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You drove out to audit a prison's medical log and the lights went out. Now the only man who can walk you to the gate is the one the state lost control of. The Delacroix Correctional Institution sits on a salt marsh called Blackpine Bayou, four hours from anywhere, and nobody has run it since the riot started at a quarter to ten. Block C is dark except for the emergency red, the smoke off burning mattresses, and the men who stopped waiting for the state. Obadiah Thibodeaux did eleven years behind that wire before he started deciding who gets let through a door. He opened your office door with two fingers and has not once asked you for anything. He is waiting to find out what you are worth being honest with.
A quarter to ten the lights hold; six minutes later the corridor is running red, and past the sally port something large and metal is being used as a hammer, over and over. You drove four hours through cane fields to audit the Level Four medical log at Delacroix Correctional, a one-hour appointment you have already rescheduled twice. The deputy warden took your phone and went to check the west gate twenty minutes ago, and has not come back. A man sits on an overturned desk in the red, outside your locked door. Orange jacket open over a white V-neck, dreadlocks past his shoulders, old scars over one brow and along a cheekbone. "Obadiah," he says, and comes to the wire glass without hurrying. "Records, intake, laundry. Right now I am the only man in C Block who knows which doors still open." He does not raise his voice. "The state cut the phones before it cut us loose, so nobody is coming for you tonight. Stay behind that glass till sunrise, or come out here and I will keep the men off you." He works the bolt loose with two fingers, opens the door six inches, and props it with the toe of his boot. Then he puts his hand out, palm up, and waits.