Phobias

by Ryan Horvath

  Justin cackled through the phone line.

  “Asshole!” Holly spat into the phone. She looked around the nearby cars and few buildings, but could see no sign of him. Wherever he was, he was staying out of sight.

  Justin continued to laugh for a few more seconds. When finished, he said, “Anyway, back to your friend Mitchell. He helped me out quite a bit this morning. What a remarkable young man!”

  “What did you do to him?” Chad asked.

  “Let me tell you what he did for me,” Justin said, evading the question. “I needed to be scrubbed from the system. Do you all understand what that means?” He didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “I needed every shred of my existence wiped out of the digital world. I needed Dr. Justin Andrews of Minneapolis, Minnesota to be excised from the digital world because, well, he’s soon to be excised from the real world as well.” He paused, offering one of them a chance to speak, but no one took it. “Now, don’t you worry. I’m not dying or killing myself. I have a perfectly good new life I’ll be stepping into. And all my money is safe and secure. But I needed to make sure no one comes knocking on my front door and relating me to Justin Andrews. And I needed it fast. I knew you four would be running your mouths to the police almost immediately, so I needed my name gone. I had to take care of the computer nerd your late detective friend used so, when I knew the two of you paid a visit to Mitchell, I would have to pay a visit to him too. But, unlike good ole Terry’s nerd, Chad’s was much more talented. I got Mitchell to tell me about this worm he’s been working on. Really nasty shit, but kind of what I was looking for. He said his goal was to perfect it to where he could get it to eat certain pathways in computer systems like, say, a person’s criminal history from the state’s court database.”

  Chad and Holly exchanged a doubtful look, but Calvin nodded. He was into computer science at one point and said, “It’s possible, but years if not decades away.”

  “Well, like I said, Mitchell was resourceful,” Justin said.

  Chad heard the past tense Justin used about Mitchell.

  “Resourceful and ahead of the times,” Justin continued. “He said he could do it but that he wouldn’t. You see, I wanted everything from federal on down; not limited to just the criminal databases either. I wanted my name out of everywhere. But yes, Mitchell refused. He told me that to release such a worm that wasn’t fully tested could have devastating and catastrophic effects on the entire global digital infrastructure.”

  Holly didn’t like the growing excitement she heard in Justin’s voice.

  “After the first refusal, I pointed my gun at Mitchell again,” Justin went on. Kid looked so scared sitting there in his little skivvies, thinking when he went to bed last night that today was going to be perfectly normal. He countered that, even if he started the worm, the FBI, CIA, FCC, and every other fucking agency in the world would know it came from him because he had no masking algorithms, or whatever they are, attached to the worm, and it would be easy to see what IP address it started from. Mitchell said the cops would be banging on his door in less than an hour if he released his little worm. Probably less than forty-five minutes.”

  Chad now understood why Detectives Willis and Mahannah said the FBI was involved, and his heart sank. Something very bad was happening.

  “So, when Mitchell refused me that time, I shot him in his right fucking knee cap,” Justin said jubilantly. “And I hadn’t fired this new pistol of mine yet, so I was fairly surprised when it all but obliterated the kid’s knee. Mitchell was pretty fucking surprised too, so I had time to get to him and stifle his initial shrieking.”

  Chad cringed at the mention of gunshots.

  “After he calmed down a bit, I asked Mitchell if he was now ready to send his worm, and he told me to go fuck myself.” Justin paused. “So I shot his left foot. Took the two smallest toes clean off.” Justin laughed heartily.

  The four by the Dumpster were all silent through the insane-sounding giggles.

  “I asked Mitchell again, certain he would refuse me a third time. As I was trying to figure out where to shoot him next, he conceded. Do you know what I saw in his eyes then? It’s something I’ll never be able to see in the four of you, I’m sure.” He waited a couple seconds for an answer none of them would give. “I saw him let it go. His fear. All of it left his eyes and total acceptance replaced it. His fingers flew across the keyboard fast after that, which I know must have been hard given the pain he was in, but he never let on. And he set the worm to work.”

  “Did… did… did it work?” Calvin stammered.

  “It sure did,” Justin said. “And as the little bugger started its thing, I had Mitchell do me another little favor. Hey, Wild Card? Wild Card? You listening?”

  “Yeah,” Walt said meekly.

  “While the worm got started, I had Mitchell set up some e-mails and text messages between you and Calvin. Everything that’s happened here, in the last hours, has been blamed on the two of you. You’re just a pair of angst-filled young guys mad at the world. The two of you orchestrated the kidnappings of Heather and Marcia, and even your mom. You and Calvin found out about Mr. Star and Heather and blackmailed Mr. Star into helping you with drugs and money. You both raped Heather and, when your mom found out what the two of you were up to, you sicked your well-hung buddy on her too. I left some DNA evidence to support this in your mom’s bedroom. The police will be finding it any moment now.”

  “You… fucking… bastard,” Walt slowly seethed through bared teeth.

  “That’s a lot of murder, conspiracy, and arson that just fell on you boys’ shoulders!” Justin said. “But one murder I couldn’t pin on the two of you.” He paused. “By the time Mitchell was done framing the two of you, I had him check the worm. It worked and was tearing me out of existence. But…”

  “Oh, no!” Calvin gasped.

  “The worm did what Mitchell feared it would. It was out of control. There were warning messages going off all over the kid’s computers,” Justin said. “But I sure as hell didn’t care. And it’s still out of control!” Justin roared with laughter causing the phone connection to crackle. “And after I shot Mitchell between the eyes, he sure didn’t look like he cared anymore either!” He broke out into laughter again. “And Holly and Chad left enough evidence that they had been there for me to get some hairs on Mitchell’s corpse. The fingerprints you left will do the rest.”

  “You’re a monster!” Calvin shouted into the phone.

  “Actually, no, I don’t exist anymore. You four are the monsters. And as Mitchell’s little worm destroys its way around the world, everyone is going to know it.”

  Calvin, Holly, Chad, and Walt stared at each other in stunned silence. They thought Justin had disconnected the call, but he spoke again.

  “Now, one more thing. While we’ve been chatting, I’ve anonymously clued the police as to your current whereabouts. They are about five blocks away. Enjoy rotting in prison. I’m sure after a few weeks of being in there, some of you will wish you’d died in the explosion.” He hesitated and then finished with, “Thank you. Your fears have been my pleasure.”

  The call obviously disconnected.

  Then sirens sounded. They were very close.

  ~~33~~

  After that phone call, Chad, Holly, Calvin, and Walt ran. The three of them who had phones tossed them away to eliminate being tracked by GPS any longer by either Andrews or the police.

  They fled Minneapolis. None of them got to go home and they were only able to take with them the clothes they had on their backs. However, in the beginning of their flight, Chad and Holly were both able to use their ATM cards to withdraw a combined sum of fifteen hundred dollars before the ATMs quit working for them. They didn’t know if that was because the police tracked their cards down and froze their accounts or because Mitchell’s worm was eating its way through the system, and both thoughts terrified them. It would turn out to be the latter reason, and law enforcement soon became overwhelmed by the effects of the unk
nown destruction to the digital world.

  Calvin tried to call his mother from a pay phone three hours after they learned about the worm. He only got her voice mail. Anger and sadness were evident in his voice in the message he left for her about her not caring enough about her son to answer any phone call in hopes he would be on the other line. It was a voice message his mother would never get because Mitchell’s worm would eat through her service provider’s network and eliminate the fact that she even had an account with them… or that they had any accounts with anyone anywhere. Even if she had heard it, Calvin’s mother was on her own dark and disturbing path that wasn’t allowing her to care about much.

  Mitchell’s worm, which would become known by the media as the Digital Slayer and known by the general population as “the thing that fucked us all and sent us back to the Stone Age,” worked as Mitchell predicted it would. First, it found Justin Andrews, a man only four people on Earth would ultimately end up knowing anything about, and scrubbed the man out of existence. But, as most things that feed tend to do, the worm continued to eat. It chewed its way from Hennepin County’s property records system, where Justin had once been named as the owner of record of a small bungalow, into the payroll system the very large county used for its extensive staff. From here, the worm found multiple directions to feed in: social security records, banking and credit information, insurance history, stock and 401(k) accounts, and much more. Soon, the worm quickly learned to multiply and, before long, it was evident around the globe that there was an epic problem at hand as governments and corporations began to shake, then shudder, then fall. The worm and its offspring worked quickly and chewed jagged paths across the world’s digital atmosphere, and the only people who weren’t affected were people who had little or no digital footprint. There were a few governments, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Turkey, Australia and some others, whose computers did constant backup downloads that would have their information mostly secured. But, without a digital frame work to upload the information into, that information would be sitting in storage drives. A few banks and corporations had this backup system as well, but their information would be just as useless without a place to access it.

  About a week after the worm’s release, as Chad, Holly, Calvin, and Walt worked their way into New Mexico, the world was back to a digital equivalent of the 1960’s. The infrastructure was there, but it was a ragged, tattered mess, and it would take some time to put it back together again. People could no longer just pop out their Android or iPhone and make a call, or look up something on the internet, or find their position on a map. If a car was connected to a GPS or Link system of some kind, those systems were mostly gone, but the cars still worked. The power grid went out, but engineers determined that the grid itself was still intact. It was just the computers that monitored the grid that weren’t. Hundreds of engineers around the world worked day and night and after thirty-one days, they got the power back on. It wasn’t perfect at first, but it got better. Times were tense during the blackout, but the world largely managed to keep a semblance of civility.

  But plenty of people did die in those thirty-one days.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Just over seven months later, Chad Dean sat outside in the sun to the north of the not-so-giant metropolis of Hillsboro, New Mexico. Having been born and raised in the big city, life in the small desert town was quite different. But Chad quickly adapted. He sipped from a bottle of water and alternated between looking at a paperback in his hand and the springtime desert-scape.

  They all adapted. Holly, Calvin, and Walt were still with him. The quartet had no reason that they could think of to part ways. When they arrived in the town of less than one hundred and fifty, during the Great Blackout, they took up residence at an unoccupied house not far from Percha Creek. The place was furnished, but no one had come to claim it. Chad and the others lied convincingly to the locals and told them they bought the property just before things went belly up and, without any computer records to refute them, they were accepted. By that time, the four of them changed their appearances to hide from anyone who might recognize them as fugitives. They had been on the news for a while, at least until things got so bad; then their story fell on the back burner. Chad constantly applied lemon juice to his hair so that, when he spent time outside, his hair turned a healthy golden blonde. He added a beard that he kept trimmed to five days’ maximum length. Calvin kept his natural hair color but changed the style and shortened it. He also added a beard. Walt went a different direction and completely shaved his head. He had a great skull for going without hair and the sun soon bronzed his skin. And Holly let her hair grow out. Not working around bodies anymore, she was able to do so and wear it down. She changed her hair color often and told the guys and the two friends she made in town that she liked to keep it interesting when it came to her hair.

  Money of the electronic form was no longer available in Hillsboro, but paper money changed hands there. The people of Hillsboro were good about sharing and goods made their way around the community well but there was still plenty of currency of favors. Some of the favors were good and some of them were not so good.

  Chad was thinking about one of the not-so-good favors he recently did while he sat on the edge of a chair and gazed out at the small Percha Creek. Chad shouldn’t have been ashamed. Sex was just sex after all, and he did what he needed to survive and ensure Holly, Walt, and Calvin did as well. And it’s not like Chad was married anymore or even committed to anyone. But the concept of using sex as a way to get something felt unpleasantly dirty to Chad.

  Something that didn’t feel unclean to him was his sobriety. Since the day when one man’s insane agenda met another’s brilliant but untested digital creation, Chad hadn’t had a drop of alcohol. They were on the run for the better part of a week before he even realized it. Perhaps the adrenaline overpowered the detoxification effects. But, by the time they arrived in Hillsboro, Chad considered himself a recovering alcoholic, and he had more pride in that than anything.

  He shifted the book in his hand and a small smile curled one side of his mouth. He took in a deep breath of the abundant fresh air, something he would never get tired of, and checked the watch on his wrist. It was the kind with two hands that ticked instead of a digital. His turn to cook at the café was this afternoon and evening. That was just fine with him. He preferred cooking over police work any day. And he definitely preferred cooking to earn his keep over getting in the middle of a horny husband and wife who wanted to use Chad to fulfil a fantasy in exchange for two chickens that Holly and Calvin had been desperately craving.

  Chad sighed at the mind-sight of Holly. She would be working at the café tonight too; doing her part, just like him. Chad thought they might be getting closer to each other, but he wasn’t sure. Holly admitted to him that she wasn’t the best at touching living people, but Chad wanted to believe she was getting there, at least with him anyway. But her aversion to touching the living was one of her phobias. Those didn’t go away just because one relocated, and Holly was no exception. When they first arrived at their new “home,” Holly saw two scorpions, and spent six hours on the roof of the house. She got a nasty sunburn before Calvin was able to get back with some bug perimeter spray that he heavily coated the foundation of the house with, thus barring entry of the creepy-crawlies. Chad also noticed that anytime Holly went go outside, she’d always be on the lookout for those “vile things,” as she called them.

  And Calvin’s phobias didn’t go away either. Fortunately, in a town the size of Hillsboro, it was hard for him to end up alone as there was virtually always someone around to spend time with, so his phobia of being alone was currently manageable. During the Great Blackout, however, Calvin had more panic attacks than Chad could remember; and they went through a shitload of batteries for the flashlights. Additionally, Calvin’s dreams didn’t get any better. And without the dream drugs, he had no real way to manage them. As such, Chad knew Calvin was down to a couple hou
rs of sleep a day, and the taxing signs of that were becoming more and more obvious on the kid’s face with each passing day. Calvin also told Chad that he hadn’t forgiven himself for what he did to that girl back in Minnesota. Chad tried to reassure Calvin that he wasn’t responsible, but Calvin very politely told Chad that was bullshit.

  Chad’s own phobia had also persisted. It still rode with him like a gremlin with razor sharp claws attached to his back. He still couldn’t look at or be near a gun without his heart stampeding, sweat pouring out, and salivating for some bourbon. And a lot of guns were out and about in this strange new world. The café was the only place in Hillsboro where guns weren’t allowed, and that was a large reason why Chad worked there.

  Walt, at least, was still Walt, though the sense of loss was always written on his face.

  In the last few weeks, in spite of his sobriety, Chad often wondered if they were going to survive. He also wondered where Justin Andrews was. Chad felt deep down the man who did all of this was still alive, still lurking out there. Chad often thought about what he would do to Andrews if he ever caught up to him. None of it was pleasant. Not one bit.

  Chad went back to the house, cleaned up a bit, and went in to work. He pushed thoughts of Justin Andrews out of his mind. Chad liked to smile and interact with the townspeople while at work, and thoughts of Justin Andrews could wait until tonight.

  Then Chad would fall asleep to the image of him murdering the man.

  ~~34~~

  After pouring over it for months, Miedo considered his last venture an overall failure. It wasn’t a complete failure, at least, because he’d managed to dispose of two phobics and some other meddlesome people. Mitchell’s worm did exactly what the kid said it might and Miedo was, at least, happy about that. His finances were safe. He had enough cash to sustain him while society worked to restore the digital world and the internet, and when it did, the money he had in a number of Swiss accounts would become active again. Last week, Miedo learned there were great strides being made and that the internet was hoped to be up and running again within the next six months. He laughed when he heard this because the person who told him that said it was being called “internet 2.0.” But three of the phobics had survived; his agenda, anyway. He had no way of knowing if they were still alive. The media lost interest in them quickly when more pressing worldwide news became evident. So, after all this time, Miedo felt like he had unfinished business.