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Holy shit. Even his friends? Was this guy secretly living on a deserted island with no one but his volleyball or soccer ball or whatever the fuck kind of ball Tom Hanks lost his mind with?
Me: That didn’t answer my question. I’m a professional at getting teenagers to open up. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Pole Dude: Ha. Okay, Mr. Borg. Whatever you say. And yes, I’m perfectly safe. Electricity and water are an awful mix, but we have protocols for situations like this. Injuries are rare. I’ll be fine.
My stomach churned. Something about that wasn’t very reassuring.
Before I could type another message, my phone dinged.
Pole Dude: Sorry to chat and run. Gotta go. I’ll call later, okay? Try not to think about me too much.
Asshole! Of all the arrogant, cockeyed, jerky things to say at the end of a text.
And I couldn’t stop staring at it—and smiling.
Chapter twenty-five
Elliot
Ithadbeentwodays since Hurricane Beatrice made landfall, and the devastation stretched as far as the eye could see.
The world looked like a war zone.
I rode in the passenger seat of our work truck, one boot braced against the dash, my fingers tight around the radio clipped to my vest. We rolled over another flooded street, the water shallow enough now to drive through but still lapping over the pavement like the tide was slow to recede. Houses stood gutted on either side, their walls caved in, roofs peeled back like tin can lids. Every tree was either snapped in half or yanked from the ground entirely, their roots exposed like gnarled hands reaching for something that wasn’t there anymore.
Rodriguez drove in silence, his eyes locked on the road ahead, but I could feel the unspoken exhaustion that clung to all of us. Two days of this—two days of pulling bodies from wreckage, two days of cutting through fallen poles and twisted metal, of stringing new wire to bring some kind of order back to the chaos. Two days of seeing people who had lost everything.
We were used to storms. I’d worked plenty before this one, in different states, different towns. I’d seen entire communities flattened, neighborhoods wiped off the map.
But this one—this one had teeth.
The Panhandle had taken the brunt of it, but Beatrice hadn’t been content to die out after making landfall. She’d clawed her way through Georgia, too, leaving miles of flooding and downed lines in her wake. And here we were, trying to pick up the pieces.
The radio crackled. “Elliot, Rodriguez—y’all still working the eastern grid?”
Rodriguez picked up the receiver. “Yeah, we’re out past Lakeview now, checking main lines.”
“Got reports of a few folks still stuck in their homes over there. No rescue crews nearby. Think y’all can check it out?”
Rodriguez looked over at me, and I gave him a nod.
“We got it,” he said into the radio.
The static cut out, and he made a sharp turn onto a road I barely recognized as a street. There was no way to tell where one property ended and the next began. Everything was covered in broken limbs, ripped-off shingles, and insulation scattered like confetti—and water.
So much water.
The further we went, the worse it got.
“You see that?” Rodriguez muttered, slowing the truck.
I followed his gaze.
A sedan sat in what used to be a driveway, but a whole section of a tree had come down on top of it. The roof was caved in. There was no sign of anyone inside.
I exhaled through my nose. “Hope they got out in time.”
Rodriguez didn’t respond. Neither of us wanted to acknowledge the fact that some people hadn’t.