The Running Man Read online

  “It was a mistake!”

  They were entering the residential district of what Richards assumed was Rockland. Summer homes. Dirt roads leading down to beachfront cottages. Breeze Inn. Private Road. Just Me’n Patty. Keep Out. Elizabeth’s Rest. Trespassers Will Be Shot. Cloud-Hi. 5000 Volts. Set-A-Spell. Guard Dogs on Patrol.

  Unhealthy eyes and avid faces peering at them from behind trees, like Cheshire cats. The blare of battery-powered Free-Vees came through the shattered windshield.

  A crazy, weird air of carnival about everything.

  “These people,” Richards said, “only want to see someone bleed. The more the better. They would just as soon it was both of us. Can you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “Then I salute you.”

  An older man with silvery barbershop hair, wearing madras shorts that came down over his knees, ran out to the edge of the road. He was carrying a huge camera with a cobralike telephoto lens. He began snapping pictures wildly, bending and dipping. His legs were fish-belly white. Richards burst into a sudden bray of laughter that made Amelia jump.

  “What—”

  “He’s still got the lens cover on,” Richards said. “He’s still got—” But laughter overcame him.

  Cars crowded the shoulders as they topped a long, slowly rising hill and began to descend toward the clustered town of Rockland itself. Perhaps it had once been a picturesque seacoast fishing village, full of Winslow Homer men in yellow rain-slickers who went out in small boats to trap the wily lobster. If so, it was long gone. There was a huge shopping center on either side of the road. A main street strip of honky-tonks, bars, and AutoSlot emporiums. There were neat middle-class homes overlooking the main drag from the heights, and a growing slum looking up from the rancid edge of the water. The sea at the horizon was yet unchanged. It glittered blue and ageless, full of dancing points and nets of light in the late afternoon sun.

  They began the descent, and there were two police cars parked across the road. The blue lights flick-flick-flicked jaggedly, crazy and out of sync with each other. Parked at an angle on the left embankment was an armored car with a short, stubby cannon barrel tracking them.

  “You’re done,” she said softly, almost regretfully. “Do I have to die, too?”

  “Stop fifty yards from the roadblock and do your stuff,” Richards said. He slid down in the seat. A nervous tic stitched his face.

  She stopped and opened the car door, but did not lean out. The air was dead silent. A hush falls over the crowd, Richards thought ironically.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “Please. I’m so scared.”

  “They won’t shoot you,” he said. “There are too many people. You can’t kill hostages unless no one is watching. Those are the rules of the game.”

  She looked at him for a moment, and he suddenly wished they could have a cup of coffee together. He would listen carefully to her conversation and stir real cream into his hot drink—her treat, of course. Then they could discuss the possibilities of social inequity, the way your socks always fall down when you’re wearing rubber boots, and the importance of being earnest.

  “Go on, Mrs. Williams,” he said with soft, tense mockery. “The eyes of the world are upon you.”

  She leaned out.

  Six police cars and another armored van had pulled up thirty feet behind them, blocking their retreat.

  He thought: Now the only way out is straight up to heaven.

  …Minus 039 and COUNTING…

  “My name is Amelia Williams. Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give us safe conduct, he says he’ll kill me.”

  Silence for a moment so complete that Richards could hear the faraway honk of some distant yacht’s air horn.

  Then, asexual, blaring, amplified: “WE WANT TO TALK TO BEN RICHARDS.”

  “No,” Richards said swiftly.

  “He says he won’t.”

  “COME OUT OF THE CAR, MADAM.”

  “He’ll kill me!” she cried wildly. “Don’t you listen? Some men almost killed us back there! He says you don’t care who you kill. My God, is he right?”

  A hoarse voice in the crowd yelled “Let her through!”

  “COME OUT OF THE CAR OR WE’LL SHOOT.”

  “Let her through! Let her through!” The crowd had taken up the chant like eager fans at a killball match.

  “COME OUT—”

  The crowd drowned it out. From somewhere, a rock flew. A police car windshield stared into a matrix of cracks.

  There was suddenly a rev of motors, and the two cruisers began to pull apart, opening a narrow slot of pavement. The crowd cheered happily and then fell silent, waiting for the next act.

  “ALL CIVILIANS LEAVE THE AREA,” the bullhorn chanted. “THERE MAY BE SHOOTING. ALL CIVILIANS LEAVE THE AREA OR YOU MAY BE CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION AND UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY. THE PENALTY FOR OBSTRUCTION AND UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY IS TEN YEARS IN THE STATE PENITENTIARY OR A FINE OF TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS OR BOTH. CLEAR THE AREA. CLEAR THE AREA.”

  “Yeah, so no one’ll see you shoot the girl!” a hysterical voice yelled. “Screw all pigs!”

  The crowd didn’t move. A yellow and black newsie-mobile had pulled up with a flashy screech. Two men jumped out and began setting up a camera.

  Two cops rushed over and there was a short, savage scuffle for the possession of the camera. Then one of the cops yanked it free, picked it up by the tripod, and smashed it on the road. One of the newsmen tried to reach the cop that had done it and was clubbed.

  A small boy darted out of the crowd and fired a rock at the back of a cop’s head. Blood splattered the road as the cop fell over. A half-dozen more descended on the boy, bearing him off. Incredibly, small and savage fistfights had begun on the sidelines between the well-dressed townfolk and the rattier slum-dwellers. A woman in a ripped and faded housedress suddenly descended on a plump matron and began to pull her hair. They fell heavily to the road and began to roll on the macadam, kicking and screaming.

  “My God,” Amelia said sickly.

  “What’s happening?” Richards asked. He dared look no higher than the clock on the dashboard.

  “Fights. Police hitting people. Someone broke a newsie’s camera.”

  “GIVE UP, RICHARDS. COME OUT.”

  “Drive on,” Richards said softly.

  The air car jerked forward erratically. “They’ll shoot for the air caps,” she said. “Then wait until you have to come out.”

  “They won’t,” Richards said.

  “Why?”

  “They’re too dumb.”

  They didn’t.

  They proceeded slowly past the ranked police cars and the bug-eyed spectators. They had split themselves into two groups in unconscious segregation. On one side of the road were the middle-and upper-class citizens, the ladies who had their hair done at the beauty parlor, the men who wore Arrow shirts and loafers. Fellows wearing coveralls with company names on the back and their own names stitched in gold thread over the breast pockets. Women like Amelia Williams herself, dressed for the market and the shops. Their faces were different in all ways but similar in one: They looked oddly incomplete, like pictures with holes for eyes or a jigsaw puzzle with a minor piece missing. It was a lack of desperation. Richards thought. No wolves howled in these bellies. These minds were not filled with rotted, crazed dreams or mad hopes.

  These people were on the right side of the road, the side that faced the combination marina and country club they were just passing.

  On the other side, the left, were the poor people. Red noses with burst veins. Flattened, sagging breasts. Stringy hair. White socks. Cold sores. Pimples. The blank and hanging mouths of idiocy.

  The police were deployed more heavily here, and more were coming all the time. Richards was not surprised at the swiftness and the heaviness of their crunch, despite the suddenness of his appearance. Even here, in Boondocks, U.S.A., the club and the gun were kept near to hand. The dogs were kept hungry in the kennel. The po
or break into summer cottages closed for autumn and winter. The poor crash supermarts in subteen gangs. The poor have been known to soap badly spelled obscenities on shop windows. The poor always have itchy assholes and the sight of Naugahyde and chrome and two-hundred-dollar suits and fat bellies have been known to make the mouths of the poor fill with angry spit. And the poor must have their Jack Johnson, their Muhammad Ali, their Clyde Barrow. They stood and watched.

  Here on the right, folks, we have the summer people, Richards thought. Fat and sloppy but heavy with armor. On the left, weighing in at only a hundred and thirty—but a scrappy contender with a mean and rolling eyeball—we have the Hungry Honkies. Theirs are the politics of starvation; they’d roll Christ Himself for a pound of salami. Polarization comes to West Sticksville. Watch out for these two contenders, though. They don’t stay in the ring; they have a tendency to fight in the ten-dollar seats. Can we find a goat to hang up for both of them?

  Slowly, rolling at thirty, Ben Richards passed between them.

  …Minus 038 and COUNTING…

  An hour passed. It was four o’clock. Shadows crawled across the road.

  Richards, slumped down below eye level in his seat, floated in and out of consciousness effortlessly. He had clumsily pulled his shirt out of his pants to look at the new wound. The bullet had dug a deep and ugly canal in his side that had bled a great deal. The blood had clotted, but grudgingly. When he had to move quickly again, the wound would rip open and bleed a great deal more. Didn’t matter. They were going to blow him up. In the face of this massive armory, his plan was a joke. He would go ahead with it, fill in the blanks until there was an “accident” and the air car was blown into bent bolts and shards of metal (“…terrible accident…the trooper has been suspended pending a full investigation…regret the loss of innocent life…”—all this buried in the last newsie of the day, between the stock-market report and the Pope’s latest pronouncement), but it was only reflex. He had become increasingly worried about Amelia Williams, whose big mistake had been picking Wednesday morning to do her marketing.

  “There are tanks out there,” she said suddenly. Her voice was light, chatty, hysterical. “Can you imagine it? Can you—” She began to cry.

  Richards waited. Finally, he said: “What town are we in?”

  “W-W-Winterport, the sign s-said. Oh, I can’t! I can’t wait for them to do it! I can’t!”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She blinked slowly, giving an infinitesimal shake of her head as if to clear it. “What?”

  “Stop. Get out.”

  “But they’ll kill y—”

  “Yes. But there won’t be any blood. You won’t see any blood. They’ve got enough firepower out there to vaporize me and the car, too.”

  “You’re lying. You’ll kill me.”

  The gun had been dangling between his knees. He dropped it on the floor. It clunked harmlessly on the rubber floor-mat.

  “I want some pot,” she said mindlessly. “Oh God, I want to be high. Why didn’t you wait for the next car? Jesus! Jesus!”

  Richards began to laugh. He laughed in wheezy, shallow-chested heaves that still hurt his side. He closed his eyes and laughed until tears oozed out from under the lids.

  “It’s cold in here with that broken windshield,” she said irrelevantly. “Turn on the heater.”

  Her face was a pale blotch in the shadows of late afternoon.

  …Minus 037 and COUNTING…

  “We’re in Derry,” she said.

  The streets were black with people. They hung over roof ledges and sat on balconies and verandahs from which the summer furniture had been removed. They ate sandwiches and fried chicken from greasy buckets.

  “Are there jetport signs?”

  “Yes. I’m following them. They’ll just close the gates.”

  “I’ll just threaten to kill you again if they do.”

  “Are you going to skyjack a plane?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  They made a right, then a left. Bullhorns exhorted the crowd monotonously to move back, to disperse.

  “Is she really your wife? That woman in the pictures?”

  “Yes. Her name is Sheila. Our baby, Cathy, is a year and a half old. She had the flu. Maybe she’s better now. That’s how I got into this.”

  A helicopter buzzed them, leaving a huge arachnid shadow on the road ahead. A grossly amplified voice exhorted Richards to let the woman go. When it was gone and they could speak again, she said:

  “Your wife looks like a little tramp. She could take better care of herself.”

  “The picture was doctored,” Richards said tonelessly.

  “They would do that?”

  “They would do that.”

  “The jetport. We’re coming up to it.”

  “Are the gates shut?”

  “I can’t see…wait…open but blocked. A tank. It’s pointing its shooter at us.”

  “Drive to within thirty feet of it and stop.”

  The car crawled slowly down the four-lane access road between the parked police cars, between the ceaseless scream and babble of the crowd. A sign loomed over them: VOIGT AIRFIELD. The woman could see an electrified cyclone fence which crossed a marshy, worthless sort of field on both sides of the road. Straight ahead was a combination information booth and check-in point on a traffic island. Beyond that was the main gate, blocked by an A-62 tank capable of firing one-quarter-megaton shells from its cannon. Farther on, a confusion of roads and parking lots, all tending toward the complex jetline terminals that blocked the runways from view. A huge control tower bulked over everything like an H. G. Wells Martian, the westering sun glaring off its polarized bank of windows and turning them to fire. Employees and passengers alike had crowded down to the nearest parking lot where they were being held back by more police. There was a pulsing, heavy whine in their ears, and Amelia saw a steel-gray Lockheed/G-A Superbird rising into a flat, powerful climb from one of the runways behind the main buildings.

  “RICHARDS!”

  She jumped and looked at him, frightened. He waved his hand at her nonchalantly. It’s all right, Ma. I’m only dying.

  “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE,” the huge amplified voice admonished him. “LET THE WOMAN GO. STEP OUT.”

  “What now?” she asked. “It’s a stand-off. They’ll just wait until—”

  “Let’s push them a little farther,” Richards said. “They’ll bluff along a little more. Lean out. Tell them I’m hurt and half-crazy. Tell them I want to give up to the Airline Police.”

  “You want to do what?”

  “The Airline Police are neither state enforcement nor federal. They’ve been international ever since the UN treaty of 1995. There used to be a story that if you gave up to them, you’d get amnesty. Sort of like landing on Free Parking in Monopoly. Full of shit, of course. They turn you over to the Hunters and the Hunters drag you out in back of the barn.”

  She winced.

  “But maybe they’ll think I believe it. Or that I’ve fooled myself into believing it. Go ahead and tell them.”

  She leaned out and Richards tensed. If there was going to be an “unfortunate accident” which would remove Amelia from the picture, it would probably happen now. Her head and upper body were clearly and cleanly exposed to a thousand guns. One squeeze on one trigger and the entire farce would come to a quick end.

  “Ben Richards wants to give up to the Airline Police!” she cried. “He’s shot in two places!” She threw a terrified glance over her shoulder and her voice broke, high and clear in the sudden silence the diminishing jet had left. “He’s been out of his mind half the time and God I’m so frightened…please…please…PLEASE!”

  The cameras were recording it all, sending it on a live feed that would be broadcast all over North America and half the world in a matter of minutes. That was good. That was fine. Richards felt tension stiffen his limbs aga
in and knew he was beginning to hope.

  Silence for a moment; there was a conference going on behind the check-point booth.

  “Very good,” Richards said softly.

  She looked at him. “Do you think it’s hard to sound frightened? We’re not in this together, whatever you think. I only want you to go away.”

  Richards noticed for the first time how perfect her breasts were beneath the bloodstained black and green blouse. How perfect and how precious.

  There was a sudden, grinding roar and she screamed aloud.

  “It’s the tank,” he said. “It’s okay. Just the tank.”

  “It’s moving,” she said. “They’re going to let us in.”

  “RICHARDS! YOU WILL PROCEED TO LOT 16. AIRLINE POLICE WILL BE WAITING THERE TO TAKE YOU INTO CUSTODY!”

  “All right,” he said thinly. “Drive on. When you get a half a mile inside the gate, stop.”

  “You’re going to get me killed,” she said hopelessly. “All I need to do is use the bathroom and you’re going to get me killed.”

  The air car lifted four inches and hummed smoothly forward. Richards crouched going through the gate, anticipating a possible ambush, but there was none. The smooth blacktop curved sedately toward the main buildings. A sign with a pointing arrow informed them that this was the way to Lots 16–20.

  Here the police were standing and kneeling behind yellow barricades.

  Richards knew that at the slightest suspicious move, they would tear the air car apart.

  “Now stop,” he said, and she did.

  The reaction was instantaneous. “RICHARDS! MOVE IMMEDIATELY TO LOT 16!”

  “Tell them that I want a bullhorn,” Richards said softly to her. “They are to leave one in the road twenty yards up. I want to talk to them.”

  She cried his message, and then they waited. A moment later, a man in a blue uniform trotted out into the road and laid an electric bullhorn down. He stood there for a moment, perhaps savoring the realization that he was being seen by five hundred million people, and then withdrew to barricaded anonymity again.