Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (27 page)

“Out of the way!” Hannah screamed,
swerving around cars, running over a screaming woman in the middle of the road,
as she tried to outrun the vehicles behind her, which had tripled in the last
ten minutes. “They’re gaining on me,” Hannah said to herself, glancing in her
rearview mirror to see an endless stream of cop cars and bright, colorful
sirens. “They’re trying to keep me from killing all these innocent people. So
inconsiderate!”

Hannah slowly veered her car into the
other lane, just for fun, to try to dodge the oncoming cars the best she could.
Three cars, seven cars, fifteen cars, all swerved to the left and right, some
of the cars speeding too fast, crashing into other vehicles, and flipping into
the air. When Hannah saw an explosion behind her, she wished she had someone
sitting next to her who could have filmed it.

“Pull your vehicle to the side of the
road!” an old male cop shouted on his loudspeaker.

Hannah made her way back into the
appropriate lane, ran a red light, and happily mauled down a homeless man, as
well as an old couple who looked frightened but relieved that the nightmare was
finally over.

“You want me to pull my vehicle to the
side of the road, huh?” Hannah said to the rearview mirror, where she could see
nearly a dozen police cars following her as she made her turn. “As you wish,
Officer.”

Hannah nearly missed slamming into
another barrage of cars as she pulled into a supermarket parking lot. She
looked franticly for her destination, and slammed the brakes when she found
what she was looking for.

“You want me? Come and get me.”

Hannah stepped outside of her car and
turned around to see at least fifteen cop cars approach her from every which
way. Men and women, all old, all in pain, jumped out and pointed their guns at
Hannah. She just giggled.

“Put your hands in the air!” the same
officer from before shouted. He looked the oldest of all.

Hannah kept giggling. “As you wish.”

She brought her hands up in the air, but
she didn’t keep them there for long. She lashed out the red streams of light
from her palms, one after another, starting to her left, then her right, then
finally in the middle. Some cops started fleeing, and a select few started
shooting, as most of the cop cars shot up into the sky, bursting into flames,
as Hannah kept unleashing the deadly streams of light out of her swollen palms.

One of the cops, a woman who looked
twenty in the face but old everywhere else, just kept firing her gun at Hannah,
as if she had an infinite amount of bullets. Hannah struck a few more cop cars,
shot her streams of light at a few others, then brought both of her palms
together to make a large ball of fire that grew to be more than three feet
high. When the young woman fired again, Hannah fired her own weapon, the big
ball of red fire smashing against the woman’s head and decapitating it from her
body.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, “that Comedy
Central show was right about you bumbling morons! You’re all nincompoops!”

She shot a few more streams out of her
palms, but there wasn’t much more to kill, or explode. When the last of the
cops fled the area, Hannah turned around, shook her hands for a few seconds,
and calmly licked her lips. She wasn’t just hungry. She was thirsty now, too.

“Can’t have a girl watch the end of the
world on an empty stomach, now can we?”

Hannah approached the shopping center
before her. Starbucks was closed indefinitely, so she fired off her red light
and blew up the building. She did the same to McDonald’s, then to the
supermarket, as well as a tiny salon in the corner, just for the fun of it.

Before the hour was up, Hannah was
surrounded by fire, with the burning of buildings, cars, and corpses all around
her. She could hear screaming in the distance, more sirens going off. She could
smell the dead bodies, which were filling up the streets now more than the
living.

She locked her car, just in case, and
started making her way up to the one building in the center that was actually
open, and the only one that didn’t have flames shooting out its windows.

Hannah entered the establishment and
nodded to the elderly chubby man in the back, who obviously wasn’t expecting
much business today.

“Uhh… may I help you?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks, hi,” Hannah said with a
smile. “I’d like a foot-long, please. The five-dollar foot-long.”

“Uhh, OK.” The smoke from the adjacent
supermarket was starting to seep its way into the sandwich shop. The man looked
like he wanted to be anywhere else but here. “What kind of bread?”

“Wheat, please. I’m watching my figure.”

“Oh… all right…”

“I’ll have a turkey sandwich. Swiss
cheese.
The works, please.
Just hold the olives.”

The man was trembling. Both he and Hannah
turned around to see a police officer running past the establishment screaming,
his body engulfed in fire.

Hannah turned back to the sweaty
employee. “Pretty hot out there, isn’t it?”

He swallowed loudly and asked, “Would you
like your sandwich toasted?”

She leaned in. “Absolutely.”

The man served her the foot-long sandwich
for free, and Hannah surprised him with a twenty-dollar tip.

“Have a wonderful day!” she shouted,
swiping a bag of Lay’s potato chips, and a large iced tea.

“Uhh… you too…” Hannah heard the man say
softly as she kicked the door open and stepped back out into the big, scary
world.

Hannah pulled her phone out of her pocket
and kept her eyes glued to it as a cop slowly crept up from behind with his
gun. Hannah didn’t even turn around; she had sensed him coming for the last ten
seconds. When he approached her dangerously close, she formed a ball of red
light in her palms, lifted her hands up in the air, and swung the ball
backward, splitting the cop into two pieces.

“Hey Yolanda, it’s me,” Hannah said on
the phone, approaching her truck. “Call me back when you get this. Let me know
how it’s going over there.”

She threw the phone down on the passenger
seat and started her car up again, maneuvering past body parts and crashed cars
as she pulled out of the parking lot.

Hannah had the address written on a piece
of paper, and it took her a few minutes to find it in the glove compartment.
But it didn’t take her long to find the house in question. She made her way to
the back of the posh, mostly desolate Caughlin Ranch neighborhood, to find
Cameron Martin’s house up top a hill that looked out over the city. It was a
remarkable view, one that was especially joyful to Hannah because she could see
all the destruction she’d imposed on the city in the last hour, particularly
with all of the burning casino buildings in the distance.

But one building she hadn’t touched was
the house in front of her. Charred, smoking, looking ready to implode on
itself, Cameron’s dilapidated
house sat
sad and sickly
before her. Hannah stepped outside her car and crossed her arms with
frustration, realizing that this little problem could throw a wrench in her
plan.

But when the mad-eyed, curly-haired woman
appeared from the side, Hannah could do nothing but smile.

“Oh thank God, thank
God
,” the woman said, her face and clothes dirtied, tears streaming
down her face. “Please… help me…”

Hannah rushed up to Kimber, a
fourteen-year-old who now looked to be in her early fifties, and grabbed hold
of her shoulders. She pretended like she was there to help. “Oh my
word
! Miss, are you OK?”

“My mom… she’s…” Kimber started coughing.
“She was in the house… she was…”
      

She started coughing again, and Hannah
sighed, knowing that the time spent with this girl was going to be agonizing.

“Just relax,” Hannah said.

“I called the cops… I called 911…” Kimber
said. “Nobody
came… nobody bothered!
You’re the first
person to show up!”

“It’s OK… come with me…”

Hannah tugged on Kimber’s hand and
started bringing her toward the car. But the sounds of barking stopped the both
of them.

“What’s that?” Hannah asked.

“CINDER!” Kimber shouted. “There you
are!”

Kimber kneeled down and planted big, wet
kisses on the family dog. She hugged the animal and started crying again. “Oh
Cinder… I thought you died, too… I thought you were taken, too…”

“Come on, Kimber,” Hannah said. “We need
to get you help. You can’t stay here.”

“I know,” she said. “But can my dog come,
too?”

“No. Only you.”

“Why?”

“You’re in shock,” Hannah said. “You’re
not thinking clearly. You can’t think about anyone else but yourself,
understand? Now take my hand and come with me.”

But Kimber didn’t move forward; instead,
she took a step back, holding onto her dog with a death grip.

“I don’t understand why I can’t bring my
dog,” she said. Then Kimber stared at Hannah suspiciously. She opened her
mouth,
then
closed it. When she opened it again,
Hannah knew the question headed her way. “Wait a minute. How did you know my
name?” Kimber asked. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“I’m friends with your brother,” Hannah
said.

“With Cameron?”

“Yes. He’s one of my
best friends
.”

Hannah was bored. And she was tired of
talking. So she kicked Kimber in the groin, knocking her to the hot cement
pavement. The dog started barking at Hannah, but she picked it up by the neck
and tossed it into the bushes beside her.

She grabbed Kimber by her hair and pushed
her forward, all the way up to her car. Kimber tried to make a run for it, but
Hannah leapt forward and slammed Kimber’s face into the front of her Dodge Ram,
which was drenched in blood. When Kimber fell to her back, she looked up at
Hannah with a gruesome face that didn’t look old or young anymore, just
revolting.

“This should keep you pretty still until
we’re ready for the big showdown,” Hannah said, unleashing a small but painful
stream of red light against Kimber’s stomach. “Try to make a move, and I’ll
kill you.”

Hannah shoved Kimber into the passenger
seat and slammed the door. Then she jumped into the driver’s seat, blasted the
AC, and grabbed her sandwich. She savored every bite—the
swiss
cheese had been a smart choice, and the wheat bread
was light and fluffy—as she admired the view of the burning house before
her and the comatose girl to the side of her. She saw the dog appear again, and
she considered running her over.

But she didn’t. As much as she deplored
human beings, Hannah didn’t have any issues with animals.
 

“I’ll let you go,” she said to the black
cockapoo in the distance. “For now, anyway.”

She turned on the ignition and backed out
of the driveway, quickly making her way to the street down the hill.

Hannah smiled and looked at the clock.

“It’s almost eleven,” Hannah said,
rubbing her palms together, this time not to make a ball of light, but to
showcase her growing enthusiasm. She turned to Kimber. “You think you’re
looking old now? Just you wait.”

Even though Kimber was barely moving,
Hannah could see the growing rage in her eyes.

“Your brother’s still alive,” Hannah
said, “and he’s gonna try his best to save you. Let’s just say it’s going to be
fun to see him try.”

Hannah thought she had weakened Kimber to
the point where only her eyes could move. But it turned out that Kimber’s mouth
could work, too.

Kimber hocked a huge loogie right at
Hannah’s face, striking her on the cheek just below her eyes.

Hannah wiped the slimy glob of spit from
her cheek, shook it off her fingertips, and slammed her fist in Kimber’s face,
knocking her out cold.

“What a little bitch,” Hannah said,
pulling onto the Steamboat Ditch trail up above the neighborhood and heading
toward her ultimate destination.

15.

“I mean… but… how are you feeling, Wes?
Are you in pain?”

“There wasn’t any at first,” Wesley said.
“But now I’m feeling sick and achy all over, like I have the flu. And at the
start of every hour, on the dot, I get this really sharp, intense pain that
lasts about a minute.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting beside Wesley in
the back seat, trying to comfort him as Liesel drove the car, “that’s the
feeling of your body aging a whole year in the blink of an eye. Fun, isn’t it?”

“I had no idea about the pain you went
through,” Wesley said. “I’m sorry I didn’t have more sympathy, especially last
year, when you really needed me.”

“What are you talking about? You gave me
that video.”

“That was a stupid nothing. Cam, I’ve
never been there for you the way I could be. Looking death in the face kind of
opens up your eyes.”