Calvin-the-shit-mush reformed into his old self with genitals righted and accounted for, but that didn’t stop the next dream denizen from presenting itself.

  And it did.

  It was unspeakable.

  Calvin was petrified where he stood.

  And then it was on him.

  Calvin cried out in the waking world again.

  His cry was edged with the sound of defeat.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Walt was distracted while the army of police officers went about police business in their police-like way. After a few moments, the flashing emergency lights no longer bothered Walt. He’d texted his mother a few times since he’d been on this ride-along with Detective Calles and the others, and she had usually been pretty fast to respond to his messages. But Walt’s last two messages were unanswered; the first for over twenty minutes and the second for just over fifteen. Walt guessed his mom must have dozed off because there was little chance she’d be in the shower or bathtub without her phone handy. His mom was just like that. She never wanted to miss a thing. He clutched his phone and told himself that everything was okay.

  He was also distracted by the doctor they all encountered. Walt was sure the man had the same body type as the gun-toting psychopath who made the rape video. Walt wondered if a doctor could really do something like this to one patient, let alone a number of patients, an ex-girlfriend, the coach, and the cops. But Walt wasn’t prepared to rule the doctor out.

  Walt was more worried than ever about his best friend too. He couldn’t imagine what Calvin was going through. Was Calvin even kept alive anymore after the video was made? The psycho could have pulled the trigger of his gun as soon as the video ended and snuffed out Calvin’s life for good. A part of Walt wondered if that’s what happened. Another more insistent part speculated that the psycho wasn’t through with Calvin and he was still very much alive, awaiting some further humiliation or degradation. Walt didn’t know which was worse.

  He looked at his phone again and saw he still had no new messages, from his mom or anyone.

  Walt sighed heavily, walked around the back of a squad car and stepped out of the ring the group of cars had made.

  He looked to his left, then to his right and saw Chad sitting on the lawn there. The older man was looking at his phone and wore a stunned expression. Walt headed in his direction.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Miedo, AKA Dr. Justin Andrews, only waited a few moments after the dip-shit detective, the wretched slut, the worthless drunk, and the wild card left his place before he also departed. He rarely stayed there long and he had work to do.

  Miedo did not like the way the other footbal
l player, the one Miedo referred to as “the wild card” looked at him. He didn’t like being the one who was studied. And the wild card was exactly that: a wild card. Walt was never a part of the plan. He wasn’t a patient of Dr. Andrews. He wasn’t part of Mr. Star’s pathetic agenda. And he had no obvious or not-so-obvious phobias. Miedo wasn’t quite sure how to work Walt into or out of the game.

  That really only left him one choice. He’d have to take out a little bit of insurance. Taking out insurance could be risky at times but it was a risk Miedo felt prudent in this case. So, after he left his smaller house in Minneapolis, he drove a fairly short distance and went to collect his insurance. It wasn’t difficult to select it. He knew exactly what he wanted and he went for it. It resisted him a little at first but he quickly subdued it with an injection of a special sedative he created with ingredients Mr. Star obtained. When he had his insurance policy in hand, he bound it up tightly with two extension cords. He triple checked the security of the knots and, when he was satisfied his policy was secure, he took it outside and tossed it in the truck of his car.

  Miedo quickly made his way to his other place in Plymouth, being careful not to speed and draw attention from law enforcement. He made it there safely and took his insurance out of the trunk of his car. He carried it across his private yard and into the space where he had his two captives with phobias. The strain of carrying the insurance around was starting to get to Miedo, even in his excellent physical shape, and he didn’t want to announce his presence to the phobics, so he propped the insurance beside the door and silently slipped inside. Both captives were under their dim lights where Miedo left them. The football player wasn’t waking up anytime soon but Miedo couldn’t always be sure about the other since she was blindfolded and, well, just kind of hanging out there.