Prologue

The year was 2038 and everything had changed in a very short period of time, at least that’s what I had been told. I was born in the year 2020.

The year a virus so severe swept the whole world and changed everything forever. I was told our kind had lived amongst humans for centuries before that without much conflict, and even though we didn’t exactly live in harmony at least things were better then than they are now.

We were seen as a naturistic anomaly, just some genetic mutated abnormality. I can’t say that I really know of a time where things weren’t exactly falling apart and where most humans weren’t trying to kill us.

I guess we don’t know what it was that finally pushed the humans over the edge but once they turned nothing was ever the same again. They were trying to find someone to blame and we were the ones they could unleash their blame onto I guess, they feared what they didn’t understand and they had no real understanding of our kind, how we came to be or why we existed in the first place.

We had just always kind of been there on the sidelines trying to fit in with humanity. In all honesty I didn’t have any understanding about what we were either.

In their eyes we became the reason people were dying, we were passing this virus to humans through simply breathing the same air let alone coming into close contact with them, or so we were told. Wrapping my arms around myself I tried to imagine myself carrying a virus so deadly that it would be better if I were dead, it was a difficult thing to envision but I had to, I didn’t have any other choice.

We were hybrids, our eyes a dead giveaway. The yellow glow meant a threat to their existence and in 2021 they all but started losing their minds. A hybrid was anything crossed with something else not of that said species, at least that’s how I understood it.

I had tried to imagine what that time must have been like, just as it all happened. The frenzied and deranged eyes of the humans as they started chasing my kind out of all the cities and towns, out of our very own homes, hoping it would rid them of this unknown virus and threat to their existence, but I couldn’t bring myself to thinking of such a time as I had been just a baby then and ever since that moment until now, my life had always been this way, fearful and threatened with the understanding that I was nothing more than a disease, a freak of nature that wasn’t worthy of existing. 

Even after they started chasing us from our homes and into the wilderness people were still getting sick and still dying of something unexplainable, what came next should have been expected I guess, except we didn’t know true evil until we looked into the eyes of humans.

The elect had devised a plan, they thought if they killed every last hybrid on the face of the earth surely then they would start to get better, so the decision was made all because some idiot with a PHD had told them to. I was told it happened so quickly that our kind had very little time to prepare if any.

They called themselves the brothers and they stood for humans against hybrids, at first they would go from village to village rounding up all the hybrids they could find, transporting them to what could only be described as modern day concentration camps, left to die of starvation.

Hybrids had certain capabilities that humans did not possess which freaked them out even more, so when more people started dying the fear overwhelmed them to such an extent that they didn’t care about what was right or wrong anymore. They came into villages and started butchering any hybrid they could find, my kind were known to be kind and gentle, not really being of aggressive nature but finally even hybrids had reached their limit, this I guess was our biggest mistake, the brothers even began to turn on their own kind then, those who were fighting to protect us, anyone who stood in their way. 

The brothers had so many clans across the globe that eventually it was almost impossible to hide from them, their duty was simple, to cleanse and restore peace, that was a joke in any event, the reality was far graver when the power and total control started going to their heads. No longer were they cleansing the earth to restore peace, instead they started going into villages and mutilating their own in a sick and perverted sense of supremacy for daring to side with hybrids.

They would butcher the men and most of the children of every tribe if they felt like it for nothing other than sport, then taking the young woman for themselves as slaves to do with as they pleased until they were then disposed of in some horrific way, it was sick to say the least. Starvation was the next thing that set in amongst the human villages and soon they were all turning against one another like wild beasts clawing at the very last strands of their existence. 

I was found by an older human man one day, when I was only four years old. He had taken pity on me as I stood staring up at my parents mutilated and burnt bodies swinging from the tree of our cottage, my little face a blurry mess of tears and sobs and the berries and little wild flowers I had picked for them scattered on the ground. He looked at me and frowned as he realized that I was a hybrid child, sighing he just shrugged but didn’t dare touch me as he peered down at me,

“Well you can’t stay here child, come with me,” He said as he started to walk away. I was so torn between staying with my parents and going with this man, eventually the crippling fear of being alone smothered me to the point that my little legs quickly started running after him.

His name was Jobe and bringing me back with him into his village I was quickly introduced to the harsh reality of what my kind was too humans, Jobe however had me live in his cabin with him, he didn’t have a wife or any children and didn’t mind the company I guess. Even though he didn’t dare touch me in fear of becoming sick himself, his kind heart prevented him from being unkind to me.

Sadly Jobe died in a freak accident one day after falling from a horse and everything changed in a heartbeat, Jobe was one of the respected elders of the tribe and therefor the other elders and tribal members didn’t dare treat me badly, after his death however the true nature of everyone in the tribe came crashing down on me like a ton of bricks. I was told to gather my things which wasn’t much and I was moved to one of the storage rooms, I was given an old blanket and pillow and I was allowed the scraps of food they threw away when I was hungry.

I wasn’t allowed to interact with the other children of the tribe, and even though I craved the interaction of someone to play with, I knew that if I dared step out of line that it would be my end. I had always assumed the actions of the tribal elders upon taking me in after Jobe died as such a kindness when they could have easily turned me away and let me die. Little did I know then as I do now that it wasn’t kindness nor pity they were actually showing me, it was insurance against the brothers.