Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (30 page)

“Leese, what time is it?”

She didn’t answer me at first.

“Leese?”

She sighed. “It’s 12:05, Cam.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s begun.”

It’s
already begun.

KIMBER

She struggled up top the mountain, trying
in her elderly state to punch and kick and maim the vicious young woman in
front of her. But the harder she fought, the weaker she became, and eventually
she had no energy left.

She thought she might get tied up to a
rock or a boulder, or, better yet, a plant she could rip out of the ground to
save herself. But she didn’t get tied up at all. Instead the young woman before
her unleashed a bright red light that smacked her straight in the stomach, and
she fell back into a new wooden home.

Kimber Martin found herself in a
home-built wooden coffin that stunk of manure.

She tried to get back up, but she felt
paralyzed from the neck down. She tried to move her hands, then her feet. But
she couldn’t. All she could move was her face.

She tried to speak. “Whhhhhaaaaa…” She
tried again. “Dooooonnnnn…” She could only make noises. “Caaaaammmmmmmm…”

“What was that?” Hannah asked, her dress
skimpy and sparkly, her crazy long hair blowing in the wind. She grabbed a
shovel and started digging the grave for Kimber toward the edge of the cliff
that looked out over Reno. “You calling for your big brother? Or your
little
brother, I should say, since he
still looks nineteen, while you look as old as Mother Theresa.”

“HELP!” Kimber shouted. “Helllllp!”

“Oh, shut up,” Hannah said, digging her
shovel into some dirt and tossing it onto Kimber’s face. “You can scream as
long and hard as you want, but the truth is, nobody’s gonna hear you, and if
they did, they wouldn’t care. Trust me. Everyone in the world’s got their own
set of problems now.”

“Why…” Kimber had control of her face,
but she didn’t have control of her tears. They started building up in her eyes,
falling down the sides of her cheeks.

“All will be explained, old lady. I’m
just waiting for your brother to come save you. That is, if he can get here in
time.”

Her shovel struck the ground again, and
already she was making progress on her burial effort. She smacked her lips
together and looked out at the smoky house in the distance.

“Speaking of time,” Hannah continued,
“it’s just about up. And let me tell you, the pain you’re gonna feel… it’s
going to be
excruciating
.”

Hannah started tapping the end of the
shovel against her hands and walked up to Kimber’s comatose body. The girl
didn’t look fourteen anymore; at this point, she looked close to sixty.

“You may look middle-aged now, Ms.
Martin, but in one minute’s time, the countdown’s really going to begin, and
you’re going to start aging a whole year of your life with each passing minute.
You think what your brother went through last year was hard? Aging a year every
day? That was so insignificant in the scheme of things, it’s hard to believe it
was made such a big deal over.”

Hannah kneeled down and picked up her
phone to look at the time. She smiled and brought the phone down to her side.

“You ready, Kimber? Here we go…” She
waved the shovel up in the air. “Ten… nine… eight…” She started skidding the
shovel up against the coffin. “Seven… six… five… four…” She waved the shovel up
high in the air. “Let the pain begin! Three! Two! One! Happy birthday to
you
!”

Kimber brought the shovel down on top of
Kimber’s stomach, slamming it so hard that all the air escaped her chest.

Then the pain
really
began.

As Hannah went back to her shoveling
duty, Kimber tried to get a hold of her breathing as she stared up at the blue
cloudless sky. The pain was specific to every joint in her body, as she could
literally feel herself growing a whole year older throughout the next minute.
She was used to this pain by now, having experienced it once an hour for the
past day and a half. But this time, as Hannah said, when 12:01 struck, the pain
didn’t cease. It continued. With each additional minute that went by, the pain
became increasingly violent. By 12:05, Kimber didn’t know if she was going to
make it another second.

She continued to hear Hannah shoveling
the dirt next to her. And she continued to listen to the soft wind flowing past
her coffin. She didn’t hear her brother. She didn’t hear Liesel. It was a
given. The pain would continue on in this fatal hour, and the fourteen-year-old
Kimber would die an ugly old lady, not warm in her bed, but crying in a coffin.

She tried to move again. She couldn’t.
But she knew, even if she could jump out of the coffin and run for her life,
she wouldn’t get too far. The pain was too much for her to handle. Running
across town wouldn’t help. The spell had been cast. There was nowhere she could
go and nothing she could do.

As 12:05 became 12:06, and as Hannah
neared completion digging the ditch, Kimber tried to ignore the pain by
thinking happy thoughts. She had a lot of events, moments, people,
successes
, to choose from. She thought about eleven nights
ago, when she played the violin for the President of the United States. She
thought about her friends, and her favorite teachers, and her parents, who she
still couldn’t believe were gone.

But the happy thought Kimber thought of
the longest was of her older brother Cameron. He had always been there for her,
but nothing had come close to the loyalty and friendship he had given her in
the last year. Even though he had been on his deathbed last year, he still got
up, rode a taxi across town, and found himself at her spring concert just
moments before she played her violin to a packed house. He had trusted in her
all of his worries and concerns over the last few months, with his aging
backward, with his searching for Liesel, with his journey across California to
end this worldwide epidemic. She had no idea if Cameron was close to
succeeding, or if he was even in Reno. But she liked knowing, even if she were
to die in the next few minutes, that Cameron was still out there somewhere,
being a hero, trying everything he could to end the madness.

“Hannah! Let her go!”
  

The shout from behind her couldn’t have
been real. It must’ve been her imagination, especially since the voice had
sounded like Cameron’s.
 

She heard a car come to a stop. She heard
the footsteps getting out of it. As the seconds marched on, Kimber realized
that maybe what she was hearing behind her wasn’t her imagination after all.

“Caaaaaammmmmm…” she said, looking to her
left to see Hannah standing still, a smug little grin on her face.

“Welcome Cameron,” Hannah said, “and
welcome… my beloved baby sister.” She took a step forward, then looked down at
Kimber. “Who’s ready to have some fun?”

Two of the red lights came shooting out
of Hannah’s palms, and Kimber started screaming.
 

17.

I snatched the largest paintball gun I
could find and started running across the large patch of dirt that housed
Hannah, Kimber, a coffin, and a cliff. I raced toward Hannah, the gun
outstretched in my hand.

I was still running when I pulled the
trigger and blasted a shot of silver paint directly at Hannah’s chest. “Get
away from my sister, you bitch!”

Hannah fell backward immediately, her
raging red streams of light disappearing from her palms. But she didn’t fall
down. She just re-adjusted herself and faced me.

“Let her go!” I screamed.

She laughed and took a few steps toward
me, passing the coffin on her right. “Oh, Cameron, Cameron, Cameron. You make
this so damn easy.”

She pushed her hands out toward me,
unleashing not two, but four large streams of red light right at my torso. I
fell back and slammed my head against the ground. I tried to grab for the
paintball gun, but I couldn’t reach far enough, and by the time Hannah noticed
what I was doing, she shot another light at my arm, making it comatose.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “Please!”

Hannah started laughing. “It’s such a
damn cliché, Cameron. You showing up here, thinking you’re
gonna
save the day. Well I’ve got news for you. You’re not.”

“Liesel!” I shouted. I didn’t hear a
response. And I didn’t hear her coming.
Where
the hell did she go? Where is she?
“Liesel! Where—”

Hannah shot another stream of light, this
one right at my face. It missed, only by an inch or two.

“Unfortunately for you,” Hannah
continued, “you’re just no match for an all-powerful witch like me.
I, one measly person on this stupid little planet, managed to wipe
out the entire human race.
What do you think you can do about it? You
think you’re capable of stopping me, Cameron? I’m ashamed you would even
consider the possibility.”

Another light smashed against my throat.
I could feel the pain from my chin to the top of my chest. All of Hannah’s
energy headed north of my body, as four more lights slammed against my arms, my
chest,
my
neck. Not a single one hit my legs. I was
astonished to discover I could still move my legs. I could jump up and run. I
wasn’t paralyzed. I wasn’t a cripple.

It
must be because of my powers. It must be because I’m a witch.
A big, manly witch who’s getting really pissed off.

I kicked myself off the ground and just
barely dodged her next light. When I jumped back up to my feet, she didn’t
flinch, merging four streams of light and striking them against my face. I
closed my eyes just before—probably a smart idea to keep me from going
blind—as the blow pushed me back against the ground. The pain was so
fierce I wanted to start screaming.

“Caaaaaaaam!” Kimber screamed. I could
tell in just hearing her shout my name that she was continuing to age, fast and
drastically. Time was running out.

“Liesel!” I shouted. “Where the hell are
you?”

“Good point,” Hannah said. “Where did she
run off to, anyway? Did she get scared?”

“Nope,” Liesel said, from a distance. I
turned my head just in time to see her sprawled out on a bed of bushes, her M16
sniper paintball gun in her hand. Hannah turned just in time, and Liesel fired,
the glob of silver paint striking Hannah directly in her right eyeball.

“Ahhhh!” Hannah screamed. “My eye! My
eye!”

Hannah brought her hands to her eye and
started walking in circles, disoriented. But Liesel wasn’t done yet. She shot
Hannah again, this time on the side of her head. A third time, against her
neck. A fourth time, in the chest. A fifth time, in the groin. Hannah looked
stunned, just standing there, taking the shots like she had already prepared
herself to die.

And then, Liesel appeared out of the
bushes, walking like a true warrior, throwing the sniper paintball gun to the
ground and strapping the massively large T16 paintball gun to her side. When
she approached Hannah, Liesel started to fire, and the blasts at which these
blobs of silver paint smashed against Hannah were so fast and loud that one
would swear they were real bullets. The paintball gun was so impressive,
pumping out rounds of paint a million times a second, that I couldn’t help but
smile. Hannah finally fell to the ground, coming to rest on her stomach, and
facing the dirt before her.

Oh
my God. She’s dead. Hannah’s dead!

I slowly made my way back up to my feet.
My eyes, nose, lips, tongue,
neck
—they were all
stinging in pain. It hurt to even blink. But I had to start moving; I had to
see Liesel’s brutal, unrelenting destruction upon Hannah’s body.

But most of all, I couldn’t wait to see
the new and improved Kimber Martin.

“You got her,” I said to Liesel, who
still appeared to be in military mode. “She’s not moving. She’s gone.”

“Don’t celebrate yet,” Liesel said.

“Owww,” Kimber said from the coffin.
“Caaaaaam! It hurrrrrts!”
 

Oh
no.

As Liesel kneeled down to inspect
Hannah’s body, which was covered head to toe with the paint, I rushed up to the
coffin and looked down to see Kimber so old I wanted to cry.

“What—” I said, but before I could continue
with my sentence, I heard the sounds of loud, volatile laughter behind me.

And it wasn’t coming from Liesel.

“You two are so very
stupid
,” Hannah said, rolling over on her back and blasting Liesel
into the air with a big ball of light. She wiped the paint from her face and
made her way back up to her feet. “It was an honorable try there, Leese. I’ll
admit I’m impressed. But you should’ve been the first to know… the silver
paint’s not gonna work on a woman with the power of
seven witches
!”

Hannah blasted more streams of red light
at Liesel, two, five, eight, fifteen, shooting Liesel in the air, back and
forth, sideways and diagonally, like she was a ragdoll.