The fluorescent lights hummed their usual monotonous tune as Jessica Chen stared at her computer screen, watching the little blue bar slowly fill as her quarterly report compiled. Forty-seven percent. She had time.

  Her phone buzzed. Another email from Derek in Sales asking for "just a quick favor" that would inevitably consume her afternoon. She swiped it away and pulled up the weather radar instead.

  There it was. A massive system churning in the Atlantic, painted in angry reds and purples, bearing down on the Georgia coast. The meteorologists were calling it unprecedented. Historic.

  The kind of storm that would have people talking for years.

  Jessica's fingers drummed against her desk with barely contained excitement.

  "Chen, you got those numbers for me?" Her manager's voice cut through her reverie. Brad had a talent for appearing exactly when she didn't want him to.

  "Compiling now. Should be done in..." she glanced at the screen, "...fifteen minutes."

  "Great, great. Hey, I'm gonna need you to stick around late tonight. Corporate wants the revised projections by tomorrow morning and..."

  "Can't." The word came out sharper than she intended. "Storm's coming in. I need to get home."

  Brad's expression shifted from friendly-boss to annoyed-boss in an instant. "Jessica, come on. It's just some rain. We've got deadlines."

  Just some rain. She wanted to laugh. Instead, she kept her voice level. "I live on the coast, Brad. Right on the beach. If this thing is as bad as they're saying..."

  "Fine, fine." He waved her off. "But I want those projections first thing tomorrow, storm or no storm. And think about what we discussed regarding your priorities."

  Jessica nodded without really agreeing to anything and turned back to her screen. Fifty-nine percent. She could feel the walls of her cubicle pressing in, the recycled air, the artificial light, the endless spreadsheets tracking numbers that didn't matter, projecting futures that would never quite materialize the way the graphs predicted.

  Her dad would have hated this job.

  The thought came unbidden, as it often did when she felt particularly trapped. He'd worked with his hands his whole life...construction, carpentry, anything outdoors. She remembered him coming home sunburned and exhausted, smelling like sawdust and sweat, but always with a smile. Always with stories about what he'd seen that day.

  The bar hit one hundred percent. Jessica grabbed her things before Brad could manifest with another "quick request" and headed for the parking garage.

  * * *

  The drive home took her from the sterile office park, through the sprawl of strip malls and chain restaurants, and finally to the narrow coastal road where the houses spread out and the ocean made itself known. The wind was already picking up, palm trees bending and swaying like dancers warming up for the main performance.

  Jessica's house sat on a slight rise, strategically positioned to give her an unobstructed view of the Atlantic. She'd spent three years saving for the down payment, another five years of "good corporate citizen" behavior to afford the mortgage. Her colleagues thought she was crazy, living alone in a place this expensive, this isolated.

  They didn't understand.

  She parked in the reinforced garage...one of many modifications she'd made to the structure...and grabbed her go-bag from the trunk. Just in case. She always kept it packed during storm season, though she'd never actually needed it. Part of her hoped she never would. Another part, the part that had driven her to build this life, almost wished for the excuse.

  Inside, the house was quiet, waiting. She'd designed nearly everything herself, working with architects who thought her requests were eccentric at best. Hurricane-proof windows that cost more than most people's cars. Reinforced walls. A foundation that could withstand storm surge. And that wall of windows in the living room, her pride and joy, engineered to give her a front-row seat to nature's greatest show.

  Jessica changed out of her work clothes...the costume she wore to play the role of "responsible professional Jessica"...and into comfortable worn jeans and a soft t-shirt. This was who she really was. Not the woman in the blazer making small talk about quarterly earnings.

  She put the kettle on for tea, her pre-storm ritual, and pulled her favorite mug from the cabinet. It was chipped on one side, a survivor of a previous storm that had sent it tumbling off the counter. She'd kept it anyway.

  The weather radio crackled to life as she poured the hot water.

  "The National Weather Service has reported a Severe Thunderstorm is approaching the Glynn County area. It is not known at this time the extent of this severe weather. Seek shelter immediately. Follow instructions from emergency & university personnel. Please limit phone use…"

  Jessica turned off the radio and picked up her tea, walking into the living room she had designed just for this kind of weather. The large bank of windows took up nearly the entirety of the east wall of the room facing the already turbulent ocean. An avid wave watcher, she had used her home to turn mother nature into her own personal entertainment center. She settled down into her big comfy chair, legs swung up over the armrest to enjoy the calm relaxation such a view always afforded her.

  The sky was a bruised purple, clouds roiling and churning like a living thing. The ocean responded in kind, waves building, crashing, building again. This was what she lived for...not the spreadsheets, not Brad's manufactured urgency about numbers that would be obsolete in three months. This. Life in its purest form. Raw, untamed, honest.

  A memory surfaced, clear as the lightning beginning to fork across the sky: She was seven, maybe eight. A summer thunderstorm had rolled in during a family barbecue. While everyone else ran for cover, her dad had grabbed her hand and pulled her under the carport. They'd laid down on the concrete, still warm from the day's heat, and listened to the rain hammer against the metal roof above them.

  "You hear that, Jessie?" he'd said, his voice barely audible over the downpour. "That's the sound of the world being alive. Really alive. Not sleeping, not pretending. Just... being."

  She'd never forgotten it. The smell of hot concrete and rain. The deafening percussion overhead. The feeling of being small and safe and connected to something vast all at once.

  That's what she'd been chasing ever since. And she'd built this entire life, this fortress of solitude, just to capture that feeling again.

  Several loud knocks at her door interrupted her reverie before it even had the chance to take hold.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  There was precisely zero chance she was getting up after just getting comfortable, so she remained quiet. A moment later the knock was repeated and joined by a silvery yet penetrating voice, "I'm coming in!"

  I'd like to see you try, Jessica mused. She valued her privacy almost as much as her safety and had taken more than a few precautions with her home so that it would remain standing during her favorite pastime. She was still unprepared when the next time the voice spoke it was from right behind her in the room.

  "Greetings humans you are about to die!" Jessica spun in her seat, awkwardly falling onto the ground, spilling her tea on herself. A young woman, dressed as some sort of clown, was standing in the middle of her living room. She was dressed head to toe in a light, almost see-through white outfit decorated with large colored shapes all over it. Her face didn't have the traditional pancake makeup, but there were two black lines extending above and below both her eyes and a red ring drawn around her lips. Jessica took a deep breath to scream at the intruder, but the girl seemed to be talking to someone else she couldn't see.

  "Oh! No... I didn't mean... Sorry, we aren't here to kill anyone! If you are hearing this message, however, you are in extreme danger. The approaching storm is much worse than anyone expects, and in less than forty minutes this entire area will be underwater." Jessica stood up, flinging the liquid off her shirt, and approached the girl, but there was no eye contact. She reached out to the strange person and gasped slightly as her hand passed right through her.

  "If you are to have a chance of surviving," the apparition continued, "you need to make your way inland as fast as possible. The waves coming will wreak destruction almost two miles inland to the taller buildings there." The rain outside increased in ferocity as if supporting her claims, pelting against the glass. "History has listed you all as casualties of an unexpected weather phenomena. This warning is extended to you as a courtesy, but it also contains an offer. Your life was destined to end tonight, and you can fight for it, or use it as a new beginning. If you wish to take us up on this offer, your old life will still be left behind, but in service of something so much greater. Simply say my name any time in the next... thirty or so minutes now, and we will do our best to help you."

  With that, as quickly as she had appeared, the girl vanished. Jessica glanced out the window once more and saw the tide pole off her beach had vanished underwater. Perhaps there was something more to this warning than she at first had believed. A loud bang nearly had her jump out of her skin. The second noise let her assess the situation a little more calmly as she went out into the driving rain to see the source of the noise. Her neighbor, Billy "Big Time" Tompkins had cracked open a beer, several by the look of it, and was shooting his shotgun into the clouds as they rolled in. He saw her and waved with a big, friendly grin.

  "Damned weather ain't gonna take me without a fight!" He hooted at the top of his lungs and fired several more times into the air. The man had zero class and reveled in the fact. He'd also been a good friend of hers ever since he drove off some thieves a year or two back. Jessica shook her head and turned to go back inside. She was having a bad reaction to stress... no space girl had shown up in her living room talking about impending doom. One of her deck chairs had come loose and was being blown across her porch, just another dark and stormy night. She moved to retrieve the chair as a strong gust of wind blew a neighbor's entire swing-set through where she had been standing just a moment before and through her reinforced windows right into her living room.

  "Shee-it, Jessie-girl, that was a close one!" Billy yelled over the wind. "You alright!?"

  Jessica nodded, experiencing a tiny bit of shock at her ruined home. "Yeah! Think I could get a ride into town? Can't stay here tonight." Standing in the broken glass with the rain plastering her clothes to her, she imagined she made quite the pathetic sight. Billy nodded.

  "Almost out of ammo, anywho. Lemmie get my keys and meet you at the truck."

  A mild panic flooded through Jessica as she nodded again. She had to get out of here. Her sanctuary had been breached and things were going downhill fast. A quick run around her home gathered her things and she headed for the door, ready to trek to the nearest hotel when she ran face-first into the clown girl again.

  "We noticed no one has taken us up on our offer, yet. My esteemed companion," her tone dripped with sarcasm, "says it is because I forgot to tell you my name to call. So Hi! I'm Khamm!" Just then another crash sounded as something else heavy blew against her home. Her heart jumped up into her throat as she nearly leapt out of her skin.

  "At least one of us is," Jessica said wryly to the vanishing image as she headed out the door. Billy's truck, a huge F-150 painted prominently with the American flag, was idling in the next-door driveway. She ran towards the truck, thinking to herself not for the first time that Billy was literally a lifesaver. A lightning strike split the sky into a tree in front of her, toppling it through the power lines in a shower of sparks. The cables caught in the branches, hissing and sparking in the rain as she screamed.

  "Get back inside!" She slowly came back to herself and heard Billy shouting at her. "I can't get to you, Jessie-girl!" He was waving at her frantically through the sparks. She ran back inside, not hearing the rest of what he was saying.

  * * *

  Jessica stood in her destroyed living room, rain pouring through the shattered window, wind howling around her. The swing-set sat like a monument to chaos among the broken glass and overturned furniture. Her chipped mug...her survivor mug...lay in pieces near the door.

  She was going to die here.

  The thought came with strange clarity. Not panic, not yet. Just... certainty. This was it. This was how Jessica Chen's story ended. Alone in a house she'd built to watch storms, killed by the very thing she loved.

  There was something poetically terrible about that.

  She laughed, a little hysterically. Didn't the alien girl say she had already died? That history had her listed as a casualty? This had to be a dream. Stuff like this only happened in bad B-movies. She would wake up any second.

  Another explosion sounded outside as all the lights went out, leaving her in pitch darkness.

  Jessica thought about her dad. About lying under that carport, feeling small and safe and alive all at once. About the life she'd built...the corporate job she tolerated, the fortress she'd created, the solitary existence she'd convinced herself was enough.

  What was she leaving behind, really? Spreadsheets? Brad's passive-aggressive emails? An empty house full of expensive safety measures that hadn't kept her safe at all?

  She had no family left. Her dad had been gone for three years now, taken by cancer in a sterile hospital room...the opposite of everything he'd loved. Her mother had left when she was young. There was Billy, good old Billy, but he'd be fine. He'd survive this. He always did.

  The corporate world wouldn't miss her. They'd have her position filled within a week, some other middle-management drone to fill the Jessica Chen-shaped hole in the org chart.

  She'd spent so much time protecting herself, building walls, watching life through reinforced glass instead of living it. And for what? To die alone anyway?

  The alien girl...Khamm...had said something about a new beginning. About service to something greater. Jessica didn't know what that meant. Didn't know if any of this was real or if she was having the world's most elaborate stress-induced breakdown.

  But she knew one thing: she was tired of watching life happen from behind protective barriers.

  If this was real...if there really was a choice between fighting for a life she'd already checked out of or taking a chance on something completely unknown...then maybe, just maybe, it was time to stop being so careful.

  Her dad would probably tell her she was crazy. Then again, he'd also taught her that being alive meant taking risks, feeling things, connecting to something bigger than quarterly projections and mortgage payments.

  "Fine!" Jessica shouted into the darkness, rain soaking through her clothes, wind tearing at her hair. "Khamm, I'll take your offer!"

  Everything around Jessica tilted wildly as she felt herself falling to the floor.

  The storm roared through the ruined window, cold rain pelting her as she stumbled toward the darkened living room. Lightning flashed again, illuminating the overturned lamp, the smashed mug, the chaos of her sanctuary torn to pieces.

  Jessica’s hand brushed something on the floor...her small wooden keepsake box, knocked open by the swing-set’s impact. Inside, amid a scattering of tiny memories, lay a single piece of metal.

  A quarter.

  Or what used to be one.

  Smashed flatter than a disk, warped at the edges. Her dad always kept it in his pocket after the day a crane dropped a pallet of bricks inches from where he’d been standing. He’d fished the coin out of the dust afterward, held it up, and laughed.

  “Luck’s real, Jessie-girl. Just don’t expect it to show up twice the same way.”

  She’d carried it ever since he died.

  Jessica picked it up now, closing her fingers around the warped metal. For a moment she could almost feel the warmth of his hand around hers, the way he’d squeeze once before doing anything reckless, like he was transferring a little courage into her.

  Thunder shook the house.

  Jessica opened her eyes.

  And for the first time all night, there was clarity instead of fear.

  “Khamm,” she whispered, gripping the coin like a lifeline, had she waited too long? Did the strange girl not hear her?

  “I’ll take your deal.”