by Ian Bull
“I’m not talking about the quality of the show. What’s actually happening to them is horrible.”
He shrugs. “I’ve seen worse, but I didn’t see the whole episode. I was on deadline.”
“You don’t care about the truth. You only care about getting clicks.” I poke him on the arm for a reaction.
Larry pushes my hand away and pokes me back. “I publish facts. History determines the truth. But let me give you my own facts, Deputy.”
We each cross arms in a face-off, two angry guys in suits and sunglasses, mirroring each other on a gravel rooftop. “Lay it on me, journalist.”
“I employ a hundred people in this building and five hundred across the country. We give them health insurance, a pension, and assistance with home loans. And we’ve won every libel lawsuit brought against us. That’s the truth I like.”
The sun beats down on my sweating bald head. I should have worn a hat. I look over the edge and see Trishelle’s car down below. It’s good she didn’t come. She’d be clawing his eyes out. Larry looks at his watch; he’s losing interest in my dilemma.
“You quote both of them in your article. How is that possible?”
“They called and offered me an interview. That was the same day as the explosions on the set of their movie, a few hours after the police spoke to each of them.”
“How do you know it was really them?”
“Because they said so.”
“That wasn’t Julia and Steven. That was Peter Heyman or Douglas Bushnell or people working for them. They altered their voices.”
“I had no reason to doubt them. Did Julia Travers call me pond scum like she usually does? No. Did their answers sound rehearsed? Yes, but so does every interview with any celebrity pushing a project. It’s all canned and rehearsed hype.”
“You have doubts, admit it. You think she’d walk away from a huge movie? Stage explosions? That’s crazy.”
“Everything that happens with Julia Travers and Steven Quintana is crazy. They asked me to run the story, so I did.”
My voice is earnest. “What if you’re wrong? What if I’m the one telling the truth?”
He sighs and uncrosses his arms and pushes his sunglasses up on his forehead. I’m getting somewhere. “I’ve made mistakes in the past, and this is a crazy story. If you come up with something newsworthy, with sources to back it up, I’ll print it.”
“Was the phone call to your office or your personal phone?”
“Office. I’ll pull the phone record. Don’t be surprised if it’s a blocked number.”
“I have my ways. And I promise that the truth will be a better story.”
“I look forward to it, Deputy Webb. You should get out of the sun. Your head is turning red.” He walks away, his feet crunching on the gravel. I’m going to need help.
18
JULIA TRAVERS
Kidnapped 42 hours ago
“I can’t make it! The lava! It’s too hot! It’s too hot. I’m going to die….”
I fall to my knees. My brain dredges up a memory of my grandmother on her death bed until my eyes flow like faucets and bubbles come out of my nose.
Steven stands on a green box ten feet away. We’re both dressed in silver heat suits, but our faces are exposed, which makes no sense if we were really this close to lava. Steven looks like a terrified zoo animal.
“If I jump, will you catch me?”
He nods. He has no clue how to do this.
“Say the line, Quintana,” Peter shouts from somewhere above.
“Jump, and I will catch you!” Steven yells, sounding like Dwayne Peabody, the worst ham actor in my high school drama class in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
My lungs hyperventilate, preparing me. My eyes shift from the green box under my feet to Steven on his box, six feet away. I teeter on the edge, imagining it to be a rock in the middle of a flowing lava river.
“The box will move in three, two, one…”
The wire that runs through my box moves on its pulley, jerking the box beneath me, dislodging my fake rock in the lava river. I leap to Steven on his box, and he catches me. We hug. “You saved my life again for the hundredth time.”
Steven grins, trying to emote “happy,” but his eyes are wide with stage fright. He looks up at the ring of cameras surrounding us.
“Don’t look at the cameras,” I whisper. “Say your lines.”
Steven grimaces, defiant.
“Say your line, Quintana.”
Steven sets his jaw. “I am sick of rescuing you. You are always the woman in peril,” he says, his acting so bad he makes Dwayne Peabody’s work look worthy of an Oscar.
“Push me.”
“What?”
“Push her, Quintana. Don’t make me work to edit this.”
Steven pushes me, and I throw myself into a back splat on the green cement floor, howling as if I’m being consumed by lava.
“Cut. We have another episode.”
I strip off the silver suit and toss it in a corner, leaving me in just my sweat-drenched underwear and a T-shirt. “Now do I get a shower?” I yell up at Heyman’s silhouette.
“Quintana’s acting is piss poor. If you want to bathe, he has to act better.”
Steven scowls as he pulls off his silver outfit. His red T-shirt is soaking wet. We’ve both lost ten pounds in perspiration today. They hung us from wires as we pretended to be floating in outer space; we wore mountaineering clothes and pretended we were climbing a granite wall, and even battled puppet alien invaders, all while leaping around in a green, cement room for fifteen hours, I’m guessing. They gave us little food, less water, and a lot of electric shocks from the cowards in the black ninja outfits.
“What about a bed? Hot food? We can’t work unless we’re fed, clean, and rested.”
“Drop five.”
Five men in black, with hoods and goggles, drop from the catwalk on their wired harnesses. Two corner me while three surround Steven, circling us like we’re zoo animals. They poke me in the legs and the back with their cattle prods, jolting me with burning electricity. My hand flies up and hits my face. Steven grunts as he battles them.
“Stop.”
The men fly back up to the catwalk. Steven runs to me, covering me with his arms. We pant like racehorses trying to catch our breath.
“Act or die. That’s the best incentive for any actor.”
“Your show will never work!” I yell. “No one can do this!”
The warehouse falls silent. The metal in the catwalk creaks. The men up high look like spiders, backlit against the bright overhead lights.
“What do you want most?”
“A shower. I need to be clean—"
Steven interrupts me. “A mattress, with blankets. We need to rest. And we need to rest together, so we each know that the other is safe. We can’t go days without sleep.”
“Slap him, and you’ll get a shower.”
“You want more violence. Of course,” I say.
“Stand and face each other. Slap him as hard as you can, or you get nothing.”
Steven stands up and lifts his chin, like a defiant boxer. He gets it now. Take the pain and you get something in return. He nods at me to proceed.
I get up and slap him, hard. He staggers back. A red handprint rises on his cheek.
“Again.”
My other hand flies out and slaps the other cheek, so hard my palm stings.
“Again.”
My hands slap again until my palms are on fire. What must his face feel like?
“We can edit that. You will get a hot shower soon.”
“Thank you, Great Oz.”
“Quintana, you want a bed? Punch Julia in the stomach.”
Steven raises his chin, defiant. “No.”
“You bombed her movie set when I offered you money. Punching her is easier.”
Steven blinks, flitting from confusion to anger. “He’s trying to set us against each other. Divide and conquer.” He yells at the ceiling
. “No!”
“Drop five.” The five ninjas with cattle prods drop back down from the ceiling. They stay on one side of the room.
“Do it, Steven. We either work together or we die!”
He shakes his head.
“I’d rather get punched by you than prodded by them. Do it!”
He closes his eyes and prays. His fist flies out faster than I can see, hitting me in the gut and lifting me off the ground. My head bangs against the cement floor. My mouth gasps like a fish, but there’s no air in my lungs. I roll onto my hands and knees and try to inflate them. I can’t.
I try again. Air fills my lungs. I breathe deep.
Tonight, we sleep in a bed.
19
TINA SWIG
Wednesday, March 13, 7:00 a.m. (CET)
Devon zooms his wheelchair across his carpeted stateroom and stops an inch before the smoked-glass window, then spins and zooms at me. I stand my ground. I’m used to this. He stops an inch before hitting my shins.
“Stop it, Devon. Find a more intelligent way to be a rebellious teenager.”
“Do not mock me,” he says, with an evil alien voice.
“I’m not mocking you. I’m challenging you to be a rebel with your mind, instead of threatening violence against this beautiful yacht or my shins.”
He rises up and down on his wheelchair as if riding a slow-moving pogo stick. “Be a rebel with your mind,” he says, imitating me with a silly cartoon voice.
“Very clever.”
“I’m sick of this boat,” He sounds like Paul Newman again, so I know he’s serious.
Outside the window is the jagged, black-and-green, volcanic island of Ustica, with its small ancient postcard town, lit up gold with the rising sun. I love these views, but it’s boring for a teenager.
“Something else is bugging you. The code you wrote isn’t working.”
His brown eyes well up.
“It’s been two days since you’ve asked Rebecca to send Professor Carlton an encrypted email. Are you stuck?”
He puts his lips over the mouthpiece. “The Hodge conjecture remains a conjecture.”
“Take a break from it. Do something else.”
“I can’t. I’m stuck on this boat.
“There’s a full media library. Watch a movie, play a video game, read a book.”
“At least let me cruise the internet.”
I’d rather let him play doctor with Rebecca again but don’t say it. That would be crossing a teenage privacy line that would be unforgivable.
“Not yet. Douglas and I have important business right now.”
“You act like Russians are trying to infect us with a Stuxnet virus.”
“You must wait, Devon. It took me two decades to achieve success, and then we almost lost it all when my first project for Douglas crashed and burned. Now we’ve climbed out of the ashes and built this new project. And, once this succeeds, we will have everything. Us against the world. All I want from you is eight more days. Maybe less.”
He turns his chair, ignoring me.
“I have to get back to work. I’ll check on you again in a few hours.”
“Fine,” he sighs. His cerebral palsy won’t let him sigh, but Douglas built that choice into his computer. It makes me love them both even more.
I move to kiss his forehead, but he backs away. Time to leave. He’s a big boy. He can live without YouTube and his Nightstream game for a few more days.
I go downstairs and into the galley and pour myself a magnificent mug of coffee with a whisper of cream, then walk out on the sundeck. The morning light hits the turquoise water surrounding Ustica, which is just five hundred yards away. I spot a lovely beach. Maybe Douglas and I can have a picnic there.
I should check in with Walter, my slimeball in Los Angeles. He’s got photographers watching Trishelle Hobbes and Carl Webb in case they make a move. But I’m too busy to send him another boob shot. No news from Piggy is good news.
I enter the main salon, where Min, Ismael, and Elliot are crowded around a monitor. Douglas stands behind them with the remote.
“My love, the second episode of The Danger Game is ready.”
“Is the first episode still making us money?” I ask Min.
“Downloads have dropped off twenty-five percent, but we’ve made about forty million, total,” he says.
I point and raise an eyebrow at Ismael. He grins. “Story submissions skyrocketed after the first episode. Fans submit dozens of times a day. We’re at sixty million.”
“We made our hundred million on Day One! And episode two is ready twenty-six hours after the first episode aired, which makes us late by just two hours.”
Douglas smiles. “I’m sorry for its tardiness, my love. This episode has a lot of computer rendering. We farmed out the work to different companies around the world. They all said the green screen was impeccable. Bravo to you on the production.”
“Thank you, my love. Hit play and let’s see this thing.”
Douglas clicks the remote, and the large monitor lights up as it emerges from its walnut cabinet. A male narrator speaks over images of Steven and Julia’s kidnapping. “Previously on The Danger Game…a ruthless cartel has kidnapped and imprisoned Steven and Julia. They threaten to torture them unless they perform for the cartel’s amusement. How much can they endure?” A montage shows them bound and gagged, tossed into a dark room, then kicked and prodded. Titles fill the screen: “You write the story. The Danger Game.”
Julia’s voice comes on next. It’s actually my voice, which the computer transformed into her sultry, silly version of female speech. “We are trapped. We cannot escape. If we want to eat, drink, sleep, or bathe…we must obey you. Perform for you. We play your requests. And today we perform…action comedy you want to see!”
We cut to the first scene: Steven and Julia are trapped in the back of a narrow rock canyon, and they shoot photon plasma rifles at a twenty-foot-tall, purple, sock-puppet alien with bloodshot googly eyes and green teeth. The puppet looks like Jim Henson designed him on LSD. The blue energy blasts hit the sock puppet in the chest, knocking him back. The sock puppet swipes his furry purple paw at Steven and Julia, knocking their plasma rifles from their hands. Julia and Steven try to run past him, but he squashes them with his fist and then makes “num num” sounds as he devours them. Julia screams as she dies, “I loved you as a child! Why are you eating me?” A confused Steven looks around as his abdomen is ripped open, and his organs spill out.
My three tech bros guffaw and high-five each other. Seeing Steven and Julia humiliate themselves for a worldwide audience gives me a rush of schadenfreude.
In the next scene, they climb a sheer rock wall in the Swiss Alps, wearing wool climbing clothes from the 1950s. Julia ties the knot in the carabiner, and Steven climbs past her—and then loses his hold. She grabs his wrist and forearm as he falls, catching him just before he drops hundreds of feet to the valley floor below. “Save me, Julia, I don’t want to die,” Steven whispers. The wind blows his thick hair as his body sways above the green fields far below.
The camera zooms in on Julia’s face as she arches an eyebrow. “Except you’re a loser. You’re just a hanger-on, using me to get ahead. You know what you are to me, Ranger boy? Deadweight.” Julia yanks her hand away, and Steven screams and falls to his death.
The scenes look as real as any big-effects Hollywood movie. Julia Travers is as believable as Faye Wray was, facing a fake King Kong. Quintana is terrible, however, which makes the scenes that much more cheesy, tongue-in-cheek, and stupid.
Good. I don’t care, as long as we make a billion.
The third scene starts. Julia and Steven stand at opposite ends of a sprawling field of grass that stretches down to the blue Mediterranean twenty miles away—each is dressed like ancient Greeks, with white tunics fringed with gold. Julia carries what looks like a swaddled baby in her arms. The baby cries, and Steven moves toward her. Every blade of grass bends with the breeze as Steven walks t
hrough the yellowing field. Julia holds out the child. “Come see what the gods have bestowed on us.”
Steven kisses her on the cheek. Julia pulls back the swaddling cover and reveals a red baby with barbed, yellow teeth, orange eyes, and sharp horns. “Isn’t he beautiful?”
The baby snaps at Steven’s hand, biting it clean off. Steven holds up the bleeding stump and screams. “He’s a monster!”
“Don’t you call him a monster!”
Julia slaps Steven hard across the face. He holds steady while she slaps him. Steven punches her in the stomach and sends her flying. The baby hits the ground, then leaps up and attacks Steven’s face, ripping it apart.
“Yo, that was a sick jump scare!” Min laughs.
“Took me totally by surprise.” Elliot laughs.
“It was decent,” the more reserved Ismael insists.
Min and Elliot groan at his critique. “You jumped, dude, I saw you.”
Ismael shakes his head. “I did not. And that scene was lame until they punched each other. Those hits weren’t rendered. They really went off, so that was cool.”
The next scene starts. Julia and Steven wear spacesuits and float inside a damaged space station. Rows of machines on the walls are blackened with bomb blasts. There’s a gaping hole leading to the vacuum of space outside. Hand-sized pieces of green steel float past them. Julia grabs one of the pieces and examines it closely. “These are fragments from a Soviet rocket. Whoever attacked us did it with old technology.”
“Be careful. There’s a lot of jagged metal in here,” Steven says.
“Don’t tell me to be careful. I know what I’m doing.”
“Are you sure? Exercise caution, please.”
Inside her glass space helmet, Julia rolls her eyes. She gives him a mock salute. “Yes, sir, Mr. Man!” she yells, and as she brings down her hand, her spacesuit hits a jagged piece of metal on the wall of the spacecraft, ripping it open at the wrist. Her glove pops off, and she screams as she holds up her bare hand in the vacuum of space. Steven grabs her wrist as her hand turns red and swells to ten times its normal size. She screams. Her hand explodes, sending out a billion blood droplets that cover their spacesuits. She flails around in space, then bumps against more jagged metal. The glass front of her helmet cracks, and the air inside escapes. She howls until there is no air left to carry the noise. Her head swells to the size of a basketball, and then it explodes like a cartoon.
