Someone put her where she is.

But nobody moves. Nobody breathes. Nobody speaks.

She crawls far enough to discover a dirt wall. She stands. Her head aches. She reaches up the length of the wall but can’t find the top.

Dizzy, she stumbles across the space. The lack of the fold is horrible. The sense of a sky above. The vulnerability.

She gets to a second wall and reaches for the top. Can’t find it.

It’s damp here. Cellar damp.

She remembers a familiar voice at the back of the train.

“No,” she says. Because it’s too terrible. The voice she believes she heard. How many times has she been wrong about hearing that same cadence of speech? How often did she wake to discover it was only Gary speaking from the other side of partially opened doors in dreams?

“No.”

But maybe. Maybe.

She touches her head, feels a lump. She was struck. On the platform. She remembers it.

“Oh, God.”

The train. And Tom and Olympia still on it.

Traveling away from her now.

“HEY!” she calls. She has to.

She was struck. Hit in the head. Thrown off the train.

Right?

She breathes in, but she can’t hold it. She can’t calm down.

She hurries across the space, finds a third wall. Can’t reach the top.

All dirt.

A hole in the ground?

Words from the census pages rise to her mind’s eye.

Safer Rooms.

Efforts by men and women to build bunkers in the event the creatures completely take over.

Have they taken over? Is she the last sane woman alive?

She moves faster. Finds a fourth wall. She scrambles to touch all four again.

The space is big. Bigger than any grave. But a hole in the ground all the same.

“Help!” she calls. But she doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to give herself away. She needs to listen. She needs to think.

Whatever’s happened…she’s survived.

She digs at the walls. She has to get out of here. Has to find her teens. Has to get back to the train.

Now.

She tries to tell herself it’s one thing at a time. Get out of this hole first. Then find her kids.

She can’t breathe steady. Can’t control it.

“Tom!”

She shouldn’t do this. There could be anybody above. The people who’ve trapped her. She remembers the name Nathan. She remembers Gary’s voice.

Or does she?

And does he wait above? Does he look down on her in the hole?

Or did they put her here to get her out of the way?

“TOM! OLYMPIA!”

She scrambles up the wall but finds no purchase.

She remembers Tom leaving the train cabin, his face red from where she slapped him.

“Oh, no,” she says.

Because whatever this is, whatever’s happened, it suddenly feels like she’s the reason it did.