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Blood steals another sip of whiskey and clears his throat.
“I’ll keep this simple, Warden,” he says. “The plan goes something like this. You allow me and Steele to hunt down the beast on our own. Everyone in the prison, including brave guards like Arty...” Blood shoots the short guard a look.
“Very funny,” Arty says.
“Anyway,” Blood goes on, “everyone stays locked up behind their steel doors, including you, Warden Leach. We hunt down the beast and we kill it by morning.”
The warden sits back in his swivel chair. He’s got one eye on Blood and the other on his computer. He’s shaking his head, his face pale, like he’s about to pull an Arty and puke all over the desktop. Sensing we’re curious about what he’s staring at on his laptop, he turns it around so that we can see the screen.
There are eight different boxes. Each one of them broadcasts a real-time version of the privately owned super ultra-max prison. Most of the scenes depict various sections of lockup and the men behind the doors. None of them are sleeping or resting in their bunks. All of them are peering wide-eyed and anxious out the window. There’s the guard shack in Gen Pop and all the blood that paints the concrete floor.
Then there’s the dark, basement depths. Dark isn’t quite the right word, because two or three emergency exit lights provide a kind of eerie dim illumination. You can see the beast resting and munching on what appears to be one of the guard’s ribcages. His face has been gnawed off, and his legs and genitals are gone.
Surrounding the beast is a giant pool of human blood, pieces of flesh, and brains. Torn apart men lie scattered about. All of them missing most or all their limbs. A couple are headless. But two are not. Get this: they are still alive. You can see their eyes opened wide, their Adam’s apples bobbing up and down in their tight necks. They know full well the fate that awaits them.
Leach turns the computer back around.
“That the hell hole you wish to expose yourself to?” he asks.
“You’re not doing a hell of a lot to stop it,” I point out. “Where’s the police? SWAT? Where’s the Army or the National Guard? You’ve got what, maybe six dead or about to be dead anyway in just a couple hours, and who knows how many more will die tonight, and they’re not doing shit about it?”
“I’ve called the police,” Leach says while grabbing the whiskey bottle off the table and stealing a swig right off the bottleneck. “I’ve called the National Guard. They’re right out front. I can show you pictures of them too since they’re being recorded on CCTV. But guess what? This is a private prison. They don’t have to do shit. All I’m getting that’s positive is the local Sheriff who’s offering up his helicopter and a sniper. He’s going to buzz the yard...” he glares at his watch. “In fact, he’s planning on buzzing the yard at any moment.”
“How do you know the beast is going to show itself in the yard?” Blood says.
“Give a rabbit a chase, Mr. Blood,” Leach says. “We’ve arranged for one of the prisoners to expose himself to the gator’s basement lair. When it comes after the prisoner, he will run out into the yard as fast as his legs will take him. By then the chopper should be here, and the sniper can take care of the rest.”
“You got a prisoner to agree to this?” I say.
“I offered him immediate parole with no strings attached if the plan works, Blood,” Leach says, not without a slight grin. “The great state of Florida is agreeing to it.”
Just then, the sound of rotors filling the night sky. Outside the window, the yard is lit up by the spot lamps attached to the four guard towers. Just like Leach predicted, a short, stocky, orange jump-suited inmate comes sprinting out the metal doors and into the yard. The chopper is closing in now. Making its way out of the open metal door is the max gator. Despite its short legs, it’s running faster than the stocky inmate.
We all stand, go around the desk, and plant ourselves in front of the big safety glass window. Strangely, it’s like we’re watching a death match play out on the floor of the Roman Colosseum a couple thousand years ago. The inmate is screaming something that sounds like “Help me, help me...”
His words are barely audible, but for obvious reasons, he’s screaming for his life which is about to be snuffed out in a matter of seconds. That is, the sniper in the sheriff’s chopper can’t kill the max gator within thirty seconds.
The chopper slows its speed and hovers over the yard, its fuselage-mounted spotlight shining down on the beast as it closes in on the inmate who, at present, is backed up against the wall and screaming his lungs out. The beast lunges for the inmate with its jaws wide open. It closes the trap-like jaws on the inmate’s left leg, severing it at the hip. The arterial blood spurts out, and he screams even louder. The sniper can be seen inside the chopper since the side door is wide open. He’s armed with what appears to be an AR-15 outfitted with a scope and a red laser sight. He takes a shot at the gator but misses.
The sniper then gestures to the pilot with his right hand to go lower.
“Jesus,” Leach says, “there are wires hanging all over the place. That pilot better watch it or he’ll catch one of them.”
The gator chomps off the inmate’s right leg. He’s still alive and still screaming, backing himself against the wall like it’s somehow possible for him to push what’s left of his body through the thick reinforced concrete wall. The chopper slowly descends, and the sniper takes another shot but misses again. All he manages to hit is a portion of the wall over the inmate’s head, sending shards of concrete raining down on the poor bastard.
You can see the sniper insisting they get even lower. The pilot drops a few more feet but that’s when the rotors catch not only an overhanging wire but also the razor wire-topped twenty-foot wall. Sparks fly, and the rapidly spinning rotors begin to shatter. The guards manning all four towers run for their lives, but there’s simply no place to go. They’re running into one another.
The chopper drops like a boulder and bursts into flames. Maybe this office is sealed tight, but the explosion is not only ear-piercingly loud, but the concussion also rocks the building like an earthquake. You can see the pilot burning up in his cockpit bucket seat while the sniper jumps out of the wreckage, his body engulfed in flames. He drops to his knees on the gravel-covered yard, then faceplants.
“He’s dead,” Arty says under his breath, stating the obvious.
The gator seems unphased by the crashing chopper it’s so focused on feeding. It’s now eating out the inmate’s stomach. Blood is pouring out of the victim’s nostrils and mouth. I pray he’s truly dead.
“They’re all dead, Arty,” I say. “Or about to be.”
Blood backs up from the window, goes back around the desk, and seats himself in his wooden chair. Slowly crossing his legs, he takes hold of his drinking glass, and calmly says, “Now, Warden Leach, about my proposal to eradicate the max gator once and for all.”