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

He dropped his
shirt, then his pants, then
his
tighty whitey
underpants. He glanced at his face in the mirror and slapped his cheeks.

“You’re lookin’
younger every day, my friend,” he said to himself. “Don’t you ever forget that.
”

Dom turned on
the shower, stuck his arm out, and waited ten seconds for the water to turn
warm. He looked down and noticed his hands aching again. He shook his head and
stepped into the shower.

He only made it
halfway in. His right foot nicked the edge of the shower door, and before he
could reach out to stop himself, Dom slipped forward and slammed his forehead
against the shower wall.

The pain was so
fierce that he started to cry. He tried to stand back up, but he couldn’t move.
The water started splashing against his face and neck, and he looked up to see
a giant blood stain pressed against the wall.

He turned away
from the stain, up toward the ceiling, up toward the bright light. He could see
the silhouette of his beloved Carolyn smiling down at him. He took a few more
deep breaths, then closed his eyes and let the warm water rush over him.

2.

“Oh my God, Cam,
have you heard about this? Come take a look at this!”

I was still only
half awake when I noticed my little sister shoving her hands against my tender ribs.
I kicked her away, playfully, and leaned over to rest my head against Liesel’s.
But she was nowhere to be found in the bed.

I sat up,
reluctantly. “What is it? What time is it?”

“Cam, you’ve
gotta see this news report! They’ve played it a few times this morning. It’s
pretty crazy. Come on. Liesel and I are watching it.”

It took me two
seconds to remember everything that had gone down in the last thirty-six hours.
And when the seconds were up, my heart leapt past my throat, all the way up
through my brain and out the top of my head.

News report? What? No! They can’t be
picking up on what’s happening already, can they? It’s only been one day!

I jumped out of
bed and ran into the adjacent room, where my sister was sprawled out on her
unmade bed, and Liesel was sitting, solemn and quiet, in a chair. Kimber turned
up the volume on the television.

The female
reporter was blonde and gorgeous. It didn’t look like Hannah’s
big,
mighty spell had hit
this
particular woman yet. “It’s a strange, bizarre phenomenon that
seems to be hitting cities all over the world. That’s right, I will state
again. Babies are starting to age at a rapid rate. There were reports as early
as yesterday morning, but now there are at least five hundred cases, all around
the world, of one-year-old babies growing rapidly, already looking as if they
are as old as three or four. And this morning we’ve had preliminary reports of
older children, as old as eight and nine, looking like, they too, are a year or
two older than they should be. We will be sticking with this story for the
remainder of the day and will be updating you as more details come in…”

“Kimber, can you
please turn this off?” I asked.

“Are you insane?
No way!”

My sister
brought her hands up to her chin, mesmerized, as if she was taking in an
escapist summer blockbuster. I hadn’t noticed it at all yesterday, but I could
sure tell this morning. Kimber, fourteen on Friday
night
,
was now sixteen years old. She didn’t know, of course. Thankfully her breasts
hadn’t doubled in size or anything. I could just tell in her face that there
was a little more maturity.

“Leese…” I said,
turning my attention to my wife.

She sighed and
bit down on her bottom lip. “Cam… we have to get back.”

“What time’s our
flight?”

“In four hours.”

“Good.” I darted
my eyes toward the bathroom. “
Where’s
Mom and Dad?”

“They went for a
jog,” Liesel said. “They should be back any minute.”

“A jog?” I
shouted. “There’s no time for a jog!”

Kimber didn’t
seem to notice the tension in the room. She just shouted, “Shhh!” and kept her
focus on the TV program.

I turned back to
the TV, where the same reporter was now talking to a doctor.

“We’re looking
into many theories,” the doctor said. “Because this is happening both in and
outside the United States, any kind of bacterial strain in food has been ruled
out.”

“Yes,” the
reporter said. “We just got a report that there are young children growing at a
rapid rate as far away as Russia and Australia. What do you think is the most
likely factor contributing to this worldwide phenomenon?”

“I’d like to
tell you that it’s just a coincidence,” the doctor continued, “but that would
be possible if we just had a few dozen cases like this around the world.
Because the volume of these cases being reported is so high, though, we have to
look at environmental factors. Is something in the air? Has something entered
our atmosphere that is disturbing our way of life? There’s a lot to take in at
the moment, but we’re going to need a few more days to really see just what’s
happening to our children.”

“Do you have any
kids, doctor?”

“I have five
kids. The youngest is three, and I can already see that he’s not only shot up a
few inches, but that his hair has grown longer and that he’s gained some
weight, too.”

“All right,
thank you for your time, Doctor—”

Before the
reporter could finish her sentence, I grabbed the remote control from Kimber’s
bed and turned off the TV.

“Hey!” Kimber
shouted. “I was watching that!”

“We’ve
gotta
get going,” I said. “Kimber, you need to get in the
shower. We have a long flight ahead of us.”

“We don’t have
to leave for another hour, Cam,” Kimber said and turned the TV back on. It was
the same talking blonde head.

“Whatever,
fine,” I said and rushed out of the room, across the hall, all the way into my bathroom.
I closed the door and locked it. I needed some alone time.

Don’t freak out,
I thought.
Let’s get back to Reno. And then we can figure all this out. Don’t
freak out, Cam. Not until tonight. Not until I’m back home.

I turned on the
shower a minute later, so that Kimber and Liesel didn’t think I was just
standing in the bathroom talking to myself. I took off my clothes, jumped into
the shower, almost tripping in the process, and grabbed for the soap.

But I didn’t
wash for a few minutes. I just stood there, letting the scolding hot water hit
the top of my head.

I crossed my
arms.

And I started to
pray.

---

Our plane took
off forty-five minutes late
;
no surprise there. The
biggest surprise was that our plane took off at all. After all the breaking news
about the strange rapid aging cases, I figured by mid afternoon that all air
traffic in the world would be stopped until someone could determine what was
causing the life-altering problem.

“A witch!” I
wanted to shout. “There’s a witch! Her mom died so she’s pissed! And she wants
to destroy the world!”

“Cam?”

I turned to my
left to see Liesel staring at me with intense focus, as if she had been doing
so for the past five minutes.

“What?”

“Do you want to
talk about it?”

“About what?”

She sighed and
gave me a knowing look. “You know what. About what we’re gonna do when we get
back later today.”

I immediately
darted my head around to make sure nobody, including the rest of my family,
could hear us. My parents and Kimber were seated two rows back, far enough away.
There was an old woman sitting next to Liesel, but she had headphones on, and
appeared to be engrossed in an episode of
30
Rock
that was playing on the big screen.

“Let’s… please…
be quiet about it,” I said.

“OK, here’s the
thing,” Liesel whispered. “I don’t really know where Hannah is. But I do have a
place we can start—”

I sighed and
literally felt an ulcer start forming in my stomach. “She could be anywhere,
Leese.
Anywhere
.”

“I know.”

“We have no
time. By the end of today, people are going to start going
insane
, do you understand?”

“Of course I
do.”

“It’s not just a
matter of if we can find your sister,
which
seems
unlikely. Within days there’s going to be no way
of
traveling, no way of getting anywhere. We’re gonna be the only two people
not
aging, and people, very shortly, are
going to find out about us.”

“Not for a
while, Cam. And as long as we leave Reno, nobody will ever suspect that
we—”

“How old are we,
Leese?” I asked, leaning into her,
double checking
over her shoulder to make sure the old woman with the funny glasses wasn’t
listening to us. She definitely wasn’t; she was sound asleep.

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen. So
in… what… seventeen days, the youngest person on the planet is going to be our
age.
After that?
We’re gonna be the two youngest people
in the world.”

“You’re right,”
she said. “We have three weeks to stop her. But I promise you, this is all
gonna blow over by then.”

“But what if it
doesn’t? If we can’t solve this aging problem soon, we’re
gonna
have to go into hiding. And then how are we
gonna
be
able to find and stop your sister? I mean… what the hell are we—”

Without warning,
Liesel kissed me. And not just a little bit. She stuck her tongue in my mouth
and just started going to town. I kissed her back—what sane guy
wouldn’t—but I pulled away quickly.

“What… what was
that for?”

“A guy across
the way was staring at us,” she said. “Don’t look behind you.”

I did anyway. I
didn’t recognize the guy.

“Let’s talk
about this when we get home,” I whispered to Liesel. “
There’s
too many people around.”

“I agree. But
Cam… you have to know…”

“What?”

“We’re not gonna
be staying in Reno for long. As soon as we land—”

“I know,” I
said.

She nodded.
“OK.”

I stared forward
for a moment, not knowing if I should go to sleep, make more conversation, or
just start bawling in front of all the passengers.

Instead, I took
Liesel’s hand in mine and stared forward at the TV screen, which had just
turned from
30 Rock
to a black
screen.

“Thanks for your
patience everyone,” a female voice said over the speakers. “We will now begin
your in-flight movie,
The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button
. Thank you very much, and enjoy the show.”

Liesel started
laughing first,
then
I joined in. She had to slam her
hand over her mouth to keep from making too much noise.

She nodded and
smiled at me, wiping a few tears from her eyes. “That’ll be good
entertainment,” she said with another chuckle. “A guy who ages backward.”

I got more
comfortable in my seat and leaned my head toward Liesel’s. I was enjoying this
rare moment of laughter, one that probably wasn’t going to rear its head again
for a long, long time. “Been there, done that,” I said.

“Story of our
lives,” Liesel added.

“My life,” I
said. “And now everybody’s life.”

“But they’re not
going backward. They’re going…”

“Forward.”

The woman next
to Liesel woke up and wiped the bottom of her chin. “Has the movie started
yet?” she asked.

Liesel just
shook her head. “No. It’s starting right now, actually.”

“Anything good?”
the woman asked.

“The main
character dies in the end,” Liesel said. “It’s sad… tragic…”

“Oh, my word,”
the woman said, closing her eyes. “I hate stories with unhappy endings. I’m
going back to sleep.”

Ten seconds
later, she was snoring.

I stayed close
to Liesel for the rest of the flight, hoping that we would touch down in San
Francisco sooner rather than later. We would then have a short one-hour flight
from San Francisco to Reno, and Liesel and I could start focusing on our big,
scary adventure.

I turned back
and looked at my family. My mom was reading a magazine, and my dad and Kimber
were both sleeping soundly.

I didn’t want to
do it. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

I don’t want to say goodbye.

COACH WELSH

The temperature was
reaching ninety-nine degrees when Theodore Welsh exited his two-bedroom home on
the corner of Kietzke and Vassar to go for a brief jog before dinner. Standing
a massive six-foot-six, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Theodore
typically found it both easier and more enjoyable to use elliptical machines at
his local gym than to go for a strenuous run in the heat. But there was
something he loved about running outside; it was a passion ingrained inside of
him since his track school days at Caughlin Ranch High way back forty-something
years ago.