Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3)

by Brian Rowe

  But before she said anything, Yolanda leaned forward, grabbed for the shovel, and missed.

  “Give it!” Yolanda shouted. “Give me the shovel, damn it!”

  Liesel gave it to her all right. She slammed it down against Yolanda’s nose, and blood sprayed all over the sister’s face. Yolanda brought her head back down to the ground, looking, finally, defeated.

  But Yolanda didn’t start crying; instead, she started laughing.

  I took a few steps closer to Liesel, who looked both in pain at her adopted sister’s disloyalty and enraged at what Hannah had gotten the girl to do for her.

  “Do you two have any idea what’s coming to you?” Yolanda asked rhetorically, letting out a big whopper of a laugh.

  “What do you know?” Liesel shoved her foot against Yolanda’s abdomen. Yolanda coughed and bit down on her bottom lip.

  She smiled. “I know a hell of a lot more than you do, you dumb knocked up bitch—”

  “HEY!” Now it was my turn to get angry. I brought my foot down on the girl’s abdomen, too. Yolanda coughed up some blood and smiled, even though Liesel and I could see that the girl was in massive pain. Her nose looked twisted, and the most blood of all was seeping down her nostrils. “That’s my wife you’re talking to!”

  Liesel pushed down harder. “Tell us what you know, Yolanda. Right now.”

  “Or you’ll what?” Yolanda asked.

  Liesel grabbed for the shovel, and Yolanda put her hands up in the air. “Try me,” Liesel said.

  “OK,” Yolanda said. “OK, OK, OK.”

  “Speak,” Liesel said, pushing the shovel up against Yolanda’s neck.

  Yolanda seemed to have difficulty breathing, but she managed to smile through all the blood and cracked teeth. “Hannah is going to destroy you both—”

  “How do we find her?” Liesel shouted. I had never seen this much menace on Liesel’s face before. She looked at the point of actually killing her own sister.

  “I know where she is, and I know what she’s capable of,” Yolanda said, laughing amidst her words. “You think I’m on your side? Think again. You abandoned us when we needed you most, Alicia. You just up and left. You think I admired you for that? You think I even had a choice here?”

  “Answer me, goddammit!” Liesel shouted.

  Yolanda started breathing heavily as she stared up at Liesel with cold eyes. “She’s up north. She’s waiting for you.”

  “Where up north?”

  “She’s waiting for both of you, plus someone else.”

  “Someone else?” I asked, finally saying something in all this heated commotion. Liesel didn’t even look at me.

  “Who?” Liesel demanded.

  “Hannah wants to see you. But she won’t disclose her location until you bring her the man she’s been waiting to kill.”

  I was lost, but Liesel seemed to understand her. “You don’t mean…”

  “I do,” Yolanda said. “Dr. Rice. The man who diagnosed, treated, and ultimately killed our mother.”

  “That’s just your theory,” Liesel said.

  “Oh, it’s no theory,” Yolanda said. “He was the guy who diagnosed her, who administered the treatments, who we saw week after week. He promised us Mom would be OK, that she would pull through. She didn’t. She got worse. She suffered. For months. And then she died a gruesome, horrible death, after all the advice he gave, after all the supposed wisdom he brought to the table. The man’s a monster. Who knows how many people out there have died because of his neglect and stupidity? You left early, Alicia. You have no idea how bad it got.”

  And meanwhile all the innocent people in the world are dying because of Hannah’s neglect and stupidity, I couldn’t help but think. Can we say, hypocrite?

  “So let me get this straight,” Liesel said. “Hannah wants us to kidnap this doctor and bring him to her, so she can kill him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “OK… well… where are we supposed to find him?”

  I couldn’t believe Liesel was giving into Yolanda and Hannah’s demands so easily. It sounded like a plan to Hell and back. I didn’t want to kidnap some innocent man who had nothing to do with me. And I certainly didn’t want to appear before Hannah with a person she believed to be the killer of her own mother. There didn’t seem to be a happy ending to that proposition.

  But before Liesel and I could discuss the matter further, the two of us just stared at each other in disbelief, as more laughter erupted from beneath. But it wasn’t coming from Yolanda. It was coming from Yolanda’s cell phone.

  “You wanna know, Liesel? I can give you exact directions.” The cell phone had been turned to speakerphone.

  “Hannah?” Liesel asked, leaning down and picking up the phone. She held it out in front of her so I could hear, too.

  “It is I, little sis,” Hannah said. “You haven’t been hurting Yolanda now, have you?”

  “Only a little,” Liesel said, shrugging as she looked at me.

  “The beloved Dr. Rice lives in Los Angeles, but he’s vacationing right now in Santa Barbara.” Hannah giggled over the phone for a moment, and then returned to her rant. “He’s staying at a mansion that looks out over the Pacific Ocean, at 4321 Raleigh Way. You find him, you kidnap him, you start heading north. You prove to me you have him, and I’ll tell you where I am.”

  “Why?” Liesel asked. “Why couldn’t you just go find him and kill him yourself? Why involve us? What’s the point?”

  “It’s all part of the game,” she said. “You messed up, leaving us the way you did. And now you have to suffer, just like—”

  “Didn’t I suffer enough in your goddamn basement, Hannah?”

  A laugh ensued. They seemed to get deeper and scarier each time. “That was the appetizer,” Hannah said. “That was nothing. The real adventure for the newlyweds? It begins now.”

  “Adventure… what adventure…”

  “Kidnap Dr. Rice. It shouldn’t be that hard. He’s powerful and rich, but also slim and non-threatening in the physical department. Prove to me over the phone that you have him, and I’ll tell you my whereabouts. And when the three of you get to me? It’ll be a showdown for the ages.”

  “Listen to yourself, Hannah,” Liesel said. She was so heated that she looked to be foaming at the mouth. “You’ve gone completely insane, do you understand? People are dying. All over the world. And you’re hiding out somewhere, enjoying all the misery and torture when you should be—”

  “I suffered, Alicia,” Hannah said, interrupting. “For all those years you were away playing pizza waitress in dumpy old Reno, I was suffering. I watched our mother die, slowly, painfully. I’m only returning the favor to the rest of the world. I’m only giving everyone a glimpse at what I went through for those four, long years. Four years I can never get back.”

  “This is absurd,” Liesel said.

  “And that glimpse? It’s only getting smaller.”

  I shook my head, feeling sick to my stomach. This can’t be good.

  Liesel looked at me with terror. “What do you mean, Hannah?”

  “What I mean…” Again, another laugh. “Remember, Cameron, when I sped up the aging process last April? When I had you go from age seven to age one in a matter of hours?”

  “No…” I said.

  “NO!” Liesel shouted.

  “Up until tonight, everyone in the world has been aging a whole year with each passing day. At midnight tonight, they’re going to start aging a whole year… with each passing hour.”

  I slumped to the ground and vomited next to Yolanda. Liesel looked ready to collapse, but she kept her ground and stood upright, a tear falling down her cheek.

  “No… No… Hannah… you can’t.”

  “I can do whatever the hell I want,” she said.

  “That gives us no time!”

  “That’s all you’ve had! Time! Well you know what? Time’s run out! For you! For Cameron! For the rest of the world!”

  Liesel immediatel
y changed her expression from one of sadness, to one of madness.

  “Hurry, Alicia,” Hannah said. “The clock is ticking.”

  And with that, the line went dead, and Liesel just stood there, her face all red, the phone shoved up against her nose and lips. Liesel threw the phone back to the ground and pointed at me.

  “Stand on top of her,” Liesel said.

  “On Yolanda?”

  “Do it!”

  I did as I was told. I pressed against Yolanda’s abdomen.

  “We have to go, Cam,” Liesel said. “You have to do the spell.”

  “Which spell?”

  “You know which spell!”

  “No…” Yolanda said. “Please… please, don’t…”

  “The one meant for Hannah?” I asked, hoping it wouldn’t be so.

  “Yes! We can’t trust Yolanda!”

  “I can’t! I won’t!”

  “Do it, Cam!” Liesel shouted, her rage intensifying by the second. “She’s one of the bad guys! She’s on Hannah’s side!”

  “She’s your sister!” I shouted, grabbing Liesel’s arm and bringing her toward me. “This is insane!”

  “Hannah’s my sister, too, Cam,” Liesel said. “Are you saying you won’t kill Hannah when the time comes?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s different. She’s—”

  “Now’s not the time for sympathy.” Liesel just stared at me, like I was an idiot for not wanting to split her sister in two. “She just killed an innocent person right before our eyes!”

  I looked down at Yolanda. The girl looked scared. There was no smart-mouthing coming out of her now.

  I couldn’t do it. I could hurt Hannah, but I couldn’t bring myself to harm this girl Yolanda. She hadn’t done enough for me to warrant killing her.

  “Oh fine,” Liesel said, and she brought the shovel down on top of Yolanda’s face, again. Even more blood sprayed everywhere, and the girl slumped over to her left, knocked unconscious.

  “Oh my God…” I said.

  “Let’s go!” Liesel shouted, grabbing my hand and racing across the cavern for my car. She dropped the shovel along the way and started outrunning me.

  We both looked back at Yolanda’s body before we jumped into the car. She wasn’t moving.

  I started up the car and headed for the exit.

  “Cameron?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t wimp out on me with Hannah, OK? You have to promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Yolanda’s death wouldn’t stop the end of the world,” Liesel said. “But Hannah’s could.”

  “I know.”

  “Promise me!”

  “I just did!” I breathed through my nose and tried not to panic. “I’ll say it again, OK? I promise! I swear!”

  “OK. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I reached speeds of seventy miles per hour as I sped my car up out of the cavern into the quiet nighttime desert of Red Rock Canyon.

  DAD

  “We have to leave, Stephen.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “My patients are counting on me.”

  “Your wife and daughter and son are counting on you. Things are crumbling. The world is going insane. How can you possibly think about work right now?”

  “How can you even mention our son?” Stephen asked, a look on his face that suggested he wanted to slap his own wife. “Cameron just took off. Didn’t even say good-bye. Didn’t tell us where he was going, or why he was going.”

  Shari took a step closer to her husband and tried not to scream. “We’ve gone through this a million times, honey. Kimber said he and Liesel needed some time away, but that he would be back. That he was gone for a very good reason and that when he returned he would have an explanation for us.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Of course it’s enough. Don’t you trust Kimber?”

  “I do. It’s our son I don’t trust anymore.”

  Stephen moved past his wife and started walking angrily to the closet.

  “Where are you going?” Shari asked.

  “I’m getting ready for work, damn it! My first appointment’s in thirty minutes!”

  “Honey, please!”

  Stephen watched as Shari slowly stepped toward him, tears running down her face. She got down on her knees, right in front of him, like she wanted to start praying.

  “Honey, I beg you,” Shari said. “Please. Don’t go into work today. Let’s take Kimber and just start driving. Let’s go somewhere quiet, somewhere we can wait until this all blows over.”

  “That’s impossible—”

  “Stephen, look at yourself!” He stared at Shari, then slowly drew his attention toward the bathroom mirror. “Look at me! Look at us! We look sixty years old!”

  “I’ve been meaning to go to the doctor about it—”

  “It’s happening to everyone,” Shari said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Your own daughter is looking like a freaking grad student, and you’re not even noticing. All you care about are your patients, and your damn career. What’s the career going to be worth to you if your family takes off without you?”

  Stephen patted the scruff at the bottom of his chin and gave himself a good look in the mirror. He had grown older. His hair had turned nearly one hundred percent white. He didn’t look like the toned, attractive forty-two-year-old any longer.

  But he turned back to Shari, and tried to forget about his appearance. He had to. “What are you saying, Shari? Are you saying you’re going to take our daughter away from here?”

  “Yes. Today.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “She’s our daughter! She’s all we have! We are going through some serious shit here, Stephen, and you’re just going to report to work this morning like it’s any other Monday?”

  Stephen moved in closer to his wife. “Well isn’t that what Cameron did when he started rapidly aging? I begged you to let me take him to that clinic in Phoenix. But oh no. We had to sit back and watch as he just went to school, trying to be normal as he kept getting older. You were OK with that. So why is this any different? Just because there’s a bleak phenomenon hitting the world, we’re supposed to just drop everything? Go hide in the wilderness somewhere and hope that everything’s going to turn out OK? You can do that, Shari, but you’re not taking me with you. It’s stupid. It’s suicide!”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense, Stephen. Please don’t go to work today. I’m begging you.”

  “I have no choice. I’ve made my decision, and I want you to respect it. We can talk more about this later. But for now, I need to get dressed. I have a long day ahead of me.”

  Shari was crying again, hardcore. “Please… please, don’t… I love you, Stephen…”

  She tried to grab his shoulders, but he just shook her off.

  “Leave me alone!” Stephen shouted, the loud eruption of his voice knocking Shari back down to the carpet.

  She stared up at him for a moment, her jaw dropped. She shook her head as she got up on her feet and ran out of the room.

  Stephen washed his face in the sink and put on his purple scrubs. He was already running ten minutes late.

  But as Stephen raced downstairs toward the garage, he stopped himself. He glanced downstairs, where he could see and hear no commotion. He quietly stepped toward the first bedroom on the right and opened the door.

  He looked inside to see his daughter sleeping in her bed. He could tell she looked older, like she too was experiencing what Cameron suffered last year. If he hadn’t been watching the news, Stephen would’ve thought that the family had caught whatever disease Cameron had contracted. But he knew what was happening. He knew everybody was getting sick. He hoped it would’ve blown over by now, but it looked like this rapidly aging disease currently facing the entire world was progressing faster and faster, so much so that he’d gotten the call last night that his father had died of a sudden heart attack.

  “I hav
e to work,” he whispered out loud. “If I don’t go to work, I’m gonna go crazy. I’m sorry, Kimber. I’m so very sorry.”

  He closed the door softly and headed toward the garage.

  When he arrived at his plastic surgery practice on the seventeenth floor of the big West Meadows building, he had to rub his eyes for a few seconds to confirm the sight before him.

  “Oh my God,” he said, as he passed a dozen people in the hallway, and then another three dozen people sitting on chairs and the floor as he came stumbling into the office a few minutes past 6 A.M. There typically was only one, maybe two patients, before 8 A.M., let alone 6 A.M. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He knew there had to be a mistake.

  “Dr. Martin,” a desperate patient asked as he made his way through the waiting area. “Dr. Martin, please, I need to see you right away. My face… I need you to do something for my face.”

  He ignored her but then another person grabbed his shoulder and shouted, “We’re getting older, Dr. Martin! You need to fix us!”

  “Now!” Another person shouted. “Right now!”

  “STOP!” Stephen shouted. They didn’t completely quiet down, but they all looked at him. “I promise I’ll get to you all today! But please, wait here a moment, and I will be back! I can only do so much!”

  As he made his way through the main door, he could hear the sounds of sobs of even more people coming from the side of him. Thursday and Friday had been crowded in his office, but they had been nothing like today.

  “Shirley?” Stephen shouted as soon as he made his way to his office. He had nearly a dozen people who worked for him, but his most trusted ally was his assistant Shirley, who had been with him for the past six years.

  “Dr. Martin,” the young woman said, appearing from behind a desk. “Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here…”

  “What the hell is going on out there? It’s chaos!”

  “I know… and… uhh… I have some bad news…”

  “What?” He had no idea what she was going to say to him. “I don’t have time for bad news. We have to get to work. There’s no way I’ll be able to do surgeries today, plus consultations with all those people out there. It’s a madhouse. You need to schedule them for consultations later on this week, and for all those who had appointments scheduled for today, I want you to—”