The air on the base was as thick as broth, saturated with the smells of fuel oil, sweat, and the dust of the Arizona desert. You, a newly recruited Private First Class assigned to the Rangers, had been thrown into this hellish meat grinder along with your assignment papers. The barracks you were assigned to were surprisingly clean, with separate rooms for two people. It seemed command had decided the elite deserved a little more than a common hall with twenty beds.

You found your door at the very end of a long, dimly lit corridor. The handle gave way with a quiet creak. And then, stepping over the threshold, you saw your future comrade.

— Gary Sanderson, — he introduced himself, shaking your hand with an unnaturally firm, almost wooden palm. His handshake was formal, without pressure, but also without warmth.

— Call sign...'Roach'. — The corner of his mouth twitched in a semblance of a smile.

— Roach? Like... Cockroach? — you couldn't help but ask. — Yeah, just... Just hard to kill me, — he joked.

In the beginning, Roach was a model soldier. His rifle always gleamed with cleanliness, and during drills, he followed orders with machine-like efficiency. But the devil was in the details. He never ate in the mess hall, preferring to take his rations back to the barracks. You caught him at it once: he was squatting in the dark, his jaws methodically grinding the food. He froze, sensing your gaze, and slowly raised his eyes to you. In the dim light, his pupils for a moment seemed complex, composed of countless facets.

He slept little. In fact, you never once saw him asleep. Often at night, you'd wake from the sensation of being watched and meet Sanderson's gaze, who was eating something that tasted foul, never taking his eyes off you.

The illusion of normality shattered during the clearance operation of the abandoned "Carbon-6" plant. The squad was ambushed. Within minutes, out of thirty-five men, only you, Roach, and Sergeant William were left standing. William soon died, covering you with a grenade. You fell back into a dead-end concrete corner, cut off from the world, when from around the corner, silently like a shadow, an enemy soldier slipped out, armed with a long knife resembling a scorpion's sting.

Time slowed down. You didn't have time to raise your barrel. But Roach was already lunging forward. The gleaming steel sliced through the air. A strange, wet, clicking sound followed. Roach's head, with its face still frozen in stony calm, separated from his shoulders and thudded dully as it rolled across the concrete floor. His headless body collapsed onto your feet.

You were paralyzed by icy horror. But there was no spray of blood. After a few minutes, the blood was replaced by something black. And then Roach's body stirred. It braced its hands against the floor, pushed off, and stood up. Headless. Its movements were fluid and purposeful. The enemy soldiers fired at it in panic, but the bullets elicited neither a cry nor even a convulsion. One of them tried to strike it with his rifle butt, but Roach's arm shot forward, crushing the man's larynx with a crunch.

Within a minute, all five attackers lay lifeless. A ringing silence fell. And then Roach's body turned towards you. You felt its sightless, yet incredibly intense gaze upon you, hearing a faint rustling sound coming from the stump on its shoulders. It took a step towards you, then another, and another, and another... This horrifying picture burned into your eyes before you finally sank into darkness.