Read Online The Toxic Children by Tessa Maurer - Free Book Online

Chapter [1]
     
     
    You can hear the sound of death above the dust-covered floors I call a ceiling. You can hear it whisper in the wind, reminding us of what we have done. The shifting of a billion souls scattered in the air… It’s the lullaby of my childhood.
    Funny how you can be put to blame for the destruction of a world you never knew. We are the Adaptions, and in this wasteland we can survive. Maybe that’s why they say it’s our fault. It took ten years for enough of us to be born for the fathers to die out, standing and screaming and guarding the graves of their dead wives. Born into a world of chemicals and poison, us little babies had to adapt to survive. We became toxic, inside and out. Maybe it makes us mental, yeah, but we survived. That’s more than I can say for humankind. They made themselves a casualty.
    “Do not forget we made things beautiful,” says the Woman. Her hair is red as fire, skin as pale as the passing glimpse of the moon. I’d call her poetry, but she’s more like hell.
    “Dead people don’t know shit,” I say, fingers pointed at her in the shape of a gun. Click, click, bang . What a beautiful sound. Too bad the bullets can’t pierce the fabric of my mind, of which she is so poorly made.
    “Inanis, you disconnect us. We are not so dis—”
    “ I disconnect ,” I seethe. I smash the side of my head with my fist until it throbs, until it bleeds, until she fades.
    I get up from my half-broken chair. I sleep there most nights. Beds make me feel vulnerable—I can’t attack fast. You have to attack fast. If you don’t, you die, and you don’t get a second chance. If you got a body, you got that life and nothing more. These bodies burn souls. You start out with this energy, this burning light in your essence, and this flesh eats it until all that’s left is some shriveled, pathetic shred of humanity. And then when you die, you’ll be another agony-ridden soul polluting the sky with the rest of the humans. That’s it. You’re done. No more lives. No heaven or hell. Done .
    So you don’t die. We don’t know how long we can live yet. It hasn’t been long enough for anyone to know, but we think we can survive until the sun explodes. By then, we will be like walking corpses. I look forward to it. Then they will leave me be.
    I grab my knife and tuck it in my jeans. I need to go up today; I need to kill something. These bodies don’t run right without blood on the hands. These poison brains don’t operate right, as if all the little connections and circuit ways got filled with rust and blood. There used to be some part of me that tried to make it work right. That part of the essence is gone.
    I get up on the ladder and knock open the latch, the portal in the ceiling to the beautiful hell of earth. The dim sunlight burns my eyes, but the feeling I don’t mind. It is something…alive. I can hear the rush of wind; it pounds at my ears, so accustomed to the stillness of my dark hole beneath the house. I climb out, my weight making the old floorboards creak. The roof is half gone; it’s a skeleton of a building now. I was born here, but nothing is left but barren walls and dirt. I got rid of the relics of the humans long ago.
    I walk through the place, kicking the broken door open and stepping out onto this world I now own. The grass and trees are dead; the sky is green and grey and smells of chemicals and corpses. Houses left and eaten by bugs line the distance. It’s all grey. Color left with humanity.
    Like an animal I slither through the thick of weeds and plants that refuse to die. I am an animal. That’s why I go mad. Animals aren’t supposed to think; that’s what makes them different from humans. When the human in me dies, I will be all animal. It gets riled up and tries to fight, and I fight back. Sometimes I don’t know which side I am. Sometimes I don’t know what I fight.
    Find something that moves. I thought once about why I kill things. I came to the