The Toxic Children (2 page)

Chapter [3]

The cold weather begins to set in. My mutated skin does not care. I enter the world looking for a kill. Time has passed and nothing has changed. I have not seen the girl. I live, breathe, eat, kill, sleep, and they haunt me. The boy is with me today. He is close to me in age, but I am not certain how old I am. He’s as shy as the day I killed him.

“Do you remember how you killed me?” he asks quietly, sitting on a rock, watching me scan for prey.

“Pickaxe through the left eye,” I answer, not looking at the figment.

“Then why do you imagine me whole? Does it hurt less?”

“How
human
—“ I turn to face him and stop, his eye a gaping, bloody hole. His right eye conveys what I understand to be sadness, “—do you think I am?”

“Not human at all, if that’ll make you happy,” he says, blood dripping into his mouth. His intact eye is vivid blue against the red.

“Happiness is intrinsically human. I am not human.”

“So are words, but you seem to love them.”

Usually I don’t mind him as much as the others, but today he’s getting under my skin like a razorblade. “I’d take out your other eye if you were real. Take a blade to it, nice and slow.”

“I’m just as real as you are, Inanis.”

“Oh yeah? Then what’s your name?”

The boy moves to open his mouth, but all he can do is look at me.

“That’s what I thought,” I say. I’m about to turn back to the task at hand, but something changes in his eyes, and it holds me.

“Azure. My name is Azure,” he says and before the smile can fully form, he disappears, and I am left with the silent wind. I feel something twist in my stomach, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. He cannot know his name; I never knew it. I need something to kill.

Something catches my eye, something red. I look up and, on a distant rooftop, I see the girl. She watches me. I could find her, kill her, but I see a deer in the brush in front of me, its horns blackened with chemicals, fur patch-like and strange. I choose the deer. Deer I can eat. Human…I am not that far gone yet. That thought makes the twisting worse, and I put my mind to the kill.

***

I eat the raw deer meat in my hole of a home. Just when I think no one will bother me further, the Woman shows up. I hate her most, with her red hair and pale skin like blood on paper.

“I wish you had been human. You would have loved the world of my past,” she says. She always has a sad smile on her face. It angers me every time I see it. It’s the most pure anger I feel.

“I wish you would screw off.”

“I am sorry,” she says, and it makes me sick to hear those words. I hate the sound of them, the
nature
of them.

She sits there, watching me silently. I try to make her disappear, but she won’t go. I wonder then if the madness in my head is something we all endure or if there is something innately wrong with me. When I see other Adaptions, they look so dead and soulless. I cannot picture these people in their heads, pestering and prying. Maybe it means that, one day, they will leave me be. If there is one thing I long for, it is for that day. I want silence. I need it.

Chapter [4]

Days pass and I don’t keep track. I never do; they lost their meaning long ago. I am in the field, listening to the wind, paying attention to the way it touches my skin. It is the only thing that reminds me there is a world outside of myself. I listen to the breathing of the world, and I know that it’s real, that it’s not some figment.

“Who do you talk to?” says a voice. I search for it, and on the hill a good thirty feet from me stands the girl with the red hair. I wonder if she wants me to kill her. What an insane thing to want.

“No one real,” I say, tensing, getting ready to attack. Some intrigue inside of me lets her talk, lets her live for just a moment. My mind wants things my body doesn’t, words and sounds—to know things.

“You seem so human when you talk,” she says. I can see the gun in her hand, knuckles white with tension.

“A residual trait.”

“I don’t get it. Where did you learn to talk?”

My skin makes itself known in a way I do not understand. It’s like the twisting in my stomach. “Most can.”

“Not the way you do. You talk with fire. You talk with a mind—a personality.”

“You are hoping, aren’t you? Wishing for a friend? I won’t be that. I have heard of romance and fantasy, and I know this world is long past that,” I say, some part of my mind I don’t understand making me speak, telling me what to say.

“Hope? Perhaps. But expect? Not at all.”

“Why are you doing this? Do you want me to kill you?” I ask, and I don’t understand why, but it irritates me. I don’t need prey walking into my hands. It shouldn’t come that easy.

“Rather you than the others. At least if you killed me, you might see me as human—you might care just a little. It’s the only thing left in this world for us: to die by the hands of someone who might remember us, if only for a moment. It’s not a good existence to be as small and insignificant as dust. No purpose, nothing. Survival isn’t enough. Survival is killing me,” she says, her words steady, but her eyes wavering with an emotion I have never felt.

Before I can process her words, she turns and walks away, all defenses down. I could kill her so easily, but I don’t. There’s something about a prey that wants you to kill it that makes you second guess yourself. It feels wrong. It’s not the way of things.

I find something to kill, some life to take out of the world, but I cannot shake her words. Survival is all that matters. Memories mean nothing—they do not last like air or sun or dirt. Why does it matter if I understand that she is human, that she thinks? She will be dead, and that’s it.

“Perhaps she thinks, even if she’s dead, the memories will keep her alive,” says the man with the dark skin and the scar through his brow. He leans against a tree, his long dreadlocks moving in the wind. My head is detailed today.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“People seldom do.”

“If you’re the part of me that understands, then make me understand in the front of my mind, the part I can access. Why does she want me to care? What does it do?”

“I already gave you my best answer. I think what you want to ask me is: why do you want to know? Why does it stir you up? Why do you care, Inanis?”

I want to kill him again. I want to cut into that scar, see what makes his head tick, and destroy it.

“I have overstayed my welcome,” he says.

“You’re the smartest of the bunch.”

“Besides, my words have been planted nicely. You’ll water them for me,” he says, and it’s not a question. Before I can throw my knife at his head, he disappears, and the silence returns. In the silence, my mind is still, and I am not human.

***

When I can’t hold onto the silence any longer, I feel the need to snuff someone out so badly my hands shake. Something dark and violent is in my head. The dark skinned man set something off inside me. The anger burns and burns and wells up into something I cannot contain.

I take off through the field and enter the neighborhood. These houses, decaying and dirtied, all once housed families. They heard laughter; they saw life, and now they are shells.
Just like me.

I see a light on in one of the houses, the window flickering orange in the darkness like a signal. I approach, quietly and stealthily. I am an expert in the kill, but tonight I cannot control what’s inside me—I cannot calculate it. It’s as if I watch, not experience, what I do. My mind is not king. The kill is.

I punch the window, shattering it, tearing up my hand. The Adaption is sitting on the floor, its features like a normal human, but its eyes sunken and skin ashen, toxic. I think it male, but I don’t have the time to process it before I rip it apart. I think it screams. Maybe that’s me. I am covered in blood. I destroy it until there is nothing left resembling a human; until there is no sign of life; until the urge stops screaming in my head.

I walk back to my basement, covered in blood. No one in the neighborhood dares bother me. In the window of a house not far from mine, I see the red. She watches me. I want her to see the truth in the blood: that I am a monster. I don’t want to be her last hope; I want to be the thing that takes all hope away. That’s what we were built for. We are the punishment, not the saving grace.

Chapter [5]

I sit in my chair, unable to sleep. It comes sometimes, the madness. Not just the people—something more than that. I shake and rock and I cannot control it. I am still covered in blood, still covered in the redness turned rust. I look at my hands, blood under the nails and staining my flesh. The remnants of life are on my hands. I get flashes. I see the Adaption. I see his eyes, and I see fear. I can hear his screaming, loud and piercing and how it ceases, but I don’t stop. I keep ripping and tearing. Blood is on me, warm and wet and red—

I get up and open the latch, running to the bathroom where the water still flows. I tear off my clothes that reek of blood. I scrub my skin until it hurts, until I feel that I am as clean as I will ever be, which is hardly clean at all. No matter how much I wash the blood off, it will always be on my hands. I was born with blood on my hands.

I feel sick with humanity. I haven’t reacted like this in a long time. I thought it was over. I turn to leave, but the Woman stands in the doorway.

“You are not this monster,” she says.

“When you’ve seen the blood go down the drain, any room for doubt leaves.”

“But you have doubted. Do not forget that.”

“Why will none of you let my mind die in peace? Monster is what I have been headed towards since the moment I was conceived. Let me
go
.”

“It is not up to us,” she says, disappearing into the bloodied mess of the inside of my head.

I want to be angry, but I am just so
tired
. More tired than I can understand. I sleep the day away, not in my chair, but curled up on the floor like the animal I am.

***

I wake up more numb than usual. Nothing means anything to me. I find a set of clothes gathered months ago and put them on. I leave the house, not sticking to the fields. I walk down the street, in full view of the world. No one approaches me; no one tries to kill me. I find someone, human or Adaption I don’t know, and I kill them. I feel nothing. No anger, no hatred, no regret. I have never been so dead.

Days pass and nothing changes. No one visits the inside of my head. The silence is numbness. I do not feel part of anything. I exist. I survive.

I walk down the street again, not caring if I am a target. I see the red when I pass its house, and it calls down to me.

“Say something to me so I don’t go mad,” it says, voice shaking.

I look up. Some part of me wants to respond, but I don’t remember how. I don’t remember what interaction means. I continue down the street. The boy, his eye now missing, appears beside me.

“You have one chance, Inanis. Don’t die on me,” is all he says. He stays with me, silent, watching. His eye burns too bright.

Like sickness, I feel something. In contrast to the numbness, I could almost call it vivid. I turn around.

“Red,” is all I can manage to say. It feels strange on my tongue. I blink a few times, as if waking up. The world looks brighter, more alive. I am aware of motions I was not before: leaves moving in the wind and the slow shift of sunlight to sunset—things that don’t matter.

“I thought you were dead. Not physically, but mentally. I’ve seen you walking. You weren’t there,” she says. She is silent for a moment. I have nothing to say. I feel something, but I do not feel alive.

A thought forms in my head. It’s hard to put together, but I manage. “Why don’t you kill yourself? You are more human than me.”

“I don’t deserve it, or maybe I’m just too afraid,” she says. “You have to understand how messed up I am. I watched my baby brother kill my family with his poison body and poison mind, and here I am, still alive for no worthy reason. Sometimes I think I made up humanity. Sometimes I think I’m dead, and this is my hell.”

“This is hell,” I say, the words coming to the surface with ease, because I think I mean them.

“Why do you deserve to be here?”

“I killed my mother and trapped her in my head. I am just like your baby brother. We all are. We are your demons, and our own.”

Her eyes fill up with emotion. She stares at me. The eye contact is painful. In the space of a second, her eyes change like a mask, covering up what she doesn’t want me to see. “Do you have a name?”

“Inanis.”

She looks at me for a moment, but then the mask is back. “Do you know how to read, Inanis?”

“Yes,” I say, and my head slips back to memories—real memories. I hear something like wind chimes. I smell roses. I hear the warm rumble of voices. I feel something.

“Do you like to read?”

“I did. That’s how I know things—things I shouldn’t,” I admit. “I burned the books years ago.”

The boy with the missing eye, Azure, he claims, looks at me. I feel his eye like I feel hers.

“Why do you talk to me? Why don’t you kill me?” she asks suddenly.

I think for a moment. “I don’t know,” I say and walk away. I can’t say any more. I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s a lie.

I turn to Azure, still walking with me. “I am setting myself up for the end of me. You understand that, don’t you? I wind myself up, I become as human as I can, and then I ruin it so thoroughly the essence in me dies.”

“I choose to ignore it,” he says, his blue eye looking back at me. “I know what you think you’re doing, but I hope for other things.”

“How can you hope when I can’t anymore?”

“I’ve been asking myself that same question,” he says, looking downward, watching his feet, forever the easy prey he was when I killed him. He looks up at me, his eye bright with something I can’t understand, and then he disappears into the folds inside my head. I am left alone in the silence. Even wrapped up in it, something in me feels, and I am not certain if that’s good, or the worst possible thing.