There was no wind, and he was without breath. The air was perfectly quiet. The only sound came from the factory. The tall, square building, surrounded by piles of cut steel bar and crates of smaller hardware, emitted a constant drone and clangor, and the occasional shriek of metal on metal.

All around was sand, the town sitting a long walk away now, with no road leading here. The sun was climbing still, but it wouldn't matter once he was inside.

There were bodies around, far away. There were a lot of them, he'd been told. Out in the fields where the fighting had been done, long before he'd opened his eyes. And there was hardly anyone left to see those bodies home. So everywhere he traveled, he saw shapes on the horizon that made him think of death.

Rock, for that was his name, had done some fighting too in his short life. He'd been taught to shoot. He'd been showed his own strength. And the handful of men he'd now been sent to kill, he'd challenged these foes before. He'd struggled blindly against them when they were a mob, during the first moments of all this mayhem in the doctor's workshop. But it was here the first real battle would take place. The first of many clashes between him and a single, ready foe.

He touched the gun at his side, barely feeling the weapon on his fingers – no more than his unnatural body felt anything. His eyes scanned the front of the factory, the shapes behind the windows, and settled on the small, man-sized entrance which stood next to the bay door. Both were closed. He walked to the former, and wrapped his fingers around the handle. The wind picked up for just a second, enough to shift the dust and metal filings at his feet. Then he flung the door open and entered the cacophony.

He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to do this.

But he had work to do.

The enslaved paused in their toil to look at him as he passed. He nearly reached out to one, to put his hand on a young boy's shoulder, but he kept his gait steady and forward. It felt wrong to touch them. He wasn't one of them. So he hid his face from them instead, behind the folds of a dirty yellow scarf - a memento that Rock had worn since it had been found, though a memento of what, he still hadn't been told. The air was hot, though. He lifted his hat, navy blue with a stiff, low crown, and let his forward motion push the air through and steal the heat hanging over his head. Heat was the only thing he felt in full. Supposedly that was just the way it was for people like him, if they could be called people. His kind. His kin.

There was a sudden, loud groan from above. He looked up, and saw something massive coming toward him. He leapt to the side, just in time to pull himself away from the spot where a massive iron cog hit the floor, a buckshot-like blast of concrete exploding in every direction from the point of impact. There were cries from the workers as the cog rolled away and toward the assembly lines, tipping and crashing to the floor as it slowed.

He turned his eyes back up to where it had rolled from. A familiar man stood above, a figure from Rock's worst memories, and the one he'd come to destroy. They didn't have names like people did, but he knew what this one was called. The factory's master, the one who'd cut steel for the doctors before, and brandished it during the coup. The Metal-Man.

The enemy's wild eyes seemed to blaze red even in the dark of the factory. The rest of his face was covered by a dust mask, and his body clothed in red and black. Rock was the forgiving sort, but this was a madman with murder in his eyes. And they had orders, both of them. The fight was coming.

Then the masked man dashed away, toward the back of the factory. Rock immediately gave chase from below the walkway, hauling himself up a ladder and following the glimpses he caught of his fleeing foe. Lights flashed, warnings beeped, and machinery swung wild at him. He ran, his hand always ready to draw and fire, and found himself ducking and darting constantly as lifts collapsed around him, drills snapped their bits into shrapnel, saws leapt from destroyed anchors, and cut wires flew past his face. His quarry was sabotaging everything in his path, tearing the factory apart, he realized. And he was right to do it. After all, if the factory's master died here, the workers would be free to leave, and there would be no one to direct the manufacturing, so as long as the master won the fight, it wouldn't matter what was left standing. Now that the battle was here, all that mattered was survival.

Sprinting through a warehouse now, with mercifully few threats to fall toward him, he saw his foe make a run for an open bay door at the side. He drew his gun, a heavy revolver-like weapon whose shots left streaks of yellow in the air, and with only a slight pause to aim, fired at the door. The chain hooked to the wall to hold the door in place was shattered near the anchor point, and the door came down hard, thundering as it hit the floor. The masked man halted, shocked, but did not turn. Instead he swung his arm down violently, and the compact apparatus strapped to it slid out and locked in place, beginning to whirr and whine. A circular saw, less than a foot in diameter, came to life at the front of the extension rigged to his arm. Then, with his other hand, he started to heave at the chain, the heavy door crawling back upward.

The factory's master had nearly opened it enough to duck through, when he glanced back at his pursuer. His wild eyes went wide, and he spun around to swing the saw, forcing the man in blue to sway and break his charge. The door came down loudly again as the battle began, in a furious blizzard of swipes with the running saw. The master's eyes were intense and unblinking, his breath forced out by the power of his swings, muffled by the mask but coming in huffs and growls as he lashed his arm in crisscrossing arcs. Rock wheeled back and bent away from the attacks, not frantic but very careful.

He'd brought a gun to a knife fight; he should have had an advantage. But his weapon was a unique one. It was powerful, each shot ferociously so. But it only held three. And one was spent. And so long as he was on the defensive, reloading was not an option. So he evaded one slash of the saw after another, looking for an opening to deflect it, to grab the swinging arm, anything he could do to break up the assault. Finally, he knocked it away, took aim, and destroyed it with one more well-placed shot, the frame exploding into two crooked arms, the warped blade spinning itself out on one of them. The Metal-Man ripped it off his arm, and tossed it to the floor.

Kachack. Whirr.

Rock watched a second saw extension come to life on his foe's other arm, but the enemy didn't continue the fight. Instead, he bounded away, and in a few strides took cover behind a stack of heavy crates.

"So. The man in blue," came the scratched and creaking voice. "Or do ya prefer 'Rock?' That's right, the doc told me all about you, Rock." The gunman heard the location of the voice subtly shifting behind the crates, though the obstruction made it impossible to track reliably. He debated lowering his weapon to reload it, but for the time being he kept it trained where he could aim at either edge of the stack in a hurry. "Where'd you get a name like that? That where Tom found yer body? He dig ya out from unner a rock, Rock?"

"I don't know. We're not all as simple as you are, 'Metal-Man,'" Rock responded, hoping for a lull. "Maybe they know something about me I don't." Talk; talk was good. Talk gave him a moment. He reached for a cartridge, to reload and recharge his weapon. But then he heard a shuffling, and pointed it closer to that side of the stack, waiting. "... But what I do know, is no matter how nicely I ask, I can't trust you not to hold these people prisoner anymore. I know you're going to work them to death. You were told to. Weren't you?"

"Yeah, thereabouts," the Metal-Man answered wryly.

"This last bullet's for you then. I'm sorry, but that's how it has to be. I want you to know, I'm just doing what I was told, too." For a second, there was a quaver in his voice that he could neither explain nor suppress. But he kept his gun high. Ready.

There was a long pause, with only the whirring of the saw and the distant noise of the factory to fill it. Then, the Metal-Man spoke. "... 'Last bullet?'" Rock cursed himself for being so arrogant as to let that slip. Not that it mattered. Gun; knife-fight. The moment the factory's master stepped out, he'd be dead. He wasn't that fast. At that moment, a streak of crimson flashed out from the stack on his right side. Rock turned, and with the kind of precision only unthinking sinew and instinct can provide, fired and hit his mark. The red jerry can was punctured, and fell to the floor in a series of plastic clunks. Rock cursed inside himself again. The scratched voice came. "So. That was yer last bullet?"

Rock tried to answer with something confident, something that would dissuade his enemy from taking advantage. But he said nothing, and that was all the response the Metal-Man needed. Leaping over the left side, he reappeared and swiped with the running blade, and suddenly the man in blue was the one on the run. No more shots. No chance to reload. He sprinted, trying to widen the gap, but with nothing to fear his foe was now doing everything in his power to pursue, and kill. The door was still too heavy to open quickly. The factory was disassembling itself in the direction he'd come. There was no safe way out. He heard the sound of the saw come frighteningly close to his right side, and dove into a roll, hearing it buzz past his ear like an angry insect.

"Whatsa matter, Rock? I heard the 'man in blue' was a threat, heard he was lookin' fer us, lookin' ta tear us up! This all ya got, man in blue? This all ya got?!"

A glint on the floor drew Rock's attention, attached to an odd but familiar shape. He dashed toward it, holstering his weapon, then stooped out of his run and snatched from the floor the broken saw he'd shot from the Metal-Man's arm. The blade was warped, but sharp as ever. He turned, and in an instant that seemed to last for minutes, he met the master's blazing eyes, saw the running weapon on his left arm, and dove straight past its reach as he plunged the limp blade into his opponent's throat.

The two stepped back, the Metal-Man clutching the ragged wound with his free hand. Rock knew he felt no great pain from such a wound, but the dark, inhuman blood still came, and the groan from the Metal-Man's throat was transformed into a gurgle on its way out. The broken weapon in Rock's hand had tasted first blood. Their eyes met again, and the man in blue shook his head slowly. "I'm sorry. This isn't how I wanted to do this."

The Metal-Man charged, swinging, screaming through his own blood. Rock lifted the broken saw rig and deflected the incoming blade, then grabbed the offending arm, clutched the master's sleeve, and struggled to hold it away from him while the saw whirred hungrily at the end of the frame. He threw the broken weapon forward again, into the stomach of his confused foe, and released it there, where it stayed. The Metal-Man stumbled backward, shocked, trying to decide between holding his neck closed and pulling out the weapon. Rock took that moment to draw and reload his gun, watching the tiny chamber window turn to a spot of blazing yellow as the weapon was armed. Then he lifted it, centered the sights between the fretful eyes of the Metal-Man, and squeezed the trigger. In a yellow flash, the fight was over.

Rock sighed, his shoulders heaving forward and downward as his whole body sloughed off the tension of battle. It was done. It was over, and he hadn't been scratched. Shaken up for sure, but unharmed. He could only hope the rest would be ended this easily. He thought about returning home, or the closest thing he had to a home. But he was undamaged, and had plenty of ammunition. He could keep going, he decided. The longer he took to end all of this, the more people would suffer. The doctor would want him to keep going.

The people in the factory, he realized, didn't know their master, their captor, was dead. Rock moved toward the heavy door, deciding to loop around to the front again rather than traverse the treacherous ruins of the factory. He'd placed his hand on the remains of the shattered chain and was about to haul the door upward, when he noticed an unpleasant sound his mind had been tuning out. He turned, and looked at the shredded body on the floor. On its right arm, still running, still scraping the floor, was the saw. Slowly Rock approached, crouched down, and inspected the weapon. He found the kill switch, and took a moment to figure out the rest of its mechanics, retracting it and removing it from its owner's dead limb. Rock stood, and with his empty gun hand he attached the stilled weapon to the opposite forearm.

"Long road ahead," he said to himself, pacing back to the door and hauling it up. He locked the chain in place, and left the warehouse, squinting against the sun. "Wouldn't hurt to get equipped."

/ / /
\ \ \

It's midday, and it's hot out in the desert. The wind helps a little. But with the cool comes sand and stink from the dry wastes war has made of this old man's world.

A physician named Thomas is sitting in the dust, miles from home, or the closest thing he has to a home. He's a little too old to walk so far comfortably, his whiskers a cascade of white and silver. But his friend is busy fixing the truck - Albert is reliably handy, to distantly understate it - and Thomas needs to escape the workshop from time to time. Escape the view from his windows, the look of the town with its craters and scorched earth and empty buildings, the ghostly sounds made by the few living who remain, and the haunting shapes of the unclaimed dead on the horizon.

Thomas sits on something metal that no longer holds a definite shape as it might have when it was manufactured. Now, it's only part of the rubble. In the palm of one hand, he balances a book, whose cover is emblazoned with marks that are unknown to him. They bring about in him a feeling he hasn't known since he was a child; the feeling of looking at something he does not understand, and wondering at implications beyond imagination. The markings are chillingly alien, but the writing inside is in a language he can read. The book speaks of things he knows, and things he doesn't know. Simple science and shocking diablerie. Proven theory and wild ideas. Reason and lunacy.

All things that will come to define his final days.

Thomas reads it through, over and over again, shaking dust and sand from the pages and the nooks of the bindings as his hands tremble at a realization.

"It could work."

Author's Note: All right, smiles everybody, here we go. I'm going to use this space minimally but for now, let me just say that whether you just found this story or you're back for more (you loony gal or fella), thank you for reading. As my first foray into fanfiction and something I spent years putting together in my head, this one means a lot to me, and I hope it makes you feel something. Because I sure didn't pull a stunt like this just to get no reaction. See you in Chapter 2!