Flash Mob Massacre
- Treatment
by Nick Sconce
Logline
After assassinations leave his town without city government or law enforcement, a seasoned private investigator must solve the case quickly or watch his birthplace spiral into the abyss.
Characters
Ben Spencer can see retirement on the horizon from his private business, Wrong Person Investigations, built on gay-basher revenge, avenging victims of porn-shaming, and staking-out high school class reunions to blackmail cheating spouses, But Ben is pulled into locating the Gracefield 14 when they kill all of Gracefield’s city officials and law enforcement leaders, including Ben’s sister, BONNIE, the city attorney, before they can strike again.
Burl and his group of domestic terrorists, the Gracefield 14, want nothing more than to kill local leaders and law enforcement in other small towns, believing they’re giving townspeople a fresh start to elect better officials and build better communities.
Bryce, Ben’s gay brother, and Jessica, Bryce’s lesbian wife, best friends married to preserve their rights before marriage equality was the law of the land, want to keep working for Wrong Person Investigations until Bryce’s cherished older sister, BONNIE is murdered. Now, they want revenge.
Sheriff Cranibee and his deputies are the only law enforcement left around Gracefield. Spread thin controlling the fallout, he needs Ben’s help to solve the case. Cranibee and Ben have a long friendship and history of working together. Cranibee had a secret, romantic relationship with Bonnie until her murder.
Madame Bloodstone, Ben’s soulmate, wants stability with Ben and to continue her BDSM business quietly until retirement. She worries Ben, working the Gracefield 14 case, will change for the worse.
The three local tribal chiefs, Roderick Barrington, Duststorm Dragswolf, and David Sawgrass, wanting to avoid blame for the massacre, are willing to work with Ben over disputes with the City of Gracefield.
White Nationalist Pastor McBride denies taking any part in the assassinations despite having uniformed city cops as henchmen for his church.
Town blackmailer, Phil Grayson, licks his chops at a new set of city leaders to blackmail but distances himself from the gruesome massacre.
Jade, one of Ben’s ladyfriends, wants to deepen her relationship with Ben.
Rainforest Jasper, one of Ben’s ladyfriends, wants to keep her sexual relationship going with Ben.
White Nationalist Pastor McBride denies taking any part in the assassinations despite having uniformed city cops as henchmen for his church.
Town blackmailer, Phil Grayson, licks his chops at a new set of city leaders to blackmail but distances himself from the gruesome massacre.
Jade, one of Ben’s ladyfriends, wants to deepen her relationship with Ben.
Rainforest Jasper, one of Ben’s ladyfriends, wants to keep her sexual relationship going with Ben.
Synopsis
Recording what he calls a kill fuse, BEN recounts the events of the Gracefield 14 case, reviewing the slain and the local newspaper coverage of the case, starting with:
Ben meets BONNIE in a coffee shop to mark the anniversary of their older brother Brad’s death. Brad was a Gracefield firefighter who perished fighting a house fire when he was a young man. Ben and Bonnie don’t see each other often and don’t get along as Bonnie blames Ben for corrupting her baby brother, Bryce, and getting him involved in Wrong Person Investigations. She also doesn’t approve of Ben’s multiple lover lifestyle and tries to convince Ben to become county sheriff so Cranibee can retire. She leaves before they start fighting.
Bonnie heads across the street to City Hall, where she meets with the MAYOR and CITY COUNCILMEN to deliver bad news on a new interstate off-ramp they want to build across Native American land. Before the meeting, she sees CRANIBEE. He sees her, too, but they keep their eye-contact secret. Bonnie argues with the city councilmen over the alternative of building the exit off an old rancher’s land. The rancher is years in arrears on his owed grazing fees to the city and county.
Ben and JADE finish an intimate visit before Ben tells her he has to work on a new 20-year High School Class Reunion. He heads back to his large house, where he finds BRYCE checking the surveillance cameras they’ve installed in Gracefield’s bars and hotels. They spend the evening surveilling the class reunion, taking bets on who their new cheating clients will be.
During his kill fuse recording session, Ben describes other seedy action happening that night throughout Gracefield that he isn’t profiting from: a desperate young woman trading sexual favors for more money to gamble at one of the three casinos in town, PASTOR MCBRIDE leading a White Nationalist sermon at his church, a city councilman cheating on his wife with an intern, PHIL GRAYSON poring over new material with which to blackmail city officials.
At Bonnie’s house, after being intimate, Bonnie and Cranibee have drinks in bed. Bonnie laments how wretched Gracefield is and asks Cranibee to check on her brothers.
The following day, BURL and his wife DOT have lunch with her sister’s family. Dot begs Burl not to drink or talk about politics, but he can’t resist.
That night, Ben and MADAME BLOODSTONE get high and cuddle, talking over their businesses and settling down. Bloodstone wants Ben to take less dangerous cases. Ben wants Bloodstone to close down her BDSM business. Ben wants to be intimate with her, but she resists, not wanting to tarnish their deeper connection. The next morning, Ben leaves Bloodstone’s house, looking back over his own property, which sits adjacent to hers, outside of city limits.
In War Eagle, Arkansas, Burl meets with his group of domestic terrorists and assassins to finalize plans for their next hit. They’ve selected Gracefield as being the statistically worst town in Oklahoma.
At a 24-hour breakfast joint, Ben, Bryce, and JESSICA meet with their final blackmail target from the recent class reunion, but she’s called the cops on them. The chief of police and a detective arrive, see them, and then leave the restaurant. Ben tells their target the deal is off the table and once she’s left, Ben tells Bryce and Jessica to run the videos of her infidelity and contact Medicaid to start an investigation into her dental practice’s billing processes to take her down.
Later that night, Bloodstone sleeps over at Ben’s house. They aren’t used to sharing a bed and Bloodstone’s sleeping habits keep Ben awake.
At Bonnie’s house, an assailant dressed in black, crawls onto her in her bed and unloads an entire clip into her face.
While Ben makes himself a late-night snack, he hears sheriff deputy sirens coming from Gracefield’s northwest side, where most of the city officials and police officers live.
Panicked, he calls Bryce for him to call Bonnie as Ben races to Bonnie’s house. Bryce can’t get a hold of her. Bryce and Jessica leave to meet Ben at Bonnie’s house.
A deputy meets Ben when he arrives at Bonnie’s and tries to prevent Ben from going inside. But Ben wrestles the deputy down and storms into Bonnie’s house to find her dead body wrapped in bed sheets. The deputy tells Ben about the other murders of the city officials and police.
Ben runs out of the house to keep Bryce and Jessica from coming inside. He tells them about Bonnie’s murder. In shock, they weep and Bryce faints, hitting his head on his truck’s wheel-well.
Before dawn, Ben sits outside the city morgue, waiting for ambulances to deliver the dead so he can go in and identify his sister.
Jessica meets him and they talk about whether Cranibee will ask for their help. Just then, Cranibee calls Ben and asks to meet him later that morning.
Ben crosses the street to the city morgue, and Jessica goes back home to take care of Bryce.
In the morgue, Ben must identify Bonnie from a tattoo on her shoulder, depicting Brad’s, their dead brother’s, headstone. Ben recalls when Bonnie got the tattoo as he called in a favor with the tattoo artist for a discount for helping her with her ex-boyfriend porn-shaming her. He remembers holding Bonnie’s hand when she got the tattoo. Now, he wants to hold her hand again, but the medical examiner tells him he can’t because the bodies haven’t been dusted for prints yet.
Later that morning, Ben drives to the county courthouse to meet Cranibee in the sheriff’s office where Cranibee is on the phone with the governor who wants to send either the OSBI or the National Guard to Gracefield to maintain order. Cranibee, distraught at losing Bonnie, confesses their relationship to Ben, who’s relieved to hear Bonnie was with a decent man. Cranibee asks Ben to help him clear the names of the three tribal chiefs and Pastor McBride, and to take out Phil Grayson in order to keep the uniformed police from jumping to conclusions and attacking Native American businesses and residences in retaliation for the Gracefield 14 murders. Ben is reluctant but agrees in order to keep the peace.
Ben checks in on Bryce’s head injury at Bryce’s and Jessica’s house. Bryce and Jessica want more than justice for Bonnie. Jessica particularly wants gruesome Southern justice, especially as Southerners are prone to enact it for wronged men but not always for wronged women.
Ben retreats to an intimate encounter with his lady friend, RAINFOREST JASPER.
Sheriff Cranibee recalls memories with Bonnie and her concern with Ben being a soulless hedonist. Deputy Roberts tells Cranibee the National Guard has arrived.
Ben moves on from Rain Forest Jasper to spend more time with Jade, who he admits to himself has become his emotional therapist to Rain Forest Jasper’s physical therapy and Bloodstone’s spiritual counseling. At Jade’s, Ben laments how terrible a brother he was to Bonnie, even during his childhood, something his mom made him go to counseling for.
Ben then heads to the Black Crows’ Cultural Center to meet with the three local tribal chiefs, RODERICK BARRINGTON, DUSTWIND DRAGSWOLF, and DAVID SAWGRASS. After flirting with TRACEY, the office manager, who has a past with Ben, he meets the three chiefs and tells them he’s there to clear their names. Ben and Cranibee believe in their innocence and agree that it would be easier simply to have the tribes run candidates against the locally elected officials rather than have them assassinated. But Ben negotiates acts of good will and good faith with the chiefs, including solving a water treatment issue between one tribe and Gracefield, getting one tribe to raise its casino entrance age from eighteen to twenty-one, and an offer to have the new I-40 exit ramp built on the free-loading rancher’s land with the retail spur being built on tribal land that’s not actual burial ground. The chiefs agree to these requests.
Ben visits Bloodstone at her house, where she mentions she “ran into” Tracey (apparently one of Bloodstone’s clients). Bloodstone asks Ben about his involvement in the Gracefield 14 case. He admits to working with the chiefs and that he’s heading to Liberty Free Will Church to speak with Pastor McBride. Bloodstone is worried that a churchgoer will take sniper shots at Ben when he gets there.
At Liberty Free Will Church, Ben interrupts a bible-study McBride conducts with three women, Ben mocking their white nationalist interpretations of the Old Testament before McBride has Ben comes back to McBride’s office.
There, McBride denies having anything to do with the Gracefield 14 murders. Ben admits McBride and his followers aren’t suspects, but Ben gives McBride three days to close shop and skin out of town or the church will burn and McBride will meet certain, gruesome violence.
The following morning, Ben wakes up at Jade’s house, having no memory of going there or what they did. Burying his grief over Bonnie’s death with alcohol is taking its toll, but now Jade feels closer to him. Ben worries that he’s getting too close to Jade and will have to break up with her soon.
Back at Ben’s house, Bryce and Jessica review their plan for putting Phil Grayson in a compromising, career-ending position with Ben. They then meet Grayson at a dive bar, get him high on various drugs, bring him back to his office, where Bryce films Jessica pretending to perform explicit sex acts with Grayson.
Ben, Bryce, Jessica, and Cranibee go to Bonnie’s small funeral. Cranibee and Ben fight over how Ben has gone about clearing the Native American tribes, although Cranibee agrees with Ben’s tactics with McBride and Grayson. Jessica corrals them and they attend the funeral services.
That night, as Ben returns to his house with Bryce in the basement, editing videos, four of McBride’s churchgoers ambush Ben, riddling his truck and house with bullets. Ben manages to get out of his truck and grab his firearms and night-vision goggles. With a terrified Bryce recording the fight from Ben’s security cameras, Ben fights off his assailants, killing each one in turn for not confessing McBride sent them. After checking on Bryce inside and calling Cranibee to have deputies dispose of the dead bodies, Ben races over to Bloodstone’s house to make sure she’s safe.
Distraught but glad Ben’s unharmed, Bloodstone checks him over. Ben then meets Cranibee at Ben’s house, where Cranibee suspects the dead assailants are uniformed Gracefield cops who attend Liberty Free Will.
The next morning, Ben wakes to a call from Cranibee asking for him to come to the sheriff’s office to inspect a package they’ve received.
At Cranibee’s office, Ben and Cranibee review a large envelope after it’s been scanned for anthrax. They removed the thick manifesto from Burl and his domestic terrorists. A flash drive also drops out of the envelope.
Debating whether to review the flash drive then bracing themselves for what they assume might be video of the actual murders of the Gracefield 14, they agree to watch it for clues.
The flash drive is in fact a montage of each gory murder in turn, starting with Gracefield’s mayor. Ben pauses the video before it gets to Bonnie and tells Cranibee that if they continue watching, Ben will seek vengeance not justice in hunting down the killers and murdering them. Cranibee agrees, though he finds it hard to believe Ben will have the fortitude and determination for carry out the revenge.
Ben wakes up from blacking out while watching the video, finding Cranibee in a similar state. Without words, Ben leaves, floats back to his truck and back home from pure muscle memory, still in a state of blackout.
Ben then seeks more comfort from Jade, still grieving over how bad a brother he’d always been to Bonnie.
The next day, Ben shares the manifesto with Bryce and Jessica, who analyze it. Ben refuses to let them see the video montage for their own mental health. Jessica, reading the manifesto, concocts a plan to round up the killers and bring them back to a desolate Gracefield location to then castrate them, and feed them their testicles before killing them one by one. Her resolve shocks Ben, but Bryce is confident that he can locate the killers’ whereabouts, while Ben prepares for the kidnappings and the secluded location.
At their favorite War Eagle breakfast place, Burl tells his group he’s narrowing down their next target in Texas.
That night, Ben tells Bloodstone Cranibee took care of the bodies of his attackers, who were Gracefield beat cops. Ben doesn’t feel bad about killing them but feels bad that they’re dead. He tells Bloodstone he’s retiring after the Gracefield 14 case and wants her to move away with him, but Bloodstone remains reluctant.
Over coffee the next morning, Cranibee tells Ben discuss how he made the dead cops look like a drug deal gone bad near the river. They discuss Ben’s plan to bring the assassins back to Gracefield. Cranibee shows Ben a little-known fall-out shelter entrance with a gradual decent for vehicles south of town. It leads to two large chambers where Ben can carry out his revenge plot.
Still shaken from Ben’s attack, Bryce works on identifying the killers from website traffic to the local Gracefield newspapers mentioned in the manifesto. The web traffic is low, so Bryce is able to isolate certain out of the area ISP addresses. Bryce shows Ben his work just as he homes in on Burl’s residence, outside of Wichita, Kansas.
While Bryce keeps working, Ben begins his personal EMDR sessions to replace his bad memories of seeing Bonnie murdered with other memories of his intimate relationships. Bryce interrupts Ben to tell him Bryce has found the other thirteen assassins by tracking Burl’s ISP address before it goes into the dark web, where Burl mines hatred to infiltrate social media. Ben returns to his EMDR until Jessica interrupts him. In Ben’s basement, Bryce has found physical locations for the assassins in a triangulated area crossing Kansas, Arkansas, and Nebraska. Ben, Bryce, and Jessica chart out their targets by location.
Ben then prepares the fall-out shelter with tarps, hooks in the ceiling, a propane camping cooker, and other instruments. He also secures the moving truck and moving van for transporting the assassins back.
Ben realizes he needs to sever certain ties and strengthen others with his ladyfriends. He meets Jade at his house to break up with her. She can’t believe he doesn’t love someone else although he lies to her and swears he doesn’t.
Ben then barges into Bloodstone bondage studio, accidentally outing one of her clients, before confessing his love to her and his need for them to stay together. Bloodstone is resolute in her belief that Ben’s vengeance will permanently change him into someone she can’t be with.
Later that night, Ben, Bryce, and Jessica set out for Arkansas for the first four of the Gracefield 14 assassins. The next morning, they lure each away from their War Eagle breakfast spot before they go in. Jessica plays the helpless lost woman. Ben knocks them out, and Ben and Bryce tie them up and dispose of their cell phones.
Outside Kansas City, Ben, Bryce, and Jessica apprehend another assassin at a barbecue restaurant.
Later, in the back of the moving truck, Ben guards the unconscious assassins while Bryce drives, Jessica driving the moving van.
Burl awakens to Ben beating the unconscious men to keep them knocked-out. Burl is disappointed that he’s been caught, and that Ben’s not interested in hearing why they carried out the murders. Ben tells Burl the city attorney was his sister before he knocks Burl out.
That evening, Ben, Bryce, and Jessica kidnap the final three assassins outside a Lincoln, Nebraska dive bar. They then race back to Gracefield.
In the back of the moving truck, Ben and Burl continue to talk, Burl not expressing any remorse except for not taking into account private investigators in his terrorist plot. They discuss whether fatalism or existentialism is at play with Ben spouting facts about the numbers of psychopaths, the percentage that become violent versus the small populations of Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, and then Gracefield, referring to himself.
In the fall-out shelter, Bren, Bryce, and Jessica carry out their plan of castrating all the assassins, forcing them to eat their own testicles, then executing each in turn, saving Burl for last. Before he dies, Burl tells Ben to fuck his fatalism as Burl believes his actions still got people to make changes to Gracefield.
Ben and Bryce take a road trip to Louisiana to feed the dismembered assassins to swamp alligators.
Later, Ben and Bryce edit footage of their revenge then post it to Burl’s dark website as a warning.
At a hipster coffee shop, Ben says his final goodbyes to Cranibee. Both still mourn Bonnie, are forced to confront their ages, but take solace in the good they created for Gracefield in the wake of the Gracefield 14 tragedy, namely, resolving the sales tax and water usage issue with one tribe, reaching agreement on the new I-40 exit ramp, making the casino entrance age 21 with another, chasing McBride out of town, and putting an end to Phil Grayson’s blackmail tyranny.
Ben and Bloodstone sit at a park, watching kids play. Ben tells her about his kill fuses, set to go off if he doesn’t check in, with damning evidence of several cases going to the FBI and media as his protection from further retaliation. She still isn’t convinced Ben’s fully healed but agrees to move out of state with him.
Later, heading toward Denver, Ben drives while Bloodstone nods off.