Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (17 page)

“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 immediately 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.”