Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (28 page)

“Keep still!”
she shouted louder.

She pulled down my underwear to reveal my
prepubescent manhood, but it wasn’t exposed for long. She threw my
embarrassingly loose briefs down to the hardwood floor and lifted my butt up in
the air to put on the diaper.

I said, “This isn’t happening,” one more
time. And then I just kept thinking it over and over.

This isn’t happening. Oh my God. Oh my
God. This isn’t happening.

Hannah sealed the diaper to my bottom and
brought her hands up in the air, all excited, as if she had done something
God-like. “And…
voila
!”

I looked down to see the diaper.
Never thought I’d be wearing one of these
again. At least, not until I was ninety and incontinent.

Hannah glanced up at a ticking clock at
the front of the room and made her way over to the other side of the crib. “All
right, Cam. Are you ready?”

“For… for what…”

“For our little adventure!” She leaned
down again, disappearing for a moment. And then she returned, with a small but
terrifying needle in her right hand. “I was wrong before,” she said. “I’ve got
one more gift for you.”

She stuck me with the needle in the side
of my neck before I had a chance to stop her, and a whoosh of overwhelming
fatigue struck my body. I blinked a few times, still awake but extremely woozy,
as I brought my head down to see Hannah unlocking the chains around my wrists.
In five seconds, I was to be a free man.

But this chick wasn’t dumb. I wouldn’t
have been able to attack her now even if I had been my athletic teenaged self.
I tried to swing my arms a few times into the air, but to no avail. She picked
me up, her left arm under my diaper, her right hand resting against my stomach,
and carried me over to the other side of the room.

Hannah tugged at
my right hand and used it to wave at the wounded Liesel.

“Say goodbye!” Hannah
said. “Wave bye-bye!”

“Leese… I
don’t…”

“Hannah…” Liesel said, her head still
resting on the ground. “I’m going to kill you… Sooner or later…”

“Yeah, yeah,
yeah,” Hannah said. “You go ahead and try, you dumb bitch.”

Hannah grabbed a pair of keys hidden at
the edge of the couch. She hoisted me up and held me close as she exited the
room, revealing a long, winding staircase.

16.
One

The top of the staircase revealed a place
that looked as normal as any middle-class home in Reno. But I could see in
looking out the large windows on the left side of the house that we were no
longer in Reno, or even Nevada.

We were in Los
Angeles.

I could see large mountains up behind the
house, as well as a congested, busy freeway in the distance. A helicopter
passed overhead, and an ambulance zoomed by outside, screaming its loud sirens
enough to make my little ears go deaf. It took me a few more seconds, but I
finally caught sight of the Hollywood sign in the distance.

I’m
a one-year-old now,
I
thought.
I can feel it. I’m one. I have
one hour left. One hour until…

Hannah kicked the back door open and led
me outside, where a frightening black sky, with no moon in sight, lingered up
above. It was cold outside, much colder than the dilapidated basement, and I
could feel a light misty rain falling down to the top of my bald head.

“Welcome to
L.A., Cameron. May I introduce you to… Griffith Park?”

A small hill and a two-lane road
separated Hannah’s backyard from Los Angeles’ famous Griffith Park, which
offered mountain after mountain of hiking and biking. We started heading up the
hill, and I tried to make sense of where she was taking me, and why.

As we reached the top of the hill, I
looked down at the back of the house, which lined a long and winding
residential street. Here was a place of horror that housed a torture chamber
and a decomposing body, and surely nobody in this neighborhood had a clue. But
as I kept my eye on the house, I noticed a figure appear in the backyard.

It can’t be,
I thought.
Wesley?

I couldn’t be sure, and considering I was
under the influence of a powerful sedative, it could’ve easily been my
imagination. But as the backyard disappeared from my view, I was almost
positive I had seen a male figure slowly tiptoeing up to the back door. And it
had looked like Wesley.

He made it. Oh my God. He found us.

I hoped I hadn’t imagined it. I hoped he
was there, making his way downstairs to save Liesel from the horrors and great
pain that she’d been suffering for days.
 

Hannah held me close as she walked across
a desolate road and entered the entryway of a dirt trail, one that was to wind
all the way to the top of the mountain.

As we ascended,
the rain started to fall, more and more and more…

---

A half-hour passed. The winds were
tumultuous; the rain, even worse. I couldn’t tell how much of the calamitous
weather was purely natural, or being egged on by Hannah’s powers—I
assumed some of it she was enhancing to a certain degree. With each step in the
mud, she was focusing more and more on the peak of the mountain.

“Are you ready, Cameron? We are minutes
away. Minutes away… from your final goodbye.”

“Please, Hannah, give me a chance, we can
talk about this, please, no, anything, I’ll do anything.” I just rambled on and
on, even though I knew that by now, being a one-year-old, anything escaping my
mouth was jibberish. I could still think like an eighteen-year-old and try to
form the words I was thinking, but the words themselves would come out wrong,
like the physical components of my mouth weren’t developed enough to literally
speak them. But that was the least of my problems. I knew, even if I could
ramble and plead like an adult, Hannah wouldn’t care. There was nothing I could
say to stop her now. She had her mind set on something cruel, and I finally had
the courage to shut up and wait for my demise.

When the hour is up, will I feel it? Will
it hurt? Or will I just float away, never to return?

We reached the top of the peak, and even though
the clouds were plentiful, and the rain was pelting us so hard it was difficult
to feel anything but pain, I could still see past the mountains into the bright
lights and city sounds of Los Angeles. I had only come here once as a kid, to
go to Disneyland and Universal Studios. That had been a fun, innocent time,
when I knew I had my whole life ahead of me. Now I was back, as an even younger
child this time, without Mickey and Minnie to give me comfort, but with an evil
witch who wanted me dead.

“All right,
Cameron. It’s time.”

I know
, I thought. But I didn’t say anything.

Hannah set me down just feet away from
where I could start tumbling down a wet, muddy mountain. I looked up to see a
swirl of black clouds forming right above my head. She stood directly over me,
bringing her hands up into the air, as if God Himself was going to descend
through the clouds, reach out, and give us both a firm handshake.

“He is here!”
she shouted up into the night sky. “Cameron is here!”

A fierce electricity took hold of the sky
above us, and not one bolt of lightning, but several, started intermixing with
one another to form one, giant bolt. I opened my baby mouth in awe as more than
a dozen bolts of lighting found each other and formed a sky so bright I had to close
my eyes.

“We are running out of time!” Hannah
shouted. “Soon, he will be gone! Send to me what was promised to me!”

I looked down at my hands to see that a
stream of water was covering them, that water had started rushing over most of
my body. I tried to keep my hands and feet clamped down to the muddy soil, but
I didn’t know if I could hold on much longer before being swept down the
mountain.

“It must be
now!” she shouted. “Now, I tell you!”

I looked up to see the bright
light,
so blinding I thought this really was, finally, the
end. I watched as the giant bolt of lightning prepared itself for launch,
readied itself to pierce through my small, aching body.

It’s
coming for me. She’s going to kill me with this lightning. And then it’ll all
be over. Everything.
 

“
Now
!”

Instead of the lightning crashing down
toward me, a bolt of a different kind of light flashed from behind me. I ducked
just in time to see it hit Hannah straight in the heart and tip her over.

“Noooooo,” she
said. Then she screamed it. “Nooooooo!”

A second white light erupted from the
side of me, and I looked to my right to see Liesel, dirtied and muddy, racing
to the top of the mountain with a look in her eye that suggested:
it’s you or me, sis. It’s time for one of us
to die!

But this time, Hannah was ready. She
brought her arms out and deflected the second light, swatting it straight at my
face. I ducked, again, but it slammed against my left shoulder and jolted every
cell in my body. Before I could reach out for Liesel, and before I could
scream, I started tumbling down the side of the mountain.

---

I think this is where we started, me
climbing up the mountain, trying not to slip, knowing my time was limited.

I figured I had five minutes left, maybe
less, before I turned zero. I could feel my heart beating rapidly, like it knew
there was such little time left. I could feel the hopelessness in my aching
hands, but I had to keep going. I had to make it to the top of the mountain. I
had to see who won.
Liesel, you have to
stop her. You have to!

I was almost at the top, lightning
shooting down from the clouds above as fast as the angry rain, the mud slide
crashing down against me, almost as if it was trying to keep me from seeing the
chaotic destruction on the other side of the mountain.

“Cameron!
I’m here!”

I couldn’t
believe it. It wasn’t Liesel. It was Wesley.

What is he doing up here? Doesn’t he know
he’s going to get killed?

I looked up to see him at the peak of the
mountain, resting on his stomach, reaching out for me to grab his hand.

I shook my head.
Wesley, you’re putting yourself in
danger. Get out of here. It isn’t safe.

“Come
on, Cameron! We are running out of time!”

He didn’t think I knew that? Here he was
trying to save me, when I had just a couple of minutes left to live. But I
continued to crawl anyway, fearing that I would die alone, with no one to hold
onto. One last hug with Wesley would make me feel at peace. I kicked and
crawled through the mud.

And just as the fierce mudslide started
shooting over the top of the peak, I leapt into the air to grab Wesley’s hands.

But I missed.

My stomach slammed against the mud and
the current above me started washing me down the mountain again, toward my
death, toward my destiny.

But as the water continued rushing down, my
body stopped moving. I found myself dangling, with someone or something
grabbing hold of me. I turned around to see Wesley with his right hand gripped
against the end of my diaper.

The diaper. The stupid diaper saved me.

“I got you!” he
shouted. “I got you, Cameron! Come on!”

He pulled me back, wrapped his arms
around my body, and lifted me up in the air. He held me tight as he ran to the
side of the peak, where there was a thin, flooded trail to take us away from
all the danger.

I turned to my right to see Liesel and
Hannah battling in the distance, the sisters standing ten feet away from each
other, both casting little balls of light at each other’s face; Liesel’s were
white, and Hannah’s were red.

Get her, Liesel! Get her! Stop her!

“Come on, Cam,” Wesley whispered into my
left ear. “We’re getting out of here. You don’t have to see this. You shouldn’t
see this!”

But just as we started to disappear
behind a tree, I watched as Hannah cast three giant balls of red light into the
air, each one slamming against Liesel’s chest simultaneously. Liesel went down,
back first, against the muddy ground.

I tried to scream, but Hannah beat me to
it. She jumped on top of Liesel, and turned straight toward me. “Noooooo!” she
shouted. “Leave the boy!”

She cast another red light, this time my
way, but instead of it hitting me, it slammed against the top of Wesley’s
chest. He dropped me to the ground as he went soaring backward, his head
slamming against the trunk of a tree. He went silent, motionless.

“Wesley!” I
screamed. “Wes! Oh God!”

As I started crying, I turned to my right
to see Hannah gripping Liesel’s throat with both of her strong hands. It was
over. I was a minute or less away from dying. And Liesel wasn’t going to save
me.

I looked up to see the sky, which now had
bolts of lightning shooting every which way. Some were landing in the distance;
some were crashing down straight toward us. I could feel all the lights
descending toward me, as if they were disintegrating fireworks, readying me for
the dissolution of my physical body. I sat still.