Ben Elton - Popcorn

The little caravanpark store in the redwood forest turned blue then red then blue again then red.

There was no particular call for the police car to be so garishly illuminated as it pulled up outside the shop. It was scarcely dawn yet and there had been no other traffic on the gravel road leading through the woods from the Interstate. Cops, however, will be cops. The few guests slumbering in the darkened trailers were lucky they hadn’t turned on the siren.

Astonishingly, it was the storekeeper himself who had raised the alarm. Wayne had shot him only once and that had been in the shoulder. The force of the impact had spun the victim back through the open door and into the parlour behind, and Wayne could not be bothered climbing over the counter to finish the job.

The storekeeper was lucky. Such is the terrible damage done by modern weapons that even a shoulder wound can be deadly. The man’s flesh, however, was old and weak and put up little resistance to the bullet as it passed through his body. In fact, the projectile had caused nearly as little damage on its exit as it had on its entry. Nevertheless, there had been considerable loss of blood, and the old man, who lived alone, had lain semiconscious on the floor in front of the television for several hours before summoning the strength to crawl to the phone. The telerecord of the Oscars ceremony had been playing throughout, and the old man’s troubled dreams and hallucinations had been further disturbed by talk of legs of fire.

While waiting for the arrival of the ambulance (which did deploy its siren and woke everybody up), the police questioned the storekeeper. They soon realized that he was another victim of the celebrated Mall Murderers, who were clearly no longer restricting their activities to malls.

‘A young man and a scrawny kid of a girl,’ one of the officers said into his radio. ‘Same description as at that motel this morning… All they took was some Jack Daniels, some cigarettes and some pretzels… oh yeah, and one of those maps of the movie stars’ homes… I don’t know why. Maybe they wanted to go visit Bruce Delamitri and congratulate him on his Oscar.’

Wayne was still swinging the severed head about in disgust. He was clearly moved by the tawdry service Bruce was getting from his employees. He saw it as symptomatic of a national malaise, and held the head up as evidence of declining standards in general.

‘I mean, shit, man! That’s what’s wrong with this fuckin’ country. People just don’t do the damn jobs they’re paid for. No wonder we can’t get ahead of the fuckin’ Japs. Wouldn’t catch no fuckin’ Jap screwing up on his duty like that, man. No way! This motherfucker deserved what he got, Bruce. I did you a fuckin’ favour.’

On the table stood a lava lamp in the shape of a rocket. In a gesture which amply summed up the contempt he felt for the dead security guard, Wayne impaled the head on the lamp.

Bruce gulped down his rising nausea and Brooke began quietly to weep. They stared, transfixed, as the great misshapen tumours and globules of red lava slowly rose upwards through the electricgreen liquid in the lamp and disappeared into the severed neck, waited a moment and then slowly reemerged from the head and dripped down again.

‘Please,’ Bruce muttered.

‘What’s that, Bruce?’

‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know who you are but-’

‘Oh, we’re just nocount white trash, Bruce,’ Wayne said, crossing over to rejoin Scout on the couch. ‘We ain’t nothing. Nothing at all. The only memorable thing I ever did in my whole life was kill people.’

But it was plain to see that Wayne rated himself rather highly. He was puffed up with pride like a psychotic peacock. He gripped Scout’s thigh proudly, as if to reassure her that he was only being selfeffacing out of politeness.

Scout was proud too. ‘We’re the Mall Murderers,’ she said. ‘I’m Scout and this is Wayne.’

Bruce and Brooke said nothing. Scout was a little disappointed. She had hoped her announcement would have more impact. Fearing that they hadn’t understood her properly, she repeated the main point. ‘We’re the Mall Murderers.’

Scout need not have worried. They had heard her the first time.

They should have guessed, of course, Bruce particularly. Two insane murderers? A man and a woman? Big fans of his work? People whose own activities had been consistently linked with his own for the previous month and now in his house ? It had to be them. But why? Their connection was entirely an invention of the media. In reality, Bruce had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall Murderers. This was small comfort, though, because murdering people with whom they had nothing to do was the Mall Murderers’ stock in trade.

‘Are you going to kill us?’ Bruce asked.

‘Now what kind of question is that? Me and Scout here never know who we’re going to kill till we done it.’

‘It just happens,’ Scout added, swinging her legs like a little girl talking about some game – although little girls don’t tend to have guns lying on their laps, except sometimes in Bruce’s movies and now, of course, in his lounge.

Silence returned.

Conversation was getting no easier. Again Scout felt it incumbent on her to try and oil the social wheels.

‘This is so great, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, us all here together, just sitting talking.’

Bruce was scarcely listening. His mind was racing. If these were the Mall Murderers, then he and Brooke could be dead literally at any moment. He had to do something: every second left alive with these two psychos was borrowed time. He looked at his big desk, which was positioned across the room, behind the couch on which Wayne and Scout were sitting.

In one of Bruce’s movies there would have been a closeup on the top righthand drawer and a music sting: that drawer matters.

Scout’s voice rattled on, scarcely penetrating the edge of Bruce’s thoughts.

‘Because Bruce here is Wayne ’s hero, and I’ve always admired girls like you, Brooke. So beautiful and all. Except I can’t deny I think it’s a shame about all this cosmetic surgery you ladies get done, because these days you don’t know who’s really beautiful and who’s just a nasty old rich bitch.’

Had Bruce moved? If anyone had been looking they might have thought he had. Before, he had been standing by the wall intercom. Now, he seemed to be a little closer to the desk.

Wayne was talking now. ‘Hell, it don’t matter none about cosmetic surgery, does it, Scout?’ he said. ‘I mean, if you look beautiful, you are beautiful, don’t matter how it happens.’

‘I just think it was kind of nice when a girl was what she was and that was it,’ Scout protested.

Bruce was definitely moving now, if incredibly slowly. He was making his way around the room towards that desk, that drawer. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Wayne and Scout were still concentrating on each other, their voices just babble inside Bruce’s head. Brooke was staring at the floor. Only one pair of eyes seemed to be fixed on Bruce, the eyes of the security guard, popping out of his severed head. It was almost as if the head was willing Bruce on. Like some creature in an insane Frankenstein experiment, it seemed to sense a man who might avenge its bloody murder. For a moment Bruce caught those eyes and they stared at each other, sharing two extreme closeups. For that moment Bruce half imagined those eyes alert in a living head, a head kept functioning by the great bloody globs of lifegiving lava that journeyed up its neck and down again.

Bruce made a supreme effort to pull himself together. His terror was making him lightheaded. The voices of Wayne and Scout, the bright eyes in the dead face and the nearcertainty that death was just a heartbeat away were all crashing about his head and preventing him from thinking. Bruce was not a weak man: his glib exterior concealed a steel core. Still only in his midthirties, he was currently the most successful movie director in the USA. This was not something that could be achieved without considerable strength of character. None the less, Bruce’s current situation was on the verge of defeating him.