The Toxic Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

will be, and you know what? That’s my job. I am an Adaption. I kill, I survive, and I do not imagine.”
    The boy looks at me, his eye so vivid with emotion that I cannot stand the sight of it, but I stare—I stare until I drive him away and he disappears. When he does, I feel it. I feel the emptiness of my head. I feel them gone.
    I go to the neighborhoods, and I murder Adaption and human alike until I am drenched with blood; until I cannot think or see anything but red—until I am dead.

Chapter [10]
     
     
    I wake up in the field. Sunlight is hot on my skin. The air is cool with approaching storm. I open my eyes to a world that means nothing . I have nothing left. I survive.
    I go to my house, and to the working water to clean off the blood like I always do, not because it bothers me, but because it sticks. I look in the dirty mirror, cracked and foggy. My dark eyes stare back at me, blood staining my skin and matting my dark hair. I see the monster.
    Almost . I want to see the monster. I feel at home inside of him, but I feel one thing, and I cannot ignore it. There is one thing left still alive in my head. The red is still alive in my head. I have to kill her, if she is not already dead. I feel it in every facet of me. I feel rage . She started all of this, and to end it I have to end her. I am so close.
    I do not clean the blood off before I leave in search of her. When I find her house, I do not find her corpse rotting on the ground. She must have chosen to live. She should have chosen death; it would have been far more pleasant than what I will do to her.
    I climb the rooftop across from her house, and I wait.
    I wait until darkness falls and rain begins to come down from the sky, washing away the remaining blood on my skin. I watch the water turn rust colored. I know that I will never be clean, and it does not matter to me. I was not made to be clean.
    And then, like a signal, the light inside the house turns on.
    Before I can jump down, someone enters in after her—another Adaption. I hear a scream, and without thinking, I run inside.
    I stand in the doorway, my mind too far gone to think. I see the red pinned to the floor, a female Adaption above her. She takes a knife and stabs straight down into the chest of the redness, blood spilling from her body, matching the color of her hair. She gasps in pain, eyes full of tears that flicker in the candlelight.
    For reasons I cannot fathom, I lunge forward and take down the Adaption. I pull the knife from her hands. She screams a guttural, wild sound. I slit her throat, and the shriek becomes a wheeze that fades to silence. She falls to the floor, dead.
    I turn. On the floor, the redness lays, body shaking with every last breath. She looks at me. I do not feel.
    “I was g—gonna live. For a bit,” she says, her voice quiet and broken. I do not remember how to respond, and I do not remember how to want to. “You killed the human, di—didn’t you?”
    I allow myself to nod. Something…something stirs. I don’t know why, but I get down on my knees beside her.
    She coughs, blood spilling out of her mouth. “You’d be a—a better human than me. You want—want it.”
    “Not…anymore,” I say through the blackness in my head.
    “Don’t say that,” and she coughs, more blood dripping down her cheeks. Her bright eyes look too dim. “You’re not—not killing me. You want it. You always—always will…because you d—dream. You—you are human . Just dif—different.”
    “You are…delirious,” I manage to say. I cannot access that part of myself.
    “No. Honest . R—right,” she says and takes a shuddering breath that wracks her entire body. She will not recover from the wound. She has minutes, seconds. “You don’t—don’t have to be a victim of—of human—humanity. We di—did enough . You sti—still have a choice. I—” she takes another, painful, bloody breath, —“ don’t . You got m—mad at me for tak—taking that for—for