Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (7 page)

“Did you get
them in?”

“Yeah.”

“All of them?”

Breaking through
the scary silence, a car blasted through the garage door in the driveway behind
us and came to a screechy stop, just yards away from us on the street. Liesel
screamed and I jumped around, knowing full well that the startling noise had
been a cause for concern.

Is it Hannah?

But it wasn’t
the evil witch. In the car looked to be a concerned father, shouting at someone
over the phone, while a mother, dressed in gym clothes, pulled her little boy
out to the driveway.

“You’re going
far away from here, you understand me?” the father shouted. “You’re no son of
mine! You’re a freak is what you are!”

Liesel and I
watched in horror as this little boy, who looked about four or five, just kept
screaming, no words coming out, just loud sounds, the kind that a one-year-old
baby would make.

The mom opened
the passenger side door of her husband’s car and shoved the boy inside, the boy
crying now louder than ever.

“Mommmmmyyyyyyyyyy!”
the boy shouted.

The woman
stopped in her tracks at the edge of the driveway. She didn’t say anything for
a moment. Then: “Jeff,” the woman said to her husband in the car, “that was our
son’s first word.”

Nothing else was
said after that. The father drove off into the distance, the kid still
screaming at the top of his lungs as the car sped around the corner.

Liesel and I
stood close together, taking in this moment with both heartache and amazement.

The woman
started walking back up to the house. She caught us in her eyeline right before
she disappeared.

“What the hell
are you looking at?” she shouted, and stepped inside the hole in her garage.

Liesel and I
turned to each other. And then we got back in the car.

“We need to
leave L.A,” I said to Liesel as I turned on the ignition. “People are starting
to go mad, Leese. We don’t want to be in one of the most crowded cities in the
world right now. By tomorrow… it’s going to be impossible to drive out of here,
to get out of here, with our lives still in tact.”

“I know, Cam. We
just have one more stop. Then we’re heading somewhere secluded.”

“Secluded?
Secluded where?”

“You’ll see.”

There it was
again. Another destination left up to my imagination. I didn’t want her talking
to me in clues and ambiguities. I wanted her to be straight with me.

But I trusted
her. I had to.

“OK,” I said.
“Where’s the next stop?”

Liesel turned
her head toward the paint cans in the back,
then
nodded toward me. “Where do you think?”

I wasn’t the
smartest nineteen-year-old in the world.

But I knew
exactly where we needed to go.

TOMMY & BECKA

The OPEN sign in
front of the psychic’s home wasn’t lit, but Tommy’s friends pushed him out onto
the sidewalk, anyway.

“It’s
gonna
be hilarious,” Tommy’s best pal Bryan said. His other friend
Zeke handed him two ten-dollar bills.

“I think it’s
gonna cost more than that, guys,” Tommy said, rubbing the back of his shaggy
brown hair, which had grown a few inches in just the past two days.

“What do you
think she’s gonna say?” Zeke asked Bryan.

“I don’t know,”
Bryan said. “Hopefully something that explains what the hell’s going on in the
world.”

“You sure you
guys don’t want to come in with me?” Tommy asked.

“You go,” Bryan
said. “It’d probably cost more with the three of us.”

Tommy nodded. “You’re
probably right.”

“Find out,
Tommy,” Bryan said. “Find out why your hair’s growing longer, why I’ve shot up
five inches, how Zeke finally got… you know… hair down there.”

Zeke punched
Bryan in the shoulder as Tommy laughed and started making his way toward the
psychic’s home. He glanced back at Bryan’s car in the distance, and wondered,
jokingly, if this was the last time he was ever going to see daylight.

He turned toward
the front door and knocked, loudly. He analyzed the sign beside her door, which
said, in bright pink letters: “MAGICAL ROSE. Successful Palm Readings for 35
Years.” He wondered if thirty-five years was enough experience to help him out
on this warm June afternoon.

He knocked
again. No answer.

Tommy tried the
doorknob. Miraculously, the door wasn’t locked. He jerked it open just wide
enough so he could slink his way inside.

“Hello?” he
asked. “Is anyone here?”

As he scooted
his way through the waiting room area, trying to find a bell he could ring, he
tried to think of how he was going to phrase his questions. He had never been
to a psychic before, and he didn’t believe in magic and paranormal phenomena.
But what was happening to his little sister Megan, and to most of his younger
friends was, for all practical purposes,
really
happening
. People had gotten older in the last seventy-two hours—a
lot older—and nobody, both locally, or on the news, could explain what
was happening. His current girlfriend Gertrude—a cute but ultimately
boring straight A student who he was thinking of dumping as fast and
efficiently as his two previous girlfriends, Kimber and Karen—had been
the one to suggest he see a local psychic. Then Tommy’s friends insisted they
skip school on Monday to go see the most talked about psychic in
town—Becka Rose. “She won’t know anything,” Tommy kept saying. But he
knew, by the time he was passing over English, French, and Algebra 1-2 to drive
down Plumb Blvd with his buddies, that today’s little field trip was something
he had to go through with. He knew that no matter what this psychic had to tell
him about his future, and about the future of the world, it would have to be
something more concrete than what all the reporters were saying. The only
person who had ever had any insight into this aging problem had been his former
girlfriend Kimber, who had once told Tommy of her older brother’s brush with
death as he rapidly aged into his senior years. Tommy had thought about calling
her today. But he knew she hated him. He knew all of his exes hated him.

Tommy pulled the
curtains open and walked, a bit fearfully, into the psychic’s work zone. A
large table greeted him, along with two chairs and a multitude of un-lit
candles. A large candle sat on the center of the table, also un-lit.
 

He opened his
mouth to say something, when a figure entered from the right, loudly chewing,
as she sat down on the other side of the table. The woman had a large kitchen
knife in her hand. Tommy wondered if he should run for his life.

But the woman
wasn’t using the knife to harm another person. She pulled a half-eaten apple
from her pocket and cut a few more slices for her to munch on.

Tommy felt it
was safe to say something. “Umm, excuse me—”

“Who’s there?”

“Hi,” Tommy
said, stepping out from the shadows. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was
wondering if you could give me a reading.”

“Please, get
out,” the psychic said, setting her utensils and apple core down on the edge of
the table. “I’m not having any readings today.”

“It’s very
important,” Tommy said. “I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news.”

She sighed and
crossed her arms. “I have.”

“I just wanted
something really quick. Just a few minutes.”

“I really
can’t—”

“Please,” Tommy
said. “It’s a matter of
life and death
.”

She stared at
the boy for a moment,
then
licked her lips. “OK. Fine.
It’ll be sixty dollars for twenty minutes.”

“I just want
five minutes.”

“Doesn’t
matter.”

He set his two
ten-dollar bills on the table. “I only have twenty dollars.”

“I’m sorry,” the
psychic said, standing back up.

“Please. My
sister.
My little sister.
She’s very sick.” Tommy
wanted to laugh. He certainly had perfected the art of lying. “You’re the only
person who can help me.”

The psychic sat
back down. She grabbed the money and motioned for Tommy to take a chair.
“Please sit,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“What’s your
name?”

“Tommy.”

“Nice to meet
you, Tommy. I’m Becka. Please give me your hands, and close your eyes.” He did
as he was told.

The psychic
didn’t say anything for a moment, but Tommy could feel, within seconds, the
room becoming frosty cold.

“Is everything
OK?” Tommy asked.

“Shh. Quiet.”

He opened his
eyes, briefly, to see that the psychic had her head tilted down. He re-closed
his eyes.

“I’m sensing
that you’ve had great troubles recently,” she said.

“Uhh… that’s
right,” Tommy said.

“And I sense that
things are only going to get worse for you. I just see… for your future… I see…
oh my goodness… I see
blackness
.”

“Blackness?”

Tommy felt a
sudden breeze hit the right side of his body, as if a window had been left open
in the back. He opened his right eye to see that no windows were in the room.

“I see… oh God…
more blackness… for your family… for your friends.”

The breeze
intensified, becoming, within a few seconds, a fierce wind. Tommy opened his
left eye this time, seeing some papers falling to the ground in the distance, a
book falling over, a candle dropping down.

“Umm, ma’am, I
think—”

“Oh God,” the
psychic said. “Oh my God! I see blackness everywhere! I see pain and suffering
and… oh God… death… death
everywhere
!”

The wind picked
up even more. It was spinning around the room, like a tornado. Tommy’s long
hair covered his face. He couldn’t see a thing. He gripped the table in front
of him; the psychic did the same.

“Stop this!”
Tommy shouted.

“Oh God. I don’t
believe it. I don’t believe it!”

“You don’t
believe
what
?”

The tablecloth
flew off the table, just past Tommy’s head. The plate with the apple core
smashed against the wall behind him.

The kitchen
knife struck him in the center of his throat.

Tommy grabbed
his throat with both his hands. An artery burst. Blood shot out in spurts,
striking the table in front of him and the hardwood floor beneath him.

He reached out
for the psychic to assist him, but her eyes were still closed, and the wind was
still spinning around the room at a violent speed.

Tommy fell off
the chair and pulled himself toward the curtains in the distance. Blood shot
everywhere. He couldn’t breathe. He could barely see.

“It can’t be,”
the psychic said at the table. “I’ve never seen it before! I see… I see…”

Tommy reached
the curtains. As a dark red pool of blood formed around him, he extended his
arm out and grabbed the left side of the curtains. As he let out his final
breath, he pulled as hard as he could, ripping the curtains down toward the
floor.

“…
my
future,” the psychic said. “My future is black, too!”

She opened her
eyes. The wind stopped. She took a few deep breaths.

Then she stared
forward. The boy was nowhere to be seen.

“Uhh… hello?”

The psychic
stood up and looked across the room to see the dead teenager surrounded by the
most blood she had ever seen in her life.

“Oh my God!” the
psychic said.

She ran around
the table and across the room to assist the boy, but she didn’t make it all the
way. She lost her balance, slipped on a pool of Tommy’s blood, and cracked her
head open on the hardwood floor.

5.

While our drive
from Reno to Los Angeles had taken half a day, our drive to the small but
colorfully decorated exterior of Tinseltown Paintball near Hollywood & Vine
took less than half an hour.

“This is so absurd,”
I said as I parked the car at the back of the near-empty parking lot.

“What is?”

“We’re going to
save the world with
paintball guns
?”

Liesel shrugged.
“I didn’t make up the rules.”

“What about just
a real gun? Would real bullets hurt her?”

“Of course.”

“Could they kill
her?”

“Cam!” Liesel
unbuckled her seatbelt and opened her passenger door. “We don’t have the time
to get a gun. You have to put in an application and—”

“You’ve known
about this for six weeks, Leese!”