by J D Jacobs
“You’re useless!” Grant stomps on his mask once it hits the ground, busting the mask open and making it unwearable. After making sure the mask is of no use anymore, he sprints out of the house.
There is a group of six small, quaint cottages all forming a circle. The houses are tidy, minus a few windows that couldn’t be fixed anyway. I even see Abbi perched on the roof of one of the cottages, but she is a good distance away. None of the other houses look occupied anymore, except for one. On the front steps of the house across from the one Grant just came out of sits a man with a mask over his face, carving a small block of wood into a spear. I can tell the man has been there awhile because there’s a large pile of wood shavings in front of him. Along with the shavings are over twenty spears that sit along the first step.
Grant runs out into the open area in front of all the houses and makes his way to the center. Grant spreads his arms open and takes a deep breath before calling out to the heavens.
“Take me!” he yells. “I’ve been here long enough! Take me already!” Grant takes another deep breath, then follows it with a loud, disappointed pant.
“KILL ME!” Grant now screams angrily at the clouds. “End my misery! I don’t want to live anymore!” He takes another deep breath, trying to inhale the Cozmin straight out of the air, but after unsuccessfully dying from the breath, he falls to his knees and clamps his fingers in the grass below him, pulling clods of dirt and roots out and squeezing them in his fists. All his anger turns into a sullen depression; his hairline forced into the ground as he begs for the Cozmin to dominate his system.
While Grant begs for death, the man sitting on the porch stands up and walks toward Grant with a spear in his back pocket. He appears unamused with the entire scene that just unfolded in front of him. The man, too, must be used to hearing people yelling insane remarks and pleading for death. Before the man can make it to Grant, however, my vision spirals.
A synchronous gasp fills my ears from the crowd as I regain my consciousness. However, I’m not lying on the stage; in fact, I’m moving. Carried, would be a better term. I look up to see the man that I just saw cry out for death. Grant steps down off the stage and runs down the roped off strip as the bodyguard on that side of the stage lets him by. I’m confused as to why he’s carrying me, even to why he’s running.
“What are…” I weakly begin to ask Grant, but he cuts me off.
“Stay down,” Grant whispers to me under his breath. I do as he says and remain still, leading people to think I’m still unconscious.
As we make our way to the hospital, I hear a man shout out to Grant from the crowd. “Get that bird away from the boy!” Although I can’t see her, I hear Abbi screech loudly behind us, and the crowd gasps as she swoops toward the man. I can see Abbi gracefully flap her wings as she leads her fierce claws on to the man’s chest. The man doesn’t have time to react from Abbi’s swift dive, and Abbi begins pecking the top of the man’s head.
The crowd gives out bloodcurdling shrieks. The man begins wailing his arms, his loud cries of pain not enough to convince Abbi to stop. Abbi continues pecking until blood starts dripping down the man’s head.
“Abbi, that’s enough!” Grant yells at his eagle. Abbi immediately stops pecking the man and glides back over to Grant and I.
We finally make it to the hospital without anymore interruptions. The doors automatically close behind us and muffle out the sound of the worried crowd. Abbi, however, scaled the building vertically, and I’m guessing she’s heading to the roof.
“Let me carry you to the elevator, then stand up,” Grant tells me. As soon as we make it to the elevator and the door closes in front of us, I jump down from his arms.
“What the hell just happened?” I ask Grant with anger in my tone for no apparent reason.
“You had a flashback,” he says as he presses the button to the 23rd floor. “You know that.”
“But why were you rushing me off the stage? Why was Abbi attacking people?”
“You were saying mine and Phil’s names while you were out. If I wouldn’t have taken you, you were going to mention the flashback to someone,” Grant tells me. I was saying their names? Do I spout out names in every flashback I have? I’m not sure how or if Grant knows what my flashback was about, but the confidence in his statement tells me that somehow he does. “Whether it was your dad or Jenkins, one of them was going to ask what happened and why you were mumbling our names, and neither one of them need to know about the flashbacks.”
“Why can’t they know?” I fire back. “Or at least my dad. Why can’t he know?”
Grant looks at me for a brief second, then turns to the elevator door. “He just can’t. If anyone asks, you had an anxiety attack.”
“Why can’t he know?” I repeat, slowly getting irritated. “I trust him.”
“It has nothing to do with trust,” he replies as he glides his hand over his slicked-back hair. “The flashbacks are our secret. If he finds out, then there’s another set of testing done on the both of us that will lead nowhere. I don’t want to go through that.”
The elevator chimes and the door slides open, revealing the observatory deck of the 23rd floor. Grant bitterly strides out of the elevator. “Follow me,” he calls back. I keep up with his fast pace and look out the hall of windows that are faced toward the city. The crowd stretches out for miles, making the sight similar to looking out over the horizon from a cliff that hovers above the ocean.
Grant pushes the door at the end of the hall and jumps up the large stairwell in five hops.
“Why are we rushing to get up here?” I ask him as I make my way up the stairs and onto the roof.
“There’s bigger information about me that you don’t know about,” he tells me, concern in his face.
“I’m sure there is,” I respond, thinking back to the flashback, “but how is that relevant now? Why did you have to whisk me away in front of millions of people to tell me right now? Couldn’t this have waited?”
“You don’t realize how important it is that you not tell anybody about our flashbacks,” he says as he makes his way to the helicopter and sits down. “Especially that one you just had. I knew what the flashback was about as soon as you said the name ‘Phil.’ That flashback was… You can’t tell anyone about it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” Grant says to himself as he throws his head back in irritation. Irritated in me or irritated that he forgot whatever is so evident, I don’t know. “You mumble the names of people you see in your flashbacks. You did it when you had one on the roof a month ago.”
“Okay, so you watched Phil die. So what? Are you ashamed of beating Phil to death after he egotoned?”
“No,” he says as his head drops. “I should’ve told you about this earlier…”
“About what?”
Grant looks up and over my shoulder. “My mask that I tossed to the side.” He gives a soft pant and then points behind me and at the vertically-extended part of the roof with the stairwell door underneath. This part has a ladder along the side of it, and Abbi is calmly perched on the top rung.
“That is where I used to sit all day,” he tells me, calming himself down. “That was The Spot. Not a spot, The Spot. That part of the building is higher than the metal wall that protects the city, making it the highest point in Tryton. That’s also the only place in the city that has wind. And my God, feeling natural wind on the back of your neck for the first time in ages would make a prisoner feel free.
“But since that’s where the wall stops, that’s also where the virus begins. I safely sat on top of The Spot for nearly a month before I put two and two together.”
I look back-and-forth between the extended spot and Grant. “If the virus is up there, how did it not kill you?”
“It took me forever to realize the Cozmin was up there. See, there wasn’t a single pack of cigarettes in the entire city when I first got here. When I went on my first supply flight, I
made sure to get as many as I could when I found the closest gas station. But when I got up there and lit my first cigarette…” He pulls the fingertips of his left leather glove, exposing the back of his hand.
His hand is eaten up by bad burns that look exactly like the burn I got on my face. His burns have healed much better, though, but there are still severe scars on his hand that makes his hands appalling to look at.
“I’m lucky I didn’t burn my face up like you did,” he tells me. “The Cozmin disease is flammable, as you know just as well as I do. When I lit the lighter, it sparked a flame and burned both my hands pretty damn badly. Ruined my first pair of gloves I had. They weren’t much protection.”
I can’t help but wince at the sight of his burnt hands, but this isn’t why he rushed me to the roof. “Why didn’t the Cozmin kill you though?”
“When I threw that mask off for the first time after Phil died, I wanted to immediately die, but I didn’t. I’m sure either your father or Jenkins have told you that there was another person who came to Tryton, begging for shelter, a month after the disease had fully spread, right? The person who was the last survivor to be found outside of the walls before we found you? Ring a bell?”
Jenkins mentioned it to me a month ago when I first met him, but he never told me any major details about it. Before I have time to answer Grant, he pulls the rest of his leathered glove off, displaying his entire hand. The burns actually did engulf his hand entirely, but the burns are nowhere near the most bizarre aspect of his hands anymore.
His fingernails are a light purple. Just like my eyes.
“I don’t know what you have going on in your body, Jaden, but I have it, too. We’re both immune.”
5.
For the first time, I think back to the poem that the talking Grim left me with onstage. He said that I’m not the only one with purple and a Cozmin immunity. And Grant is proof that he’s not lying.
“How though?” I unconfidently ask, thinking back to the conclusion I made while I was in Westwood. “I got the purple eyes from the green gas. The wolves; they got their purple fur from the gas. My rats… I-I totally forgot about them, but they must have got it from the gas. The Cozmin gas burnt you, that’s where it came from.”
“My fingernails have been purple ever since the Cozmin spread,” Grant tells me. “This isn’t anything new. As soon as Abbi stared you straight in the eyes in front of that liquor store, I knew that you and I were both immune the same way.”
My mind is racing, trying to find a more logical reasoning behind this. The Grim was right, I’m not the only one immune. But Grant and I are also not the only two.
“Is there anyone else like this?” I ask him to see if he knows what the Grim didn’t tell me.
“I don’t know,” he says with a little hesitation, “I wish I did, but I don’t. But I’m almost positive that there is a connection between the color purple and being immune to the Cozmin.”
“Does that mean there’s also a connection between the purple color and the sepia flashbacks?”
He ponders for a moment. “There must be. And if that’s the case and there’s someone else in the city having these flashbacks, then that also means that somebody else in this city is immune to the virus.”
I walk across the roof to the foldable chairs that Grant and I usually sit in as the information I’ve just been bombarded with settles. Why would the Grim tell me that information during my speech? Why couldn’t he have me wait and let me find out now? I consider telling Grant about the poem that the Grim left me, but he wouldn’t believe me. He was never fully convinced that Grims are a thing, so every time I mentioned them to him, he looked at me crazy. Bringing it up now would do nothing but hurt my case.
“Why is it a secret? So nobody else will know that you’re also immune?” I ask him over my shoulder as I sit in my chair. The crowd below us starts to scatter out and deplete from around the stage.
“I simply never told anybody,” he admits as he makes his way to the chair next to me. He digs his tongue through his missing teeth. “I was wearing an oxygen mask when I first made it to Tryton. I wore it for show, so they wouldn’t think I was crazy. It never truly hit me that I was immune from the virus until I burnt my hand up on The Spot. I always thought there had to had been others like me that, for some reason, could breathe in the Cozmin and survive.”
I can see Grant’s point, where he wouldn’t want everyone to know that he was immune. As soon as they find out, they throw you up on a stage and get you to embarrass yourself in front of millions. And now, he’s seen how people reacted to me and he doesn’t want to get the same attention I do. I can’t blame him.
But somebody else being immune is still trying to settle itself down in my brain. Why are Grant and I immune? Who is the third immune person that the talking Grim mentioned? I know Grant doesn’t know, but there has to be some reason for our immunity.
Abbi glides over to where we are sitting and rests in between the two of us. “I’m sorry about what happened to Phil,” I tell him, bringing up the flashback. “You and him were close. I saw a few flashbacks between you two before.”
“He was something special,” Grant says as he reaches down to pet Abbi. “He worked with me at Carmando, a software manufacturer in southern Mississippi. Once the Cozmin took over, he quickly became the only person that I knew that had survived. Everyone else I knew and loved died right off the bat in the Saidsod Zone.”
“The Saidsod Zone?” I ask, stumped.
“The Saidsod Zone refers to the first forty-eight hours after a city had contracted the Cozmin,” he answers. “I think 80% of the people who died from the Cozmin died within their city’s Saidsod Zone. Some cities didn’t contract the Cozmin for a couple of weeks after it began spreading, so they had more time to prepare and, thus, had less people die in their Saidsod Zone. But it wouldn’t matter; nearly every single person ended up dying, anyway.
“But yeah, I somehow found myself traveling with Phil. There was nothing left to hold him back–he didn’t have any kids or siblings, and his wife died in our city’s Saidsod Zone–and he was headed north to find somewhere safe. Once my wife died from the Cozmin, I had nothing to stay for. So I went with him. We ran from the virus until we reached Westwood, and then we followed that crowd when they transported to Roaksville. They were the only city we came across that seemed to have a plan.”
“Why did you fight Phil, though?” I ask him, forgetting to consider if it was too touchy of a subject. I take Grant’s pause as a sign to finish my question. “When he egotoned, why did you beat him to death? Why not let him die?”
“Phil told me to,” he says. “We talked about death all the time because that was the only thing left guaranteed. Phil told me he didn’t want to end up frozen in fear like many of the dead egotoned were, so he wanted me to whoop him ‘two days till Sunday’ if he ever egotoned. No clue what that meant, but I did it. I told him to do the same with me if I got sick, but I was afraid if I were to egotone, I would have overpowered Phil and killed him.” He gives a light shrug. “Guess it’s a good thing that we’ll never know.”
Suddenly, the door under The Spot swings open, and Jenkins stomps his way across the roof.
“Mr. Grant Bryson, what in the hell was that!?” he yells as he makes his way toward us, staring angrily at Grant.
“The kid had an anxiety attack,” Grant lies to him. “I would’ve done the same thing if you threw me out for millions of sharks to feast on.”
“I’m not talking about that,” says Jenkins. “Your damned bird sent a man to the emergency room!” Abbi screeches at Jenkins for his mention of the B-word, but Grant calms her down.
“Don’t call her the B-word,” Grant tells him. “That’s why Abbi attacked that man: because he called her a B-I-R-D. I’m sorry, but the guy should’ve kept his mouth shut.”
“I told you that if you couldn’t control that… thing… then you’re losing its privileges.”
“First off, yo
u can’t take her from me. She belongs solely to me,” Grants says, but he’s cut off before he can finish his second part.
“Oh yes I can! In fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing!” Jenkins motions behind him to two people that I had overlooked when Jenkins walked in. Gerard and Keaton make their way to us with a well-sized birdcage in their hands. Both of them are wearing protective gloves made specifically for handling large birds
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing with that cage,” Grant says with fear in his eyes as Jenkins’s intentions become clear. Abbi disapproves of Gerard and Keaton’s attempt to grab her, and is able to evade and peck the men at a satisfying pace.
“I’m not taking her for good,” Jenkins says, a lot calmer now, “just for a few weeks. Besides, Mr. Bryson, I have to show some punishment; if not, the citizens are going to beg for her head on a plate.”
Grant pauses, accepting that Jenkins may have a point. As much as he loves Abbi, there’s no denying that Abbi pecked this dude’s scalp into a different shape.
“Besides, I’m running messages to…” Jenkins pauses and looks at me like he forgot I was there. “She’ll be gone for a while anyway; I’ll include that time she’s gone into her punishment.”
“Whatever,” says Grant, not as irate as before but still unhappy. “But don’t put her in that cage your walking shadows are holding. I’ll take her myself to wherever you’re keeping her. And I want to be able to visit her.” Grant motions for Abbi to perch on his shoulder, and she does so eagerly, all while she stares down the two henchmen.
“I suppose that’s fine,” Jenkins says, even though Grant had already decided that those were the only conditions in which he’d agree. “But we’re putting a harness and leash on her. You better not let her leave your shoulder at all.”
Grant had already given out a loud groan and began walking toward the door before Jenkins was halfway done with his sentence. Grant is obviously not happy about having to lock Abbi up away from him, but there’s not much he can do.