What Kills You Makes You Stronger. Clementine is a teenage girl from rural Oklahoma who hears voices. At first, it's nothing special. Lost dogs and ice cream socials--things on local radio, complete with commercials. But when when she slips into a trance and foretells the beginning of World War III mere hours before the bombs start falling, the locals realize just how special Clem may be. Carl is a government scientist with a secret laboratory. He's trying to figure out how to save the human race once the war ends and the radiation clears, and Clem's special gift may be exactly what he needs. First, though, he'll have to do a few experiments. Nothing painful, he tells her--well, not too painful, anyway. With no interest in becoming Carl's experimental lab rat, Clem runs, leading the scientist and his cronies on a wild chase through the ruins of the American heartland. She's almost free when one of her pursuers decides to shoot her rather than allow her to escape. Bullets tear through her chest--a fatal wound--and it looks like things are finished for young Clem, to say nothing of Carl's grand plans to save the world and gain fame and fortune... until Clem wakes up in Carl's secret lab a thousand years later. Well, it's not Clementine, exactly, but she has Clem's memories and some of her voices. Carl is there, too. In fact, now there are two of him.