Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (18 page)

“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 have 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—”

“Dr. Martin,” Shirley said, interrupting
him, “I’m the only one of your employees who reported for work this morning.
Everyone else called in sick.”

“Who did?”

“Everyone.”

Stephen stared at her, aghast. “What the
hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“I know what you can do.” He rarely
intimidated poor Shirley anymore, but he got up in her face and bent down
toward her. “You can get every one of those sons of bitches on the phone for
me! I’m not going to put up with this shit!”

“But Dr. Martin!”

“Get Ned on the phone! He’s not sick!
That man hasn’t been sick in fourteen years!”

“I tried him, twenty minutes ago. He’s
not answering.”

“Then try again!”

“Dr. Martin, with all due respect, I
think we need to close down. For the day at least.”

“I will not—”

“Or the week? You know, when all this
dies down? When the world goes back to normal?”

“Jesus Christ, not you, too.” Stephen
couldn’t look at her anymore. He always thought of her as attractive, as a
younger, prettier version of his wife. But Shirley didn’t look young anymore.
She looked as
old
as his wife.

“Dr. Martin. Please.”

“Call Ned.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m going, Dr. Martin. I’m very sorry.”

“You can’t go,” he said. “You can’t just
leave me here!”

She grabbed her purse and headed toward the
back entryway. “Get out, Dr. Martin. While you still can.”

“No! Please! Don’t go!”

But the girl was gone, and Stephen was
suddenly alone, in his big, crowded office, with nobody to help him. He could
perform some consultations by himself, but that’d be it. There was nothing he
could do now. He realized that what Shari and Shirley were both telling him was
true: he might have to temporarily close down the practice until this annoying
aging disease blew over.

“I
can’t
…” he
said aloud, his forehead sweating, his heart pounding. “I can’t do this by
myself.”

He turned his hands into fists, took a
deep breath, and headed back out to the waiting area, where he could hear the
voices becoming louder and louder. He opened the door and stepped into the room
to see people jump up to their feet and rush toward him.

“Please help me!”

“I need work done to my face! It’s
changing!”

“The bags under my eyes,
please
!”

“I look like my mother!”

“All the work you’ve done! It’s
meaningless! I look old again! I look so very old, Dr. Martin!”

Stephen couldn’t catch his breath. The
voices were all starting to echo inside his head, as if a form of schizophrenia
was taking hold of him. He pushed two people back, and kicked a third person in
the shins.

“Shut!
Up
!” Stephen shouted.

Everyone did. They all stood still, a
clan of zombies, all looking scarily pale and frail,
all
staring at him like he was their God.

“Everyone, listen to me,” Stephen said.
“I promise I will get you all looking your best. I will get you all looking the
way you did before. Even
better
than
you were before.”

“But when?” somebody asked from the back.

“Soon, very soon.”

“Why not now?” somebody else asked.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but
my staff has not shown up for work this morning. Which means that I’m going to
have to shut down the practice for at least today. I hope you’ll understand.”

“But… but…”

“You can’t!”

“We need you!”

“You need to make us beautiful
again!”
 

Stephen backed up against the door. He
could see the hopeful looks on everyone’s faces changing into panic and rage.
They all stared at him now not as their savior, but as their enemy.
 

“Please,” Stephen said, reaching for the
doorknob. He could see at least twenty people marching toward him. “Please,
everyone, leave your names and numbers with me, and I promise I will—”

Stephen reached for the doorknob, but by
then, it was too late.

The first person threw a chair at his
face, and it struck Stephen across the forehead. When somebody else threw her
heavy purse at him, he missed the doorknob and fell straight to the floor.

Stephen looked up to see dozens of people
racing toward him, and before he could scream, the patients starting grabbing
at his scrubs, his shoes,
his
face. They just clawed
at him, in anger, in spite, in overwhelming frustration that this award-winning
plastic surgeon couldn’t help them look their best in a time of great need.

His scalp was the first to go, then his
eyes, then his tongue. The patients clawed through his stomach and ripped out
his intestines.

And that’s when all went quiet for Dr.
Stephen Martin.

11.

“Did you call your family?”

“No,” I said, looking out at the
darkness. “I don’t know what to say.”

We had stayed the night in the car, at a
giant, mostly vacated beach about twenty minutes away from Santa Barbara. It
was just past 5:30 A.M.

Liesel grabbed hold of my hand and gave
me the phoniest of smiles. “We should get going. We’ll want to grab this guy
before the sun comes up.”

“When will that be?”

“About an hour or so.”

“OK.”

“OK?”

I just nodded. “We gotta do what we gotta
do, Leese. If kidnapping this guy and bringing him to Hannah will put an end to
all this, then let’s do it.”

She let go of my hand and turned on the
car ignition. “All right. Let’s go.”

It creeped me out a bit, driving down a
long, very lonely highway, into Santa Barbara, darkness overwhelming the area.
We didn’t pass a single car for ten minutes.

“Did you input the address on your
phone?” Liesel asked.

“Yeah.” I glanced at my phone again. We
were closer. “In three or four minutes we’ll be making a right turn on a street
called Oxnard. We’re gonna stay on that for a few minutes, then make another
right.”

Liesel shook her head. “Hopefully he’s at
the top of the mountain, with the most gorgeous mansion and the most stunning
view of anyone in town. It’s going to make it super easy to kidnap this guy if
he’s living in luxury.”

“Easy, Leese? Nothing about this is going
to be easy.”

Barely five seconds had passed when she
said, “Damn it.”

“What?”

“Look.”

I looked out to see a small hint of the
Monday morning sun appearing on the horizon.

“Crap,” I said. “Do we need to wait
another day?”

“We don’t have time,” Liesel said. “We’re
so close.”

“You’re right. People are aging a whole
year every
hour
now.”

“Plus he could still be asleep,” Liesel
added. “We need to try.”

We passed through an intersection. I
looked again at my phone. “OK. It’s the next right.”

“Signal or no signal?”

I pointed. “Look, it’s up there. Turn at
the green light.”

The drive to Dr. Rice’s impressive
Spanish villa, which rested at the top of a peak that looked out over the
Pacific Ocean, was treacherous, to say the least. We went up, down, up, down,
sideways, backways,
then
up again. We missed two
turns,
then
had to backtrack. By the time we reached
the top of the mountain, the sun was starting to show its bright orange face,
and Liesel and I were sweating profusely from forehead to armpits.

“OK,” I said. “This is it. 4321.”

Liesel just stared at the home for a
moment. It was at the back of a dead-end road and looked big enough to house a
family of fifty. I couldn’t tell if she was ruminating on a plan of attack, or
simply admiring the decadent mansion.

I waited for her to give me instructions.
But before she said a word, Liesel stepped outside and opened the back door.

Umm,
you don’t want to talk about this before we break in?

“Leese?”

“What?”

“What’s the plan?”

“
Cam
.”
She cleared out everything in the back, to make room for the inevitable body.
“We’re improvising.”

I softly closed my door and followed
Liesel along the left side of the doctor’s home, which led us to a backyard
that was spacious enough for a nine-hole golf course. He had a swimming pool,
two Jacuzzis, various sculptures, plus a garden that stretched all the way
toward the sparkling ocean.

But we weren’t admiring the view for
long. We turned around to see not one but three lights turned on inside the
house.