Here is chapter 1! This new version is going to have less chapters in it because I decided the chapters I originally had been to short so they've most been combines. Let me know what you think!

~DDM~

'It's raining.' My fogged mind supplied, I could feel the water falling on my face. When did it start raining; it was supposed to be sunny, wasn't it? I tried to move, confused by the strange texture against my skin…all my skin.

I opened my eyes, blinking as the rain continued to fall on my face, I just stared into the dark sky, trying to make sense of what was happening and where I was. How did I get here? I closed my eyes and memories came flooding back.

Graduating from school, getting my first job with Grace at the emergency room, my hectic first day, lunch at the café…the strange man at our table.

'Can I help you?'

'You can die.'

Bang…

Pain…

Darkness…

I screamed, sitting up and looking down at myself. I was sitting in mud and appeared to be completely naked. Panic began setting in and I looked around, hoping to find something familiar. I gasped as I looked around, not only was nothing familiar but total carnage surrounded me. Bodies lay scattered about in the mud, some placed appeared to be on first, helicopters and various machine part were sticking out everywhere.

A hand landed on my shoulder and a shriek tore its way from my mouth. I spun around, muddy, wet hair sticking to my face and neck, threatening to block my vision. I stared wide eyed at the man kneeling beside me. He was half dressed and likewise covered in mud; a body several feet away was missing his pants.

"Whoa, whoa, calm down. I'm not going to hurt you." He reached over to a body I hadn't noticed next to me and stripped off it's jacket, before draping it over my shoulders. I cringed but he only shrugged. "It's better than nothing. Stay here, I'll be right back."

I nodded numbly, not having a clue as to what else I should do. He went back over to the half dressed mand and finished commandeering his clothing. I used the somewhat clean sleeve of the jacket around me to wipe off my face as best I could; looking up into the sky and letting the rain help. When the man was done lacing up his newly acquired boots he came back over to me. Gently, he pulled me to my feet and I was glad when my knees didn't just give out like I thought they might.

"I'm Marcus, Marcus Wright." He introduced himself before zipping up the jacket I was wearing, it went almost all the way down to my knees.

"Odessa…Croy." I gave him my name in return. "Where are we?"

"No clue." He said with a scowl as he looked around. "Come on, lets see if we can't find you something closer to your size."

He led me through the field of bodies until we came upon a young man, short and thin. Marcus removed the corpse's clothes when I was unable to bring myself to do it. I've seen dead bodies in the hospital but this was something totally out of my comfort zone. He turned away as I took the jacket back off and started to put on the other clothes, trying desperately not to think of the clothes previous owner.

The wife beater was a decent fit, but even with the help of the belt, I couldn't make the pants stay up. After a moment of through, I came up with an alternative solution. I didn't like it, but it was better than nothing at all.

"Could I have his shorts, please?" I requested. Marcus raised an eyebrow at me, shrugged and did as I asked before turning away again. I discarded the pants and used the wife beater to wipe more of the mud off before I pulled on the shorts, suppressing a shudder as I did. I pulled the jacket back on and used the belt to synch in the waist for a makeshift dress. We had to take several pairs of socks for the boots to fit decently enough to make walking ok. After I was dressed, Marcus picked a seemingly random direction and we began to walk. I asked him if he knew where he was going and he gestured to the partially cleared sky, pointing to a particularly bright star.

"North."

We walked in silence for a while before I broke it again.

"I'm not supposed to be here." I said sadly. "After what happened, I should be dead."

"That makes two of us." He sighed, running his hand over his short, dark hair.

"You died too?" he nodded. "Are you sure?" It felt like a stupid question. "Maybe we just think we died and instead we were just unconscious for a while. What happened to you?"

"Lethal injection, pretty sure that's permanent. You?"

So much for that theory.

"A man shot me while I was having lunch with my best friend." I stopped walking. "Grace! What if he hurt her too? What if she's back there?"

I felt like crying, looking back the way we came when a heavy arm settled across my shoulders.

"You were the only living person I found, and I looked." He said, gently getting me moving again.

"How do you think we ended up here, wherever here is?"

"No idea. They were supposed to chop me up until there was nothing left."

"They, who are they?"

"Cyber something." He said, and I stopped walking again, frowning at him.

"Cyberdyne?"

"Yeah, that's it. How'd you know?" I barely noticed when he stopped too.

"When I accepted the job at the hospital, they had to option to sign up to be a body donor for their research. My body was supposed to go to them after I died; I just didn't expect it to be a week later."

We began walking again, the rain had stopped, and the sun was rising. I pulled my hair over my shoulder, running my fingers through it, pleased that most of the mud seemed to be gone, and began to braid it. Questions kept chasing one another around my mind, sending me in endless circles, my brain on overdrive.

Why were we here? Where is here? Why aren't we dead? Was I just unconscious? If so, for how long? Where was Grace? What happened to those people back there? Where are we going? How long have we been walking? Why haven't we seen anyone or heard anything?

Every one of my questions just seemed to lead me to new ones rather than supplying any answers.

The feel of the ground suddenly changed beneath my feet; the feeling of sandy ground giving way to something harder. I looked up and saw the Marcus had stopped too, looking down. He crouched and brushed sand aside, revealing what looked like tarmac, I could see the faded yellow lines of the lanes a little father up. We were standing on a road, but a road to where? How could a road be covered in so much sand? Didn't enough people drive on it to keep it clear?

"Where do you think it goes?" I asked, hesitantly, unable to keep the question to myself.

"I don't know," he said as he stood up and looked around. "What I do know, is that roads lead to towns and cities. If we find one, we can figure out where we are."

I agreed, and we changed course, following the moderately covered road to where ever it would take us. Marcus was quiet, so I tried to stay that way too. It was difficult, extremely difficult. Long periods of silence bothered me, down to the bone, so I tended to fill it with chatter, but I was trying to respect my new companion's silence.

It was some time before we took a break, sitting atop a large boulder we'd come across on the side of the road, the sun was now high in the sky and it was getting hot. Our perch was elevated enough that we could see the mountains in the distance more clearly, in almost every direction. I didn't care much for the scenery, the sand seemed to stretch on endlessly, only the mountains in the distance breaking things up. I was still worried about Grace, wondering what might have happened to her after I was shot. Hopefully someone stopped the man before he was able to hurt her too.

"There's something over that way." I jumped in surprise when Marcus spoke, pointing in the direction we had been heading.

"It looks like mountains to me." I said, and he rolled his eyes.

"Look harder." It was my turn for an eye roll, but I did as he asked, straining to see more than just what I had. There was something there, something grey and sticking up in an unnatural fashion; possibly man made?

"The grey thing?" I asked, and he nodded, pleased I was finally seeing what he did.

"We'll keep going in that direction." He slid off the boulder and offered me a hand to help me slide down as well. The silence that followed was really starting to bother me. It wasn't uncomfortable by any means, just…quiet.

I couldn't take it anymore.

"Marcus?" he grunted at me and I took that as an acknowledgement. "Can I aske you a personal question?"

"Shoot."

"Why were you on Death Row?"

"What?" his steps faltered but he didn't stop.

"You said you died by lethal injection, they don't do that to anyone unless they are on Death Row." He didn't say anything for a few minutes and I was afraid that I'd crossed some invisible line I hadn't been aware I as standing on. "I'm sorry, you don't have to answer that."

"Does it bother you?" he asked after the silence had stretched again.

"What?" it was my turn to ask.

"Does it bother you?" he asked again.

"Does what bother me?"

"That I was on Death Row." He said, and I looked down at my boots as I gave it some serious thought. Did it bother me? He hadn't done anything to try and hurt me. In fact, he hadn't been anything but helpful since I woke up in the mud. He hadn't needed to help me, he could have left me behind in the midst of the chaos and just left. He was quiet, but gentlemanly all the same.

"No, it doesn't, I was only curious." I paused but felt the need to explain myself further. "I only asked because the quiet was killing me! Just so you know, for the future, long silences hardly last long around me. I can't help it, I'm a talker." I smiled up at him, hoping to convey my sincerity about nothing minding his Death Row status. He smirked and rolled his eyes.

"I'm a pretty decent listener." He watched the dust kicked up by his boots for a moment fore he looked ahead and spoke again. "I did something stupid. Thanks to me, a couple of cops, and my brother lost their lives."

"Oh," I said softly. "I'm sorry about your brother."

"What about you? What did you do before you died?"

"I studied to be a trauma surgeon at Georgetown Medical, graduated top 10% of my glass." I said proudly. "I'd just gotten my first residency in an ER with Grace. I was having a pretty eventful first day…sadly, I died half way through it. I would have really like to see what happened after lunch. I bet it would have been even more hectic."

"How so?" he was humoring my need to talk, something I was grateful for.

"I'd already stitched up a young stab victim and gotten a couple of bullets out of someone else. There had been a huge pileup on the freeway so I had to give some stitches, reset a few shoulders, and set quite a few broken bones, pulled bits of metal and glass from whoever was sat in front of me. I love it!"

"You liked all that?"

"Not the people getting hurt part, obviously."

"Oh no, of course not." He nodded and laughed.

"No really! It was the helping people part that I liked. I love to help others. It's the main reason I wanted to become a trauma surgeon, instead of a lawyer like my Dad or a judge like my mom." My throat felt tight as I thought of them, feeling the tears starting to build. It must have shown on my face because Marcus hurried to ask me another question rather than lapse into silence again.

"Your parents practiced law and you went into medicine?"

"Yeah, they weren't really happy about it at first."

"They didn't like that you wanted to be a doctor? Most parents would kill for their kids to choose that."

"They wanted me to go into law in some way, anything other than that was a step down as far as they were concerned."

"Any siblings?" he asked.

"No, it was just me. I don't think my parents could have handled having another child."

"You were that much of a handful?" he asked playfully.

"Oh no, they were just really busy. All the time. They had full schedules, almost every minute of every day was planned out for them. My mom talked more than once about how inconvenient it had been for her to be pregnant while she worked. I was with Ellie most of my childhood."

"Ellie?"

"She was my nanny until I was fifteen, after that, my parents decided I was old enough to look after myself and that I didn't need her any more. She was still there to talk to if I needed to, she never really disappeared. I spoke to her regularly until I was about eighteen and mom found out. She threatened to sue her for 'stalking' me after she was no longer my nanny so we stopped talking. I didn't want anything to happen to her just because she was fulling the emotional need that my parents weren't concerned about."

"That's rough. Did you have anyone with you when she had to leave?"

"Just Grace, when she was allowed over."

"My brother and I did almost everything together. Most of it was less than legal, but we looked out for each other."

The grey structure was getting closer, it looked vaguely familiar.

"I would have liked a sibling, someone to spend time with. Grace and I met in fifth grade, she was the closest thing I had to a sister. We did everything together. We had movie nights, dinners, shopping, sleepovers, class projects. We were inseparable."

"Well, lets find out where we are, they we can see if we can find out about your family."

I beamed at him, suddenly realizing how much taller than me he was. I only came up to his shoulder. I looked down at the jacket I was wearing, it was more comfortable that I thought it would be when I first put it on. It was a dirty green color and had obviously seen better days. One arm had what looked like medical tape around the bicep; it was stained red, like blood. I leaned over to inspect Marcus's jacket, though it was a different color, black instead of green, it too sported something similar on the arm. I wondered if it had some kind of significance.

"Is that what I think it is?" Marcus broke through my thoughts. I looked ahead and saw the grey structure had officially taken a shape.

"That's the back of the 'Hollywood' sign! We're in California!" I instantly felt better knowing where we were. All that comfort however fled when were got closer, the sign looked like it had gone through war. We stopped in front of it and looked out over the city of Los Angeles.

"Oh my god…"