The Danger Game

by Ian Bull

  My staff in Miami may know people at some of these agencies, but that’s a Hail Mary pass. I grab my phone off the vast coffee table and speed-write a text.

  Trishelle pushes the toaster button down and pours something in the kitchen. This is the first time I’ve been with Trishelle when we haven’t ripped each other’s clothes off. Our best friends are missing, which kicks our relationship into new territory. She comes back in the living room and hands me a cup of coffee.

  “That was fast.”

  “It’s instant espresso. Real coffee is brewing.”

  We sip and trade stares. I want to yell at her but don’t. Anger is too blunt a tool for the precision work that this situation requires.

  She reads my mind. “I’m sorry. Julia is my best friend, but I still work for her. I can’t stop her, only steer her.”

  “Why didn’t you call me sooner last night?”

  “Because you were calling me. At least I thought it was you. They were phishing me with your number. The voice even sounded like you. He’d say two words and hang up, and then I’d hit redial. I didn’t get a clue until we got to the station. I got played.”

  “He played all of us. It’s not your job to keep them safe. It’s mine. I should have warned them, but I downplayed the danger.”

  Trishelle puts down her coffee, walks into the guest bedroom, and comes back with a guitar. She pulls open the sliding door a few inches, letting in a clean ocean smell and the sound of waves and seagulls. She sits on the edge of the opposite couch and strums. The breeze blows a few strands of hair across her face.

  “I’ve heard that song before. It’s good.”

  “You haven’t heard it before, because I’m writing it now.”

  “Were you playing it last night?”

  “When I couldn’t sleep.”

  I fall into a mini-trance, watching her play, then shake myself out of it. “Trishelle, I love ya, babe, but we don’t have time for ‘Kumbaya.’”

  Trishelle keeps playing. “You’re the one who just woke up. I’ve been busy thinking, and this is how I think. Last night you called McCusker. Did you call the woman detective? What’s her name?”

  “Gum. I called them both. I only got through to McCusker. He said that unless we witnessed an abduction, we can’t yet say they were kidnapped. But he’s on it.”

  She keeps working the same musical notes. “Call Gum then.”

  I fight not to react. Trishelle’s phone, which is on the coffee table between us, dings with a text. She grabs it. “It’s from Rick, Julia’s agent. He says to look at the Celebrity Exposed website—and, that if it’s true, we’re ‘fucked.’”

  We race to the study and pull up chairs to an oak desk with a huge desktop computer. Trishelle calls up the Celebrity Exposed site. The lead article fills the screen:

  Travers and Quintana Pull Plug on Big Budget Movie for Phone App

  by Larry Naythons

  Actor and producer Julia Travers, who was on a winning streak with three hit movies in a row, is dumping the silver screen for the smartphone, in a risky move that may prove profitable if her new venture is a success, or a career killer if it fails. Together with fiancé Steven Quintana, she is launching Tales by Travers, a new storytelling smartphone application that allows users to influence and even help write episodes of their new streaming series.

  “Do you want to see me in a romantic comedy? A thriller? An adventure? We give it to you,” Travers told Celebrity Exposed.

  Quintana, who has zero Hollywood credits, insists that letting random submissions drive the creative process won’t lower the story quality. “We will pick the best ideas submitted and turn them into very short episodes for mobile devices,” he says.

  The first series will be a self-referential exploration of Travers and Quintana’s own adventure-filled past called The Danger Game. Travers and Quintana will play “Julia” and “Steven,” fictional versions of themselves who’ve been kidnapped and sealed inside a bunker/film studio. The obstacles they face and whether they “survive” or “perish” will be decided by fans who contribute ideas and dialogue through the app.

  “Blowing up a successful movie career seems foolhardy, but she could be at the forefront of a new kind of storytelling,” says Joe Weiss of the Hollywood Reporter. “It represents total ownership from story through distribution.”

  And that ownership could pay off. Julia Travers is known around the world. If twenty million people buy her app for five dollars, she can make $100 million before the first episode airs.

  The Tales by Travers app dropped at midnight, and sales are brisk, according to AppTracker. The first episode of The Danger Game will drop today, with a new episode every two days or less.

  Story submissions may be where they make the most money. Users will pay a dollar to submit an idea, ten dollars to submit a page of dialogue. If either is selected by the producers, that fan will earn five thousand dollars. With up to twenty million people watching and submitting, Travers and Quintana’s take could be half a billion dollars within the first week.

  Journalists went to Malibu yesterday for a press conference to promote Under Withering Fire, Travers’s new movie, but instead endured a terrifying fake “attack,” which they insist was a promotional gimmick to kick off the first episode of The Danger Game. The movie was supposed to be distributed by Warner Bros. The studio will not comment.

  Chris Grivakes, an independent counsel who works for the studio, did say, “Travers and Quintana have been accused of fabricating drama in the past and turning a profit on it.”

  Grivakes may be referring to Travers’s kidnapping three years ago, and Quintana’s involvement in a “fight to the death” competition show, set on a crashing plane. Rumors arose that both events were fabrications designed by Quintana and Travers to raise her Q-rating.

  The Danger Game may be the next logical step. Considering how fast entertainment is changing, The Danger Game may be the safest place for Travers and Quintana to be.

  “Who is Larry Naythons, and why is he writing this fake crap?” I ask.

  “Before he met Julia, Steven worked as a paparazzo. He’d sell his photos to Larry Naythons. He’s only gotten bigger since then.”

  “Along with his bullshit. You and I are going to visit Larry.”

  Trishelle inhales like she’s been stabbed. “What if the article is real?”

  “There is no way that Steven and Julia are creating a game for the internet.”

  “No, I mean, maybe they’ve been kidnapped, for real, to be in this game.”

  I stare at her. Bushnell did bankroll Six Passengers, Five Parachutes. Heyman helped him run it. They could be doing this together.

  Trishelle reads my mind. She grabs her phone and types it into the search engine. “The game app is for sale. I’m buying it.” She downloads the app. “The first episode airs tonight at 8:00 p.m. That’s in ten hours.”

  She shows me her phone. Julia and Steven are on a movie poster, green and red, trapped in a dark room with glaring lights above them. In red scrawl, it says The Danger Game. Underneath is the tag line: The world is watching.

  “Tabernac,” she whispers. “It’s happening again.”

  14

  STEVEN QUINTANA

  Kidnapped 14 hours ago

  Julia sleeps beside me. Her breathing is slow. It’s pitch black, and we’re on a cold cement floor. We’ve been this way for eight hours. The floor is too cold to sleep on, so I taught her how to rest on her knees and elbows. If your knees are far enough apart and you tilt forward, you can rest your face in your cupped hands. You can fall asleep like that if you’re tired enough.

  She tilted over a few times, but then her brain and body adjusted, and she’s in a deep sleep that will last about thirty minutes until her hands and arms fall asleep, and her brain wakes her up again. I squat next to her like a caveman, so if she tilts and falls, she’ll land against me.

  My Ranger training came back. How to survive capture. How to go without
food and water and sleep. How to make lists and prepare, so you don’t give up hope.

  She snorts and inhales, and I catch her before she pitches face-first onto the cement. She whimpers and crawls into my arms, and I plop down on my butt, holding her. “You slept. That’s good.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I’ll get us out of here.”

  “GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!” A loud voice, an inch away from our faces, screams.

  We scramble across the cold floor in the dark. My forehead smacks into a cement wall, and white light flashes through my brain.

  Now the voice whispers, and, again, it sounds an inch away. “If you want to eat, drink, sleep, piss, or shit, then obey me. If you want clean clothes or to bathe, then obey me. Most of all, if you wish to escape punishment, obey me.”

  It’s Peter Heyman. I shout into the darkness. “Still can’t get a job, Peter? Maybe people would hire you if you took that piece of metal out of your face!”

  Someone stabs me in the calf, and a jolt of electricity convulses my body, sending my knees into my chest. They can see me in the dark. I put my hands on the floor and sweep my heel fast in a low roundhouse kick—and knock my attacker off his feet. I roll fast, get on top of him, and slam his head against the cement, which jars his night-vision goggles off his forehead.

  Julia screams. They’re shocking her now. I almost get the goggles on when they prod me six times in the back, sending me convulsing across the floor. I bang my head again and hear the goggles shatter. Someone yanks them off my forehead.

  “This is a wonderful start!”

  The overhead lights snap on. After hours of darkness, they are like white-hot suns. My eyes blink, fighting to work.

  “Now, you are docile. You want your eyesight back more than you want to fight,” Peter’s voice whispers. “You are so predictable.”

  My vision returns. Julia and I are in a large, square room, twenty-five yards across. The walls and floor are painted bright green. Three men, dressed in black with hoods and goggles, surround me and point electric cattle prods at my face. Julia, ten yards away, is surrounded by another three men.

  “UP!” Peter shouts, and all six men fly up and away, like Peter Pans. They wear harnesses on their chests and back, and the retracting wires yank them up to a metal catwalk above us.

  Glass shards are on the floor next to me—the remains of the shattered goggles, gone now with the men. I roll onto the shards, hiding them under my still shaking thighs.

  Julia and I lock eyes. Her blonde hair is stringy, her face is dirty, and the crotch of her blue track pants is dark. She crosses her legs. She wet herself.

  “Don’t worry. I did it too. It’s hard not to piss yourself when asshole cowards are jabbing you with twenty thousand volts.” I shift and feel the shards of glass poke into the back of my thighs. There are three of them; one is long, two are short. I must hide them somehow, in my pocket, my underwear, or in my mouth. Sweat drips into my eyes, and I wipe it away—it’s not sweat, it’s blood.

  Julia touches her own forehead. “You’re cut.”

  I glance at the wall. There’s a red mark where I collided with the cement. I shout up at the metal catwalk. “I left a red mark on your pretty green wall!”

  “We can paint it,” Peter whispers. I can’t see him, only the silhouettes of eight men on the catwalk above me moving in front of the white-hot lights.

  “We’re in a green screen room,” Julia says. “They’re filming us.”

  I look at the walls. Every few feet there is a six-inch circle of wire mesh.

  “Those are microphones and speakers,” Julia says, pointing at the circles, and then at the catwalk. “And those are cameras above us.”

  In between the bright lights, there are ten cameras mounted on a big ring, which hangs halfway down from the ceiling.

  “Very good. Our cameras can capture every angle and close-up, no matter where you are in the room.” Heyman’s voice is coming from all the mesh circles. “Your kidnapping is episode one, which ends with that little fight you gave us. It will be airing around the world.”

  Julia laughs. “You’re trying this again?”

  “Killing us on camera hasn’t worked yet!” I yell. I run my hands along the back of my piss-soaked jeans and find the shards of glass. I slide them into my socks.

  Heyman cranks up the volume on his voice. “THIRD TIME’S A CHARM.”

  Buckets on ropes lower from the ceiling—one in front of me, one in front of Julia.

  “Mine has water and sandwiches,” Julia says, emptying plastic water bottles and plastic-wrapped food onto the floor. Her bucket rises back up the catwalk.

  My bucket stays. “Mine has toilet paper, alcohol, and bandages.”

  “Eat, drink, and relieve yourselves. We’ll send down the script for episode two. Do that well and you’ll get clean clothes and a mattress to sleep on.”

  “Script? You kidnapped the wrong guy. I’m no actor.”

  “‘We’re all poor players, strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage, and then we are heard from no more.’ You are no different, Quintana. Yours is a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  Julia forces herself to stand. “You’re an idiot, Peter Heyman. Don’t you know that it’s bad luck to quote anything from Macbeth before your actors perform? Now your project is doomed to failure!”

  “It is you who are doomed if you do not do as you are told.”

  “‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves!’” Julia shouts up at the men on the catwalks. “‘And this room means nothing to me! You can bound me in a nutshell and I would count myself king of infinite space!’”

  Heyman laughs. “‘Were it not for your bad dreams.’ I also know Hamlet.”

  A lever flips. They plunge us into darkness again.

  “‘There is no darkness but ignorance, and you’re as ignorant as the Egyptians in their plague of fog!’ That’s Twelfth Night, malevolent fucker!”

  I hope their night vision can see me because I’m grinning. My girl’s got grit.

  15

  JULIA TRAVERS

  Kidnapped 15 hours ago

  I’m glad we’re in the dark. I don’t want Steven to see me, like this, squatting over a bucket. Then come the snickers. The pigs on the catwalk above can still see us with their green goggles. They see everything. They hear everything.

  I finish and clean myself. How are we going to get out of this?

  Steven taps my arm. He’s ripped open the sandwiches and water, which we devour. I choke on the stale bread, and Steven jams an open water bottle into my hand. My throat guzzles half of it before the sandwich even goes down.

  My hands find the bandages and alcohol. “Let me clean that cut.”

  “Can you find it?”

  “Yes.” My fingers run across his skin until they find the gash. I rip open three bandages, put them against his forehead, and stretch them across the wound, pulling it taut. It feels like it will work.

  “There.” I kiss his forehead.

  “How sweet.” Heyman’s voice shocks me, and I fall back on my ass.

  “I need stitches. You want me to act with a cut on my forehead?” Steven yells.

  “We’ll fix it in post. It’s all special effects.”

  “Turn on the lights! To see if I put the bandages in the right place!”

  “We see them. What you did will suffice.”

  “We need sleep!” Steven yells.

  “There are two sleeping mats behind you. Rest. You have a lot of work in front of you.”

  Steven and I crawl until we find the folding mats they dropped from the ceiling. They’re only an inch thick, but they feel like plush mattresses from a four-star hotel. My body wants to shut down, but it’s too afraid to sleep.

  What can I do? I can fight back and defend myself. I can hide my feelings. I can act. I can distract. Will that be enough?

  Heyman whispers, “Thanks for the help with the b
ombs on set, Quintana.”

  “Nice try, Heyman. Julia knows the truth.”

  “What Julia thinks doesn’t matter. The world thinks you set off the bombs and that you two are producing this entire show. That means no one is coming for you. Your only hope is to obey.”

  My mind twists, trying to unravel all the lies. Steven wraps his arms around me and whispers, “He’s trying to break us. We can’t let him.”

  I nod and close my eyes, willing myself to believe, and to sleep.

  16

  TINA SWIG

  Tuesday, March 12, 4:00 a.m. (CET)

  Sicily

  Min, Ismael, and Elliot work at their stations while I pace behind them. Most TV producers hide their idiocy by being screaming assholes when quiet precision is best. “How many downloads so far?”

  Min sits at the first desk, tracking the app purchases. He blinks, trying to focus. “Come on, Min. I went for a five-mile run on the beach yesterday while you three were sleeping off your hangovers. I told you, be sharp for the Monday night drop in California. If you yawn, I’ll cut your balls off.”

  Min sits up straight like he’s got a yardstick up his ass. “We’re at ten million and climbing. A lot of downloads from India.”

  “How many in the US?”

  “We’ll hit a half-million downloads by midday. We’ve been open eighteen hours. Not bad for a Monday game release. That Celebrity Exposed article helped.”

  “How are the platforms reacting?”

  “We’re on all of them. No one is rejecting us, at least for now.”