The Running Man Read online

“Where?” said the other.

  They watched the dark shape as it separated from the ground. Its engines took on a curiously flat sound, like artillery practice on a cold morning. It rose at a steep angle, as real and as tangible and as prosaic as a cube of butter on a plate, yet improbable with flight.

  “You think he’s got it?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  The roar of the jet was now coming to them in falling cycles.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though.” The first turned from the diminishing lights and turned up his collar. “I’m glad he’s got that bastard with him. That McCone.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “As long as I don’t have to answer it.”

  “Would you like to see him pull it off?”

  The trooper said nothing for a long time. The sound of the jet faded, faded, faded, until it disappeared into the underground hum of nerves at work.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  A crescent smile in the darkness. “My friend, I think there’s gonna be a big boom.”

  …Minus 024 and COUNTING…

  The earth had dropped away below them.

  Richards stared out wonderingly, unable to drink his fill; he had slept through the other flight as if in wait for this one. The sky had deepened to a shade that hung on the borderline between royal velvet and black. Stars poked through with hesitant brilliance. On the western horizon, the only remnant of the sun was a bitter orange line that illuminated the dark earth below not at all. There was a nestle of lights below he took to be Derry.

  “Mr. Richards?”

  “Yes.” He jumped in his seat as if he had been poked.

  “We are in a holding pattern right now. That means we are describing a large circle above the Voigt Jetport. Instructions?”

  Richards thought carefully. It wouldn’t do to give too much away.

  “What’s the absolute lowest you can fly this thing?”

  There was a long pause for consultation. “We could get away with two thousand feet,” Holloway said cautiously. “It’s against N.S.A. regs, but—”

  “Never mind that,” Richards said. “I have to put myself in your hands to a certain extent, Mr. Holloway. I know very little of flying and I’m sure you’ve been briefed on that. But please remember that the people who are full of bright ideas about how to bamboozle me are all on the ground and out of danger. If you lie to me about anything and I find out—”

  “Nobody up here is going to do any lying,” Holloway said. “We’re only interested in getting this thing back down the way it went up.”

  “Okay. Good.” He gave himself time to think. Amelia Williams sat rigidly beside him, her hands folded in her lap.

  “Go due west,” he said abruptly. “Two thousand feet. Point out the sights as we go along, please.”

  “The sights?”

  “What we’re going over,” Richards said. “I’ve only flown once before.”

  “Oh.” Holloway sounded relieved.

  The plane banked beneath their feet and the dark sunset line outside the window tilted on its ear. Richards watched, fascinated. Now it gleamed aslant the thick window, making odd, fugitive sungleams just beyond the glass. We’re chasing the sun, he thought. Isn’t that amazing?

  It was thirty-five minutes after six.

  …Minus 023 and COUNTING…

  The back of the seat in front of Richards was a revelation in itself. There was a pocket with a safety handbook in it. In case of air turbulence, fasten your belt. If the cabin loses pressure, pull down the air mask directly over your head. In case of engine trouble, the stewardess will give you further instructions. In case of sudden explosive death, hope you have enough dental fillings to insure identification.

  There was a small Free-Vee set into the seat panel at eye level. A metal card below it reminded the viewer that channels would come and go with a fair degree of speed. A touch-control channel selector was provided for the hungry viewer.

  Below and to the right of the Free-Vee was a pad of airline stationery and a G-A stylus on a chain. Richards pulled out a sheet and wrote clumsily on his knee:

  “Odds are 99 out of 100 that you’re bugged, shoe mike or hair mike, maybe mesh transmitter on your sleeve. McCone listening and waiting for you to drop the other shoe, I bet. In a minute have a hysterical outburst and beg me not to pull the ring. It’ll make our chances better. You game?”

  She nodded and Richards hesitated, then wrote again:

  “Why did you lie about it?”

  She plucked the stylus out of his hand and held it over the paper on his knee for a moment and then wrote: “Don’t know. You made me feel like a murderer. Wife. And you seemed so”—the stylus paused, wavered and then scrawled—“pitiful.”

  Richards raised his eyebrows and grinned a little—it hurt. He offered her the stylus but she shook her head mutely. He wrote: “Go into your act in about 5 minutes.”

  She nodded and Richards crumpled the paper and stuffed it into the ashtray embedded in the armrest. He lit the paper. It puffed into flame and blazed brightly for a moment, kindling a tiny reflective glow in the window. Then it collapsed into ashes which Richards poked thoughtfully.

  About five minutes later Amelia Williams began to moan. It sounded so real that for a moment Richards was startled. Then it flashed across his mind that it probably was real.

  “Please don’t,” she said. “Please don’t make that man…have to try you. I never did anything to you. I want to go home to my husband. We have a daughter, too. She’s six. She’ll wonder where her mommy is.”

  Richards felt his eyebrow rise and fall twice in an involuntary tic. He didn’t want her to be that good. Not that good.

  “He’s dumb,” he told her, trying not to speak for an unseen audience, “but I don’t think he’s that dumb. It will be all right, Mrs. Williams.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  He didn’t answer her. She was so patently right. Nothing, anyway, that he hadn’t lost already.

  “Show it to him,” she pleaded. “For God’s sake, why don’t you show it to him? Then he’d have to believe you…call off the people on the ground. They’re tracking us with missiles. I heard him say so.”

  “I can’t show him,” Richards said. “To take it out of my pocket would mean putting the ring on safety or taking the full risk of blowing us up accidentally. Besides,” he added, injecting mockery into his voice, “I don’t think I’d show him if I could. He’s the maggot with something to lose. Let him sweat it.”

  “I don’t think I can stand it,” she said dully. “I almost think I’d rather joggle you and have it over. That’s the way it’s going to end anyway, isn’t it?”

  “You haven’t—” he began, and then the door between first and second was snapped open and McCone half strode, half lunged through. His face was calm, but beneath the calm was an odd sheeny look which Richards recognized immediately. The sheen of fear, white and waxy and glowing.

  “Mrs. Williams,” he said briskly. “Coffee, if you please. For seven. You’ll have to play stewardess on this flight, I’m afraid.”

  She got up without looking at either of them. “Where?”

  “Forward,” McCone said smoothly. “Just follow your nose.” He was a mild, blinking sort of man—and ready to lunge at Amelia Williams the moment she showed a sign of going for Richards.

  She made her way up the aisle without looking back.

  McCone stared at Richards and said: “Would you give this up if I could promise you amnesty, pal?”

  “Pal. That word sounds really greasy in your mouth,” Richards marveled. He flexed his free hand, looked at it. The hand was caked with small runnels of dried blood, dotted with tiny scrapes and scratches from his broken-ankle hike through the southern Maine woods. “Really greasy. You make it sound like two pounds of fatty hamburger cooking in the pan. The only kind you can get at the Welfare
Stores in Co-Op City.” He looked at McCone’s well-concealed pot. “That, now. That looks more like a steak gut. Prime cut. No fat on prime cut except that crinkly little ring around the outside right?”

  “Amnesty,” McCone repeated. “How does that word sound?”

  “Like a lie,” Richards said, smiling. “Like a fat fucking lie. Don’t you think I know you’re nothing but the hired help?”

  McCone flushed. It was not a soft flush at all; it was hard and red and bricklike. “It’s going to be good to have you on my home court,” he said. “We’ve got hi-impact slugs that will make your head look like a pumpkin dropped on a sidewalk from the top floor of a skyscraper. Gas filled. They explode on contact. A gut shot, on the other hand—”

  Richards screamed: “Here it goes! I’m pulling the ring!”

  McCone screeched. He staggered back two steps, his rump hit the well-padded arm of seat number 95 across the way, he overbalanced and fell into it like a man into a sling, his arms flailing the air around his head in crazed warding-off gestures.

  His hands froze about his head like petrified birds, splay fingered. His face stared through their grotesque frame like a plaster death-mask on which someone had hung a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles for a joke.

  Richards began to laugh. The noise of it was cracked at first, hesitant, foreign to his own ears. How long had it been since he had had a real laugh, an honest one, the kind that comes freely and helplessly from the deepest root of the stomach? It seemed to him that he had never had one in his whole gray, struggling, earnest life. But he was having one now.

  You bastard.

  McCone’s voice had failed him; he could only mouth the words. His face was twisted and scrunched like the face of a badly used teddy bear.

  Richards laughed. He held on to one arm of his seat with his free hand and just laughed and laughed and laughed.

  …Minus 022 and COUNTING…

  When Holloway’s voice informed Richards that the plane was crossing the border between Canada and the state of Vermont (Richards supposed he knew his business; he himself could see nothing but darkness below them, interrupted by occasional clusters of light), he set his coffee down carefully and said:

  “Could you supply me with a map of North America, Captain Holloway?”

  “Physical or political?” A new voice cut in. The navigator’s, Richards supposed. Now he was supposed to play obligingly dumb and not know which map he wanted. Which he didn’t.

  “Both,” he said flatly.

  “Are you going to send the woman up for them?”

  “What’s your name, pal?”

  The hesitant pause of a man who realizes with sudden trepidation that he has been singled out. “Donahue.”

  “You’ve got legs, Donahue. Suppose you trot them back here yourself.”

  Donahue trotted them back. He had long hair combed back greaser fashion and pants tailored tight enough to show what looked like a bag of golf balls at the crotch. The maps were encased in limp plastic. Richards didn’t know what Donahue’s balls were encased in.

  “I didn’t mean to mouth off,” he said unwillingly. Richards thought he could peg him. Well-off young men with a lot of free time often spent much of it roaming the shabby pleasure areas of the big cities, roaming in well-heeled packs, sometimes on foot, more often on choppers. They were queer-stompers. Queers, of course, had to be eradicated. Save our bathrooms for democracy. They rarely ventured beyond the twilight pleasure areas into the full darkness of the ghettos. When they did, they got the shit kicked out of them.

  Donahue shifted uneasily under Richards’s long gaze. “Anything else?”

  “You a queer-stomper, pal?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Go on back. Help them fly the plane.”

  Donahue went back at a fast shuffle.

  Richards quickly discovered that the map with the towns and cities and roads was the political map. Pressing one finger down from Derry to the Canada-Vermont border in a western-reaching straightedge, he located their approximate position.

  “Captain Holloway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn left.”

  “Huh?” Holloway sounded frankly startled.

  “South, I mean. Due south. And remember—”

  “I’m remembering,” Holloway said. “Don’t worry.”

  The plane banked. McCone sat hunched in the seat he had fallen into, staring at Richards with hungry, wanting eyes.

  …Minus 021 and COUNTING…

  Richards found himself drifting in and out of a daze, and it frightened him. The steady drone of the engines were insidious, hypnotic. McCone was aware of what was happening, and his leaning posture became more and more vulpine. Amelia was also aware. She cringed miserably in a forward seat near the galley, watching them both.

  Richards drank two more cups of coffee. Not much help. It was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate on the coordination of his map and Holloway’s toneless commentary on their outlaw flight.

  Finally he drove his fist into his side where the bullet had taken him. The pain was immediate and intense, like a dash of cold water in the face. A whistling half-whispered screech issued from either side of his clenched mouth, like stereo. Fresh blood wet his shirt and sieved through onto his hand.

  Amelia moaned.

  “We’ll be passing over Albany in about six minutes,” Holloway said. “If you look out, you’ll see it coming up on your left.”

  “Relax,” Richards said to no one, to himself. “Relax. Just relax.”

  God, will it be over soon? Yes. Quite soon.

  It was quarter to eight.

  …Minus 020 and COUNTING…

  It could have been a bad dream, a nightmare that had crawled out of the dark and into the unhealthy limelight of his half-awake mind—more properly a vision or a hallucination. His brain was working and concentrating on one level, dealing with the problem of navigation and the constant danger of McCone. On another, something black was taking place. Things were moving in the dark.

  Track on. Positive.

  Huge, whining servomechanisms turning in the dark, in the night. Infrared eyes glowing in unknown spectrums. Pale green foxfire of dials and swinging radar scopes.

  Lock. We have a lock.

  Trucks rumbling along back-country roads, and on triangulated flatbeds two hundred miles apart, microwave dishes swing at the night sky. Endless streams of electrons fly out on invisible batwings. Bounce, echo. The strong blip and the fading afterimage lingering until the returning swing of light illuminates it in a slightly more southerly position.

  Solid?

  Yeah. Two hundred miles south of Newark. It could be Newark.

  Newark’s on Red, also southern New York.

  Executive Hold still in effect?

  That’s right.

  We had him dead-bang over Albany.

  Be cool, pal.

  Trucks thundering through closed towns where people look out of cardboard-patched windows with terrified, hating eyes. Roaring like prehistoric beasts in the night.

  Open the holes.

  Huge, grinding motors slide huge concrete duncecaps aside, shunting them down gleaming steel tracks. Circular silos like the entrances to the underworld of the Morlocks. Gasps of liquid hydrogen escaping into the air.

  Tracking. We are tracking, Newark.

  Roger, Springfield. Keep us in.

  Drunks sleeping in alleys wake foggily to the thunder of the passing trucks and stare mutely at the slices of sky between close-leaning buildings. Their eyes are faded and yellow, their mouths are dripping lines. Hands pull with senile reflex for newsies to protect against the autumn cold, but the newsies are no longer there, the Free-Vee has killed the last of them. Free-Vee is king of the world. Hallelujah. Rich folks smoke Dokes. The yellow eyes catch an unknown glimpse of high, blinking lights in the sky. Flash, flash. Red and green, red and green. The thunder of the trucks has faded, ramming back and forth in the stone canyons like t
he fists of vandals. The drunks sleep again. Bitchin’.

  We got him west of Springfield.

  Go-no-go in five minutes.

  From Harding?

  Yes.

  He’s bracketed and braced.

  All across the night the invisible batwings fly, drawing a glittering net across the northeast corner of America. Servos controlled by General Atomics computers function smoothly. The missiles turn and shift subtly in a thousand places to follow the blinking red and green lights that sketch the sky. They are like steel rattlesnakes filled with waiting venom.

  Richards saw it all, and functioned even as he saw it. The duality of his brain was oddly comforting, in a way. It induced a detachment that was much like insanity. His bloodcrusted finger followed their southward progress smoothly. Now south of Springfield, now west of Hartford, now—

  Tracking.

  …Minus 019 and COUNTING…

  “Mr. Richards?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are over Newark, New Jersey.”

  “Yes,” Richards said. “I’ve been watching. Holloway?”

  Holloway didn’t reply, but Richards knew he was listening.

  “They’ve got a bead drawn on us all the way, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” Holloway said.

  Richards looked at McCone. “I imagine they’re trying to decide if they can afford to do away with their professional bloodhound here. Imagine they’ll decide in the affirmative. After all, all they have to do is train a new one.”

  McCone was snarling at him, but Richards thought it was a completely unconscious gesture, one that could probably be traced all the way to McCone’s ancestors, the Neanderthals who had crept up behind their enemies with large rocks rather than battling to the death in the honorable but unintelligent manner.

  “When do we get over open country again, Captain?”

  “We won’t. Not on a due south heading. We will strike open sea after we cross the offshore North Carolina drilling derricks, though.”