by Brian Rowe
“We should find the nearest side street,” Liesel said.
“We can’t turn off too quickly. They’ll be expecting that.”
“Do you think they called in back-up? Do you think another cop could be coming in the other direction?”
“Let’s pray that doesn’t happen.”
Liesel slunk down in her seat. “Oh God, Cameron.”
“What?”
She didn’t say another word. She just pointed forward, at the large mountain up ahead. We couldn’t hear the sirens yet. But two, possibly three, cop cars were headed our way, the bright colors on top of their cars illuminating the gray skies. I looked in my rearview mirror and thankfully didn’t see the other car coming up from behind yet.
“We have to hide,” I said.
“No, duh,” Liesel muttered. “What the hell are we gonna do?”
When I glanced in the rearview mirror again, this time seeing the cop car from behind gaining on me, I knew we had to do more than simply hide.
When I spotted the rundown gas station up ahead to the left, I got an idea.
“Leese, grab the bag with the paintball guns.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it. We’re running out of options here.”
Liesel grabbed the heavy bag and brought it to the front seat. As I pulled into the gas station, I was startled by an odd noise from behind.
“Whhhhhhh—” The voice was low and grumbly.
First, Liesel screamed, not exactly subtle. I slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car as soon as I could. I felt icky all over, as if a dead body had transformed into a man-hungry zombie in the back seat.
“He’s awake!” I shouted.
Liesel jumped out on the other side, the bag of paintball guns slung over her shoulder. “I don’t believe it!”
“I thought we had more time!”
“I did, too!” Liesel shouted.
I turned to my left to see the three cop cars approaching us. Then I looked to my right to see the other cop car appearing over the hill. Then I looked toward the back of my car to see the Dr. Rice fellow realizing, for the first time, what was happening.
“Oh my God, could this get any worse?” Liesel shouted.
I pursed my lips and scratched my head for a moment. I had an idea. “Take two of the paintball guns out of the bag. The smaller ones.”
“What for?”
“Just do it.”
Liesel handed me the one that looked like a pistol.
“OK,” I said. “Follow me.”
I took Liesel by the hand and we tiptoed into the food mart adjacent to the gas station. At first I thought it might be closed, given that it was dark inside. But I was happy, first, to see that it was open, and second, to see that only a single person—the cashier—was inside. He was short, sunburnt, and looked totally disinterested in his job.
I approached him and waved the paintball gun in his face, trying to move it fast enough so that he’d think it was a real gun.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the man shouted, raising his arms up in the air. “Please don’t hurt me!”
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. “Not if I don’t have to!”
“Come on,” Liesel whispered into my ear. “We have to go.”
He opened the cash register and started throwing twenty-dollar-bills at me.
“I don’t want your money!” I shouted. “I want your car!”
“My car?” he asked, dumbfounded. “It’s a dumpy little—”
“Now, asshole!” I screamed, shoving the paintball gun against his chest.
“OK,” he said. “OK, OK, OK.” He tossed his car keys at us, keeping his arms up high.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Out back!”
“How much gas is in it?”
“I just filled it up,” the man said, his lips quivering. I figured he was going to start crying at any second.
“You’re a good man,” I said. “I—”
Before I could finish my sentence, Dr. Rice barged into the mini-mart, his shirt off, a scowl on his face that suggested he wanted to eat Liesel and me whole. He ran toward me first, and I stepped aside to let Liesel break out some more of her karate moves. She kicked him twice in the face, then once in the balls, sending the corrupt doctor down to the ground once again. He wasn’t knocked unconscious this time, but he slumped over, crying in pain.
“Come on,” Liesel said, rushing toward the back door.
“Yes, sir,” I said with a chuckle, chasing after her.
The cashier had been right. His car was dumpy, a crappy little brown jeep that looked about twenty years old.
At least the cars aren’t growing a year older with every hour, I thought. Then we’d be in serious trouble.
Liesel and I jumped inside, and I looked back, only once, to see the cop cars pulling into the gas station.
I turned on the ignition when Liesel said, “Where are we gonna go?”
I took a deep breath, and looked out the dirty windshield. “We’re going forward. That’s all we can do.”
Liesel didn’t challenge my decision as I started driving away from the food mart, not heading back toward the road we were on, but down a dirt road that aligned with the back of the gas station. Liesel turned back after a minute or so to see if any of the cops were following us. They weren’t. It looked like, before the mini mart attendant could notify the cops that we had stolen his car, we had covered too much ground.
“We have to find another car, Cam,” Liesel said after the first ten minutes. “The cops are gonna be looking for this one.”
“They’re not gonna be looking for us for long, Leese. Everyone’s getting sick. And by tonight, nobody’s gonna be interested in finding two lowly criminals. Especially not when all their mothers and fathers are dying, when their children are growing from five to twenty-five, from one to forty-one. We’re gonna be OK. We just have to lay low. Try not to get pulled over again.”
Liesel looked at the speedometer. I was going eighty. “You’re speeding again.”
“But I’m not over the speed limit,” I said, annoyed. “I’m not even on a road!”
Liesel put her feet up on the dash and brought her hands to her face again. “Dr. Rice… we don’t have him… we’re not gonna have him…”
“You sent Hannah those pictures,” I said. “She believes we have him. That’s all that matters.”
“But when we show up tomorrow… when she sees he’s not with us…”
“We’re just gonna have to improvise,” I said. “Have faith, Leese. Maybe this will all turn out the way we hoped.”
She didn’t respond. She just pushed her head back against the seat and stared out the passenger side window.
It took nearly thirty minutes to find a paved road, but when I did, I quickly found a major freeway, and we were back on track toward our destination. I drove all day, and we pulled over for the night in Portola, California, a small town outside of Graeagle.
Liesel fell asleep minutes after I parked in a vacant lot.
But not me. I stepped outside the car and called Kimber for an update. I got her voice-mail. I left a brief but urgent message.
I stayed up the entire night waiting for her to call me back.
She never did.
MOM
Shari Martin was in the mood for something sweet, something loaded with sugar and carbs and fat and tasty goodness. The problem was that it was after midnight, and she knew it wouldn’t be healthy to raid the fridge. Her mom had taught her when she was a little girl to never eat after midnight. She was always tormented growing up for liking sweets, and she ultimately stopped craving them. She started exercising, eating healthy, and losing weight. That’s when she met her husband Stephen.
She had cried for most of the day, sleeping in fits, then waking back up and crying some more. She tried to be there for Kimber most of the afternoon and evening, but her daughter still seemed to be in shock, just lying on her bed for most of th
e day. Then around 4 P.M. Kimber started playing her violin, and did so for much of the evening. It was nearly 1 A.M. now and Shari could hear no activity coming from her daughter’s room. She hoped she was sleeping. She hoped her daughter was OK.
Shari wasn’t stupid. She knew what was happening. She knew that it wasn’t a coincidence that everyone she knew was rapidly aging, while her son had mysteriously left without warning and was not returning her phone calls. There was no way in Hell that Cameron wasn’t involved in this somehow, considering he had aged both forward and backward in the last year. She hoped her son was getting to the bottom of this epidemic. She hoped he would stop it for Kimber.
She sat up in her bed and petted her dog of six years—Cinder Lou Martin. She was thankful that the dog hadn’t aged at all, that she was still as healthy and chipper as ever. But even as she petted the dog, she could feel the sharp pains in her own hands and wrist. She felt tired and weak all over, like she had aged not a few years, but a few decades. She hadn’t looked at herself in the mirror in a while—she knew that if she did she would have a heart attack from fright.
Shari needed a bite to eat, and for once in her life, she wasn’t going to stop herself from enjoying something sweet. She tiptoed down the hallway, and before she made her way to the kitchen, she hopped downstairs and peered into Kimber’s bedroom. Her daughter was asleep in her bed, pillows covering her face, the covers sprawled out everywhere like she’d been kicking and screaming throughout her soft but noticeable snoring. She closed the door shut.
“Thank God,” Shari whispered.
She stepped into the kitchen and turned on one of the overhead lights, seeing her dog staring up at her near the sliding door. She let her dog roam outside for a minute as she moseyed on over to the refrigerator, opening it to reveal a sweet treat in the front and center.
There sat a chocolate frosted vanilla cupcake, sitting there and staring at her, begging her to take a bite. She reached for it and let the tips of her fingers caress the edges of the icing. But it still didn’t feel right. She couldn’t make herself grab hold of it and take a generous bite. She decided, as she closed the refrigerator door, that she would wait until tomorrow.
Shari instead grabbed a handful of vanilla wafers from the pantry and set them down on one of her slim, fancy dining room plates. It wasn’t until she had moved the plate over to the kitchen island that she realized her husband had given her these plates as a Christmas gift three years ago.
She closed her eyes. “Oh Stephen…” Her lips quivered and she could feel herself tearing up again. “Why did you always have to be so stubborn… why couldn’t you have just dropped everything, and run away with me…” A tear fell and she wiped her cheek. She set the plate down and turned on the burner. “I’m sorry, honey… I’m so sorry…”
She moved the tea kettle over to the burner and turned it on full blast. She picked out her favorite tea—Sleepytime—and dropped two tea bags into her favorite pumpkin-decorated mug.
When the tea kettle started singing, she pulled it off the burner and poured the steaming hot water into the mug. She blew on the top, took a sip, and sighed, happily.
Shari set the mug on her plate with the vanilla wafers, turned off the burner—not all the way—and made her way back to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, with difficulty, and slowly, over the course of a half-hour, sipped the tea, taking a break once in a while to take a bite of the vanilla wafers. She treated it as her final meal, enjoying every soothing sip, every scrumptious crumb, until she took her final sip and bite, set the mug and plate down on her dresser, and lay down on her bed. She stared up at the ceiling and tried to make her mind go blank. She tried to forget everything. She tried just to focus on the here and now.
Finally, she slept.
When Shari Martin awoke the next morning, the first thing she looked at were her hands, which no longer looked like the smooth, silky ones from a week ago. They were extended, almost hilariously so, and more pale and tough. She rubbed one hand along the other and tried not to scream at the paper-thinness of the skin. She remembered saying goodbye to her grandmother when she was a kid, and feeling that rough skin on her hands and arms; here Shari was, just forty-three, her skin feeling exactly the same as her dear departed grandmother all those years ago.
She sat up in bed, looked around the room, and focused on her dog Cinder in the back corner. Cinder, always so gentle and friendly, was cowering in the corner, staring up at her like she didn’t recognize her anymore.
“Hey you,” she said to the dog. “Are you OK?”
Cinder started whining, and Shari knew she had to let her outside to go potty.
Shari made her way over to her bathroom, herself feeling the urge to urinate. “Just a minute, Cinder,” she said. “I get to pee first.”
She did her business in the bathroom and made her way over to the sink to wash her face. She splashed water up a few times, the coldness of it refreshing against her warmer-than-normal dry skin.
Shari wiped the water off with a small towel, and as she set it back down on the rack, she took a good look at herself in the mirror.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She just smiled, subtly, exuding a deep breath that confirmed her deepest, darkest suspicions.
The lines were there. The bags were there. Shari didn’t look like herself any longer. She looked like her own mother. She looked older than her mother. Shari was forty-three years old, but this morning, a few minutes past 8 A.M., Shari presumed she was eighty years old, maybe even eighty-five. In the blink of an eye, with no warning, with no time to prepare, the second half of her life had disappeared. She knew she was having problems with Stephen, and she knew she still had a long way to go to make her life a happy one, but Shari thought she had time.
“It’s all but run out,” she said to herself, running her fingers along her cheeks.
She turned to see Cinder wandering into the bathroom, looking up at her owner like she was seeing a complete stranger, or, worse, a ghost.
Shari took one last look at herself in the mirror and headed back to her bedroom, and the adjacent hallway.
“I’m in the mood for something sweet,” she said to herself, “and I’m not going to stop this time.”
She walked downstairs and past the entrance hallway toward the kitchen, stopping herself when she saw Kimber at the table, eating Cheerios. Shari was happy to see her daughter eating something, anything. She knew she had raised a strong young woman. She knew she had done the best she could.
“Kimber?” Shari asked, stepping to her left so Kimber wouldn’t have to see her.
“Mom?”
“Hi honey.”
“Where are you?”
“I just… I have to do something real quick,” Shari said, trying to think of a lie.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“It smells weird in the kitchen.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Kimber said. “It smells like eggs. Rotten eggs. I can’t explain it. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”
“I’ll figure it out, sweetie,” Shari said, calmly. “But could I ask a favor of you?”
“What?”
“Could you go out front and let Cinder go potty? And could you grab the newspaper, too?”
“Oh, uhh… sure…”
“Thanks,” Shari said. “Give her a few minutes.”
Shari hid in the corner, behind the entrance hallway cabinet, as Kimber passed by and called for Cinder, who replied promptly with loud barking. Shari only caught the right side of her daughter’s face, not believing her eyes, but having to. Her daughter looked late forties, maybe fifty. She was a few inches taller, too. Shari, again, wanted to scream. But she kept it all inside.
“This is a nightmare,” Shari whispered to herself. “This isn’t real life. This is a nightmare that I need to wake up from.”
“Come on, Cinder!” Kimber shouted. “Let’s go outside!”
> Her daughter opened the front door and waited for Cinder to run by her. She looked back once, not seeing her mother, before closing the door as she made her way out to the front driveway.
“Good girl,” Shari said. “Good, good girl.”
Shari stepped into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out the cupcake. It still looked delicious as ever, just waiting for somebody to take a bite. She ran her fingers through the frosting and enjoyed a lick off her finger. The taste reminded her of Heaven; similarly, she hoped Heaven would have tasty treats like this one.
She brought the cupcake down to the kitchen island and smelled the buttercream frosting. It was nice. It masked the awful smell that was wafting through the giant kitchen, and, likely, the entire home. She could already feel herself becoming light-headed. She needed to move faster.
Shari unwrapped the cupcake and set it down on the same dining room plate from last night. She smiled, trying to remain calm, as she reached into the drawer to grab the candle and box of matches. She placed the pink candle in the center and let it sink down into the cupcake.
She took a deep breath, wiping the tears from her cheeks. The crying had started up yet again. She was relieved that this would be the last time.
She looked outside the kitchen windows to confirm Kimber’s faraway location. Her daughter was all the way across the driveway, in a small field, the newspaper in her hands, the dog jumping up and down and peeing more times than she could count.
“I’m praying for you, Kimber,” she said. “I hope you make it. I really hope you make it.”
Shari walked back over to the kitchen island, and the cupcake. She smiled and stared at the candle in the center.
She closed her eyes. “Please, God… please…”
She reached into the box and pulled out a match. She looked at it, examined it. She knew keeping the gas on all night had been a smart idea. She knew now what she had to do.
She struck it once. Nothing. She struck it twice. Nothing again.
The smell was unbearable. She turned to her left to see Kimber clapping for Cinder, and starting to walk across the street back toward the house.
