Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (31 page)

“Stop it!” I shouted.

Hannah just laughed, mercilessly enjoying
the torture she was inflicting on her younger sister. “Go ahead and try, you
piece of shit.”

I looked down at Kimber, who lay in the
coffin, in relentless pain, just waiting to die. She looked up at me, getting
older by the minute, her face turning skeletal, her eyes calling out for me to
either save her or end her misery. I started breathing heavily, a tear rolling
down my cheek, as I turned to Hannah, who was striking Liesel down with all she
had.

I brought my palms together.

“Hey Hannah,” I said, and when she turned
to me, I unleashed a large ball of sparkling green light right at her face,
knocking her silver painted body backward.

She
grinned,
her
teeth revoltingly yellow beneath that silver exterior, and shot her red lights
back at me. She missed and I fired a green shot back. Part of me wanted to stop
and marvel at what my body was doing at this moment, shooting giant green laser
beams out of my own palms. But I couldn’t analyze what was happening. I could
only think of Kimber, and keep going, until I passed out, until my body wore
out, until I died—all of the above.

Hannah struck me in the shoulder,
then
I struck her in the leg, almost knocking her over. I
looked to my right to see Liesel struggling to move; she appeared to be out of
this match. It looked like the final duel was between
me and
Hannah
.

“Fight me like a man,” she said, walking
toward me with increasing anger. “You don’t have it in you, do you, Cameron?
Everything you’ve done in your entire life has taken you to
this very moment
. Don’t you want to make
your little wifey proud?”

I didn’t answer her. Instead I shot two
more streams of light, this time against Hannah’s palms, and she shoved the
green lights right back at me with her red ones. Before all the lights hit me,
I pushed them back at her. I shot out my lights, and she shot out hers, and
before I knew it, we had one enormous stream of light hovering ten feet up into
the air.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Look at this!” Hannah said. “It’s like
Christmas!
Bells will be ringing
,
Cameron Martin!
Silent night
, you
dumb son of a bitch!”

She leapt forward and shot the light
toward me with all her might. I tried to push back, but I couldn’t this time,
and the huge stream of light slammed against my chest, knocking me five feet
back against the ground.

The back of my head slammed against a
sharp rock, and the whole world went fuzzy. I looked up to see four of Hannah,
and sixty-four streams of light headed my way. I tried to raise my arms to
fight back, but I couldn’t. I looked down at my palms to see them dirtied and
beaten, with no more energy to bust out my painful streams of green.

Hannah’s streams continued to hit me from
head to toe, and as four Hannahs became one, I realized I was rising into the
air. I turned to my right to see Liesel floating up into the air, too, both of
us unchained by the laws of gravity due to Hannah’s extra powerful waves of
light, the harsh red color growing darker by the second.

“Well, this is it,” Hannah said, bringing
us further and further up into the air. I looked down to see Kimber, still old,
still in pain. I could see over the cliff, all the way down to the sharp rocks
below. I could see out over all of Reno, my hometown, the place I was born in,
the place I was to die in. “You two really disappointed me. You didn’t bring me
Dr. Rice first of all, so I had to take care of him myself! Second, all you
could think of to destroy me with were some measly little paintball guns?
What’s the matter with you? And third, you got here past noon! You got here way
too late to ever hope you could save humanity! I’m severely disappointed, not
just for your sakes, but for Kimber’s, too. Here’s a poor little girl, who’s
now going to see not just
my
bright,
shining lights, but that bright, shining light at the end of a
tunnel
! Kimber! Look fast! Because I’m
throwing your brother and my little sister over the
cliff
!”

I looked at Liesel, and she looked at me,
as Hannah turned her body to the right and waved us toward the cliff. I looked
down. It was all happening so fast. I was coming closer and closer to the edge.
In seconds she’d be dropping me, and all would be lost. Our mission would be a
failure. I would be dead.

“Goodbye you two!” Hannah screamed with
glee. “It’s been nice knowing you!” She started laughing, hysterically, like a
complete madwoman. “Oh, and Cameron… I know I’m a few days late… but
happy birthday
!”

Liesel was sobbing, clearly, at a lost
for what to do, and I tried, one last time, to use my palms as a weapon. But
the magic, newly discovered just a few days ago, seemed to have vanished. I
tried to move but couldn’t. I tried to scream out, but I couldn’t do that
either. The time had come. It was over.

So I closed my eyes. And waited to die.

Then I heard a gunshot.

My eyes re-opened as I felt myself
falling back toward the ground. I tried to scream but had no time to. Hannah
had lost her grip on Liesel and me, and we were now falling back down toward
the earth. I hoped there’d be padding, maybe a couch or a bed of flowers to
fall into, but I knew that was wishful thinking. I fell on my right side, and I
heard a crunch on my right arm.

“OWWWW!” I screamed the loudest I’d ever
screamed.

My arm was broken. The pain shot through
me like sharp knives.

But I still sat up, just in time to
witness the impossible sight before me.

Hannah stood beside the coffin, looking
out at me, bewildered, then looking down at the bullet wound in her chest.

I turned to my left to
see Wesley—astonishingly old but alive—rushing forward, the gun in
his hand
,
his face beat red
. He pulled the trigger a second time, and
the bullet struck Hannah in her side.

“WESLEY?” I screamed. “You’re alive!”

He fired again, and this bullet smacked
Hannah in her right eye, this time the shot successfully blinding her.

Wesley fired one more time, the bullet
merely grazing Hannah’s leg, before he fell to the ground face first.

“Wes! Oh my God!” I crawled over to my
best friend, wrapping my arms around him, my tears flowing now like they would
never end. “Wes… you came back… you… you saved us…”

“Not yet, Cam,” Liesel said from behind
me, looking like she had survived the long fall with only a few minor
scratches. The only major wound I could see was a big cut on her right palm.

I looked over to see Hannah still moving,
but slowly.

“We have to end this,” Liesel said.

“Leese, I can’t… my arm… it’s broken.”

“Then pass your powers onto me.”

I couldn’t have heard her correctly.
“What did you say?”

Hannah started sitting up, and I found
myself confused as to what to do—listen to Liesel or try to fight Hannah
again with my one good hand.

“Cameron!” Liesel shouted. “Bring your
left palm to mine!”

I looked at my good palm. Even though I
hadn’t broken my left arm, the palm had three major cuts on it, with blood
dripping down to the dirt. I looked at Wesley, then at Liesel, and I then I
smashed my left, bloodied palm, against my wife’s even bloodier palm.

The flash of light between us lit up the
entire city, both of us sharing each other’s energy like bolts of electricity.
I dropped my jaw in awe as Liesel stepped backward, smiling, her red hair
blowing in the wind, her whole body outlined with a white, sparkly glow. I
watched as her palms became unrecognizable, the white balls of light she had
introduced me to that night in the hospital last year, now returning for one
last hurrah.

As Hannah made her way back up to her
feet, the red lights beginning to glow out of her palms yet again, Liesel fired
four huge blasts of white lights directly at Hannah’s head. Hannah fell back
against the dirt, and Liesel ran toward her. I grabbed onto Wesley, who was
barely breathing, and watched as Liesel started unleashing her fury and power
against Hannah’s body.

“Cam,” Wesley said. “Cam…
 
I can’t breathe…”

“Hang in there,” I said. “Hang in there,
Wes. Don’t die on me now. You’ve come too far.”

I watched as Liesel formed a large white
stream of light and smashed it directly against Hannah’s chest, not letting up
for a second. The light grew bigger and bigger and bigger, until an electric,
seemingly fatal shock smashed against Hannah’s entire body. I thought she might
be dead. But alas, she was
still
breathing.

“Caaaaaaaaam,” Kimber cried.

“Kimber… oh God…” I crawled past Wesley,
up to the coffin, looking down at Kimber. She looked even older. She looked
seventy-five, maybe eighty. She had her arms by her sides and her legs stretched
out, as if she was dead already. She looked up at me with frightened eyes.

“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “You’re
going to be OK, do you understand me?”

I looked over at Liesel, horrified, to see
Hannah smiling, saying something to Liesel through her yellow, bloodied teeth.

Please,
Leese. Just kill her. Let this be it. Let this be the end of Hannah.

When Hannah started laughing, and Liesel
started crying, I thought the worst.

But then Liesel grabbed Hannah’s head,
ripped open her jaw, and shot the white stream of light down her throat, for
ten seconds, twenty seconds, a full freaking minute.

Liesel closed the mouth, kissed her
sister on the forehead, and ran toward me.

“What did you do—” I started.

“Cameron, get down!” Liesel shouted.
“Get—”

Hannah’s body exploded into a thousand
pieces, portions of her scalp smacking the side of the coffin, parts of her leg
shooting over the cliff, chunks of her brain dropping to the ground before us.
It was if Liesel had dropped the world’s most explosive grenade in the girl’s
mouth.

It was, finally, a reality.

Hannah was gone.

“That… was awesome,” Wesley said before
he dropped his face back down into the dirt.

I took a few deep breaths and turned to
Liesel. She looked at me. I looked at her. I smiled. I jumped to my feet.

“She’s dead! The wicked witch is dead!” I
smiled, laughed out loud, then turned back to the coffin, ready to see my
sister not an eighty-year-old grandmother anymore, but the fourteen-year-old
girl I knew and loved. “I can’t believe it’s finally ov—”

I looked in the coffin. Kimber was still
old.

“What…”

I looked behind me, to see Wesley still
old, too.

Liesel brushed the dirt from her hands,
and sat down Indian style, a disappointed look on her face.

I rushed up to her. “Leese… what… she’s
dead! Why the hell aren’t they back to normal?”

“It was too late,”
Liesel
said.

“
What
?”
I grabbed Liesel by the shoulders and brought her close to me. “What was too
late? What do you mean?”

“Owww!” Kimber shouted. “It hurrrrrrts!”

“Liesel!” I screamed. “Answer me!”

“Before I could kill her,” Liesel said,
“she made one last spell.”

“One last spell? What kind of a spell?”

Liesel stood up and pulled me up with
her. She held me close, our noses almost touching.

“Cameron, her last words… made it clear…
that for the aging to end… to let Kimber and Wesley live… to save the world…
one of us has to sacrifice ourselves. One of us has to die.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I
couldn’t. I wanted to vomit. I thought I might faint. Finally, I said: “What?”

“She said it… too quickly… before I could
finish her off…”

“What… what does this mean?”

“If one of us dies, the spell will be
broken. If we both live, everybody dies.”
         

I turned back to see Kimber and Wesley, both
near dead, both still in horrific pain. They had to be reaching their
mid-eighties by now, maybe even ninety. There was no time. In just a few
minutes, two of the most important people in my life would be gone forever.

“Leese, I—”

“Cameron, go to your sister.” She pushed
me away.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No,
what—”

“Be with her. I have to do this. I have
to go.” Liesel looked toward the edge of the cliff.

I shook my head faster. “What? No. No,
no, no. It doesn’t have to be this way!”

She smiled, tears welling up in her eyes.
“I got us into this mess, Cameron. It was always me who started this. It has to
be me who ends it.”

“No.” I started crying. “Leese… you can’t
do this to me—”

“If I don’t, your best friend and sister
will die. I’m not gonna let that happen.”