One extra muggy day, while the governor was feeling particularly good about himself, having just signed several new bills into law aimed at firing up his base, there was a flash in the sky, and something extraordinary happened in the great state of Florida: All the gun owners, through some cause unknown, suddenly became alligators.
In Ocala, Jesse Lakewood, who carried a concealed Glock on his hip, trimmed trees with his chainsaw, shirtless and sweaty, when dark, leathery alligator skin spread across his chest, arms, thighs, and finally his face. You’d be forgiven if you imagined this was a painful process, but it didn’t hurt at all. His blood turned from hot to cold, like iced beer running through his veins, the war inside him flushed away, and for the first time in years, he felt good.
Two hours away in New Smyrna, Tom and Barbara Clayton turned into alligators together in their garage, while reloading shotgun shells, and, ironically, venting grievances over a world that was changing too fast. As they went full reptile, their thoughts became as cool as a gentle AC breeze, and the feeling was divine. Alligators can only make so many sounds, but any expert would tell you that their raspy, guttural noises meant only one thing: pure bliss.
Up in the panhandle, Dennis “Always Packing Heat” Bilyard weaved through traffic, threading the needle at 80 miles per hour in his double smokestack lifted truck. When he transformed, it happened at a curve in the road that sent his truck roaring into a lake, and though the impact smashed many of his bones, the transformation somehow healed him into an ordinary, healthy alligator.
From Naples to Tallahassee, Miami to Jacksonville—in sprawling urban neighborhoods, housing complexes with private yacht docks, strip mall towns, and in trailers on the poorest back roads, people were turning into alligators. Anyone with a firearm was affected: hunters with rifles, MilSim AR folks, apocalypse survivalists with stockpiles of ammo, big explosion-loving Barrett .50 Cal owners, old timers with wheel guns, even tiny handgun carriers. All the gun owners, regardless of level, obsession, or creed—none were spared.
Everyone who transformed into alligators retained their original human consciousness, but this consciousness was now guided by their alligator nature. The alligators abandoned (and soon forgot) their homes, jobs, families, sacred symbols, and even their guns, and they migrated to a new swamp home. Around the same time, the lakes overflowed their banks, and the land leveled itself, and much of the world around them became what could be called a perfect swamp.
Unfortunately, the governor had lost his entire base of voters. More unfortunately, the governor himself was now an alligator too. He looked just like any other alligator, and since he couldn’t talk, no one could tell how important he’d once been. But this didn’t matter, because he didn’t care about the things he used to, and he found himself quite happy just basking in the sun. And there were so many alligators, hardly moving, just basking in the sun.
It wasn’t long before the alligators ate up their natural food sources and became hungry. There had been X million gun owners in Florida, and now there were exactly X million new alligators, and that many alligators eat a lot of food. The governor was hungry, too, but it wasn’t long before nature worked itself out, and the alligators began eating each other, until their numbers were in equilibrium with their environment. Unfortunately for the governor, he was eaten in the feeding frenzy that occurred in his area on the 45th day since The Great Alligator Transformation, by an alligator who, when human, had been a twenty-one-year-old fisherman with a large back tattoo that read “Ain’t sorry, ain’t nothing to be sorry about.”
