The Devil's Grip: The Curse of Stone Falls Read online

  The ambulance rolled away with a few cars trailing behind.

  ~

  Gina lay in bed, unable to move. She turned her head toward the alarm clock. The glowing red numbers indicated 9:45 AM. She wouldn’t miss work today, for she no longer was a Burger King employee as of 9:15 PM the previous evening. Managers do not like to be insulted. A confirmation of what she had said with a single middle digit high toward the ceiling had not helped either. That was all right. Everything was all right. Nothing mattered anymore. She couldn’t even hear her mother babbling from her bedroom. That’s all she did; whine, scream, yell, complain, and insult her. That’s all she knew how to do from her soiled bed.

  It would be so easy. She would slip a rope around her own neck. In a few minutes she would be done, no more suffering, no more pain, no more fighting, screaming, no more anything.

  Her mother would win. Gina couldn’t deal with that. She couldn’t do that, not yet at least. It would be a last resort, the final option for her broken life. Oh, she knew she was messed up. She didn’t need a shrink to tell her that much. But she didn’t want to lay on a couch for the rest of her short life. What for? To hear that she had lost it because of her mother? That wouldn’t be news to her.

  What could she do? Leave? How? She had no money, no job–any more–no hope. Get rid of her mother? The thought had crossed her mind a few times, but she couldn’t do it. She was her mother after all.

  She felt weak, cold, sick. She was dying. She knew it. Life was slipping away from her body. She picked up the phone and dialed.

  ~

  “Engine 61, Medic 61, unknown medical, 725 Meadow Drive.”

  “Hey, it’s Gina!” Ben said before turning on his emergency lights.

  Alex picked up the mic, “We haven’t seen her in a few days,” he said before pushing on the switch. “Medic 61, en route.” He hooked the microphone back on the radio. “One of these days we’re going to find her dead.”

  “Don’t say that. I would miss her.”

  The ambulance slowed down at a red light. Ben made sure that drivers stopped in each lane on his left. He proceeded a few feet forward and did the same on the right. All the vehicles stopped, a Ford Explorer in the left turning lane, a lone Ford Focus on the number one lane, and a light pickup truck and a motorcycle on the number two. The right turning lane was empty. The way was clear to proceed forward.

  Whether it was his gut feeling or by experience, Ben felt the need to stop.

  A white Kia came barreling down the hill toward the intersection. The small car slammed into the Focus and propelled it across the street. As if in slow motion, the white Ford passed in front of them and finished its course onto the opposite curb. The culprit stopped where it had hit the other car. Steam was escaping beneath its crumpled hood.

  “Yep, I saw that one coming,” Ben said.

  Alex did not comment. “Medic 61 still alarm,” he radioed.

  “61 go ahead.”

  “Traffic collision Washington Avenue and Monterey Bay Boulevard, two vehicles involved, unknown injuries, we proceed to our initial call.”

  “Copy, two vehicle TC, Washington Avenue and Monterey Bay, unknown injury, break, Stone Falls Engine 62, Medic 62, traffic collision Washington Avenue and Monterey Bay, unknown injuries.”

  Ben parked the unit in front of Gina’s house, as usual. The engineer was outside, waiting against the white Engine 61.

  “I guess Gina isn’t doing so hot today,” Ben told the older firefighter.

  “The girl’s nuts, what can you do?” he said, hardly raising a lazy shoulder.

  The medics pushed the gurney for another run at Gina’s house. It was the same routine without much variation: they knocked, she opened in tears, and they listened to her rant for a few minutes without being able to get much out of her. In the meantime, her mother would be in the bedroom yammering about her daughter.

  Some crews didn’t mind calls to her house. The sadness had passed, and the situation was almost becoming comical. Other paramedics like Alex had a harder time. They felt powerless and unable to help her. He had learned to treat people because he wanted to help them out. He had gone to paramedic school to ease people’s pain and comfort the anxious. It sounded cliché, but it was true. He wanted to be the one to hold the hand of a scared patient and witness the first smile on the road to recovery. Gina was out of the norm. She was lost in her dark universe of pain and fear, and there was nothing he could do for her except attempt to ease her mental suffering.

  The ride to the hospital was as anodyne as the rest of the call. Sometimes Gina talked about her mother. Other times she mostly stayed quiet with a blank stare toward the window. The world moved on outside. Hers had stopped a long time ago.

  “How are you today, Gina?” Ben asked seated next to her on the side bench.

  She looked at his direction in an empty gaze. She was not looking at him; she was looking through him, as if she had heard a voice from an invisible being.

  “Gina?”

  Alex waved his hand in front of her face to get some kind of reaction.

  Nothing.

  Alex sat back on the cushioned bench and filled out his paperwork. He knew everything all too well, her name, date of birth, medical history, down to the medication she was taking and allergies, but just short of her social security number, as if he had purposely forgotten it out of decency.

  They arrived at the hospital without lights and siren. Where was the urgency? They rolled her out of the ambulance and wheeled her inside the twenty-bed emergency room.

  “Hi, Gina!” a few nurses said with a jovial outpour as they walked by.

  One of them came by with a clipboard in hand. “Welcome back, Gina. It’s nice to see you again,” Emily, a young Asian nurse, said. She was short, thin, and beautiful, as she could judge from the not-so-appropriate looks from the firefighters and paramedics. She felt like a walking ice cream cone, but she didn’t care. She acted the way she was brought up in China, sweet and smiling, but she would be able to claw any of these guys’ jugulars in a heartbeat, the Chinese tiger way. Submissive Asian girls? Yeah, right.

  Why hadn’t she attended medical school? She had thought about it, but it wasn’t for her. She didn’t want to spend a decade in school (to the great despair of her father), but above all she loved the contact with patients. That’s why she had become a nurse in the first place. Doctors were buried in their stacks of notes, no thank you.

  Gina stayed silent.

  “Anything new I should know of?” The young nurse asked Alex.

  “Nothing.”

  “That was easy.”

  Ben looked at the empty beds around the ER. “It’s quiet today.”

  Emily’s head snapped toward him. “You just didn’t say that!”

  A male African American nurse walked by. “What did he say?”

  “Ben used the Q word.”

  “You used the Q word?” the man asked him.

  “So what?” Ben asked, perfectly knowing the answer.

  “You know better. Now it’s gonna be very busy!” Emily said.

  “Ben, how many times did I tell you that you can’t say that it’s QUIET in an emergency room?” Alex asked while holding a laugh.

  “You two… not cool. Nope, that was NOT COOL,” the man said.

  Ben came closer to the nurse in blue scrubs. “Seriously, Tyron, when do you plan on having a man’s job?” The two paramedics chuckled again.

  “You see, Ben, I’m the smart one. While you boys hang out between dudes, I’m all alone with all those charming women.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t like bald guys!” Ben replied.

  “Oh, trust me, they do,” he rubbed his bare skull, “this thing is a chick magnet.”

  “Um, Tyron, I’m still here,” Emily elbowed him before walking away to the nurses’ station.

  “All right, that’s all nice and fun but we have to go back to the station to play Call of Duty,” Ben said, tapping Alex on the back.
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  They both walked past the automatic doors in a light stroll.

  Tyron glanced at his patient, “Don’t worry, Gina, we’re going to take care of you.”

  She glared back at him with a cold and soulless stare.

  A shiver ran down his spine. Who was this girl lying on the bed? She was not the Gina he was familiar with. Something was happening.

  Stone Falls High

  Jessica knew what suffering meant. Suffering was sitting in a math class. She consulted her watch with a slight movement of her wrist, because she didn’t want to look too obviously bored. She wouldn’t get in trouble if she was caught. Half the class was brain dead anyway, lost somewhere between food coma and complete boredom. Some of the students had a blank stare headed roughly toward the white board. Others had their heavy heads deeply anchored on their closed fists at the end of their vertical arms like support beams on one of those Californian houses at the edge of a cliff.

  A few girls wore skirts much too short. High school wasn’t a place to learn and grow. It was a social theater, not to say a breeding ground. She wondered how some of them weren’t pregnant yet. She knew she wouldn’t do anything before marriage. That was old fashioned, she knew that much, but it was ok. She didn’t mind the occasional mockery either. Waiting was well worth it.

  Jessica cared about her teacher, Miss Taylor. How would she feel seeing another one of her students looking at her watch?

  What about the clock on the wall, you might ask. They all indicated noon. The principal had decided to unplug all of them since they distracted the students. That was at least what he thought.

  Her wrist achieved the appropriate rotation angle for ideal time viewing: 2:51 PM. Another nine minutes of math to go. She could handle that.

  She looked out the window. A few short trees sprawled in front of the main building. Wooden benches were scattered along narrow concrete pathways through short grass. A proud American flag floated above a state flag on top of a tall mast mounted on a round stone base. A small army of yellow school buses were already parked along the curb.

  2:56 PM. Miss Taylor announced the next day’s homework. The classroom came to life in a rising clamor. Some of the boys emerged out of their sleep, occasionally wiping a speck of drool. Others asked the teacher to repeat a page number, and a last one complained that it was too much.

  Jessica didn’t say anything. She duly noted the assignment, even if she cringed at the idea of spending quality time with her math book.

  3:00 PM. The school bell rang. Jessica stood with the rest of the classmates. They were classmates, not really friends. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them, far from that. She just didn’t feel that she had anything in common with most of them. They were into football and flirting, drinking beer on Friday nights, and spending half of their Saturdays comatose in their beds. She was at the polar opposite, involved in her church and children counseling, which didn’t make her Miss Popular.

  She left her desk and joined the herd of students surging in the white wall corridor. She followed the crowd streaming down the stairs like a flash flood onto the main hallway and gushed out of the three-story red brick building onto the street.

  She walked down another few steps and traveled through the narrow park before the four-lane boulevard. The density of people decreased as she walked farther away from the sprawling building. Her thoughts were already getting lost in the late afternoon. Homework, math first to get rid of the painful part, English second, an easy chapter to read with a short summary and a few questions, American Hist–

  “Hi Jessica,” a man’s voice called her.

  The young girl snapped out of her post-classroom daze. She looked to her right and gasped.

  Jeff Simons was walking toward her like a wolf closing in on its prey.

  The encounter was surreal. It wasn’t a coincidence. She knew that right away.

  “How are you?” He asked her with a beaming smile.

  Her blood froze. She was entering an entirely new level of discomfort at the very edge of fear. The man was following her. He was stalking her. Jeff Simons was a hunter.

  She quickly glanced around her to find somebody, a backup, a friend, a group of jocks, a police officer, school security, anyone. A few girls were farther away, but much too far to be of any immediate help.

  “I was looking for you,” Simons said stopping in front of her.

  She stood there, waiting for what was next, still looking for potential help.

  Simons saw her impending distress, her gaze scanning for assistance atop her stiff body. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just could not wait ‘til Friday to talk to you.” He paused. “Look, I was a little too forward last week. That was inappropriate of me. I apologize if I made you uncomfortable.” He laid his thick hand on her frail shoulder. “I hope you can forgive me for what I said, and I hope we can be friends, if that’s ok with you.”

  She stayed silent for an instant, her breathing short and shallow. “Of course,” she managed to say in one fleeting breath.

  “Good, I’m glad.” At about six feet tall, Simons was towering above her, his cold brown eyes locked onto the young student like a serial killer awaiting the perfect moment to strike.

  “I have to go home now,” she managed to say, her mouth hardly open.

  “I’m happy I found you.” His hand finally released its grasp on her shoulder, only to grab her hand. “Really, I am so glad we had that little talk. I didn’t want us to start on the wrong foot.” He tapped her delicate hand already a prisoner of his grip.

  The words echoed in her terrified mind, start? Start what? A friendship? What friendship could they have? He was an older man. She was a young girl. Was this even legal?

  He tapped her on the shoulder. “See you on Friday.” He smiled and walked away.

  She stayed where she was for a short moment. After she made sure he was gone, she started walking again. Was he truly gone? Was he following her? She didn’t think so, but she didn’t think he would meet her at school either.

  A small group of girls was heading in the same direction she was. She paced to catch up with them and stayed within a short distance.

  She used to enjoy her walk home, the majestic oaks dwarfing her, even without their leaves in the winter. She liked looking at people watering their lawns or walking their dogs.

  She had entered a different world. She looked over her shoulder to find him. Was he following her? Perhaps he was hiding in a car? Or maybe behind one of those trees she loved so much. She stopped and turned around. Her breathing was shallow. She was trying to be quiet. She didn’t even know why.

  She repeated the process all the way home. She walked for a while and stopped to scan her surroundings. Did he know where she lived? It wouldn’t be difficult to find out if he wanted.

  Jessica reached her older two-story house. She unlocked the front door, swung around it, and locked it again right away. She stepped backward, her eyes riveted on the white wooden front door. She turned around, ran to her room, slammed her door behind her, and collapsed on the bed. She jerked an instant, an uncontrollable sob invading her. She felt betrayed, violated.

  Somebody rapped on her bedroom door.

  She screamed.

  “What’s going on?” Tracy shouted through the door. She opened without waiting for an answer. “What the hell happened to you?” Her sister was lying on the bed, face down. “Jess?” She came closer. “Jess? What’s wrong? Talk to me.” She gently sat next to her. “Tell me.” She laid a sweet hand on her sister’s back.

  Jessica jerked away from her as if she was jolted by an electrical charge.

  “Jess, it’s me. What happened?”

  Jessica sat on the bed, knees to her chest. She took a deep breath and explained what had happened starting from the previous Friday with the wish-he-was-her-boyfriend comment, or even the lovely-lady episode. What might have been borderline from anybody else now seemed like venom from him. She finished her account wit
h the obvious, finding him at school and his apology which only made the matter much worse. The man was following her. That was the bottom line. For what she knew, he was outside spying on them as they spoke.

  “I’m going to rip his eyeballs out.” Tracy clenched her black-nailed fingers around his imaginary neck. “We need to tell somebody.”

  “Mom?”

  “And Dad, maybe he can talk to his cop friend.”

  “You want to talk to the police?” Her teary eyes opened wider.

  “Jess, you don’t know how far this bastard is willing to go. I’m not going to sit around and wait for something bad to happen before I do something.”

  Next

  The bomb fell on Jane, Jessica’s mother, a few minutes after she arrived home from the hospital. She sat at the kitchen table and took a deep breath.

  “That’s not the kind of thing you want to hear after a twelve-hour shift.”

  Sitting next to Tracy, Jessica lowered her head.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not upset, I just need to figure out what happened.” She took a short while to collect her thoughts. “Let’s see. You met this guy… what’s his name again?” She asked looking at her younger daughter.

  “Jeff Simons.”

  “Right, so you met this Jeff Simons at church. He’s the dad of a new kid, and he made you uncomfortable.”

  “That’s the least you can say. That bastard was hitting on her! He could be her dad! If he touches her, I’m going to kill him!”

  “Tracy, this isn’t helping. We need to stay calm and collected,” her mother said.

  The older sister shook her head and rolled her eyes in frustration.

  The mother continued. “Then, today, he went to the school and apologized.”

  “It’s the way he said it, Mom. It was so wrong.”

  “What concerns me is that he went to your school. That’s…” she shook her head, “that’s creepy.”

  “This guy is a stalker!” Tracy blustered.

  “What can we do, Mom?”