by Brian Rowe
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.
Margaret had waited this long. She could wait another hour, if need be.
It turned out to be nearly two hours before Darlene returned, feeling experimented on and violated, but happy to know she was finally done with all the tests. The time had given Margaret to consider her history with her wife and former girlfriend, how the two had met. Back in the late 1990’s, Margaret had been enjoying her summers teaching Extension courses at Yale. Reeling from a recent break-up from a local theatre actress who had left Hartford for Broadway, Margaret was looking for anything but another relationship. But when Darlene, African American, a little on the chubby side, started talking her ear off after every one of her History of the British Novel classes, she started to get the feeling that this funny, attractive woman might be interested in her. By the end of August they had started dating, by 2000 they were celebrating their two-year-anniversary, and in 2008 they made it official by tying the knot in an intimate ceremony, just days after the November election when same-sex marriage became legalized in the state. They had been happy, healthy, and prosperous in the last fourteen years together. And Margaret didn’t want that to go away.
“Please, have a seat,” the white-haired doctor said to Margaret as he entered the room forty minutes after Darlene had returned from all her tests. Margaret and Darlene sat next to each other on two chairs in the back of the room, awaiting with fear, anxiety, and only a modicum of hope for what the doctor was about to say to them.
“So you’ve been pretty swamped today?” Margaret asked, a forced smile on her face.
“Swamped? That’s not the word. In thirty-seven years, I’ve never seen anything like today. People get sick. But they don’t all come down with symptoms the same morning.”
“What do you think is causing it?” Margaret asked again. Darlene was keeping her mouth shut.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw those reports about the children rapidly aging…”
“Us too,” Margaret said. “Do you know why something like that would be happening?”
The doctor shook his head and turned toward Darlene, who looked frightened to hear his next few sentences.
“Hi Darlene,” he said.
“Dr. Gallagher,” Darlene said with a nod. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“You too.”
“How’s your family?”
He didn’t answer. He darted his eyes toward Margaret for a moment, and then back at Darlene. “Darlene, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
“Oh?”
“What?” Margaret added, clutching her chest with one hand and grabbing onto Darlene’s hand with the other.
“May I ask…” the doctor continued, “how long you’ve been experiencing these symptoms? The stomach pains… the nausea…”
“Since Saturday,” Darlene said.
“Two days ago Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“And nothing before then?”
“No. I’ve been fine.”
The doctor squinted his eyes, like he was deep in thought. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, clearly dumbfounded by her response. “This is just… incredible.”
“Incredible?” Darlene asked.
“The pain you’re experiencing… you should have been feeling pain for weeks, for months.”
“I felt perfectly normal until Saturday,” she said with a shrug.
He nodded. “Darlene, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you have stomach cancer. Stage 3 stomach cancer.”
“What?”
“What?” Margaret stood up, her jaw dropped. “Doctor! No. Stomach cancer? There would’ve been symptoms…”
“I know…”
“Stage 3? That’s impossible!”
“I understand your—”
“Impossible!”
Margaret started bawling as she dropped down on the marble tile floor and backed up against the wall. She brought her hands up to her face and continued to sob. Darlene didn’t freak out though. She stayed glued to her chair, in total shock.
“Uhh… Doctor…” Darlene tried to talk, but she was struggling. She felt like throwing up again, but she kept her composure. She breathed through her nose for a few seconds, then said, “Doctor, how long do I have?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just stared at her. Finally: “Normally, I’d say, at least a year, maybe two.”
She nodded and tried to smile. “That’s not… that’s not too bad…”
“But considering how fast the cancer has grown since you first started experiencing symptoms on Saturday… I’d say… one or two days.”
“One or two days? Until what?” Darlene asked.
The doctor turned his gaze from both of the women. It took Darlene a few seconds, but soon, she knew.
Margaret grabbed Darlene’s hands again.
Darlene didn’t have any trouble crying now.
4.
“I don’t think I can go in there again,” I said, scratching the top of my backpack, trying to avoid looking at the front of the house.
“You have to, Cam,” Liesel said. “It’s part of the plan.”
“What plan?”
“You’ll see.”
I avoided looking at the house that previously provided shelter for Hannah’s insanity, and Liesel’s mother’s rotting corpse. Instead, I looked across the street, where families were frantically packing their cars with luggage, chairs, computer screens, everything. It looked like that scene in Independence Day when Will Smith walks out of his home to see all of his neighbors leaving town, unaware of the spaceship looming overhead. Except here in Los Angeles on this hot afternoon, Liesel and I would not be one of these departing families; we’d apparently be staying put for a short while. We had just arrived at 1242 Addison Street in Los Feliz, where Liesel had grown up as a child, where she had spent many, many years with her whacked out sister.
“What… do you think she’s actually here?” I asked.
“Of course she’s not here. We’re not here for her. Come on.”
“I told you I don’t want to go in, Leese!”
She shook her head. “You’re such a baby.”
I stopped. “Hey! Be careful! The last time you said that, you turned me into a real baby.”
Liesel didn’t smile. She unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out of the car, taking quick, quiet steps all the way up to the front door.
I didn’t move for a moment, wanting to remain in my comfy passenger side seat for as long as I could. Liesel and I had switched off driving all the way down to Los Angeles, but she had driven most of the last three hours while I took a quick nap. I had no idea where she was taking me, even though the Los Feliz house made sense. Liesel and Hannah had a history here; I understood that. If there would be any clue as to Hannah’s whereabouts, it would be somewhere in this house. But I really didn’t want to return. I didn’t want to see that corpse, that basement, that crib, any more diapers. It had taken us close to ten hours to reach L.A., mostly because we decided to drive the speed limit the whole way. We didn’t want to be pulled over by any cops. Not today. Not ever.
I finally jumped out of the car, slammed the passenger side door, and looked up ahead. Liesel had disappeared.
If she’s been kidnapped by Hannah again, I’m going to kill s
omebody. Starting with myself.
But then the front door opened from inside, and Liesel waved to me. “Come on,” she said.
I turned to my right to see many of the family cars taking off down the road, and part of me wished I was with them. I wanted Liesel and I to escape to some middle of nowhere destination, where we could try to get back to our normal routines, and essentially hide from the rest of the world. But I knew every second counted with us. Every single moment we weren’t on the hunt for Hannah was a moment added to more casualties in this massive war that was to affect the lives of everyone.
As I walked to the front door, my cell phone started ringing for the fortieth time. This time, the call was from my dad. Again, I ignored it. I couldn’t talk to them right now. I knew I would down the line. But now, it was time to focus.
The interior of the house felt bright and lived in, with a clean living room and a small but neatly designed kitchen. The place looked old, to be sure, but it didn’t exactly seem like the place of death and horror I knew it to be. When I walked down the hall, I could see the door to the downstairs basement closed shut. My fingers lingered on the doorknob, and when I pushed forward, the door opened.
I really don’t want to go back down there. But part of me feels like I have to.
I hadn’t really talked to Liesel about it, but my few hours in that basement reigned as the most frightening of my entire life. What I experienced in those last remaining days at Washoe Med as an eighty-something-year-old man last year was nothing compared to what I suffered during that traumatic day last April. It had to have been more of a scar left on Liesel’s psyche, given that she was down there for more than a week, humiliatingly locked up in a cage. But it was still high up there on my list of infamously awful days. I needed to see it again. Maybe it would help get me past it.
“Liesel?”
I didn’t hear anything. The silence haunted me for those grueling ten seconds, when my imagination started coming up with different scenarios of what might have happened to her. Kidnapping. Chloroform. Ax to the head. I shouted her name twice more, and again she didn’t reply.