Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2)

Happy
Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2)

by

Brian Rowe

Kindle Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Brian Rowe

http://mrbrianrowe.blogspot.com

Kindle
Edition, License Notes

This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or
given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading
this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only,
then please return it to amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely
coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously.

1. One

The nightmare
was real. Again.

I crawled up the
steep, scary mountain, trying to keep breathing, trying to keep my eyes open,
the rain pelting down against the ground and splashing wet mud against my
terrified face. I could hear the thunder exploding with fury above me, the
lights in the sky signifying an impending apocalypse.

Worst of all, my
diaper was giving me serious irritation on my butt cheeks.

My name is
Cameron Martin. It’s Wednesday, April nineteenth.

And I’m a
one-year-old.

Last year an
unimaginable curse took hold of my body, causing me to age an entire year of my
life with each passing day. For the last three months of my senior year of high
school, I aged from seventeen to eighty-five, turning back to normal magically,
and thankfully, just in time to see my high school graduation. In March of last
year, I thought I had all the time in the world. In June I realized how
precious life can be, and from then on I made a promise to myself to not waste
a single second.

To make matters
more complicated, the girl I fell in love with during those tumultuous three
months turned out to be the girl who inflicted the evil curse upon me in the
first place. My girlfriend is a witch, and a vastly powerful one at that. I
knew by the time I started dating her that she had otherworldly powers, but I
didn’t find out until nearly a year later just what this girlfriend of mine was
capable of. Her name’s Liesel. And she’s the best, worst thing that ever
happened to me.

It’s been nearly
a year since Liesel cured me in that dark, depressing hospital room, nearly a year
since I saw my whole life flash before my eyes. There I was, seventeen years
old on the inside, eighty-five and rotting on the outside, waiting to die. But
something extraordinary happened to me that night. I didn’t die; I got better.
And in June I was finally able to put that horrific episode behind me.

But now, here I
am, in the pouring rain, crawling through mud, nearly naked, once again
counting the seconds to my death. And unlike last time, when the tiniest bit of
hope carried me through to my final moments, tonight, I have no hope. None.
There’s nothing she can do for me. There’s nothing
he
can do for me. And there’s nothing that demonic sorceress above
wants more than to see me erased from this planet forever.

I knew tonight
was the night I was going to die. But still, I couldn’t give up.
 

You have to keep going
, I told myself.
There was a miracle before. Maybe there can be a miracle again. Come
on, Cameron. Move your scrawny little ass.

“Move!” I
shouted, although something more like “Mooo” came out of my infant mouth.

I tried to push
through the mud faster, but I kept sliding. I tried to kick up with my feet,
but that wasn’t helping either. I always wondered why memories from our first
few years of life were typically suppressed by the time we hit puberty. I
realized now it was because the helplessness we feel under the age of three is
the most terrifying feeling in the whole world, more so than loss, more so than
pain. The helplessness I’ve felt in the last few hours has been nothing short
of debilitating. I feel thankful that my eighteen-year-old mind has stayed in
tact these last two weeks, no matter how young I become, but I’m also not happy
having these teenaged thoughts in a body reserved for someone whose main
concern in life is to cry a lot and crap a lot.

Must keep going…

I was halfway up
the mountain by now. It had been mere minutes since she had cast me down the
mountain, mere minutes since she assumed I was to be a dead, rotting carcass.
But one thing she didn’t know about me is that I fight until the very end. As
long as my pudgy, thirty-inch-body kept moving, and as long as oxygen still
found its way into my pink, spotless lungs, I knew I’d try my best to stay
alive.
Kill me now and I’ll stop. Let me
keep breathing, and I’ll get to the top of this mountain if it’s the last thing
I do.

I figured by the
time I reached the peak of the mountain that the rain would start calming down.
But it didn’t. The further I climbed, the worse it became; the heavy rain
smashed against my head like a tidal wave from Hell. As much I didn’t love the
snow in those freezing Reno winter months, I would’ve welcomed a five-minute
blizzard recess from this calamitous downpour.

Thankfully,
though, the incessant rain only meant one thing:
I’m not the only one who’s still putting up a fight.

I puckered my
lips and blinked a few times, noticing that my eyesight was going blurry. I
could see flashing lights at the top of the mountain, bolts of lightning
crashing down from the black, angry sky. I wanted to reach the top, but with
every inch further I climbed, the further away the peak of the mountain seemed
to get.
 

I stopped and
turned around, glancing down below to see a flash flood overtaking the adjacent
park and parking lot. A lone Volkswagon Beetle drifted down the nature-made
river toward the crowded I-5 freeway. It was understandable, and understood,
that nobody in Los Angeles would be taking a midnight hike tonight. But here I
was, on my hands and knees, crawling up the world’s largest mud pile to see if
my beloved was still alive.

If she goes, I go.

“Cameron!”

It was faint,
but noticeable in the distance. I heard my name shouted again, this time more
clearly. Most remarkable of all, it wasn’t Liesel.

It can’t be.

I crawled as
fast as my puny arms and legs would let me, bypassing the wettest parts of the
mud, which by now were slowly forming into a nearly unavoidable mudslide. I
wanted to jump up to my feet and run faster than the speed of sound, just bolt
with all my might until I reached the top to see once and for all the aftermath
of what had been the longest, most unusual, most haunting two weeks of my life.

This from someone who spent three months
last year aging into an eighty-five-year-old man.

“Cam!” he
shouted. “I’m here! I’m here!”
 

“I can hear
you!” I shouted back, but what came out of my mouth was “Ikearu!”

Ten seconds
passed. Twenty. Thirty. I didn’t hear him. He stopped shouting. I wondered for
a moment if all the screaming from the other side of the mountain had been a product
of my child-like imagination.

I was almost at
the top. I could
feel
the top. I
reached my arms out and prepared myself for the final pull.

He finally said
something again.

“Cameron!” he
shouted. “Where
are
y—”

A flash of
lightning crashed against the mountain just yards in front of me, and the land
beneath me started to shake. My legs slipped out from under me, and I lost my
grip.

The entire
mountainside transformed into a gigantic, terrifying mudslide.

“Oh shit!” I
shouted.
That
phrase came out normal.

I kicked my feet
against the ground, clawed through the mud with my small, pathetic hands, and
rolled myself up to the top of the mountain, just in time to see a massive,
jaw-dropping mudslide crash down the mountain like an avalanche of destructive
chocolate milk.

I took the
deepest breath I could, laid back against the top of the mountain, and looked
up to see a bolt of lightning headed right for me.

This night’s just gone from worse to a
lot worse
, I thought.

A few days ago I
was eighteen years old. Currently, I’m one. And in a few minutes, I’ll be gone.

Throughout the
month of April, I have been de-aging a whole year of my life with each passing
day. Last year I had three months to tackle my embarrassing, inexplicable
curse. This year, I’ve had less than three
weeks
.
There just hasn’t been enough time.

Time’s all but run out.

“Liesel!
I love you!”

I have no idea
what escaped my mouth in those final, fleeting moments of my young adult life,
but I hoped she could hear me. She had to hear me. After all, what more could I
have hoped for in those final breaths than to know that Liesel, in all her
glory, would go on, and feel my love… forever.

I exhaled one
last time, closed my eyes, and focused my final thought on an image of happier
times:
Liesel on the mountain bike. She
was so fast. So very fast.

In a brief,
exhilarating moment, I was transferred back four months to a chilly Christmas
Eve, when all was right in the world.

2.
Eighteen

“Hey!
No magic! No magic!”

“That’s your excuse
for everything,” Liesel said with a laugh as she breezed by me on her mountain
bike, her red hair blowing in the ferocious winds of the deserted Reno
mountains.

We had been
racing along the Steamboat Ditch Trail up in the Caughlin Ranch area of Reno for
nearly an hour on this crisp Wednesday morning, one that started like any
other, but one that was to end like no other in the history of my brief but
eventful life.

“Now you’re just
showing off!” I shouted as Liesel for the first time pulled out so far in front
of me I could barely make out her bike in the distance. I hadn’t kept up with
my athletic training since my basketball days ended last May, and even though
Liesel and I frequented this bike trail a lot lately, my stamina and strength
certainly weren’t what they used to be.

I looked
forward. Now I couldn’t see her at all.

“Leese!
Where—”

I turned a
corner, leading me to a cliff that looked out over all of Reno. I could see
casinos in the distance, the Truckee River, three golf courses, a plane taking
off from the Reno-Tahoe International Airport. I had spent eighteen years
trying to get out of this place, but now, I felt proud to call it my home.

Liesel appeared
in the distance, sitting backward on her bike, her arms crossed, disappointed
in my lackluster biking skills.

“You’re
pathetic,” she said. “I expected more from the
star basketball player
!”

“Umm… do you see
a basketball hoop out here?”

I almost knocked
my bike into Liesel’s as I raced past her at the speed of lightning, taking her
by surprise as I sped down the trail, less than a mile away from the street we
liked to think of as the imaginary finish line.

“Not fair!” she
shouted from way back.

“You shouldn’t
have stopped!” I shouted into the wind, but I wasn’t sure if she could hear me.

Of course she heard me,
I thought.
The girl can float thirty feet up in the air. She can hear me. She can
probably hear my thoughts, too!

That final
theory of Liesel’s powers left me so terrified that I nearly crashed my bike
into the large dirt mound beside me.
 

“I’m catching
up!” Liesel shouted. “Don’t look back! I’m gaining, Cam!”

“No magic!” I
shouted back.

I could hear her
laughing, the echoes of her bike tires approaching closer by the second. “Oh,
shut up
!”

I turned the
bend, and then another. The street was fifteen seconds away, ten seconds. The
finish line was in my reach.

“I’m gonna win!”
I shouted. “You don’t stand a—”

Liesel’s bike
blew past mine in the final few yards, her back wheel kicking up dirt in my
face, making me lose my balance and tip my body, and the bike, to the right.

Uh, oh.

“Liesel,
what—”

I crashed to the
ground on my right side and watched as my bike spun into the air and over the
cliff. I stopped myself from falling, just in time to look over the edge to see
my precious mountain bike smash against the steep slope, flipping time and time
again until it finally stopped against the big, sharp rocks at the bottom of
the cliff.