I get a call from my agent. They want me to cover Alligator Alcatraz.
“Alligator Alcatraz? Is that like a prison for evil animals?” I say, eating an apple. It sounded like the plot of a hit film, a kind of zoo for animals that had committed crimes. And then they escape.
“Its more of a detention centre for immigrants.”
“It’s a concentration camp?”
“Well no, it’s a compound used to hold immigrants located in the Everglades. The idea is that even if you escaped, you’d have to contend with the alligators and pythons that live in the swamps around it.”
“Sounds like a concentration camp to me. Why not Alligator Auschwitz or Snake Sobibor?”
“Will you just go and report on it?” they say. I nod, although as it’s a phone call, they can’t see it. I take a U-turn on the highway just as I’m about to hit the Louisiana border, driving down towards Miami, towards the Big Cypress National Preserve, towards America’s future.
I park my car on a dirt track, the air conditioning in the car working double time. It was so hot and humid in Florida that you could taste yourself, your sweat barely evaporating and creating a human flavoured fog around every individual. I play GTA6 on my Steam Deck, sighing at the NPC dialogue, thinking how when they first started making the game they were aiming for parody, yet now it seemed like a cosier version of the reality of Florida in 2025. I get bored of the game, delete it, then play Balatro 2 for a few minutes. Somebody taps on the car window.
“Can you roll your window down sir?”
“No.”
“Are you refusing to comply with-“
“Its broken, okay.” I say to the cop. Both of his hands are on the grip of the pistol hanging on his belt with a piece of string.
“Sir, step out of the vehicle.” He says. I roll my eyes, open the car door and look at myself in the cop’s mirrored sunglasses.
“What you doing out here?”
“I’m just chilling out. What are you doing out here, were you going to have a wank in the bushes or something?” I say.
“Show me your United States birth certificate.”
“Why would I carry that around? You want to see my swimming certificates too? You going to add me on LinkedIn?” I say, smiling.
“Sir, I’m arresting you on suspicion of being an illegal alien.”
“Haha, okay. Is this a prank? Are you promoting a Men In Black sequel?” I say, looking up and down the dirt track for some teenager with a phone. Instead, there’s just scraggly bushes, with crickets chirping all around us. The cop grabs me and pushes me against the Hyundai.
“What you got in your pockets?”
“Why don’t you find out?” I say. The cop obliges, plunging his hand into my pocket and screams in pain. He pulls his hand out, with the needle of a syringe running beneath a fingernail. As he goes for his radio, I move my hand up, push the plunger on the syringe and inject him with 30mg of heroin. His eyes roll up into his head and he collapses to the floor, I kneel next to him and pat him on the face.
“First time? Try and enjoy it, you fucking pig.” I say, oinking a few times. I look over his limp body and get an idea.
Twenty minutes later I am dressed as a cop. I found his motorbike up the track and was now riding it towards Alligator Alcatraz, hitting the vape as I rode towards the old airport. The cop was naked back in the trunk of the Hyundai, with an IV of heroin to keep him docile until I got back. I hadn’t needed to take his underwear, but I wanted to get into character. I was a piece of shit American cop. All I cared about was eating fast food, shooting people in the back and being illiterate. My kids would grow up to hate me, if I didn’t kill them, then myself, first. As I pulled into the parking lot I was playing ‘Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta [Explicit]’ by the Geto Boys on my bike stereo. One of the prison guards is already running towards me, flailing his arms in the air.
“What the hell are you listening to? Don’t you know law enforcement are only allowed to listen to Coldplay and Taylor Swift?”
“I forgot man, sorry. Is this Alligator Prison?”
“Yup, welcome my brother. You here for a tour or you bringing someone in?”
I look behind me. There is nobody there.
“I’m just here for a tour, brother.” I say. And with that, he leads me towards Alligator Alcatraz.
We pass a McDonald’s and a Denny’s, freshly built amongst the remnants of the air traffic control tower that used to be here. The floor is littered with dead Miami Blue Butterfly’s, the whole area had been flooded with toxic gas a few weeks previously. My tour guide, Private Hank Hanks, explains to me how building the immigration facility had been dangerous.
“Turns out building a prison with a moat is dangerous if the moat already contains hundreds of alligators.”
“Moat? What’s that?” I say, picking my nose.
“Ah, its European. They used to build castles with a ditch around it, then fill it with alligators.” He explains helpfully. We pass the gift shop, where Governor Ron DeSantis sells t-shirts with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ on them, as well as severed taxidermy alligator heads, Key Lime cookies and saltwater taffy. The cashier behind the counter has a pet flamingo she keeps in a cage, where visitors are encouraged to feed it with a bag of peanuts you could buy for a dollar.
Past the gift shop are dozens of RVs, where the immigrant workers who had built the facility had lived before being deported to Mexico. Private Hank Hanks laughs as he tells me this, before giving a long monologue about him seeing the President when he visited the facility earlier in the week. I keep laughing and slapping my thigh to encourage him to continue with his witless story as we pass chain-link fences.
“Here it is. Ain’t it beautiful?” says the prison officer. I look round.
“Its just tents?” I say, looking around. It was just tents and chain-link fences. I remember my cover just in time. “Ain’t that genius. Hoo-boy!” I yell. A man barely five feet tall comes running over to us.
“Private, who in the hellin’ heck is that?” he says, pointing his gun at me.
“Easy there, he’s one of us.”
“Yeah. I didn’t graduate high school.” I say. The man is wearing camouflage trousers and a t-shirt with the Punisher logo on it printed on top of a blue and black U.S. flag that says ‘Blue Lives Matter’ along the bottom. He wears a baseball cap that says ‘Fish Fear Me. Women Fear Me.’, and he scrutinises me beneath the shadow of the brim.
“What you doing here?”
“I just thought I’d come take a look before the liberal media come with their helicopters and try and make the tents blow away.” I say, leaning against an RV. I root round in my pockets and find a half-eaten burger, so start to chew on it.
“Don’t worry about that brother, you should be worried about the protestors who are going to try and dig a hole underneath the ‘traz. They gonna try and flood this place with gators.” He says.
“Ah yeah. I hate it when people try and get in the way of what we’re doing here.” I say, winking. The little man nods.
“Exactly. This goddamn country needs martial law. We need to go from town to town, cleanse it of any criminal activity, and rebuild America as it should be. The strongest country this Earth has ever seen, so help me God.”
“Hallelujah. As I was saying at a KKK meeting the other day, we should nuke Los Angeles and those goddamn progressives trying to summon satan.” I say, nodding at the guys. All the guys stand around nodding with their thumbs tucked into their belts.
“Lookie here son, I’m the warden here, Warden Gordon, you lookin’ to transfer over? We could use men like you.” He says.
“Ah, I don’t know about that. I’m already under investigation for bombing a retirement community. The amount of goddamn forms you gotta fill in, I’m like, why can’t ChatGPT do this shit so I can get back on the streets to hunt down commies?” I say. The warden laughs, with Hank Hanks joining in. We start walking towards a cluster of tents.
When we enter one of the tents, there’s more chain-link fences, with as much room as possible filled with bunkbeds. Had they designed this in Prison Architect? There was barely any room to stand. Bare lightbulbs hang around the fabric ceiling, with mosquitos flying around lazily.
“I’m surprised you’ve given these guys beds. If I was in charge they would sleep on a bit of wire that electrocuted them randomly.” I say, spitting.
“Its about optics, son. You remember Guantanamo Bay?”
“Yep.”
“Exactly. We don’t want anyone to remember what we’re doing here cus of the cruelty. Matter of fact, Trump himself stayed the night here, he wanted to prove that this was a humane facility.”
“Wow, Daddy stayed here? I thought it was more like a concentration camp.” I say. The warden laughs.
“We don’t use that word round here. Concentrate. Its because the goddamn liberals at city hall say that concentrating is ableist against prisoners with ADHD. This is more like a containment facility.”
“Like in Ghostbusters?”
“I ain’t seen that.” Hank Hanks says. I shake my head. Its so hot and humid in here I start to feel faint.
"What about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean?" I ask. He blinks.
"Wha-"
“I notice there’s no real walls or bars here. What’s stopping all the inmates from piling against one of these fences, breaking it down, then going from tent to tent, murdering the prison guards with their bare hands.”
“Don’t you worry about that, these fences are made from American steel.”
“And what happens if it floods or there’s a tornado?” I say. The warden spins round with an evil grin on his face.
“What do you think would happen? All the alligators would get caught up in the wind and fly around. We got a storm shelter for our guards, as for the prisoners, well. Let’s just say…they’d be dead.” He says. I give my own evil grin back. This guy didn’t deserve to live, but I couldn’t just wait outside Alligator Alcatraz, follow him home and run him over as he made his way to his front door. No, karma had a funny way of working things out, except for all the times that it didn’t. I could imagine a shiv, covered in shit, made from a broken bit of glass, would find its way into his belly soon, but who knows? Maybe he would actually read the Bible and find out his entire worldview was in opposition to the religion he said he followed.
As I left Alligator Alcatraz, all the prison guards lined up to wave goodbye. They had given me a free t-shirt and a pack of collectible stickers featuring inmates they had illegally rounded up beforehand. I was touched. Even the most hateful person, who had dedicated their lives to cause violence and death against unarmed people, seemed to do it out of genuine care and affection for who they saw as their own kind. It was almost touching, seeing this group of fascists hand over gifts and pat me on the back as I passed by them.
“I guess I better go back to Miami. Thanks for the tour of your detention centre, my brothers in blue. My beloved guardians of justice. My saintly holocaust enablers.” I say, waving at them. I opened the pack of stickers and started slapping them on my bike, then drive back towards the Hyundai.
As I dumped the drugged-out cop naked on the dirt track, I wondered to myself about justice, the law and incarceration. It seemed absolutely cruel and meaningless, that the country had long ago lost its perspective and seemed intent on either killing or locking up the working classes that it had forced into addiction and squalor. The United States had the biggest prison population in the world, where people would be locked up in maximum security penitentiaries to undertake slave labour for decades. The next step was to criminalise all citizens so that they lived in a constant state of fear and paranoia, either ratting each other out for the smallest infraction, or throw themselves into the thresher of ultraviolence should they try and fight back. The ageing elders hoarded all the resources, voted for a clueless child emperor and rotted away in neighbourhoods monitored by privatised security forces, dying in a prison they had built around themselves as they watch Netflix movies and eat microplastics.
None of this needed to happen. None of this would stop happening. And as I drove away there was a whisper on the wind, like God was speaking to me.
“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” It seemed to say.
