Cockroach King Part 1

Cockroaches can live for a week without a head.

A cockroach can hold its breath for forty minutes to retain water.

A female ootheca can hatch close to fifty nymphs.

They can go up to a month without any food.

Ahmed knows more than this. These are just the facts that translate well. The ones that make people recoil slightly, step back, scratch their arms as if something is crawling on them.

These are just a few of the cockroach facts in Ahmed’s head that made him the undisputed cockroach king in all of Auckland.

A title he wears with pride, wearing it like he wears his Taqiyah. Proud and bold. COCKROACH KING signwritten on his black HiAce in lime green, sharp and offensive against the dull greys of industrial estates and suburban cul de sacs.

He had a fierce reputation. If you had a problem, you called the King.

He did no maintenance. He left that kind of slow, polite work to the big companies. The ones that sold reassurance and monthly plans. When they inevitably fucked it up, Ahmed was there to save the day.

He did not wear gloves unless the job absolutely demanded it. He did not explain what he was doing. He did not soften his tone. He walked into your house like he already knew where the problem was, like he could feel it vibrating through the floorboards.

People did not like him.

People trusted him.

You see, Ahmed was not always the Cockroach King.

When he came to New Zealand as a refugee in twenty fourteen, he was placed with a large pest control firm. Good money. Good job security. A uniform two sizes too big. A laminated ID card with a photo he hated. He took the job because it was there. He kept it because he was good at it.

He took to the work like butter to toast, especially cockroaches. Ants bored him. Spiders were easy. Rats were loud and stupid. Cockroaches were different. They had intention. They had patterns. They had rules.

Ahmed watched them longer than the others did. He crouched when others sprayed and left. He stopped thinking of chaos as random and started seeing design everywhere.

It took weeks for him to be recognised as a specialist. His customer service was shit. He knew he was the best and he carried an air of arrogance that managers disliked but tolerated. He never spoke. He just pointed and hissed. A sharp sound through his teeth that meant move, or stop, or do not ask questions.

Customers complained about his attitude and then asked for him again.

But he always got the job done.

And for this, the customers loved him.

Ahmed transcended the company within a year. Even as a standard technician, he was requested by name by people he had never met. Friends of friends. Landlords. Restaurant owners with sweat on their temples and inspectors on the way. The company always obliged. They had learned early not to argue with results.

Ahmed was always successful.

One treatment. One hour. Not a cockroach left.

Dead ones in the open. Dying ones staggering into the light. Survivors dragging poison back to their nests like offerings.

The efficiency of his work was awe inspiring. It was also bad for business.

Ahmed played to his character. He bought a van. Bought tools. Paid a signwriter. The company did not lose an employee. It created a competitor. They still called on him when they were stumped. He charged them double. Sometimes triple. Cash if they knew what was good for them.

This gross overcharging is what gave him the ability to take his family back to the motherland in twenty three. A visit framed as nostalgia, but driven by something heavier. A victory lap disguised as a reunion. Just a month before the attacks of October seventh. Timing so cruel it felt deliberate.

It made the news in New Zealand.

Twelve Kiwis stuck in Gaza while Israel conducted airstrikes twenty four hours a day. The bombardment was described as relentless. That word came up often. Relentless. Surgical. Necessary.

Ahmed and his family were staying in the south, near Khan Younis. A place the Israelis told people to move to. A place that was supposed to be safer. At the start of the war it felt like a scare tactic. Noise and intimidation. Ahmed was concerned, but not panicked.

The Embassy said the twelve Kiwis would be able to leave through Egypt once there was a ceasefire. It never came.

Ahmed, his wife, his two children, and eight other nationals were stuck. A week passed. Then another.

Below the hotel, tents began to appear. One row at first. Then another. The more tents arrived, the more confident Ahmed became that a pause in the fighting would come. People would not be pushed south if it was not safe. That was the logic everyone repeated to each other until it sounded like truth.

Ahmed gained another fierce reputation, this time among his own people. Families came to him for food or money. He always helped. Sometimes he bought pallet loads of flour straight from the aid trucks. Pure cash. No questions.

When people asked where the money came from, he told them he was the Cockroach King of Auckland. He was chattier in his own language. Softer. Familiar. A man among his own.

The days turned into weeks.

Back in New Zealand, people sent messages of support. Well wishes. Kiwi ingenuity will get you home. On the ground, the camps grew denser. And with the density came heat, waste, and cockroaches.

They arrived in numbers Ahmed had not seen before.

He spent his days between the tents, on his knees, with no pesticides. Sealing gaps. Lifting mats. Moving food. Teaching people how to starve them out. How to think like them. How to deny them warmth. He found purpose in it. A familiar rhythm. Something he could still control.

Then one day, everything broke.

Ahmed was helping an old woman with an infestation in her tent. He was crouched low, showing her where they were nesting, when the sound came. Not a warning. Not a whistle. Just impact.

The hotel behind him collapsed inward, folding like it had been waiting for the excuse.

There were no bodies to retrieve. The blast was clean in the way only modern weapons are clean. Concrete dust, twisted rebar, silence where there had been noise seconds before. Over four hundred dead.

Including his wife.

Including his two children.

Including eight other Kiwis.

Ahmed did not scream. He did not run. He did not drop to his knees the way grief is supposed to look. He stood very still, hands hanging uselessly at his sides, staring at the space where the hotel had been. His brain began cataloguing immediately. Counting. Ordering. Trying to make sense of absence.

This is what happens when a structure fails.

This is what happens when pressure is applied incorrectly.

This is what happens when you are not fast enough.

Someone was talking to him. He did not hear them. Someone touched his arm and he pulled away instinctively, like something had tried to crawl onto him.

Later, much later, people told him his family had died instantly. That there had been no pain worth worrying about. They said it gently, as if gentleness mattered. As if facts had ever softened anything.

Ahmed did not sleep that night. Or the next. He sat near the tents and watched cockroaches move between shadows, navigating debris with effortless precision. They adapted immediately. New pathways. New nests. No confusion. No mourning.

They did not search for what they had lost.

They simply continued.

Grief did not arrive all at once. It came in practical waves. He reached for his phone to message his wife and remembered. He turned to tell his son to stop wandering too far and remembered. He calculated how much flour he still needed to buy and realised there was no one left to feed.

The world did not collapse for him the way the hotel had. It carried on. Aid trucks arrived. Bombs fell elsewhere. The camps reorganised themselves around the hole where a building used to be.

Ahmed stopped helping people with infestations. Not because he could not, but because it no longer felt useful. Purpose had left with his family. Only function remained.

At night, when everything finally went quiet, he lay awake and replayed the moment again and again, the way he used to replay difficult jobs. If he had stood somewhere else. If he had chosen a different tent. If he had listened to a warning that never came.

He knew better than anyone that survival was not about morality or deserving. Cockroaches taught him that. They survive because they do. No more. No less.

Ahmed survived.

That was the part he could not forgive.

Twenty twenty four arrived with a bang, but not like the fireworks you see on New Years Eve from the Sky Tower. There were no colours. No countdown. Just concussion. Khan Younis was under siege with no end in sight.

Was this retribution.

Was Allah punishing him for all the lives of the cockroaches. For profiting from death. For turning extermination into a crown.

Ahmed wandered through what used to be streets, now a tarmac wasteland scored with tank tracks and dust. A man with no purpose is a dangerous thing. Not because he wants to die, but because he no longer knows how to live.

Every day he returned to the collapsed hotel. Every day he tried to get closer. Irish UN soldiers guarded the perimeter. Polite. Firm. Exhausted. Ahmed spoke more English to them than he had spoken in his entire life combined. He explained. He pleaded. He pointed at the space where his family had been.

Always in vain.

Every single day.

Through those Irish lads, the word spread that Ahmed was a Kiwi. A strange detail that carried weight. That word travelled in a straight line through chaos and landed in the ears of the Foreign Minister back in New Zealand.

Ahmed found himself on the news again.

He watched it on his Samsung, the screen cracked from a fall weeks earlier. The headline read like a joke written by someone with no skin in the game.

The Cockroach King of Auckland is alive in Gaza.

They interviewed his customers. His old boss. People spoke about him warmly. Said he was a good man. A family man. The best man for the job. Someone said he always got results.

Ahmed stared at the screen and felt something shift.

Not hope.

Purpose.

A GoFundMe was raised in his name. A hundred thousand dollars within days. Messages poured in from strangers. From Auckland. From places he had exterminated into silence. The people needed him. Or at least the idea of him.

Bombs were still dropping while Ahmed tried to work out how to get to Egypt. The route was under siege. Vehicles were being targeted. Even the aid trucks. On foot it would take days. Days meant exposure. Exposure meant death.

The aerial footage on the news did not match the ground. From above, walls still stood. Buildings looked wounded but upright. From below, the bones were showing. Rebar like snapped ribs. Rooms open to the sky. No privacy left anywhere.

The only way out of Khan Younis was at night.

In the dead of it.

Ahmed waited for darkness and then moved. Darting through shadows. Pressing himself into blackness. Thigmotactic. Using touch to orient himself the way cockroaches do. Walls guided him. Rubble told him where he was. His hands learned the city faster than his eyes ever could.

IDF soldiers guarded the exits. There were no gates. No fences. Just vision. Eyes and red laser light cutting through dust and breath. He could see them clearly. They did not see him. They were not looking out. They were looking through.

He watched their breath bloom briefly in the laser haze. Small clouds of proof that they were human.

Ahmed knew what to do.

If he could hold his breath.

If he could stay below the laser sight.

If he could become small.

He moved swiftly through cracks and crevices. Light on his feet. Determined. Like a cockroach crossing a kitchen floor that has already decided it is hostile. Feeling walls as he went. Eyes closed at times. Navigating by memory and pressure and instinct.

He did not think about his family.

He did not think about God.

He thought about distance. About angles. About the space between survival and detection.

For the first time since the hotel collapsed, Ahmed was not standing still.

He was moving.

By the time Ahmed reached the outer edge of the border zone, the trucks were already there.

Hundreds of them.

A spine of stalled generosity stretching toward the horizon. White metal baked dull by the sun. UN logos flaking. Tyres half buried in dust like animals that had lain down and decided not to get back up. Aid that had travelled thousands of kilometres only to be defeated by paperwork and politics in its final metres.

There was no cheering.

That came later, on television.

Here, there was only waiting.

The UN presence was thinner than he expected. A handful of soldiers, some medical staff, a few officials who spoke softly into radios and loudly with their hands. Everyone looked tired in the same way. Not the exhaustion of labour, but the exhaustion of restraint.

They saw him before he reached them.

A man alone walking out of the south with no bags, no family, no convoy.

One of the Irish soldiers raised his hand.

“Stop there.”

Ahmed stopped.

“Who are you travelling with?”

“No one.”

The soldier frowned slightly.

“Where is your group?”

“There is no group.”

They exchanged looks. That silent conversation professionals have when something does not fit the expected shapes.

Another soldier stepped closer.

“Identification?”

Ahmed pulled the phone from his pocket. The battery was low. Everything was low. He scrolled carefully, like each movement cost something.

New Zealand passport photo.

News article.

A screenshot of the GoFundMe page someone had shown him weeks earlier.

The Cockroach King of Auckland is alive in Gaza.

The soldier read it twice.

“Jesus,” he said quietly.

That word again. Always whispered.

They took him aside, sat him on a crate between two trucks that smelled faintly of onions and diesel. Someone handed him water. This time he drank slowly. He had learned.

“You’re the only one,” the UN official said eventually.

Ahmed nodded.

“We were twelve,” he replied.

Silence.

The official did not ask where the others were. He did not need to. In this place, absence explained itself.

The trucks did not move.

Hours passed.

The sun climbed, stalled, then began to descend. Heat radiated up from the ground and pressed against the undersides of the vehicles. Ahmed watched cockroaches move confidently beneath them, unbothered by uniforms or insignia. They had found warmth, shade, food, and stillness.

Everything they needed.

One of the drivers noticed him watching and followed his gaze.

“Bloody things,” the man muttered, grinding one under his boot.

Ahmed flinched before he could stop himself.

“They’re just doing what works,” he said.

The driver looked at him strangely but said nothing.

Radio chatter intensified as evening approached. Snatches of conversation floated past.

Not yet.

Clearance pending.

Only aid.

No civilians.

Orders are orders.

Ahmed understood then.

The border was not opening.

The trucks might move.

Aid might pass through.

But people were not meant to.

He was an exception. An administrative error that had become inconveniently real.

A UN medic checked his vitals. Asked if he was injured. Ahmed shook his head. The medic hesitated.

“Are you sure?”

Ahmed almost laughed.

“I’m sure I’m alive,” he said. “That’s about all I’m sure of.”

Night fell slowly. The kind of dusk that drags itself across the sky because it knows what darkness brings.

Finally, a senior official approached him. Older. Greyer. Someone whose authority came from years rather than rank.

“We’ve received confirmation,” he said. “You can cross.”

Ahmed looked past him at the waiting families gathered at a distance.

“Just me?” Ahmed asked.

The man nodded.

“Just you.”

Ahmed stood.

The weight of that landed late.

He turned back toward the camps, toward the trucks, toward the people who would still be here when he was not. For a moment he considered refusing. Staying. Becoming part of the stalled mass.

But he knew himself.

He survived because he moved.

Because he adapted.

Because he took the path that existed, not the one that should have.

The Irish soldier walked him to the crossing point. No handshake. No speech. Just a nod that said I see you and I won’t forget this.

Ahmed crossed on foot.

The ground changed almost imperceptibly. The dust finer. The lights harsher. The air carrying less smoke and more diesel.

On the Egyptian side, there were no crowds. No applause. No cameras. Just officials who looked at him with suspicion and then boredom. A man alone is easier to process than a group.

They took his details.

They searched him.

They wrapped him in another foil blanket, this one newer, shinier, almost mocking in its freshness.

Behind him, the trucks began to move.

One by one, aid rolled forward into Gaza as night fully claimed the sky. Food passing people who would not eat it. Medicine passing bodies that would never need it.

Ahmed watched until the last truck disappeared from view.

Only then did he sit down.

He felt lighter, but not relieved. Like a limb had been removed and the pain had not caught up yet.

In the distance, beyond the lights, Gaza continued.

Bombs still fell.

People still moved.

Cockroaches still adapted.

Ahmed was alone in Egypt.

Alive.

Extracted.

Unfinished.

The story had not ended.

It had simply crossed another invisible line.