The Game

               “Alright,” I say out loud, more to reassure myself than Tessa, who’s quivering behind me. I lift the key up to the lock and slowly but firmly turn it.

It’s been two days since this scavenger hunt began, and two days since any form of peace in our lives has taken shape. From the get-go, me and Tessa were paired up to try and track down all the right clues and beware of false ones. The first team to make it to the end of the hunt wins $100,000.

Easy and fun, right? Trade off some of your free time for a chance at cash, right?

Me and Tessa had followed the instructions texted to our phones right when the game began. Three choices (and hours) later, as we followed our clues to a casket an abandoned mansion, we found this message taped to the back.

 “Dead End”

We both stepped away from the casket (completely by chance,) and two knifes suddenly flew out of it in the direction of where we both stood just seconds ago. That’s when this stopped being a game. The “Game Masters” (or so we call them,) knew we weren’t dead, and since then, they’ve been after us. Not counting their organized efforts to kill us, we’ve survived two more “dead ends,” one by diving inside some sort of abandoned mine to escape a rock slide, and in the other, Tessa grabbed me and jumped into a lake so we could avoid breathing poisonous gas. And I used to say that nothing happened in two days....

Back to the present, we’re standing in a densely covered forest, and I’m opening a door which should contain our next clue.

"Be ready to bolt," Tessa reminds me.

"Yeah," I answer. I begin to pull back on the door, and it swings open mugh easier than I thought it would. To our great relief, it’s not a dead end. Sadly, it’s not a clue either. The door opens and we see a long, dark hallway with a very faint light at the end.

“L-ladies first…” I say with a stutter.

“Just….please go ahead of me,” she says back.

Darn. She didn't even give me something to work with on that one.

Reluctantly, I go in, and Tessa walks close behind me. As we advance, it becomes apparent that the challenge is not in this hall, but the room it leads to, and we both relax a little.

 "John," Tessa calls my name suddenly. "What do you think the real prize in this game is?"

"Real prize?" I ask back questioningly.

"Think about it. We entered this game for money, but could that really be the reward the game masters have planned if we win? Why go to all this trouble to award only $100,000?"

She's right. It would really be an anticlimactic finish if that were the case. "I don't know," I answer. 

"Come on, put a little more thought into it than that."

"Okay, okay." I really don't want to think hard about the answer to a question like that, but it doesn't look like I have much of a choice. "Maybe we get a million dollars!"

She stares at me a moment, then asks, "Is that really all you're thinking of?"

"Yep," I answer honestly. "Can you even imagine what I could do with a million dollars?!"

"There are more important things than money, you know."

There are, but I don't care. With money, I could buy a luxury car even before I get my driver's licence. With that done, I could spend more of it on parties and fun stuff. There's a girl I like named Mira, and I know she's attracted to loaded guys. Once she likes me, the rest of the world could be destroyed and I probably wouldn't care.