The Quicksand

The bus was old. It was once bright yellow and a school bus for children, but not any longer. Now it was a gray prison transport with steel mesh over the windows and a welded cage for prisoner confinement. The ongoing mission for the bus was simple. The driver and the guards, who sat in front of the welded iron, were to haul desperados across the old Tamiami Trail between Naples and Miami to the Dade County correction facilities.

The historic route that rose above the sawgrass and the swampland was also on a mission. The road was an ongoing testament to an iron dredge and a crew of lost souls from the 1920s who were not as tough as the steam engines they drove over a sea of quicksand.

When the Tamiami Trail was complete, it was Henry Ford's turn to provide the iron on which to travel between Tampa and Miami, but not even Henry Ford and all of his mechanical wizardry could cope with a swamp that was always moving, and a land with a dark history that was not really land at all.

For most of the prisoner transports, the old bus rattled across the burning blacktop that was crumbling into the swamp on either side, over the concrete bridges that were black with mildew, and emerged from the sawgrass on the other side of Florida without many problems.

Quite often on an "Everglades Excursion," a prisoner, or two, learned a lesson from the business end of Billy Club, and was ready for first aid upon reaching Miami, but when Big Freddy King climbed aboard at the Naples Jail, the bus ride was going to be very different. This time, the bus driver and all four of the hastily appointed prison guards were scared to death.

Big Freddy King was traveling to Miami because he was a killer. He was not only a convicted serial killer on the Gulf Coast, but he was heading to Miami because he was facing new murder charges from several other Florida counties.

The bus driver and the prison guards were all snapping at each other and spitting nails, because Big Freddy King had already escaped from two other jails and one other prison transport. On the occasion Big Freddy escaped from a prison bus, the driver and the guards went missing, but Big Freddy was not talking about where they might be.

For the unprecedented ride to Miami, the superintendent of corrections decided a midnight run would be the best for transporting the dangerous prisoner because traffic would be almost nonexistent. Neither the bus driver nor the guards were crazy about traveling over the swamp in the dark, but they did like the idea that a state trooper escort with flashing lights might allow the rattletrap bus to make the trip faster.

Because the superintendent of corrections did not like to waste money, politics, or time, he opted to assign six other prisoners to ride on Big Freddy's death row bus. All the other prisoners were in custody for minor crimes, and were mostly small-time crooks, but everyone scheduled for the ride was very frightened of Big Freddy King and the stories from his past.

Big Freddy was not black, brown, or white, but he was a mixture of all three. When he was not hunching over because of waist-chains, leg irons, and shackles, the mass murderer stood over six-foot-six and had enough strength from his body building in prison to break through a wall of sheetrock. Because he was originally from an island deep in the Caribbean, his choice of devotion was voodoo. When bloodhounds and the state police finally tracked Big Freddy down for the most heinous of his murders, he was feeding a bonfire, howling at the moon, and sitting among the bloody remains of a dozen drained and headless chickens.

After the bus finally began to roll and start out on the midnight run to Miami, the bus driver, the four armed guards, and the six small-time who were also in chains were all very happy when Big Freddy fell asleep after his shackles were locked to the floor of the bus. Everyone was also pleased that the state trooper and his cruiser with the flashing red and blue were leading the way through the dark night and the fog that was beginning to swirl.

Somewhere near the Collier County line that was almost halfway to Miami on the road that bootleggers used and drug smugglers traveled over, and where mobsters' bodies became crab food beneath the lonely bridges, Big Freddy King woke up and began to howl and thrash at his chains like a wild animal.

The blue and red flashes from the state trooper cruiser were almost mesmerizing until Big Freddy awoke and began howling, and calling upon something no one could see. When the midnight bus went dark, it was because the state trooper's cruiser swerved and flew off the road. When the prison transport also swerved, because something was in the way, and began to roll over at 80 miles an hour, time began to slow until the old bus finally stopped rolling on the land that was not really land at all.

Even though the state trooper cruiser rolled many more times than the bus, the trooper made it out before his car sank in the quicksand, but on the bus, only the driver and the two guards who were not inside the cage crawled out alive.

The guards in the cage, the minor league crooks, and the evil that was Big Freddy King vanished in A Sea of Quicksand, that is always waiting at midnight, beside and below, the old Tamiami Trail.