The Curse of Friday the 13th, Day 3, Part 1

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Length (rounded up): 2000 words, 8 min.
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The Curse of Friday the 13th, Day 3, Part 1
Friday the 13th, 12:01 a.m.

Blindfolded, Julie took another cautious step, but still accidentally bumped into Mike who had already stopped, firmly holding her sweating hand.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Have we arrived?’

‘Yes, we have.’

‘Can I remove the blindfold?’ She impatiently raised her uncasted left arm to her head.

‘Yes, you can.’

To help his wife, whose right arm was severely restricted by a long cast, Mike reached out to untie the cloth that was wrapped around her head to cover her eyes. As he loosened the knot, the heavy, black fabric soundlessly slipped off and fell to the floor at their feet.

After Julie was freed from the temporary darkness, she also removed the neck sling that had been supporting her casted arm until then. She decided to get rid of it a long time ago, because the heavy weight of the plaster arm cast made her neck hurt, although the neck padding was amply cushioned. The sling also fell through the air and touched the ground, landing beside the discarded blindfold.

Exhausted after the long journey, Julie took a seat at the table. Mike had driven for hours, promising her a safe place to hide away from the ravages of the Curse of Friday the 13th. But they had just arrived at a steel gate that seemed to be in some distant, godforsaken area.

He had asked her to wear a blindfold so that she couldn’t see the check-in process, internal structures, and security codes (secrecy, you know, sweetie). She had heard the loud, metallic clang as the reinforced entrance had opened and closed, and their footsteps had echoed on the uncarpeted concrete floors. Finally, the electrical mechanism had hissed, signalling the opening of a door, and they had entered the next room.

After all the hustle and bustle, they found themselves in a small, peaceful space now. With a careless movement, Julie dropped her massive, cast-bound right arm onto the table. The unstrapped shoulder-to-wrist cast made a loud rumbling sound as it hit the wooden surface, making her fear that the sturdy shell would shatter. Eventually, the L-shaped cast rested on the desk, relieving her aching neck.

She wearily rested her head on her plaster-wrapped arm.

Mike peered at her. ‘You should be more careful with your broken arm.’

Julie checked the integrity of the plaster cast wrapping her limb. ‘If I would break my right arm again, would it be my fault? Or can I already blame the Curse?’

‘Let's greet the first minutes of the new Friday the 13th.’

Julie uninterestedly checked the chunky cast covering her right arm. She had worn so many casts, in so many different configurations, built from so many different materials that she couldn’t discover anything new in this one.

The restraining shell, which ran down from the armpit to the wrist, disabling both her elbow and wrist, was just a remnant of a supermassive plaster exterior that had been applied on the previous Friday the 13th. The short time between the second and the third Fridays hadn’t been long enough for all of her fractured bones to heal.

To protect her unhealthy right arm, the white shell tightly surrounded it from the armpit down to the wrist. The long arm cast was flexed at the elbow, forming a large, white letter L with a decent and textbook-perfect ninety-degree angle. Compensating for the handcuff-like restriction, its inside was adequately padded with soft linings.

The second thing, which could trigger her worst memories of the Curse, was a soft collar around her neck. Despite its resemblance to an oversized and uncomfortable neckwear that prevented Julie from moving her neck, the spongy material felt much better than the concrete-like Minerva cast she despised. As someone who valued appearance, she attempted to maintain at least a modicum of elegance in the face of adversity. She had put a colourful silk scarf around her neck to conceal the big neck brace. However, her efforts were in vain.

The Curse of Friday the 13th... After experiencing two terrible Fridays the 13th, Julie had become more open to accepting the existence of supernatural events. Mike was a good and brave man, but, unlike her, he was sceptical and grounded in reality, unable to believe in unexplainable interventions.

Two anomalous series of disasters had befallen her on the previous two Fridays the 13th. From a mystical point of view, it categorically had to be the Curse. But, when viewed through the lens of common sense, it was an entirely different story.

Every doctor who had put Julie into a full body cast, as well as the nurses who had wiped the dust off her medical shell, agreed on one thing. They had all insisted on a logical explanation: the Curse of Friday the 13th does not (or cannot) exist, and everything that had happened to Julie must have been a fateful concerto of mutually interacting, unfortunate events.

Anyway, from Julie’s frog-perspective, the rules of the cruel game were insanely simple. Until the midnight on Friday the 13th, she had to endure a series of accidents, crashes and incidents that broke, crushed and mangled every bone in her body. During this bewildering sequence of events, she was fitted with various types of casts to treat the broken parts of her body.

With each new disaster, more and more casts were added. The envelopment enwrapping her body unstoppably grew larger and larger... and finally, just before midnight, and after several mishaps, she found herself tightly wrapped like a mummy in an impenetrable sarcophagus, which firmly secured and softly embraced each part of her body, including her face.

By the end of the infamous Fridays the 13th, Julie became a prisoner in plaster, transformed into a motionless and speechless patient, buried alive in a stone-hard and body-shaped shell, completely isolated from the world.

Reflecting on her life, which the Curse had torn in two, she recalled what her calendar looked like during those days. She spent most of her time in casts, wholly moulded around in rigid layers, thrown down and kept in a static, separated, and utterly dull state of existence, deprived of almost everything that makes life worth living.

In the remaining short, cast-free weeks between two full body casts, she had to wait in dread for the arrival of Friday the 13th, which would bring its new series of accidents, and she had to welcome a brand new, all-encompassing medical shell, which this Cursed Day would kindly provide to her.

How can life be such unfair to me? Why do I deserve this fate? – she contemplated. Protecting her plastered arm, Julie shifted her posture in the seat.

At least, Mike told her what time it was. The new Friday the 13th had just begun. But she still didn’t know where she had been taken to.

She looked around to explore the small room, which was furnished with simple but functional pieces of furniture. A modest bed, a table, two chairs, and a small-screen TV in the corner. Like a low-budget, half-star motel room, which had just been vandalised. By berserking tax officials.

‘Much ado about nothing.’ She shared her scathing review of the subterranean and substandard hotel room.

Mike smiled. ‘Would you change your opinion if you would know more about it? You’re in one of the safest places in the whole world, honey.’

A little more interested, Julie looked around again, trying to find a reason to reconsider her evaluation. But she couldn’t.

‘No idea.’

‘This is a COG shelter,’ Mike said.

The secret was out, but the acronym didn't reveal much to Julie. ‘A what?’

‘Continuity of Government. If a natural disaster, an attack or anything else would decapitate the state, in other words, it would wipe out the whole government, the people here would take control, and continue to govern the country. Julie, what you're allowed to see is just a simple room, but this facility serves as the headquarters for an entire staff.’

Julie’s eyes got wide open, but Mike remained serious.

‘How do you know about this place?’

‘The details are top secret,’ he said. ‘I know about it, because the company I work for is a vendor of the DoD. Right after the second Friday the 13th, I had an idea about how to help you. However, it took a few months for me to get the necessary clearances to bring you here. Only a select, small number of people have the privilege of being here.’

‘Where are we now exactly?’ Her fingers nervously tapped on the hard top of her long arm cast.

‘I cannot disclose the exact location, because this is highly classified information. This is why I asked you to leave our cell phones at home so that we couldn’t be followed or tracked, and this is why we changed cars on the way here. It's also why I had to blindfold you before you entered this building. For the moment, it’s enough to know that we’re in Sublevel Five.’

‘Are we under the ground?’ she asked.

‘Yes. There are four more floors above us, and the whole building is protected with a thirty-foot-thick, reinforced ferroconcrete dome. On the surface, another hundreds of feet of conglomerate consisting of rock, soil, and sand cover this whole lovely location.’

Julie’s jaw dropped. ‘Concrete and reinforced walls? And...?’

‘The deepest level to which I could get a free ticket for you for today was the minus fifth floor. The lower levels below us are reserved for the permanent staff only. But, unluckily, you’re just a civilian visitor, and we can’t get any deeper than that.’

‘Have you already been down there already? And how many more levels are there?’

‘There was a lot of information that wasn’t shared with me.’ Mike reached out and placed his hand on Julie’s casted hand, preparing her to hear something important. ‘And one more thing. To make sure that you cannot see anything confidential, you aren't allowed to roam around the facility. You must remain in this room until the morning of Saturday the 14th.’

She put her hand over her heart. ‘I swear that I'm going to stay here.'

‘Sorry, Julie. Your oath isn’t enough for the people, who run this place. They instructed me to lock the door, and leave you here alone for the next twenty-four hours.’

‘And you?’ she asked.

‘Terribly sorry, but I'm afraid I can’t stay with you.’

‘Why?’

‘Ask some assholes at the Pentagon. But the most important thing is that you’re going to get through this damn day without any harm.‘

‘You're hiding me here because you fear that Adam and Eve Nilrem would hire someone to break my bones just and put me back into a full body cast? Don’t you think that the Curse can be real?‘

‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ Mike stood up to kiss her goodbye, and shut the door.

The thought of being alone filled her with fear. Left there, she was sitting in her seat, slightly uneasily. She was locked up in a room, which was just a bit more homely than a prison cell. However, it was the price she had to pay for her safety.

Ominously, the old fractures under her shoulder-to-wrist arm cast began to ache again. To cuddle the injured arm, Julie tried to find a place, which could be more comfortable than the wooden desk. How about lying on the bed and watching TV all day? Hopefully, it'll be merely boredom and not the Curse that will torment her today.

Already resting on the bed, she found an excellent spot for her cast-bound arm, nesting her incapacitated limb into a cushion. Peering at the grey ceiling, she started to feel safe, and the icy grip of fear around her heart began to thaw.

After all, what harm can came to her in a government shelter, which was deep under the ground? What wicked machination of the Curse can penetrate into the safest place in the world?

to be continued

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