Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (5 page)

“Cam?” she
asked.

I took a step
back and wiped my eyes. “Goodnight, Kimber.”

“
Cam
.” There was no smiley face, no
chuckling now. She stared at me with an ultra-serious look, like she wanted to
viciously attack me. “What the hell is going on?”

I didn’t tell
her what was going on. I couldn’t. I said, “Whatever happens, just know, I
won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

“Is everything
all right?”

I nodded and
stepped out of the bathroom. “Goodnight. I love you.”

I headed back
toward my bedroom when I heard Kimber say, faintly, “I love you, too.”

My hug for
Kimber might have been a surprise, but her hug from behind surprised me most of
all. She wrapped her arms around my waist and rested her head against my back.
I knew she knew something big was coming.
 

I turned around
and tried to force a smile. “Take care of Mom and Dad for me,” I whispered.

She nodded. “I
will.”

“I’ll be back as
soon as I can. And Kimber…”

She took a deep
breath and smacked her chapped lips together. “What?”

“You have to
trust me, OK? Please trust me.”

“I will, Cam.”

When she took a
step back, I turned to my left to see Liesel standing in my bedroom doorway.
She and Kimber locked eyes for a moment, and then Kimber looked back at me.

“I’ll be back
soon,” I said, taking Liesel’s hand.

“OK,” Kimber
said, and she looked down, with sadness, as Liesel and I passed her.

I held onto
Liesel’s hand as we stepped outside into the night and heard the door lock
behind us.

We grabbed our
suitcases from my dad’s car, which I had kept unlocked, and threw them into my
Toyota 4Runner. I pulled the car out onto the street and looked back at the
house one last time, until it disappeared behind a bunch of trees.

I turned to
Liesel. “One more
stop
?”

“One more stop,”
she said. “And then we’re kissing Reno goodbye.”

---

The apartment
complex was as dark and ominously quiet as the first time I visited it, when I
was a sixty-four-year-old on his way to his senior prom.

“Grandpa?”
Liesel asked as we stepped inside the apartment.

“Shhh,” I said.
“Leese, it’s almost 1 A.M.”

She just
shrugged. “He doesn’t sleep much, don’t worry.”

“Really? How old
is he again?”

“He’s
eighty-four,” she said. She looked up at the ceiling and thought for a moment.
“Well, let’s see. He’d be… eighty-
seven
now.”

She turned to
me, and I stared at her for a moment. “That’s right, Leese… you’re
right—”

“Grandpa!”
Liesel shouted. It was as if it just occurred to her that her aging grandfather
could be in trouble. While most everyone we knew sixty and younger wouldn’t be
facing problems for at least a week or two, Dom would be in serious trouble in
a few days, if not now. “Grandpa! Answer me!”

She stepped into
his bedroom to see his bed made, the room super clean.

“Is it possible
he could—” I started.

Liesel stepped
back into the hallway and turned toward Dom’s bathroom. The door was open a
smidge, and she could faintly hear the
drip-drip-drip
of water dropping down from the showerhead.

“Oh no…” she
said.

I decided not to
follow her inside. As I heard Liesel start sobbing, I backed myself up against
the wall behind me, wanting to leave her alone. Her crying told me one thing:
Grandpa Dom is dead.

I figured it had
been a heart attack. But it could’ve been anything.

It’s the first casualty. With Dom’s
death, the crisis has now officially begun.
 

“Cameron?”

I leaned my head
in. “Yeah?” I whispered.

I brought my
hand to my mouth. There was blood on the shower wall. A trickle of water was
coming out of the showerhead. Liesel was embracing her grandfather’s dead body,
his head resting on her shoulder. She kissed him on the cheek before bringing
him back down toward the floor.

I thought Liesel
would ask me to help her move the body, or call an ambulance.

But this was no
ordinary situation we were in. I knew that three days ago, and I knew that now.
I knew calling anyone would only get us into trouble. We had to be as
inconspicuous as possible, so I knew, even though Liesel felt intense loss at
the moment, that she wouldn’t be asking me to call a single person.

She let go of
her grandfather, stepped out of the shower, and stormed past me. “Come on. We
have to go.”

I just stood
there, not sure what to do or say. She had madness in her eyes. I figured she’d
at least want to say a few final words. “Leese, shouldn’t we—”

“Let’s go!
Now
!”

---

The first five
minutes of the car ride were quiet. I didn’t even touch the radio. I pulled up
to the last intersection before US-395, not sure if we would be heading west to
Sacramento or south to Los Angeles. I figured Los Angeles. It made the most
sense.

I kept the
engine running as I rested my hand against Liesel’s shoulder. I was overjoyed
to feel her hand touch mine.

“Is there
anything I can do?”

“He was such a
great man,” Liesel said. “Weird, to be sure, but great. He didn’t deserve to go
like that.”

“Do you think he
just slipped, or do you think—
”

“He aged two
years in two days, Cam. It’s one thing for a seventeen-year-old to grow rapidly
older. It’s another thing for a man in his eighties.”

“So that means…”

“People in
their
eighties and nineties… there’s nothing we can do for
them.”

“Leese, I’m so
sorry…”

“It’s OK,” she
said. “Cam, you have to understand… we’re not going to make any head way if we
get wrapped up in our emotions. We’ve both been crying so much tonight… If we
continue this way, we’re never gonna get
anywhere
.”

“I know,” I
said.

“It seems almost
unthinkable,” Liesel said, “but remember, the lives of not thousands, not
millions, but
billions
of people are,
in the end, going to be left in our hands.”

I just shook my
head. “Well when you put it like that…”

“Hey,” she said,
pulling my chin close to hers. “We’re in this together. We’re
gonna
save the world, Cameron. Sooner or later, no matter
what it takes, we are gonna stop my sister, do you understand me?”

“I know,” I
repeated.

“We need to look
forward, here and now, and not let our emotions separate us from what’s really
important. Finding my sister. Killing my sister. Whatever it takes.”

“OK,” I said,
looking up at the freeway ahead of us. “So where are we headed?”

She breathed
through her nose, stared at the on-ramp up ahead, and darted her eyes toward
mine. “We’re goin’ to Hollywood.”

“I thought so.”
I said with an aggravated sigh.

“What?” Liesel
asked.

“Just… I don’t
know… your sister could be
anywhere
.
Do you really think she’ll still be in that basement in her house? Or even in
L.A.? It seems like it would be the
last
place
she’d be.”

“Cam?”

I looked at my
wife, who, remarkably, considering the circumstances, appeared as beautiful and
luminous as ever.

“I’ve got a
plan,” she said. “You’re just gonna have to trust me. I’ve known this girl my
whole life. And I know… more than ever now… that a lot of this is just a game
to her. She
wants
us to find her.
She’s not hiding in a mummy’s tomb in Egypt, or in an igloo in Antarctica.
She’s close. I can feel it.”

I nodded. “OK. I
trust you. Of course I trust you.”

“Time’s a
wastin’. Let’s hit it.”

And with that, I
sped onto the US-395 freeway and started heading south toward Carson City. Los
Angeles was eight hours away.

MARGARET & DARLENE

The waiting area
was so crowded that a line had started forming down the hallway toward the
elevator. It got so bad that after 9 A.M. the young assistant, a girl in her
late teens, had to start turning people away—the young and the old. There
was crying and screaming, sadness and madness. It had all started at 5 A.M. and
it looked like things were only going to get worse for the rest of this
devastating day.

Tired, and a
little frightened, after a long weekend of increasing stomach pain, Darlene
Dickerson sat in the back of the room, a slim magazine opened to page twelve on
her lap. She tried to concern herself with articles about hidden beach gems in
North America, but the more time that passed, sitting there waiting, the more
the inevitable was beginning to hit her. She knew something had been wrong as
early as Saturday morning, but now, having waited forty-eight hours to seek
medical treatment, she needed an answer as to what the hell was wrong with her.

She set the
magazine down, crossed her legs, and rested her head against the wall. She
closed her eyes and started breathing, slowly and heavily, through her nose.

“How’s the
pain?” Darlene’s wife Margaret asked.

“No better, no
worse.”

Margaret brought
her hands down to Darlene’s and silently prayed for her beloved to be the next
to be called. They had been waiting for over two hours. The room was hot, too,
and not making Darlene’s strange symptoms any better.

“Do you want
more water, honey?”

“No, I’m fine,”
Darlene
said. “I just want to go back there, see what’s
wrong with me. Why is this taking so long?”

“I told you.
I’ve been coming here for years. I’ve never seen it this crowded here before,
ever. There must be a plague or something.”

“Wouldn’t that
be wonderful,” Darlene said, blinking a few times and pressing her thumbs
against her eyes.

“Don’t tell me
your eyes hurt now, too.”

“No, no. I’m
just tired.”

The pain had
started on Saturday like any normal stomachache. Darlene spent the day thinking
she had just eaten something weird the night before, but the pain turned to
nausea late in the evening, and she spent most of the night throwing up. For
most of Sunday she figured she had the stomach flu, some kind of rotten bug she
had picked up somewhere, but by the end of last night, she had started
suffering migraines, chest pains, the whole kit and caboodle. This morning she
hurt all over, and she feared the worst: cancer.

“My mom had it,”
Darlene had told Margaret last night. “Her mom had it. I’m fifty-one years old.
It’s totally possible.”

“You’re too
young,” Margaret had said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just something you ate.
This will pass.”

But now, sitting
in this stifling hot doctor’s office at 8:30 A.M. on Monday morning, Margaret
couldn’t be sure. Her wife was prone to bouts of sickness from time to time,
but nothing she experienced had ever been quite like this. Margaret just needed
to hear her wife’s name called out, loud and clear.
Anytime
now.
Any second.

“Darlene
Dickerson?”

Margaret opened
her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief to see a young girl standing in the
doorway, a clipboard in her hands. Her hair was blonde and stringy, and her
face seemed to be battling a bad case of rosacea. She didn’t look like one of
the employees here; she looked like another patient in search of a doctor.

As Margaret and
Darlene stood up and made their way across the room, Margaret couldn’t help but
wonder if there truly
was
some sort
of plague wafting through the U.S., or, at least, Hartford, Connecticut, where
Margaret and Darlene called home. She had been watching the riveting stories on
TV all weekend about the babies around the world rapidly aging. These
unthinkable stories reminded her of what happened to her nephew Cameron, who
had suffered something similar during his senior year of high school. She
hadn’t been around to see what happened to him, but her sister Shari had filled
her in on all the details after the fact. She was happy to know that he was OK
now, married, living the good life back in Reno, Nevada. She hoped these cases
of rapid aging wouldn’t affect him. She hoped there wasn’t any connection to
what he suffered all those months ago.

Margaret
followed Darlene down a long hallway, where Darlene got weighed, and her blood
pressure checked. After another brief wait in one of those claustrophobic white
rooms, Margaret watched as Darlene explained to her doctor all her symptoms,
plus her and her family’s medical history. He took some blood from her, which
made Margaret woozier than Darlene. Then he took Darlene out of the room and
told Margaret to wait as they performed further tests down the hall.