The Toxic Children (3 page)

Chapter [6]

I sit on a rooftop near the house of the red. I watch her be human; I see her leave and look out at the world with fear and fire. I smell cooking food, something I haven’t had in a long time. I see her through the window, painting. I do not understand art anymore, but I do not dislike the sight of it. Art will die with the humans, just another casualty of mankind.

I feel a sick knot inside me the whole time, something anxious. I try to be what I think of human as. It feels like I have a knife inside me, moving whenever I try to stay calm and quell the kill in me. It wears me to the bone.

Hours pass and I leave my spot. I walk to the field, listening to the silence. In the manmade world, I feel like the monster, mutated and wrong. In nature, I feel like any animal.

“I saw you,” says the red. She stands far from me, just at the edge of the field. “Why were you watching me?”

“Trying to understand,” I say. I do not care that she saw me. It does not matter.

“If you want to understand, why did you burn your books? Books are more honest than the world. If you want to understand people, listen to what they make up.”

“They burned the inside of my head. They showed me worlds and things that I will never have. They hurt.”

“They’ve always hurt. Books have always shown us what we want and cannot have. They make us feel alive when nothing else does.”

“Why?”

“Because it hurts, and hurting makes everything else feel real.”

“I think your real is my fake.”

“The fake things hurt the most sometimes. Dreams, wishes…” she says, her eyes looking into something I cannot see.

“Tell me one thing,” I say. “Why is being human better than being an Adaption?”

She looks at me, her eyes conveying something I do not understand. “I have only old reasons. Love and art and feeling and hope, but the truth is…those things mean nothing now. Humanity is torture,” she says and walks away before I can say anything else.

Some part of me disagrees. Some part of me thinks that it was a gift, the pain and the pleasure of it. It seems so
full
, and I am so
empty
.

Even though I try, I know what I said to Azure is true. I am setting myself up to die with a clean cut. I will be faced with what I want, and shown exactly how much I cannot have it. I believe second chances are a thing of man, not of the Adaptions.

I fight because I always have, and because…I do not know what I am without the essence. I can be angry; I can ignore all that is inside of me, but when I face the truth, when I look it in the eyes—in my eyes—I see a monster staring back. When I kill, I feel alive with madness. The first time I felt it, the first time I felt the lust of killing, the blood on my hands, it terrified me. I grew sick with it.

Some days, I still cannot stomach what I do. Without the shred of a conscience I have, I know I will do disgusting, vicious things that to this day would sicken me. Knowing that, knowing that that will become my personality, my mind, my actions…it excites me more than it would any human. It sickens me some, too. There will come a day when it only excites me—when it is all I want. I know I am just prolonging that. Maybe I would like to believe otherwise, if I knew how to hope.

The little blonde girl appears beside me. It reminds me of the dream she last came to me in, only the reality of the world is clear in the tall, dying grass and weeds, not the lush green of the imagined past. “You felt bad when you killed me, you know. Not just sick, not just mad, but guilty.”

I feel the twisting. “What’s your point?”

“You call it sickness, but it’s more than that. You’re not being truthful with yourself.”

“Why does it matter if I felt guilty? Or do you just want me to admit that I did? You were a kid—you smiled when you saw me. The fear, the hatred, those were always okay. I understood them, but smiling? It was…innocence,” I say, seeing it much too vividly. She laughed when she saw me, this little chirping sound, eyes shining. Her parents must’ve told her some lie to let her leave the world happy. It should have made me stop—it should have made me let her go. I know that from the books; I know that should’ve changed me, but it didn’t because I
am
a monster. I slit her throat. She never laughs in my head.

I look at her, her throat open and bloody now. “
Oh
,” she says, touching the gap. She looks at me. “It matters ‘cause you need to remember the truth. If you’re going to become the monster, you needa be honest. If you were the monster when you killed me, imagine what you would’ve done? I bet I wouldn’t look human anymore, like that Adaption.”

“You wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t care. I know and I accept that. I will do the things that would give even me nightmares. That’s the price of giving up the fight—that’s the price of never having to feel like a human. I am attached to the essence, but it kills me in a different way. It’s the difference between always dying, and just getting to be dead.”

“You feel different. Why aren’t you angry at me? Why are you so calm?”

“I am tired,” I say simply, and I am. I have been feeling too much—more than I am meant to. I have been toying with the idea of humanity. That’s the truth. Some deep, old part of me thinks that being in contact with humanity and not killing it will break the monster and let the human out. I hate that part of myself.

There are two sides to me: the monster and the human. If I don’t let them cross over into each other, they both make sense. When they cross, that’s when I go mad. I can feel the kill in me along with the conscience. I can feel my head turning and twisting.

“I like the monster in me,” I say. “I like the way it makes me feel. I liked killing you. I have liked killing every person I have killed. The sickness is a side effect; the killing is the medicine. I accept that just as much as I accept the guilt. I’m going insane,” I say, and I laugh a sickened laugh. “This is too much.”

I walk out of the field, leaving the imagined girl behind.
I want to kill
. I can feel the sides of me fighting. The red girl has made me so loud inside, so stirred up. I was fine before. Anger I can manage, but this…

I feel a stitch in my chest. My head pounds and aches. I feel the heaviness of tired so much that I can barely stand. The fight in me is too much. More than to kill, I want to shut off. I want to escape. I want to be human and I want to be a monster. I want to be a devil and an angel, but even in the books, those do not cross. I want to be something that doesn’t exist.

Without thinking, I am at my house. I go inside and down into my cavern. I curl up on the floor, wanting to kill, but more than anything, wanting to stop feeling so
alive
in the worst possible way. I hold myself down, fighting the kill with sleep. For the night, it works, and I rest.

Chapter [7]

A few days pass, my mind in a strange sort of haze. The kill in me is strong, and the more I ignore it, the sicker I feel. The red left a book on my doorstep, some gesture of humanity I cannot process. The sight of it made me sick with glimpses of memories that shouldn’t be left in my head. I am supposed to be past this point. I need to be—I need to stop fighting inside of myself. I need to lose. That would be the best thing. That would end this madness.

I walk down the street, the sun nearly set. It is silent. Something snaps in the distance and I hear the crunch of leaves. I stand still, waiting, listening. Out from the bushes, I see the glint of red hair reflected in the last of the sun. When she sees me, the fear in her eyes tells me that to kill her would be very…
satisfying
. Some part of my head, some distant, locked away part, screams. For the first time in a long time, I hear it. It hurts my head.

The girl grips her gun tightly. This is not on her terms; she did not mean to run into me. I watch her, waiting to see what she does.

“When you don’t speak, you scare the hell out of me,” she says. I can see she’s shaking in the cold.

“And when I do?”

“You make me afraid of myself.”

“Why?”

“Because I realize how insane I really am,” she says, the gun lowering subconsciously. “Sometimes I harm myself to make sure I’m still alive—to feel something. Sometimes I think I’m just as soulless as the Adaptions.”

The thought of that, of her mutilating her own body, twists me. There is something wrong about it; it’s not something animals do, and even humans are animals—they are the worst animals of them all.

“Why do you tell me these things?” I ask, trying to understand something that feels so vividly. She doesn’t know what numbness means.

“I don’t know!” she nearly shouts. “I hate who I am and what I am. I hate what the entire human race did. Do you realize humans are dead? I am of the last of my kind. Any child conceived by a human will be an Adaption. We fucked up so badly that monsters were a better fit to rule the earth.”

“You may have to live with the guilt of humanity, but I have to live with it dying inside of me,” I say, anger warming my skin. “This game you are playing is a dangerous one. It’s going to kill you and kill the thing in me that talks to you.”

Her eyes fill with water. “I would trade places with you if I could. None of you deserved the life you got. My brother’s eyes were so alive. He
loved
, I swear to you. We kept him locked up. I killed him before he killed me. He made it to five. How is that fair?” she says, the water falling.

“Your kind killed fairness,” I say, walking away. I can’t look at her. I can’t look at what she is and what she has done. I do not care who she has killed. I am angry that she cries about how she is
human
. I remember wanting to be human so badly that I managed to cry. I remember my mother. My toxic form in her body made her sick. Some die during birth, others years later. The older we get, the more deadly we become, our entire existence an antibody to the world and a virus to the humans. She can feel all the guilt she wants—it will always be too late. I remember wanting and I remember hope. I will never be what I was supposed to be. I will never be human.
Guilt doesn’t change shit
.

I walk to the neighborhoods, a sick, twisting pain within me that screams to kill. I long to act out a revenge I will never be able to. I will never kill the men who made us; the men who destroyed the world and murdered the humanity of mankind. I will always seek to punish. I will always mimic the crimes they committed. The truth is:
we are them
. We are their children, and it makes us what we are. It makes us monsters.

I have to kill.
I walk into a house, and my mind goes black.

Chapter [8]

I am in the field again, covered in blood. The sun rises, warm on my cold skin. I do not remember how I got here. For the first time in my life, I blacked out. I remember going into the neighborhoods, wanting badly to kill. I killed several. I know that. I lost control, and I did not feel. I was the monster. I understand that I am losing consciousness. I can feel myself dying.

I breathe deeply, trying to be nothing. Not human, not Adaption. I want the fight in my head to go quiet. I want to stop fighting. I have been fighting for much too long.

“Killing will kill the human inside you,” says the worst man I ever killed—at least of the ones who stayed behind in my head. His black eyes watch me. “I would think you would kill every chance you got until it died. I know it hurts.”

“My devil,” I say. “That would make you happy, wouldn’t it?”

“The thing is, Inanis,
you
will never be happy. The closest you will get to happiness is to feel nothing, and the only way you will feel nothing is to kill the humanity. It’s up to you. Hang on, or let go,” he says, disappearing.

Hang on or let go
. That is all there is. That is all I have. He’s right. It isn’t win or lose; it isn’t fight or give up. I can hang on to what I could never be, or let go and become what I am supposed to.

The Woman shows up then. They rarely come so close to each other.

“I know why you’re here,” I say. “You think that, because you’re my mother, you can save me from the hell your kind created. You think you can say something that will change me, wake me up.”

“If you choose to let your essence die, we will be gone. We cannot exist in a mind that cannot imagine. You will have to let us go.”

“I know that!” I snap. The outburst makes my head spin.

“I will not tell you what to do. I am not going to stop you. I have no right to, Inanis. I’m sorry,” she says, fading away before I can say another word.

These visions in my head are my ties. They keep me here—they keep the human alive. When I fall into the depths, they pull me up, talk me down, but they are not real. None of them are. The only things left keeping me human are made of my insanity. The truth is…there is nothing left for the human in me. I need to adapt. The red girl is the only real thing I know, and she longs for death. I will outlive her, and when she is gone and I am alone with myself, the monster inside will tear me apart. The human in me, the essence, will not stand a chance. It is not a matter of whether or not; it is only a matter of
when
. That is the truth.

I can feel my funeral coming. I think I have begun to accept what will be inside the grave.