Meridian Rust

When a dying inmate and a young arsonist escape a crumbling prison hospital in the shadow of a shuttered automotive plant, they carry with them the poisoned legacy of a town that traded its workforce for a corrections economy. As the two men cross the chemical-scarred flatlands of the American interior, a private prison recovery agent hunts them with cold precision. Trust evaporates under the weight of buried confessions, and the highway becomes a conveyor belt toward mutual destruction—a final, concentrated outbreak of the toxins that decades of decline left festering in the blood of the forgotten.