After a shower, I sank onto the couch, the cushions conforming to my tired body. The day replayed in my head—the faces of clients, stacks of paperwork, the weight of their stories pressing into me. But then I thought of Mrs. Alvarez, her timid smile as hope crept in, and my chest swelled with a quiet pride. This was why I did it, why I drained myself daily; it mattered.
Still, as much as I wanted to bask in those small victories, I couldn’t shake the feeling of the impending storm my coworker had warned me about. I flipped on the TV and turned to the local news to try and catch the latest weather forecast. There was no good news to be heard, only the looming threat of a fucked up weekend.
Should I run out and get supplies?
For what? I won’t even be here. Right?
Fuck.
An uneasy feeling rolled through me, one I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it was the way the city seemed more agitated lately, or the subtle shifts in the office, the sense that we were all bracing for something big.
I glanced at my phone, willing it to stay silent for the night as I went to pull out my suitcase. Tomorrow would come soon enough, bringing its own set of challenges, ones I wasn’t sure I was ready for. But tonight, I let the stillness wash over me, holding onto the peace as long as it would last.
The bus ridefrom Atlanta to the men’s maximum security prison in Sumterville, Florida, was hot and muggy. As if being cooped up on a bus wearing a prison uniform and cuffs wasn’t already oppressive enough. There was no A/C, and because we were a transport full of convicted felons, we couldn’t crack any fucking windows. The whole vehicle smelled like nigga funk and sweat, and we couldn’t do anything but sit and suffer in it.
Just when I thought shit couldn’t get any worse, the rain began. What started as a few thick, sporadic drops soon turned into a full-on downpour. I glanced over at my twin brother, Kadeem, who sat across from me. They had us spaced out one to a seat.
“This shit is starting to look crazy,” I said.
“No fucking talking, inmates!” the correctional officer hissed from behind his protective barrier.
Shit, his ass was lucky he was sitting behind the locked area that separated them from us. If not, those could’ve easily been his last words. I had no problem beating a nigga’s ass like a snare drum.
Instead of giving a verbal response, Kadeem only nodded. I didn’t need to hear him speak to know he felt the same way. We were identical twins, born two minutes apart on the second of June, and damn sure shared the same brain for the most part. I was the yin, and he was the yang. There was no me without him.
A few weeks back, we “celebrated” our thirty-second birthdays with some honey buns from the commissary and getting buzzed off some hooch. It had been our fifth consecutive birthday being behind bars, so the shit wasn’t anything new to us. We were both convicted felons serving time for being in the drug game, where we both played distinct roles. I was the Atlanta-based leader of a big drug trafficking organization. I authorized sales of the purest cocaine, made deals, and set the prices, while Kadeem handled all the logistics and communications when it came to getting our product where it needed to be.
Shit went left for us when Kadeem recruited and paid a corner boy to traffic our product. He arranged for the young nigga to fly to Texas and get cocaine supplied by my plug from a Mexican cartel, and drive it back to Atlanta and deliver it to me. The cocaine would’ve then been distributed by my hustlers and corner boys throughout Atlanta and its surrounding cities. However, it never reached me or my brother. The nigga got pulled over in Alabama and sang like a canary on us, pillow talking with the Feds like they were paying the nigga’s bills, when it was Kadeem and I who’d put food on that mothafucka’s table and gave him work.
Still, it wasn’t our first time fucking around and finding out about the judicial system. We’d been hustling since we were old enough to walk and talk. The Feds spent years on our asses. Because of our prior convictions for drug felonies, we were charged with fifteen years in federal prison. We’d served five in Atlanta and were being transferred to a different prison facility in Florida to finish out the rest of our sentences.
We’d been riding on I-75 for over four and a half hours, and for the last twenty minutes, the road had been slick with rain, and the windshield wipers were going into overdrive. All I managed to see outside my window were menacing gray and black clouds covering the sky as the heavy sheet of rain continued to blow sideways. The strong wind shook and whipped the trees back and forth so hard that they nearly bent in half. I could’ve even sworn I felt the bus being pushed a few times.
The longer we rode through the storm, the more I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something didn’t feel right. I sat up straight, stiffening my posture as if that would help me see better. The bus driver continued to forge ahead, slowing his speed so as not to hydroplane and crash, but Mother Nature seemed to have other plans.
“Shit! It’s a downed tree.” The bus driver hissed as he swerved and quickly slammed on the brakes at the same time to avoid a collision.
Our bodies jerked forward violently as the bus skidded, sparks flying as it repeatedly struck a guardrail. Unable to stop, the bus turned up on two wheels and flipped over before rolling at least three or four times down a steep hill. We all went flying, heads and limbs knocking against the ceiling and windows with heavy thuds.
When the bus finally stopped in a ditch, there was broken glass and blood every fucking where. Everything was silent except for the heavy tap dance of the pouring rain against the bus and groans of pain from the twenty inmates still cuffed inside.
“Twin?” I called out to my brother. “Talk to me, twin.”
“I-I think I’m straight,” Kadeem finally responded, voice gruff. “You good?”
“I think so too.”
I tried sitting up slowly to assess the situation. The CO I wanted to knock the fuck out earlier was out cold with a bloody head. I saw a set of keys attached to his duty belt, and a diabolical plan began to take form in my mind. Why dream about being free when I could be it?
I inched forward, stretching my limbs as far as they could go to reach through the broken gate that separated us and steal the keys to unlock the cuffs. After unlocking myself and Kadeem, I tossed the keys to another inmate before finding a way out of the bus and climbing up the steep hill. I wasn’t their savior. Those niggas could save themselves or not. I didn’t give a fuck. The only person I cared about was my brother.Niggas like us weren’t supposed to even make it to our thirties. But yet again, we’d made it out the mud and survived.
We’d managed to make our way back up the hill to the highway, but the visibility was so poor I could barely see half a foot in front of me. Still, the thick black D-O-C letters printed on the back of our uniforms were like literal targets on our backs. I knew we had to ditch the tops and split up and find shelter sooner than later, to wait out the storm.
“What the fuck are we going to do now, twin?” Kadeem inquired, eyes glued to his bleeding arm.
“We gotta split up,” I announced, chest heaving in and out.
“Split up and go where, nigga? We don’t even know where the fuck we are.”
