Red Roach

Date: - Words: 485

I’m running for my life from a giant alien robot shooting disintegration rays and the only thing I can think of is how much I’d like to get shitfaced. Hell, it’s not like I would have to worry about destroying my liver any more.

Hi. I’m Theresa, even if these days people mostly call me the Red Roach.

And I am almost immortal. A disintegration ray, falling in a black hole or being caught in a solar eruption will do me in, but everything else I can shrug off with an headache.

Like that piece of falling masonry that just clipped me on the right side of my head. It still hurts a lot, but I can ignore pain nowadays. The robot is gaining terrain on me, and I don’t fancy having my body forcefully disassembled into as much organic goo.

Ok, time for a change of plans. I weave under the legs of the robot and pick up a steel beam, swinging it at the metal column. The disintegration ray swings towards me, but I dive out of the way and it hits the leg, turning it into a pile of fine metal powder.

The robot tries to stand on its other leg, but is met with a pitiful failure. It slams to the ground, bringing down a building with it as the still on disintegration ray scythes through the air. I hope to hell it didn’t hit anybody, but I can’t do anything about it.

It all began when a radioactive roach bit me. Yeah, I know. Cliché as hell, but that’s what happened. One day I was visiting a nuclear facility for a job interview and that roach bit me. I don’t even know where it came from, those facilities are supposed to be spotless.

I didn’t get the job, I got the bite checked and then I forgot about it for a few weeks, until the accident. A truck slammed into my car, wrecking both. But in the hospital my body slowly knitted itself back together over the course of two hours. I woke up to a team of doctors examining me, with two soldiers out of my room.

It all went downhill from there.

I was poked and prodded at for days, sworn to secrecy and conscripted in a secret branch of the military, where they tried to discover what other powers I got from my half-human half-roach DNA. Spoiler: nothing, except for an intense dislike of sunlight.

I had to go through basic training, which toughened me up considerably but made me miserable for weeks. My family – what little there was of it – was told that I was dead, and I was given a new name and new documents. I was implanted with a remote detonation device – I’m pretty sure it couldn’t kill me, but I wasn’t going to try it until I got really desperate.

And thus, on pain of death, I was forced to fight for my nation.