Anomalies are a menace. They are monsters; they are mistakes.

Genetic defects in the code that brings us to life. A little typo in their html that has made them… broken.

Anomalies are not the next stage of evolution. They are a logistical error that should be eradicated before we move on and carry this virus forwards.

The things that these Anomalies can do; the things that they have done, you would realise their true monstrosity that they hide under their self-pity. They victimise themselves, act as if they’re the only ones to know suffering.

You don’t know suffering until you have to bury your 16 year old son. Until you have to identify his body in the morgue after a raging Anomaly blew his body to bits. My son. My son. A civilian, a boy, an innocent life caught in some madman’s path of destruction.

Nothing hurt as much as planning your son’s funeral. Nothing ached like looking into his empty bedroom and remembering that he would never sleep there again. That I would never have to knock on his door to wake him up so he wouldn’t be late to school. That I would never have to yell at him to clean his toys or stop playing his games.

I left everything the way it was for months. Until the posters on his wall began to peel off; until everything began to develop a thin layer of dust. And that hurt more. The dust settling, the acceptance that he was gone. I packed his things in boxes and keep them in the basement.

They say there are five stages of grief. I thought I had surpassed them, I thought I had finally overcome it. But still, inside me, there bubbled this deep seated rage, this anger that never seemed to fade. This feeling of injustice, the knowledge that he didn’t have to die, that nobody had to die.

So I enlisted with Purity as a researcher. We took the DNA of Anomalies, studied them, figured them out, questioned how we could reverse the effects of their mutated genes. There was always the overbearing feeling that maybe we never could. Maybe it was an affliction that couldn’t be stopped with a single injection. Maybe we were fighting for nothing.

I won’t lie and say I am impartial to Anomalies. I never liked them. I never wanted my son anywhere near them for fear of what they could do to him.

“But they’re my friends,” he would say.

“No, they’re not,” I told him firmly, “They’re bad people. They’re dangerous. They could hurt you.”

“No they can’t!”

He was wrong, obviously. They could hurt him. And they did. I hated them for it, all of them, each and everyone of their pitious kind.

They are all insects, and I’m helping to exterminate the swarm.