Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (29 page)

“Bummer,” he said to himself.

He sat down, Indian style, and ran his
hands over the two mounds in front of him. He looked out in the distance, at
the robust mountains up above his street. He had had so much to look forward
to. He had his sophomore year at USC coming up in August, and he was hopeful
his first graded short film—a documentary about the East L.A.
homeless—was going to be a memorable one. He couldn’t wait to see his
dad’s face at Christmas when he showed him his film, finally proving to the
old, sickly man that he had what it took to be a documentary filmmaker. He had
so many stories he wanted to
tell,
so much he wanted
to give back to the world. And Wesley had always wanted to share his hopes and
dreams with the two people he loved the most: his own mom and dad.

“Mom… Dad…” Wesley brought his head down
to his knees, the tears flowing within seconds, “I think I’m gonna be joining
the two of you very shortly.” He didn’t say anything for a moment. He didn’t
know what to say. He kept it simple. “I just want you to know that I love you,
for all the opportunities you gave me, for all you sacrificed for me. Whatever
happens to me, you both will be in my heart forever.”

Wesley wiped his eyes with the bottom of
his dirty palms and got back up on his feet. He looked down at the two graves
one last time before turning around and heading back inside the house.

He admired the top floor of the house
again, waving to his pets in the distance,
who
all
looked at him somberly, like they knew he would be leaving them, too. Wesley
made his way downstairs.

He looked up at the clock in his studio.
It was almost noon. His time was almost up. He was a
survivor,
that
was for sure. But he also didn’t like to feel pain, especially when
he didn’t need to, especially if he was just going to die anyway.

Wesley brought his hands down to his
camera, the same one he’d had since freshman year of high school. He didn’t say
any final words to it—even though he loved his video camera like it was
his own child, he wasn’t about to go that far—but he took one last
appreciative gaze at the device that had been his everything for the last five
years.

Finally, Wesley walked into his bedroom
and shut the door behind him. The gun lay on his pillow. He tried to ignore it
as he rolled onto the middle of the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

“Well,” he said out loud, “I guess this
is it.”

He closed his eyes, always having been
curious about what would happen when he died. Would he see a bright light?
Would he see his family? Would he see nothing? Wesley was about to find out.

Wesley unhooked the watch from his wrist
and looked down. 11:57.

“Come on, Cameron,” he said. “Make a
miracle happen.”

He lay back and waited, seeing 11:58,
then 11:59.

Wesley sat up, brought his feet down to
the edge of his bed, and reluctantly grabbed the handgun. He analyzed it for a
moment.

He thought about waiting. He thought
about giving it another ten minutes, twenty minutes. The pain would be
excruciating, but it would allow more time for Cameron and Liesel to reverse
the curse. He didn’t want to say good-bye that easily. He didn’t want to throw
away the possibility of a future because he was too scared to endure a few more
minutes of pain.

With ten seconds to go before the clock
struck noon, Wesley let a couple more tears fall down his cheeks as he brought
the gun up to his face.

He took a deep breath, shoved the gun
into his mouth, and rested his finger on the trigger.
 

16.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed
Liesel’s phone and tried to dial Hannah myself.

I had hoped there was a plan. I had hoped
there was a clear destination. But there hadn’t been. We knew Hannah was somewhere
in Reno, but we didn’t know where, and worst of all, the evil sister wasn’t
even answering her phone.

“This is all a game to her, Cam, remember
that. She doesn’t want to just tell us where she is. She wants us to use our
heads. She wants us to think—”

I was tired of thinking. When the fifth
ring went to Hannah’s ironically cheery voice-mail, I screamed: “Where are you,
you sack of shit? You want me? Come and get me!”

Liesel grabbed the phone from me and
threw it in the back seat. “Cam, screaming at her voice-mail isn’t gonna help
us.”

“But we only have ten minutes until
noon!” I took a scared deep breath and turned toward the dash, looking at the
sights of my deserted neighborhood. “It’s just… we don’t have time to solve
another mystery. We need to find your sister now. Right now!”

Liesel had been certain that Hannah would
have been hiding out in the church we got married in, but nobody was there.
Then we drove up to Krueger Stadium, where Liesel and I had floated in the air
at graduation. We assumed she might be there. She wasn’t. Before we knew it,
the minutes were ticking down to the hour of real demises, of real destruction,
when everybody in the world would lose their lives.

There was one last idea:
Maybe she went to my house
.

Yolanda had alluded that Hannah would go
after Kimber, which made sense, considering she had dumped Wesley’s body off in
Graeagle. With my parents both gone, the last person remaining for Hannah to
torture before my very eyes would be my little sister.

“I don’t know what we’re
gonna
do if she’s not at the house,” I said. “I mean, she
wants us to find her, right? It’s the last place that makes sense…”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Liesel said,
“because we’re almost there.”

“Almost…”

We made our way up the slim two-lane
road, until finding the turn-off to the even slimmer one-lane road that led to
my house.
 

“Oh my God,” I said, noticing the smoke.
“Oh my God… what did Hannah do…
”

“Here let me—”

“Just pull over, Leese.”

“No, wait—”

“Pull over!”

She still wouldn’t, so I just opened the
passenger side door and leapt out onto the dying shrubs that ran alongside the
road. Liesel finally slammed on the brakes, but I didn’t stay to chat. I was
already running at top speeds toward my house at the top of the hill.

“Kimber!” I shouted. “Are you in there?”

“Cam! Stop!” I heard Liesel shouting from
behind, but I didn’t pay any attention. If Hannah had done something to the
house with Kimber inside, there was a chance she could still be alive, maybe
down in the basement or something. The house was engulfed in smoke, but I
didn’t care. I ran inside without thinking twice.

I headed straight for the staircase down
to our bedrooms, where I thought maybe Hannah had tied up Kimber to the wall or
something. I had my arm covering my face, as I could barely see through all the
smoke.

“Kimber? Kimber?”

The smoke was too heavy. I became
light-headed almost instantly. A bad case of nausea hit me without warning, and
before I could turn around, I found myself falling to the carpet.

“Kimber… are you… are you in here…”

I didn’t hear her. Better still, I didn’t
see a body.

It hit me, right then and there, that if
Kimber
was
in the house, she’d be long dead. I’d only
been in the house for thirty seconds, and I was already feeling the effects of
all the smoke. I needed to get out.

Part of me wanted to just close my eyes
and fall asleep right here on the ground, not sure if I’d ever wake up again,
but I pushed myself back up to my feet and headed upstairs, toward the living
room area and the kitchen. I tried to look out to see where Liesel was, but I
couldn’t locate her.

I coughed a few times,
then
turned back toward the front door.

That’s when I saw the body, burnt to a
crisp, sprawled out next to the exploded refrigerator in where the kitchen used
to be.

“Oh my God! No! Kimber?”

I wished I had a mask, something,
anything
, to keep the smoke from entering my lungs. I had
nothing. I ran over to the body. It was unrecognizable, except for a few
strands of long, black hair.

My mouth dropped open, and my eyes
started to burn. “Mom… oh God… mom… no…”

“Cameron!” Liesel leapt at me from
behind, grabbing my waist and pulling me back down to the ground. She jumped up
and started dragging me to the front door.

“No,” I said. “No… I can’t… I have to get
my mom… I have to—”

“Cam, there’s nothing you can do! Come
on!”

“I can’t just leave her here,” I said, my
tears mixing in with the dirt on my face. “I can’t just—”

“I know where Kimber is!”

The interruption brought me right back to
reality. I got up on my feet, as Liesel helped me out of the house, out of the
smoke. “What? Where?”

“Kimber was never here, OK? The house was
never Hannah’s destination!”

Liesel coughed a few times, then I
followed suit. When we erupted back into the sunlight of what was a beautiful,
crystal clear June day, I fell and slammed my arm against a rock, scraping it
more gruesomely than expected. Blood dripped to the ground.

“Shit,” I said.

“Oh, God, Cam, are you OK?”

“I’m all right,” I said, standing back
up, with trouble.

“Cam, let me look at it,” Liesel said.

“No, no, it’s OK.” I applied pressure to
the wound and looked up toward the car. “So where’s Kimber? How do we get to
her?”

But before Liesel could answer, I heard a
familiar barking coming from the side of me. I couldn’t believe it. I ran to
the edge of the driveway.

“No way,” I said. “It can’t be!”

There was my dog Cinder, running at top
speeds down the road, barking loud as ever.

“Cinder, you’re
alive
!” She jumped up on me and almost knocked me down to the
ground. She started licking me all over, cleaning all the yucky dirt off my
face. “I don’t believe it… I don’t believe it!”

She barked a few more times, then raced
further down the street, past Wesley’s car, and over to the spot where the road
dipped down the hill. The dog turned her head to her left and started barking
again.

I looked at my dog,
who
had remarkably survived whatever devastation had struck my home. “What is it,
girl? What do you see?”

I jumped back up to my feet, my arm still
noticeably bleeding, and raced over to my dog. I knew she was trying to tell me
something.

“What’s out there? What are you—
”

“Cam!” Liesel shouted, by the front of
the car. “We have to go!”

“What?” I asked. “But what about
Kimber—”

I stopped in mid-sentence, catching the sight
that Liesel had seen, and what my dog was now seeing. Way out in the distance,
up top the highest peak of the Steamboat Ditch bike trail, was the strangest of
activity. I couldn’t make out any faces, but I could see the streaming of
bright red lights shooting out from the body of what looked to be a young
woman.

Hannah.

“She’s at the top of Steamboat Ditch!” I
shouted, turning around and running back to the car. Liesel was already inside,
turning on the car ignition.

My dog turned toward me. I could tell she
wanted to come with me.

“Stay here, Cinder,” I said. “I’ll be
back, OK?”

The dog did what she was told, and I
jumped into the passenger seat of Wesley’s car.

“You ready?” Liesel asked.

“Of course I am,” I said, turning around
and double-checking for the fortieth time that all the paintball guns were in
the black bag.

“Seriously, Cam. Are you ready for this?
She has the power of
seven
witches.”

“I know.”

“She could kill us,” Liesel said. “In
seconds
.”

“I don’t care. She’s got my sister. I’ll
do whatever it takes.”

“I just want you to be extra—”

“This isn’t a choice, Leese!” I shouted.
“There’s nothing to think about! Let’s go!”

She sighed and nodded. “OK. Here goes
nothin’.”

She grabbed my hand, and I grabbed hers.
We looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, recognizing this might be the
last time we ever see each other alive.

She kissed me on the lips, wiped a tear
from her eye, and pulled the car around. We both looked at Cinder, who was
sitting calmly near my destroyed home, as we hit the main road, a few seconds
later finding ourselves on the Steamboat Ditch bike trail.

“Should only be a minute,” Liesel said.
“I know exactly where they are.”

I looked in the rearview mirror. I was
astonished to see another car passing by my house.