"He ran me off the road," Michelle says abruptly, as if the words have been there for a long time, just under the surface, waiting to come out. She told one person the day she got here, but apart from that, she hasn't talked about it at all, just carried it around with her like she has so many other things. For all the running she's done, there's no getting away from what's left in her own head, and sometimes that's what she wishes she could outrun the most. "This guy, Howard, and he... I woke up in his bunker and he told me that there'd been some kind of attack. That the world had ended, essentially."

As it turned out, he hadn't even been entirely wrong about that. Still, she would rather have faced the monsters outside than the one she was trapped underground with, no question about it. "So, yeah."