You awoke once more to the folds of night.

You began to wonder if perhaps the sun had ceased from existence and left the world to forever be reigned by the moon and stars, that perhaps the rest of the universe had decided to become as cruel and unforgiving as your captor who had taken you captive, who watched you from afar with the single glowing eye of his that never faltered, never wavered.

"Have you been watching me this entire time?" you snapped and adjusted yourself, wrists sore from where they had been tied against the wood of the chair you were bound to. It occurred to you that you had spent an entire day unconscious, that the world had completed a full rotation without you knowing and the very thought began to unnerve you. Had others noticed that you were missing, that you hadn't shown up for work? Was your face joining the long row of posters pinned up in Times Square, labelled as missing, the hopes of ever finding you alive dimming as each hour passed?

"Of course not," your captor replied, sounding genuinely offended. "You're not as important to me as you think, you might know."

"Well you certainly took the time to tie me down so you must care somewhere deep down within that stone cold heart of yours," you retorted, beginning to hate each and every thing about the person that held you hostage within the depths of darkness when the day had decayed and the shadows once more asserted their dominion over this rocky planet.

More than anything you hated how your captor was making a game out of this, the way he was slowly drawing out the fact that within a few moments time he would be dragging a knife across the surface of your skin, splitting it like one would with a tomato. You weren't sure what would be worse, the torture itself or the feeling of immediate dread that loomed over you, knowing that each second could be the second in which he pulled out the knife, pressed the tip against your cold, damp skin that beaded with sweat, hair prickling on the back of your neck.

It also occurred to you that your captor had never told you his name. Sometimes you wondered if he even remembered his name, if it was just some minor detail to him that was lost within the trenches of his insanity that shrouded his mind, masked out any form of his old self. You wondered what he had been before this, before he had picked up the knife and begun the career of butchery.

But now you were determined to give this person a name, even if the dark shrouded him like an omnipotent veil, hiding the features of his appearance. In giving him a name it would make your captor more human, more vulnerable. Because things without a name were unpredictable, dangerous with moves that could not be anticipated. If something had a name it was branded, just another member of the human race no matter how sadistic their mind may be. And if something was human, than it had a weakness as all mortals that walked this planet often did. Unless... The horrible thought occurred to you.

Unless he wasn't human.

You shook off such thoughts for it was impossible for him to not be human, right? You didn't sound so sure, the memories of the convenience store flashing with a blue light, certainly not the product of any weapon of terror ever before seen on the surface of this planet, the way he had walked away from the ruins without a scratch while everyone within a fifty foot radius of the blast site had perished. The way he had been able to leap from rooftop to rooftop almost as if he were flying...

Almost as if he were teleporting.

Your mind wandered back to the killer as you begun to piece together what you knew about him so that you could formulate a name within your mind. You knew not of where he came from or why he did what he did, then again, killers usually offered no reason for their motives. You thought back to the knife you had fond amongst the rubble, the knife that your captor held now, whose surface gleamed with the faint light of the moon that managed to sneak its way through the drawn blinds of the dusted apartment.

The knife had been coated with dust, though you were certain that the killer had used the knife frequently, why else would he carry it with him? But even that thought seemed to be a juxtaposition, for dust was a substance that covered objects that were never used. What sort of thing could be killed and leave a thin layer of dust upon the blade that had slaughtered them and not an ounce of blood?

And then the name came to you amongst the collection of your thoughts, a name that seemed to fit this person entirely, even if it was not the name that had been assigned to him at birth. Dust, you liked that name. Dust was ancient, forever, something that had always been and would continue to exist even after the fall of man. Something about your captor suggested that he had been around for years, the way his blue eye laced with red seemed to glint, reflecting an ancient mind behind.

But you did not tell Dust the name you had given him for you thought he would not take kindly upon it.

"Now there's still one thing that I don't understand," you continued as Dust moved closer to you, his glowing eye inches away from your face as you felt the tip of the blade drag against your skin, a tip of ice that was chilling your blood at the very thought of it. "Everyone has a motive for why the kill, it's never just because it's fun. There's always a reason behind someone's actions, even if they deny it or don't realise it themselves."

"You want to know my motive?" Dust asked, humour ringing the edges of his words. "I have you tied up, life in my hands, and you still have the nerves to ask me questions? I find it amusing how you treat this as an interrogation, I the one providing the answers to your demands whilst you are bound in chains."

"Can't you give one straight answer?" you snarled, feeling slightly on edge.

The eye was suddenly in front of your face again, the dim light burning with hatred and sadistic glee intermingled into one amalgamate of an emotion, one that was so wretched and festered that it made your mouth go dry. "Don't test me," he snarled, the tip of the knife pressed against your throat. You felt a thin trickle of heat run across your throat and vaguely realized that you were bleeding from the contact point, startled by the warmth of your own blood when your skin had been chilled from the frigid temperatures of the outside world. "Perhaps a knife in your throat would keep you quiet?" It was more of a statement than a question and you truly believed that Dust was considering doing such a thing.

"However..." The pressure of the knife against your throat immediately lifted as he moved away, pacing across the room. Though your wound continued to bleed, the blood still streaming. For it was always the wounds that remained. The pain was never the worst part, the actual torture. It was the scars, the long-term effects that were left behind.

"Seeing that you are going to be dead in a matter of hours, I suppose it wouldn't hurt gracing you with one answer," Dust finally concluded, leaning against the window as his gaze trained on yours. "If you want to know why I kill, why I take hostages and wait for the police to arrive, why I lure them in like flies chasing rotted flesh, than an answer you shall have."

He began to pace back and forth, seeming to be a habit of his. "Many thing that killing is something blind, something that is done to somebody random and that's it. But there's so much more to it than that."

"I already got that," you replied impatiently. "It's fun to draw out the pain, that's what you said last time - " You were cut off by Dust's hardened glare.

"Yes, there is an art in prolonging the duration of the killing, but inflicting mortality upon an individual is also about strategy as well. For me, the whole of human society is a pillar with the workers, the less important people as mere specks of sand that are relying on a table to hold them up. Why bother cleaning up the specks of sand when you could knock the whole table down, dispersing and loosing the sand in the process? Kill two birds with one stone as your species refers to it as."

You blinked, still not understanding.

"You're not the brightest firefly, are you?" Dust sighed, leaning against the wall. Even though it was dark, you could have sworn that he had folded his arms in a gesture of impatience. "You see, what I'm doing, I'm not just killing for fun. I've begun to isolate the key individuals within this society that if removed, could bring the whole of civilization to its knees."

"So you're killing police officers in New York City because you think it will bring about the end of the world?" you laughed, shaking your head. "I don't know what type of bank you go to, but it's time to cash in your reality check. Even if you manage to disrupt society within New York City, it won't bring about the end of the world."

"But would it?" Dust sighed. "There is a street in this city - "

"There's a lot of streets in this city," you snorted.

"There's a street in this city," Dust continued, venom in his words that drained your will to even consider mustering up the courage to cut him off again, "that is one of the corner stones of the United States of America. Some would call it Wall Street, I believe, the hub of this country's financial resources, nest of the stock market. If you bring down New York City, you bring down Wall Street. If you bring down Wall Street, you cripple the economy of this nation. You cripple the economy, you wipe the United States from the international trading market, limiting the resources that other countries may get. Down the line the domino will fall until the whole thing collapses."

The truth behind his words scared you to your deepest core. You may not have known a lot about the stock market, but it was true that Wall Street was a key developer in ensuring that it was kept up and running. And if New York City fell into ruin from the lack of a police department, if anarchy reigned, that would bring Wall Street to its knees and thus the U.S economy. In a single calculated blow, you could bring an entire country to its knees and sow the seeds for chaos.

"You've given this a lot of thought," you said at last, biting the inside of your cheek as you struggled to hide the fear that so evidently laced your words.

"We've had a lot of time to work things out," Dust replied. You looked around, wondering who the we was that Dust was referring to. As far as you could tell, he was the only one in this room besides you, acting alone since the start. "I believe this satisfies your question?"

You nodded in reply, wishing that you hadn't even asked at all. Dust seemed to take delight in this and took a step towards you, examining you from side to side. "Before we begin work, however, it would be extremely rude of me to deny you food beforehand."

"You're going to feed me before you torture me, how kind of you!" you exclaimed, words dripping with sarcasm.

Dust merely shrugged and walked over to where you assumed the counter to be, picking up a paper plate and then plopping it and its contents onto your lap. "Eat," he commanded and took a seat in front of you, happily working away at whatever piece of food he had.

You looked down at your own plate, struggling to make out its shape in the thin amount of lighting that you had. You picked up the piece of food and were surprised to find it soft, almost like a piece of bread. You decided it was bread as your fingers continued to prod the substance and it suddenly occurred to you that this food might have been laced with poison or some other chemical. But the growing protest in your stomach was to great to ignore so you wolfed down the piece of bread, savoring the taste.

It turned out that it was not only a piece of bread, but rather a hot dog. A very cold hot dog if one was to get technical. It was almost comical, the way the two of you ate in silence, you on the brink of torture sharing the same room with the very person who was about to drive the blade into your skin.

"You should be a chef," you muttered through a mouthful of food, shuddering at how awful it tasted. Though you hadn't eaten in over two days so you weren't in much of a position to judge when it came to food. Your mind had crossed the boundary to an instinctual process of thought that deemed survival necessary, allowing you to digest any food no matter how disgusting for the sake of your own survival.

"My brother was a chef," Dust replied, taking another bite of his hot dog. He then frowned at his word choice. "No, my brother is a chef. Had is past tense, a word you use for the dead."

"You have a brother?" You took this with an ounce of surprise. For some reason you had never thought of Dust having a family; it was hard imagining a demented serial killer living in harmony with other people in a neighbourhood with a green lawn and a white-picket fence.

"Of course," he replied as if this was obvious and was a piece of information that everyone should know. "He prepared the food."

You looked around and could find no other signs of life besides you and Dust. "We're the only ones here," you inquired, not understanding what he was playing at.

Dust's gaze was suddenly sharp. "He is here, how can you not see him?" He gestured to a spot of empty air six feet to his right. "He doesn't like you that much, then again, I don't like you that much either."

You wondered if he was hallucinating the presence of his brother but decided not to say anything on the subject anymore in fear of triggering a violent response from him. Once Dust had finished eating his hot dog, he sat up, rubbing his hands together. For some reason when he did such a thing, the sound of scraping bone resounded across the room, giving the impression that his hands were constructed out of bone rather than living flesh, but that was impossible, right?

"I think I will take much delight in what is to come next," he decided, sadistic delight in his words. "Come to think of it, perhaps I won't kill you after all. I've always wanted to see how long it would take to carve away a human's humanity, how many slices it would take before they were a hollow shell of themselves. Perhaps you shall be the first in my long line of experiments."

"You want me to drive me to the brink of insanity?" you laughed, feeling hysteria rise in the back of your throat. "Hate to burst your bubble sweetheart, but that'll never happen."

The eye watched you for a moment. "Anyone can break with the right amount of pressure." There was truth in his words and you hated him for that.

"You won't win," you snarled, leaning in closer as the ropes dug against your wrists, beginning to rub them raw. "They're going to find me and they're going to lock you up along with the other sadistic inhumane bastards."

"Inhumane?" Dust chuckled at those words. He suddenly walked over to the blinds, tearing them down so that the full wrath of the moonlight streamed into the apartment, illuminating the decaying building the two of you were in. It was only then that you were able to take in his full appearance and realized with horror that Dust was not even human at all. He was a skeleton of short stature that would have come up to your shoulders had you been standing up, clad in a faded-blue jacket that was beginning to grey at the edges with several rips along the edges. The tips of his bony hands had been filed down to take the form of claws that were wrapped around the hilt of the blade in his grasp. The worst thing of all was the dust, the way it seemed to cover every inch of him. Perhaps dust was a fitting name after all.

"Oh, you have no idea."