by Brian Rowe
I looked at Liesel, and she looked at me, as Hannah turned her body to the right and waved us toward the cliff. I looked down. It was all happening so fast. I was coming closer and closer to the edge. In seconds she’d be dropping me, and all would be lost. Our mission would be a failure. I would be dead.
“Goodbye you two!” Hannah screamed with glee. “It’s been nice knowing you!” She started laughing, hysterically, like a complete madwoman. “Oh, and Cameron… I know I’m a few days late… but happy birthday!”
Liesel was sobbing, clearly, at a lost for what to do, and I tried, one last time, to use my palms as a weapon. But the magic, newly discovered just a few days ago, seemed to have vanished. I tried to move but couldn’t. I tried to scream out, but I couldn’t do that either. The time had come. It was over.
So I closed my eyes. And waited to die.
Then I heard a gunshot.
My eyes re-opened as I felt myself falling back toward the ground. I tried to scream but had no time to. Hannah had lost her grip on Liesel and me, and we were now falling back down toward the earth. I hoped there’d be padding, maybe a couch or a bed of flowers to fall into, but I knew that was wishful thinking. I fell on my right side, and I heard a crunch on my right arm.
“OWWWW!” I screamed the loudest I’d ever screamed.
My arm was broken. The pain shot through me like sharp knives.
But I still sat up, just in time to witness the impossible sight before me.
Hannah stood beside the coffin, looking out at me, bewildered, then looking down at the bullet wound in her chest.
I turned to my left to see Wesley—astonishingly old but alive—rushing forward, the gun in his hand, his face beat red. He pulled the trigger a second time, and the bullet struck Hannah in her side.
“WESLEY?” I screamed. “You’re alive!”
He fired again, and this bullet smacked Hannah in her right eye, this time the shot successfully blinding her.
Wesley fired one more time, the bullet merely grazing Hannah’s leg, before he fell to the ground face first.
“Wes! Oh my God!” I crawled over to my best friend, wrapping my arms around him, my tears flowing now like they would never end. “Wes… you came back… you… you saved us…”
“Not yet, Cam,” Liesel said from behind me, looking like she had survived the long fall with only a few minor scratches. The only major wound I could see was a big cut on her right palm.
I looked over to see Hannah still moving, but slowly.
“We have to end this,” Liesel said.
“Leese, I can’t… my arm… it’s broken.”
“Then pass your powers onto me.”
I couldn’t have heard her correctly. “What did you say?”
Hannah started sitting up, and I found myself confused as to what to do—listen to Liesel or try to fight Hannah again with my one good hand.
“Cameron!” Liesel shouted. “Bring your left palm to mine!”
I looked at my good palm. Even though I hadn’t broken my left arm, the palm had three major cuts on it, with blood dripping down to the dirt. I looked at Wesley, then at Liesel, and I then I smashed my left, bloodied palm, against my wife’s even bloodier palm.
The flash of light between us lit up the entire city, both of us sharing each other’s energy like bolts of electricity. I dropped my jaw in awe as Liesel stepped backward, smiling, her red hair blowing in the wind, her whole body outlined with a white, sparkly glow. I watched as her palms became unrecognizable, the white balls of light she had introduced me to that night in the hospital last year, now returning for one last hurrah.
As Hannah made her way back up to her feet, the red lights beginning to glow out of her palms yet again, Liesel fired four huge blasts of white lights directly at Hannah’s head. Hannah fell back against the dirt, and Liesel ran toward her. I grabbed onto Wesley, who was barely breathing, and watched as Liesel started unleashing her fury and power against Hannah’s body.
“Cam,” Wesley said. “Cam… I can’t breathe…”
“Hang in there,” I said. “Hang in there, Wes. Don’t die on me now. You’ve come too far.”
I watched as Liesel formed a large white stream of light and smashed it directly against Hannah’s chest, not letting up for a second. The light grew bigger and bigger and bigger, until an electric, seemingly fatal shock smashed against Hannah’s entire body. I thought she might be dead. But alas, she was still breathing.
“Caaaaaaaaam,” Kimber cried.
“Kimber… oh God…” I crawled past Wesley, up to the coffin, looking down at Kimber. She looked even older. She looked seventy-five, maybe eighty. She had her arms by her sides and her legs stretched out, as if she was dead already. She looked up at me with frightened eyes.
“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “You’re going to be OK, do you understand me?”
I looked over at Liesel, horrified, to see Hannah smiling, saying something to Liesel through her yellow, bloodied teeth.
Please, Leese. Just kill her. Let this be it. Let this be the end of Hannah.
When Hannah started laughing, and Liesel started crying, I thought the worst.
But then Liesel grabbed Hannah’s head, ripped open her jaw, and shot the white stream of light down her throat, for ten seconds, twenty seconds, a full freaking minute.
Liesel closed the mouth, kissed her sister on the forehead, and ran toward me.
“What did you do—” I started.
“Cameron, get down!” Liesel shouted. “Get—”
Hannah’s body exploded into a thousand pieces, portions of her scalp smacking the side of the coffin, parts of her leg shooting over the cliff, chunks of her brain dropping to the ground before us. It was if Liesel had dropped the world’s most explosive grenade in the girl’s mouth.
It was, finally, a reality.
Hannah was gone.
“That… was awesome,” Wesley said before he dropped his face back down into the dirt.
I took a few deep breaths and turned to Liesel. She looked at me. I looked at her. I smiled. I jumped to my feet.
“She’s dead! The wicked witch is dead!” I smiled, laughed out loud, then turned back to the coffin, ready to see my sister not an eighty-year-old grandmother anymore, but the fourteen-year-old girl I knew and loved. “I can’t believe it’s finally ov—”
I looked in the coffin. Kimber was still old.
“What…”
I looked behind me, to see Wesley still old, too.
Liesel brushed the dirt from her hands, and sat down Indian style, a disappointed look on her face.
I rushed up to her. “Leese… what… she’s dead! Why the hell aren’t they back to normal?”
“It was too late,” Liesel said.
“What?” I grabbed Liesel by the shoulders and brought her close to me. “What was too late? What do you mean?”
“Owww!” Kimber shouted. “It hurrrrrrts!”
“Liesel!” I screamed. “Answer me!”
“Before I could kill her,” Liesel said, “she made one last spell.”
“One last spell? What kind of a spell?”
Liesel stood up and pulled me up with her. She held me close, our noses almost touching.
“Cameron, her last words… made it clear… that for the aging to end… to let Kimber and Wesley live… to save the world… one of us has to sacrifice ourselves. One of us has to die.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I couldn’t. I wanted to vomit. I thought I might faint. Finally, I said: “What?”
“She said it… too quickly… before I could finish her off…”
“What… what does this mean?”
“If one of us dies, the spell will be broken. If we both live, everybody dies.”
I turned back to see Kimber and Wesley, both near dead, both still in horrific pain. They had to be reaching their mid-eighties by now, maybe even ninety. There was no time. In just a few minutes, two of the most important people in my life
would be gone forever.
“Leese, I—”
“Cameron, go to your sister.” She pushed me away.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, what—”
“Be with her. I have to do this. I have to go.” Liesel looked toward the edge of the cliff.
I shook my head faster. “What? No. No, no, no. It doesn’t have to be this way!”
She smiled, tears welling up in her eyes. “I got us into this mess, Cameron. It was always me who started this. It has to be me who ends it.”
“No.” I started crying. “Leese… you can’t do this to me—”
“If I don’t, your best friend and sister will die. I’m not gonna let that happen.”
Two tears dropped from my eyes. “But what about you… Leese… I can’t live without you!”
“You’ll figure it out,” she said, trying to remain calm, trying not to let her emotions run wild. She took a step backward.
“But Leese…” I breathed heavily, trying to form my thoughts into words. I could barely talk now, I was crying so hard. “The baby… our baby…”
She shook her head. “It’s not even a person yet… it’s OK…”
“Our child… you can’t—”
“Cam, this is the only way. Now please, turn around, and don’t look. This will all be over. We can’t waste another second. We need to save Kimber and Wes—”
“You can’t!”
“I have to go!” She started walking backward. She wiped the tears from her eyes. “I love you, Cameron. I always will.”
Liesel started to turn around. I shouted it before I could even think straight: “Liesel! Wait!”
She turned back to me. “What?”
Are you sure about this, Cam?
“I’ll let you go…” I looked back at Kimber and Wesley, and took a deep breath.
Yeah, I think I am.
“Just please, Leese,” I said, “before you go… please say good-bye to my sister.”
“I can’t,” she said. “There’s no time—”
I stared at her, my heart pounding, my head telling me what I needed to do. “Please… for me.”
She sighed, shook her head, and raced over to the coffin. She looked down to see what I had just seen, a ninety-year-old woman, near dead, fighting for her final breaths.
Liesel extended her arm, took Kimber’s hand in hers, and said, “Good-bye, Kimber. I’ll miss you.”
It wasn’t a long good-bye. But it gave me just enough time to start sprinting toward the cliff.
“Oh my God!” Liesel shouted as she turned toward me. “Cameron! What are you doing?”
I didn’t look back. I didn’t think. I didn’t breathe. And I didn’t stop. I just kept running, faster and faster and faster and faster.
I jumped off the cliff, looking straight down at the rocks below, willing to sacrifice myself, waiting to die, so that my sister, my best friend, my wife, and my unborn child, could live on.
“Nooooo!” Liesel screamed. “Cameron!”
Two giant white lights shot out of her palms and struck me in the back. I looked down and waited to fall. But I didn’t. I remained in mid-air, levitating.
She pulled me around. There she was, keeping me alive by the power of her palms, tears streaming down her face. All she had to do was let go.
“Leese, you need to let me go.”
“I won’t!” she screamed. “Cameron, I love you! I can’t live without you!”
“This way you live on, and I live on. Because of our baby. You have to live for our baby.”
She just shook her head, bringing herself down to her knees.
“You have to let me go, Leese. For Kimber. For Wes. And for the sake of our child. Please…”
She continued shaking her head, her sobbing now uncontrollable. “I… I can’t. I won’t.”
I looked down, then back at Liesel. “I love you, Liesel. I’ll love you forever… but please... you need to let me go.”
She continued to weep as she closed her eyes, turned her hands into fists, and brought them down to her sides.
As I started to fall, past the cliff, past Liesel, Kimber, and Wesley, down toward the rocks below, I could see the future already. I could see Kimber, in that coffin, opening her eyes, taking deep easy breaths, feeling the softness of her cheeks, jumping up and down as that perfectly rambunctious fourteen-year-old I would never forget. I could see Wesley rolling over, padding down his dirty clothes, licking his chin to find facial hair, blinking real fast to discover he was finally nineteen again. And I could see Liesel, at the edge of the cliff, sobbing, in pain, but rubbing her belly, knowing deep down, in her heart, that the right choice had been made.
I was close to hitting the rocks, but I wasn’t afraid. I saw life for what it was now: a miracle.
I got to live. I got to love.
I got to save the world.
EPILOGUE: LIESEL
“Hey! Slow down! Watch out for the cliff!”
“K, Mom!”
The brown-haired boy almost struck the fence before pulling out in front of his mom and pedaling faster and faster, so far away that for a moment Liesel lost sight of him.
“Cameron Jr!”
She heard a soft giggle as she turned the corner that looked out over the city, at the same cliff where her husband perished five and a half years ago. Liesel stopped the bike and turned to her left, where she saw her son laughing, his hands clamped over his mouth.
“Did I scare you?” he asked with a knowing smile.
“You damn know well the answer to the question.”
“Ooooooh, you used an X word!”
Liesel shook her head. “No, damn is fine. Shit’s the one I’m trying to avoid.”
The boy’s jaw dropped open. “Another X word!”
She rode up beside the boy and smacked him playfully on top of his head. “Come on, Cam. Get serious. I told you I was taking you up here for a reason.”
His smile faded, and he nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”
He pulled out the kickstand on his bike and took his mom’s hand.
“So this is where…”
“Yeah,” Liesel said. “Over here.”
Liesel walked with her son toward the back of the dirt field, the same place over five years ago where Liesel killed her sister and Cameron sacrificed himself so that the human race could live on. Liesel’s little boy, who she named Cameron Jr. because she wanted to keep the memory of her deceased husband alive, knew that his father had passed on, but until today, he didn’t know how or why. Liesel wasn’t prepared to go into specifics, but she was determined to finally, on his fifth birthday, share some details about the man who stole her heart all those years ago.
Liesel kneeled down in front of the gravestone. She’d visited this sight before, but she hadn’t brought her son here. She set him down on her lap and pointed to the tombstone, which stated: CAMERON JASON MARTIN: June 10, 1994-June 21, 2013. BELOVED HUSBAND, BROTHER, FATHER, AND FRIEND. HE ALSO SAVED THE WORLD.
Liesel snickered at that last line, which she thought sounded jokey at the time but knew it had to be added. It was a true statement, after all. And she knew Cameron would’ve agreed with the simplicity of the statement. She knew he would’ve found it just as humorous, and just as appropriate, to be included.
“Is this where he’s buried, Mom?” the boy asked.
“Yes. I thought about a cemetery. But I didn’t think it was appropriate to put him to rest among hundreds of others. Cam, your dad was a true original. He did something… that surprised even me. All throughout high school he was so selfish, worried only about his own needs. I thought this way about him for the longest time, before he finally noticed me. But in the end… he turned out to be the man I always hoped and knew he could be… a selfless, honorable hero… not just for us… but for the whole world.”
“What did he do, Mom?”
Liesel smiled, trying not to get choked up. “He made it so that you and I could have a life togethe
r. When you’re older, I’ll tell you more, I’ll be more specific. But for now, just know, that if your dad hadn’t done what he did five years ago… you wouldn’t be here. None of us would.”
The boy smiled and started picking at the bushes next to the gravestone. “Mom… I wish I could meet Dad. Even just… for a minute.”
“I know, honey.” She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “It may be the next best thing to that… but Cam… I have a surprise for you tonight.”
He looked up at his mom. “What? The slumber party? I thought that was tomorrow.”
“It is. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m putting on a small get-together for you tonight, too.”
“What? Another party?” He looked confused. “But all my friends are coming tomorrow!”
“I know,” Liesel said. “Tonight, on your real birthday, it’s going to be just the two of us, plus a few select guests. We’re gonna have cake, a few presents, and a surprise… something that I think you’re going to enjoy very much.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you. That’s why it’s called a surprise.”
He sighed. “But Mom!”
“Come on. We have to start heading back.”
Liesel got back on her bike and turned around to see her son take one last look at his father’s gravestone. He sighed, loudly, before getting back on his bike.
“You OK?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine,” he said.
“OK. Let’s go.”
They rode their bikes back the way they came, all the way to their car, which Liesel had parked at the edge of the Caughlin Ranch neighborhood.
Liesel still lived in Reno, but she was across town now, in an area called Damonte Ranch. Traffic was light as usual—Hannah’s spell had wiped out ninety percent of the world’s population back in 2013, and the rebuilding was still in its early stages. In fact, when Hannah’s spell was finally broken at 12:33 P.M. on Tuesday, June 21, the oldest living person in the world was only twenty-two years old. Therefore, in the last five years, there was a lot of progress to be made, with a lot of history having been wiped out from what the majority of the world believed to be an environmentally rooted plague. Nobody in the younger generation understood why it stopped, just in time for humanity to be saved, but everyone still living was grateful that it had. There was a rough road ahead, but everyone, especially the young adults, who were now the seniors of the world, felt confident there would be a day in the future when life could finally go back to normal.