Story of a Roach

Part 1: The Pestilence

        The sound of water pulsated down from leaky pipes in the dark, dank, refuge which I lived. Irradiated to high hell, filthy, and no better than the slop you’d find in sewage. The best kind, in other words. Of course, this kind of life is one to be expected. It was inherently within us to thrive among pestilence. Our neighbors, however, had a very different lifestyle. You could hear footsteps through the walls, and sounds of creatures beyond them. Dwellers in their hive of steel and glass; eating like kings, drinking with no limitations, killing with much prejudice. Disparity had bred animosity between us. We were exterminated on sight like meaningless pests. This was simply beyond me how things can be so apathetic to the lives that differ from their's: simply because it is not their's.

 

I know you're probably thinking how subjective that all is, but their derision was never in question, honestly. My cousin left our home to scout for mere crumbs in the waste one night. We never found out what happened to him, but we inferred he was caught by a Dweller lurking the hallways. We were in the waste disposal and found a corpse of one of us; deformed beyond recognition, blunt trauma by the looks of it. Our exoskeletons shattered under the force of a weapon. Thrown into the garbage like a discarded wrapper. It's that behavior which truly spawned the animosity between our people.

 

We took the loss of not just my cousin, but of many of our kind to heart. They may have a fortress of steel, but we had our own advantages against them. What we lacked in strength we made up for in sheer numbers. Although, we lacked the order that they appeared to possess. The council led by my father was conspiring with his fellow leaders on action. “We either stay and die here slowly, one scout, one child at a time. Or we bring the fight to them and accept our inevitable loss for the greater good.” It didn’t convince many of us because we were scared obviously. Why would we want to leave the safety of secrecy? Why would we fight a war where we must surely would lose? The words rang true as we lost more brethren over the next few weeks at an unprecedented rate. All patrols were recalled, and we consolidated ourselves afterwards. From there we did nothing, but remain idle. Not even a single scout left for weeks. In that ominous stillness, we all awaited a golden opportunity. It was only a matter of time before it arrived.

 

I awoke one morning under a stack of papers to a vibration and painfullyresonant creaking. There were hese sirens that blared and alarms that screeched unceasingly. My father brought together the council and tensions rose beyond control. To escape the deafening howls of alarms, some of us even fled. Without much order in the pandemonium; fear and ignorance led us to launch a desperate assault on the Dweller’s nest to take advantage of the confusion. We navigated the walls and emerged from the ventilation shafts unto the pristine floors. My brother and friend both clinged to a Dweller’s foot and he reacted with mild annoyance rather than pain. With a swing of his colossal arm he shattered the head of my friend. See that’s the thing though. I’ve never seen that senseless brutality until that day. That was my brother whom I’ve known my whole life. We’ve laughed and cried together and hell...he was family. How could all that be destroyed in a split second? With such cold and heartless execution? The friend I once knew now lay in a tattered mess, a corpse. As I saw the life fade from his eyes I began to proceed farther, dodging clubs and enormous spiked boots all the way.

 

I reached a large, metal doorway with a couple of fellow -- not even soldiers; “militia” would be a better term. It slid open and we were faced by a Dweller, tinted mask covering his eyes. He drew his club and without hesitation, swang at us which a fellow militia member dodged with a swift rightward movement. Another one of us sank his teeth into that boot and he released a cry of anguish and swung his foot upwards which catapulted that militia into the wall with a sickening crunch. He then turned to me and tried to crush me in contempt and rage. I vaulted forward and through his legs and sunk my teeth into the back of his leg. With that, he collapsed in pain and we didn’t hesitate to  climb on top of him and defeat him: one bite at a time. It was a frenzy. He screamed with indescribably repugnant shrieks and attempted to remove us, to no avail. We continued our assault until his struggling ceased and he lay still. That was the first time I’ve attacked anyone with any malcontent, let alone with an intent to kill. Sure, I’ve play fought back in the den, but this was something raw. Something almost surrealistic. The rest of the militia moved on with haste, but I stayed behind to observe the body. A face once filled with spite now showed his last emotion: fear? He feared death, just like any of us. Even the titan fell to the lowliest of places in the end.

 

That’s when I saw a most unnatural sight. A dweller (distinguishable by the brightly colored jumpsuit he garnished), dodged the blow of a fellow dweller and in a skilled counter, swung a club across the other one’s face. Now bleeding profusely from his nose, the Dweller retaliated quickly in rage, but the rogue Dweller blocked it with his own club and pulled a device out shaped like an “L” and with a gaping hole in the front. He pushed this device to the Dweller’s stomach and pulled a trigger of some sort. Then an ear shattering “boom” as the Dweller fell limp and lifeless to the ground while a pool of blood formed around his slumped body. Several of our kind attacked this rogue Dweller, but he dispatched them with ease and precision that was peerless by any of his fellow Dwellers. He traveled down the hallway and I heard the sound of that device grow fainter, and fainter: ”boom...boom...boom”.

 

I traveled down the same hallway, avoiding footsteps of Dwellers as I went. This battle was turning less and less optimistic as time passed. Our casualties were piling up and the enemy seemed to just keep coming. I eventually ducked into a backroom and made my way into a darker chamber with a single wooden platform with a large plastic device with a glass shell. It displayed many tints of green and had strange symbols dotting across it with eerie incandescence. I was startled by a voice like no Dweller or militia. In fact, it sounded like it had no semblence to anything biological at all. “Radroach detected, extermination in process." It said with a plain tone. It actually was levitating above the ground with unnatural ease and it shot out a torrent of flame from it's "arms", which scorched the steel walls and left the machine on the platform charred and a mess of burnt rubber. I tried to get closer to it, but as I approached, the screech of metal pierced my ears and it almost sliced me into two pieces with some hellish rotating blade. I kept my distance and dodged flames as they torrented out at me, and then I noticed something: it avoided the fires themselves as it made them. I formulated a quick thought and in the slight time between the torrents, I sprinted for underneath it and jumped with all my strength, and held onto this plastic thread. I started scaling it and under my weight the thread snapped and I fell back to the ground. The thing simply collapsed to the ground, motionless and still.

I exited the room through another open doorway, and I hurried down the halls until I reached a colossal chamber with a gaping hole in bedrock which connected to the steel complex I've always known. A light shined in with radiance, incomparable to any radiance I’ve seen prior. A female Dweller stood at the entrance staring out into the gap, apparently unaware of my presence of simply did not care. It was in that moment that I saw the pain in her own eyes. The same pain I held in mine. The Dweller who killed both Roach and Dweller alike; with prejudice that exceeded even the enemy's of whom I now related to. I had no home here, as apparent as that was now. I was pest, vermin, haughty and unpalatable to these things. Surely they would counter-attack to remove us. I was, but a pestilent Roach then, but I was also mourning the loss of my family and friends, just as they would be too. I felt myself gravitate towards this light without even realizing it. I knew then that I possessed a final passion...whether of vengeance or grief is unbeknownst to me, but I knew then that it was the start of something arduous and dangerous: a true adventure. There, I stepped forward; a roach into an unknown land, seeking an unknown person.