Nothing sends people scrambling for a boot faster than the sight of a scurrying cockroach. But to the pests, there are far scarier dangers out there.

True terror? That’s getting zombified — and then eaten alive.

When some unlucky American cockroaches encounter the emerald jewel wasp, the wasp delivers a paralyzing sting to the roach’s body. Then, with surgeon-like precision, it injects a mind-altering cocktail into the roach’s brain. The roach, now a zombie slave, is forced to cater to the wasp’s every whim. But the wasp has only one desire: to reproduce.

Like a handler leading a horse, the wasp grabs hold of the roach’s antenna and steers it into a hole. There, it lays an egg on the roach that eventually hatches into a hungry larva that chows down on the cockroach. When the baby matures, it bursts from the roach’s chest ready to continue the gruesome ritual.

“It’s kind of straight out of Alien,” said Kenneth Catania, a biologist from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, “and it’s about the only thing I can think of that’ll make you feel sorry for a cockroach.”