Maenads
Cast
Cindy (aka Tom Nettle)
- GENDER: Trans female
- AGE: 23 years old
- HEIGHT: 5’4”
- WEIGHT: 135 lbs.
- HAIR COLOR: Natural black hair, cut short, but usually wears a long blonde wig.
- EYE COLOR: Hazel
- DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Slender figure and sharp facial features.
Kell (aka Kelly Turnbull)
- GENDER: Female
- AGE: 28 years old
- WEIGHT: 185 lbs.
- HEIGHT: 5’8”
- HAIR COLOR: Short brown hair
- EYE COLOR: GREEN
- DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Stocky build, flat face, and big eyes.
Fred Black
- GENDER: Male
- AGE: 56
- WEIGHT: 160 lbs.
- HEIGHT: 5’10
- HAIR COLOR: Brown
- EYE COLOR: Brown
- DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: a legally distinct character from Frank Black from Millennium whose physical resemblance to actor Lance Henrickson is entirely coincidental to the extent required by law.
Julia Nettle
Lt. Carter – Fred Black’s friend and longtime colleague, and supervisor of the Major Crimes Division of the Seattle PD.
Det. Wong
Det. Morgan
Det. Pindleton
Part 1 – ‘Millennium’
SEATTLE, WA – Former FBI profiler Fred Black is sent by the private ‘consulting’ firm he works for, The Aeon Group, to help law enforcement investigate an impossible bank heist, during which all surveillance footage was rendered unusable and the bank vault was somehow sealed from the inside after the culprits departed; most disturbingly, and of most interest to the Aeon Group, all the witnesses inside the bank claim the crime was committed by a human-esque figure with a bull’s head and horns, surrounded by raging flames.
At the same time, Fred decides to do an old friend in the Seattle PD a favor and quietly look into a Missing Persons report about a young man whose mother claims he has been kidnapped, but whom Fred’s friend assures him has simply gone to where his mother won’t look – ‘just like all the other times she’s shown up here doing this.’
‘I can even tell you where to find her.’
‘…her?’
‘Mom likes to leave that part out of the reports.’
While the investigation into the bank heist stalls, Fred decides to look into the ‘missing person’ for his friend, and quickly finds who he’s looking for: a young trans woman named Cindy, who has gone to stay with her girlfriend, Kell, who both react to Fred’s presence with hostility and suspicion, believing he is working for Cindy’s mother. Fred assures both of them that he has no interest in disrupting their lives, and that he has done everything he promised to do by locating Cindy and confirming her safety. But after Fred refuses to help Cindy’s mother, she stages a suicide attempt to guilt her ‘son’ into coming back to take care of her. Fred suggests to Cindy that perhaps she should consider returning to her mother’s home for a short while until her health improved, and the situation became less volatile. Fred thinks he’s just providing polite advice and doesn’t expect Cindy will actually listen to him, but she runs away crying; the next time he sees Cindy, she’s taking her mother home, slumped and defeated, wearing men’s clothes.
Not long after Fred encounters Cindy and Kell, there’s a breakthrough in the investigation, and for the first time the investigators are able to observe what actually happened on the only security footage to survive the attack. But instead of seeing a man with a bull’s head and horns, or even a team of bank robbers, all the footage shows is a young man in a suit leaning against the door and a skinny woman in a white dress with a gold, diamond-studded grill in her mouth dancing to unheard music – but somehow, this causes every other person in the bank to panic and cower, visions of flames and the horned man overpowering them. Even more confusingly, when the investigators manage to open the damaged bank vault, they discover much of the money in the vault wasn’t stolen – instead, the attackers set what they didn’t take on fire, along with three executives whom they tied to chairs and then buried them under the money before setting it alight.
Once the vault is opened, Fred Black begins to have visions – the same ‘condition’ that forced him into early retirement from the FBI – which help him find more clues to follow and intuit explanations for what occurred that traditional police work is unable to explain. While watching the security footage, he notices the suspect leaning against the door is mouthing words in rhythm with the woman’s dancing, and that many of the terrified customers and tellers are mumbling the same words in time in unison. After watching the tape repeatedly, Fred realizes what the words are – the lyrics to ‘The Motto’ by Drake:
Now she want a photo, you already know though
You only live once, that’s the motto, nigga, YOLO
And we ‘bout it er’ryday, er’ryday, er’ryday, er’ryday
Like we sittin’ on the bench, nigga, we don’t really play
And we ‘bout it er’ryday, er’ryday, er’ryday, er’ryday
Fuck what anybody say
Can’t see ‘em, ‘cause the money’s in the way.
Fred’s visions continue to become stronger and more disorienting, until he starts seeing the horned man, too – and realizes that the culprits who attacked the bank and murdered the executives are Cindy and Kell: Cindy is the dancing girl, and Kell is the ‘man’ guarding the door.
Hoping to talk them into surrendering, Fred visits Cindy’s mother’s house to speak with Cindy, who invites him in for a friendly conversation, during which she avoids all his probing. But then she starts talking about how she feels no guilt about, ‘all the things I’m doing,’ and thanks Fred for coming: ‘we were worried you wouldn’t be here in time.’ Kell then comes into the room behind Fred, beats him over the head with a bat, and drags him into the kitchen… where Cindy and Kell have already killed and mutilated Cindy’s mother in a ritual sparagmos, chopping her body into chunks and splattering them all around the room, then painting bulls’ heads on the walls and ceiling in her blood and viscera.
Half-conscious, Fred is overtaken by visions of the flaming horned man, and thinks he sees Cindy changing shape as her bones crack and her muscles rip, and her shoulder blades tear out of her back and extend into plated skeletal wings. But before Fred can make sense of the vision, he is startled back to semi-lucidity by the sound of Cindy’s skin sloughing off to reveal the woman’s body underneath. The last thing Fred sees as he looks up, his hair turned white from the horror he is witnessing, is Cindy in her white dress and blonde wig smiling down at him, then opening her mouth to reveal a human eyeball sitting on her tongue, which she then swallows… and Fred wonders just how long it’s been since Cindy sucked the left eyeball out of his skull.
Kell buries a cleaver in Fred Black’s skull, leaving him slumped against the refrigerator in a puddle of gore and dismembered human remains. When the police arrive and find the bodies, Cindy has left Fred’s phone playing ‘Goodbye, Charlie’ by Bobby Darin on repeat:
‘Thought you had it made
But they're dumpin' you off
After bumpin' you off, pal
Don't you know lechery
Leads you to treachery
Things boomerang
Someone you trifle with
Pulls out a rifle without a pang
Bang... bang... bang!
Goodbye, Charlie
Cashin' in your chips
Wild-eyed Charlie
Time you came to grips
There ain't no doubt
Strike three, you're out
Goodbye, Charlie
Goodbye!’
- Bank robbery – ‘The Motto’ by Drake
- Fred Black’s death – ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ by Black Sabbath & ‘Horses’ by Patti Smith
- Cindy and Kell dance after escaping from Seattle [end part 1] – ‘Love Will Keep Us Alive’ by The Eagles
- ‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam
- ‘Pepper’ by Butthole Surfers
Part 2 – ‘The Bacchantes’
After the murder of Fred Black and Cindy’s mother, Cindy and Kell go on the run. As the police desperately try to stop them, the two Maenads go on a road trip from Seattle to Los Angeles, making plenty of stops along the way to commit massacres against bankers, corporate executives, conservative politicians, and every other representative of the cultural, economic, and political orthodoxy they can manage. When the time for another sacrifice arrives, Cindy and Kell break into the house of the richest family around, who have all assembled for a holiday breakfast. The Maenads slaughter most of the family, leaving only the youngest daughter of 18 years alive, whom they tie to the dining table and rape and torture until midnight, then spend the time until sunrise eating her alive and covering themselves in her innards as they make love on top of her. When the police arrive days after Cindy and Kell have departed, they find the remaining pieces of the daughter’s body fashioned into a sculpture set before a makeshift idol decorated with her head; the rest of the bodies have been torn to pieces and thrown around all over the house, and the walls are covered in gore. Like before, Cindy and Kell cover the walls and ceiling in bloody drawings and finger paintings, but this time they also leave a message written in the daughter’s blood: ‘WHY U MAD?’
The more crimes they commit and bloody rituals they perform, the more the country succumbs to a moral panic over ‘deviants,’ ‘Satanists,’ and ‘troublemakers’, with Cindy and Kell becoming the poster children for the end of polite civilization… which only inspires Cindy and Kell to become even more flamboyant and bloody in their exploits, and to start uploading footage of their slaughters to social media, set to the songs Cindy hears while she plays video girl to inspire Kell on her rampages.
By the time the Maenads arrive at their final destination, Los Angeles, a crowd of supporters and rubberneckers has assembled, and is already under attack by the police. But once Cindy and Kell reveal themselves to the crowd, the police panic and run away, the ones not fast enough to escape getting torn apart by the frenzied crowd.
Bar fight – ‘Space Lord’ by Monster Magnet
Cindy and Kell fleeing the cops in a stolen convertible – ‘Shiny Happy People’ by R.E.M.
Boardwalk – ‘Johnny Can’t Read’ by Don Henley
Driving into LA – ‘California Love’ by Tupac and Dr. Dre/’Brad Logan’ by Rancid.
Meeting the crowd – ‘Hit in America’ by Beat Crusaders
Highway – ‘Alien’ by Pennywise
Campfire singalong: ‘One Tin Soldier’ by Coven
‘Little Willy’ by The Sweet
‘Saints of Los Angeles’ by Motley Crue
‘As if it Were Your Last’ by Blackpink
Part 3 – The Black Parade
‘Two thousand, zero zero
Party over, oops, out of time
So tonight, we’re gonna party like it’s 1999’
When night falls, Cindy and Kell lead a procession down Sunset Blvd., at the climax of which they perform the ritual they have been preparing for and summon ‘God’s forgotten son,’ Dionysus, to manifest on Earth. Dionysus curses his father and begs Cindy and Kell to kill him, ‘for flesh is a prison to me.’ Cindy castrates Dionysus and slits his throat; across the world, everyone with the same pain in their souls as Cindy and Kell are overcome by the same frenzied inspiration, and within minutes civilization collapses in a literal Bacchanalia of violence and bloodshed.
The heavens open, and god’s wrath falls from the sky to cleanse creation of the taint his unwanted deviant son has unleashed with his martyrdom. The celebrants cheer as the world is annihilated; Cindy and Kell throw their middle fingers into the air at the heavens they have spited, then kiss as they are consumed by a raging torrent of flame racing down the street all around them.
‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ by My Chemical Romance
‘1999’ by Prince & The Revolution