Excerpt from Phobia: A Jake Hawksworth Thriller

CHAPTER ONE

Angela Gonzales white-knuckled the steering wheel, her heartbeat thrumming in cadence with the sweep of the wipers.  The rain pounded the windshield with a vengeance so fierce Angela feared the glass would implode, the mighty torrent washing her away in a blur.

She was still shaken by the day’s earlier events.  If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she never would have believed it. She’d returned to the office, burying herself in the stack of Tuesday to-dos piled up on her desk, hoping no one noticed the concern etched in her face.  Once five o’clock rolled around, she hightailed it out of there and headed across town toward Doctor Weston’s to spill her guts.

Angela contemplated how to approach the unsettling news to the doctor.  What if Weston just brushed it off as another of her paranoid delusions?  She’d made such progress over the last six months and didn’t want Doc to think she’d taken a step backward.

A chill tickled the back of Angela’s neck.  She instinctively swatted at the imaginary tentacles that ran across her neck and down her spine.  Although it was only late afternoon, it may as well be midnight. Tempestuous leaden clouds rolled over one another in an angry dance, releasing their violent rage on the hapless drivers below.  

Angela’s muscles tensed as she approached the bridge.  Bridges.  Fucking bridges.  Just one of a handful of phobias she suffered from.  With Doctor Weston’s help, she’d made significant progress on most.  The bridge thing was still a work in progress.  And then there was that other one—the whopper of them all.

As the car rolled across the bridge, Angela’s heart banged around inside her ribcage.  Though the bridge was a shiny new steel structure, the fear that it would collapse sending her to her doom was overwhelming.  Logically, she knew it wouldn’t, but that didn’t quell the all-encompassing sense of dread coursing through her body.  

That nagging tickle again.  This time across her arms.  Down her legs.  Ignore it.  Mind over matter.  Just like Doc always says.  She dismissed the rumble of the bridge beneath her, the sizzle of the rain on the roof overhead, and went to her happy place.  

She and Dina are in their favorite spot on a pristine white beach, the sun kissing their exposed skin, the silky sand glistening on their sinewy bodies.  And not a damned bridge in sight.  Or spider.

Her breath cinched.  Her eyes zeroed in on her arm.  Was it a trick of the light?  A reflection of the rain drizzling down the windshield?  Then she saw another.  And another.  Little black dots running up and down her right arm.  That tickly, crawly sensation again on her neck, her legs, her head.  More dots skittered across the edges of her vision.  Across the dashboard. 

A sharp pain stabbed her right calf.  Then another.  The realization hit her like a one-two between the eyes.  Her greatest fear a stark reality.  She flicked on the overhead light, illuminating the cabin.  Hundreds, maybe thousands of spiders of various shapes and sizes skittered chaotically around her.  Angela screamed, instinctively slammed on the brakes.  The car fishtailed, ricocheted off a concrete barrier, reentered the traffic—into the oncoming lights of a large truck. 

Angela struggled to regain control of the vehicle as the spindly creatures danced across her body.  One hand swatting, the other gripping the steering wheel like a vise.  She maneuvered the vehicle back into her lane, out of the path of the ten tons of steel bearing down on her.  She had to get out of the car now.  Get these things off her.  Another creature bit into her, this time her neck.  The pain was agonizing.  She let loose a guttural wail.  

The car drifted back into the truck’s path, as if being guided by the creatures crisscrossing across the steering wheel.  She heard the warning of the horn, the flashing of the truck’s lights.  But her hands no longer gripped the wheel.  Instead, they clawed at her face, swiping at the gummy organisms relentlessly traversing her face, burrowing in her ears, her nose, her mouth.  

The truck’s lights encompassed her.  Her mind flashed to that beach again.  To Dina.  Her one true love.  The only one who had ever had the patience to weather all her neuroses and phobias.  The last thing Angela saw was a pair of black orbs flanked by hairy tentacles.  Her scream was shrouded by the crunch of metal on metal and the escalating storm.  And then all her fears were gone.