Which made me afraid.

“How did you get inside this house?” I asked again.

She turned toward me. “I think I can get your generator back up and running. Maybe. If, uh, the storm didn’t blow out everything. What kind of casing did it have?”

“Unnnhh,” I muttered, trying to communicate that I had no clue. “How—”

“What killed it, lightning? Or the wind?”

Beyond the pain, beyond the fear, my thoughts solidified and my heart piqued—here was help, and it was only one person, not a horde. Not a total end. From her dress and demeanor I gathered that she was a signifier of nothing, a lone agent, ignorant of what I was doing here. One fringe character can recognize another without too much trouble.

“Maybe lightning,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll take a look at it.”

I leaned my head back against the wall. Was she a blessing? Was the pain I felt now the sacrifice? “Generator’s in outbuilding three.” I pointed. “That way.” I swallowed, my mouth dry. “How did you get inside this house?”

She looked at me, and for a terrifying moment I thought I had misjudged the whole situation, had been tricked again, had handed the power source of this operation over to the enemy. But she only smiled.

She said, “The door was open.”

Then she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving her pack on the floor. When she returned she had a sponge and a bowl full of water, a half-empty water bottle, and two Advil. “For you,” she said, and after I swallowed the pills I said, “Thank you,” and went back into the nothingness.

Her name was Rita. Fixing the generator was slow going. Parts had to be ordered, and because I didn’t want anyone coming near the house, I gave her cash and let her use my old pickup to go fetch whatever she needed. Each time she drove away I expected her not to return, but she always came back. After parking the truck she gave me a report on the state of the outside world, though I hadn’t asked, and handed me any change, though this always embarrassed me. She also brought back barrels to collect rain to flush the toilets and bathe. We mostly ate out of cans, and sometimes we built a fire in the large kitchen’s fireplace and cooked rice and beans. The sky remained cloudy for a while after the storm, and the rain came and went.

I had not ventured back into my city since she arrived. Instead, I’d moved from the main house’s living room floor up to the room where I’d lived during construction. Each morning she appeared at my bedroom door to play doctor. She took my temperature and believed ibuprofen was the cure for everything. I tried to wave her off, but it didn’t do much good, and I was in a weakened state. When I was shot I had fallen and hit my head, and as a result I had a giant goose egg and kept having dizzy spells, which made getting around difficult. For the first few days I was nearly bedridden, ruminating on the events of the night of the storm, Krystal, all the broken things I could not fix. Sometimes when I fell asleep I woke to frank vertigo, a terrifying phenomenon, and when Rita found me she’d have to help me walk to the bathroom. I was at her mercy.