“I’m not asking you to rat him out or to stop seeing him. If he’s in trouble, I can help him. If he gets in touch, tell him that.”

“You could tell him yourself if you hadn’t chased him out of our lives.”

“Complications, son. We’ve discussed this.”

“Will he be okay? The cops, I mean.”

“If I can help him,” he said. “If I can find him in time.”

He touched my shoulder, nodding as he spoke. Neither of us knew the world was ending.

8

The same darkness pressing down on Gibby’s house deepened the sky above Lanesworth State Prison Farm, forty-five miles east. If anything, the night sky there was blacker, unspoiled as it was by streetlights or traffic or civilization of any kind. First opened in 1871, the walls at Lanesworth were three feet thick, the windows little more than barred slits in the stone. Situated at the end of a four-mile private road, the prison filled an empty corner of a rural county; and though it had not worked as an actual prison farm in over forty years, the signs of its original intent could still be seen in the ditch lines and fallow fields and new-growth forest. Before nature had retaken so much of it, men had suffered in the cold, died in the heat. The chain gangs were long gone, but the prison still sprawled across eighteen thousand acres of lowland and scrub. Built to house a thousand men, it held twice that number now. A few inmates were classified as moderate offenders, potentially dangerous, but most were the worst the state could offer. Killers. Drug dealers. Serial rapists.

In a subbasement beneath death row was a string of cells that stayed warm when others were cold, and cool when others were hot. In one such cell, a killer stood beside a bed, but it was not his bed, and not his cell. He didn’t like the man whose cell it was, but nothing at Lanesworth was about like.

In a corner of the same cell stood a man known as Prisoner X—or just, X. That wasn’t his name, but people called him that. They thought it was short for Axel, his true name, or because he’d killed ten men, and eaten parts of them. Others said that he’d killed his wife for infidelity, but only after he’d emasculated her lover, then cut Xs into his eyes. X had been an inmate for so long that people didn’t really care anymore. He was part of the prison, like the steel and concrete and stone.

“Higher, please. Your left hand.” X gestured, and the man by the bed complied. Shirtless in prison jeans, he stood with both hands up and fisted. “Excellent. Perfect.”