door from the other side, but whoever it is doesn't expect Miriam to be leaning back against it, and they don't make it through the first time. She feels like a bird in a net, wildly flapping its wings. She knows she has to get away, has to get free, lest they – well, she doesn't know what they'll do to her, but she knows it can't be good.

Miriam lurches to her feet, clearing the door just as Frankie slams into it thinking he needs all his weight and momentum. He comes tumbling out like a cascade of brooms from an overcrowded closet.

Frankie stumbles and stands between Miriam and the tall, hairless man.

She shoves Frankie hard into Hairless Fucker. They both go down, and a tiny voice inside her is thrilled that the sonofabitch might get his bright white suit dirty.

Like a deer fleeing the hunt, she bolts across the lot toward the highway.

It's a fast highway. Two lanes, each way.

It's all rushing metal, glaring headlights. A stampede of steel at 70 MPH.

Miriam doesn't think. She just runs. Straight into traffic.

Her foot hits the median before she even realizes it. Behind her, the delirious effect of honking. Brakes, screeching.

She's out in the other lane – a car whips past her, the mirror nearly clipping her outstretched hand clean off just before spinning her like a top – when she hears the hard crash of metal on metal, glass on glass, airbags and gravel and screaming. She hears someone from this lane say "Holy shit!" when they see whatever's going on in that lane, and Miriam knows she just caused a car accident, maybe a bad one, but she doesn't look back, because looking back means slowing down and slowing down means getting dead.

You're a bad person, she thinks.

You just caused a car wreck.

And a tiny part of you is happy about it, because it's a distraction for them, a slow-down, an obstacle.

You're a user. Even when you don't mean to be.

People might be hurt. You could stop and help –

But another voice reminds her: it is what it is, fate gets what it wants, this has already been written, so move, move, move.

Her foot hits the highway shoulder on the other side. An umpire's voice in her head yells, Safe! A car behind her drones its horn. Endlessly. She pictures a body slumped over, head on the wheel, but she hopes that's not what it is, that it's just the car.

The umpire in her head is wrong, though. She knows she's not safe. That's just an illusion.

Miriam keeps running.

Ahead of her, a storage lot. Row after row of orange storage units.

It's a twenty-four hour facility, but it's got a gate and a keypad, and it's closed up tighter than a choirboy's asshole with a perimeter fence topped with a row of barbed wire. But that's a feature, not a bug. Miriam jumps. Hits the fence like a shark.