The Running Man Read online

  “Put this on,” Richards said.

  She continued to rock and moan, not hearing him. He dropped the parachute and slapped her. He could get no force into it. He balled his fist and punched her. She shut up. Her eyes stared at him dazedly.

  “Put this on,” he said again. “Like a packsack. You see how?”

  She nodded. “I. Can’t. Jump. Scared.”

  “We’re going down. You have to jump.”

  “Can’t.”

  “All right. Shoot you then.”

  She popped out of her seat, knocking him sideways, and began to pull the packsack on with wild, eye-rolling vigor. She backed away from him as she struggled with the straps.

  “No. That one goes uh-under.”

  She rearranged the strap with great speed, retreating toward McCone’s body as Richards approached. Blood was dripping from his mouth.

  “Now fasten the clip in the ringbolt. Around. Your buh-belly.”

  She did it with trembling fingers, weeping when she missed the connection the first time. Her eyes stared madly into his face.

  She skittered momentarily in McCone’s blood and then stepped over him.

  They backed through second class and into third class in the same way. Matches in his belly had been replaced by a steadily flaming lighter.

  The emergency door was locked with explosive bolts and a pilot-controlled bar.

  Richards handed her the gun. “Shoot it. I…can’t take the recoil.”

  Closing her eyes and averting her face, she pulled the trigger of Donahue’s gun twice. Then it was empty. The door stood closed, and Richards felt a faint, sick despair. Amelia Williams was holding the ripcord ring nervously, giving it tiny little twitches.

  “Maybe—” she began, and the door suddenly blew away into the night, sucking her along with it.

  …Minus 005 and COUNTING…

  Bent haglike, a man in a reverse hurricane, Richards made his way from the blown door, holding the backs of seats. If they had been flying higher, with a greater difference in air pressure, he would have been pulled out, too. As it was he was being badly buffeted, his poor old intestines accordioning out and trailing after him on the floor. The cool night air, thin and sharp at two thousand feet, was like a slap of cold water. The cigarette lighter had become a torch, and his insides were burning.

  Through second class. Better. Suction not so great. Now over McCone’s sprawled body (step up, please) and through first class. Blood ran loosely from his mouth.

  He paused at the entrance to the galley and tried to gather up his intestines. He knew they didn’t like it on the Outside. Not a bit. They were getting all dirty. He wanted to weep for his poor, fragile intestines, who had asked for none of this.

  He couldn’t pack them back inside. It was all wrong; they were all jumbled. Frightening images from high school biology books jetted past his eyes. He realized with dawning, stumbling truth, the fact of his own actual ending, and cried out miserably through a mouthful of blood.

  There was no answer from the aircraft. Everyone was gone. Everyone but himself and Otto.

  The world seemed to be draining of color as his body drained of its own bright fluid. Leaning crookedly against the galley entrance, like a drunk leaning against a lamppost, he saw the things around him go through a shifting, wraithlike grayout.

  This is it. I’m going.

  He screamed again, bringing the world back into excruciating focus. Not yet. Mustn’t.

  He lunged through the galley with his guts hanging in ropes around him. Amazing that there could be so much in there. So round, so firm, so fully packed.

  He stepped on part of himself, and something inside pulled. The flare of pain was beyond belief, beyond the world, and he shrieked, splattering blood on the far wall. He lost his balance and would have fallen, had not the wall stopped him at sixty degrees.

  Gutshot. I’m gutshot.

  Insanely, his mind responded: Clitter-clitter-clitter.

  One thing to do.

  Gutshot was supposed to be one of the worst. They had had a discussion once about the worst ways to go on their midnight lunch break; that had been when he was a wiper. Hale and hearty and full of blood and piss and semen, all of them, gobbling sandwiches and comparing the relative merits of radiation poisoning, freezing, falling, bludgeoning, drowning. And someone had mentioned being gutshot. Harris, maybe. The fat one who drank illicit beer on the job.

  It hurts in the belly, Harris had said. It takes a long time. And all of them nodding and agreeing solemnly, with no conception of Pain.

  Richards lurched up the narrow corridor, holding both sides for support. Past Donahue. Past Friedman and his radical dental surgery. Numbness crawling up his arms, yet the pain in his belly (what had been his belly) growing worse. Still, even through all this he moved, and his ruptured body tried to carry out the commands of the insane Napoleon caged inside his skull.

  My God, can this be the end of Rico?

  He would not have believed he had so many death-bed cliches inside him. It seemed that his mind was turning inward, eating itself in its last fevered seconds.

  One. More. Thing.

  He fell over Holloway’s sprawled body and lay there, suddenly sleepy. A nap. Yes. Just the ticket. Too hard to get up. Otto, humming. Singing the birthday boy to sleep. Shhh, shhh, shhh. The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.

  He lifted his head—tremendous effort, his head was steel, pig iron, lead—and stared at the twin controls going through their dance. Beyond him, in the plexiglass windows, Harding.

  Too far.

  He’s under the haystack, fast asleep.

  …Minus 004 and COUNTING…

  The radio was squawking worriedly: “Come in, C-one-niner-eight-four. You’re too low. Acknowledge. Acknowledge. Shall we assume Guidance control? Acknowledge. Acknowledge Ack—”

  “Eat it,” Richards whispered.

  He began to crawl toward the dipping, swaying controls. In and out went the pedals. Twitch-twitch went the wheels. He screamed as new agony flared. A loop of his intestines had caught under Holloway’s chin. He crawled back. Freed them. Started to crawl again.

  His arms went slack and for a moment he floated, weightless, with his nose in the soft, deep-pile carpet. He pushed himself up and began to crawl again.

  Getting up and into Holloway’s seat was Everest.

  …Minus 003 and COUNTING…

  There it was. Huge, bulking square and tall into the night, silhouetted black above everything else. Moonlight had turned it alabaster.

  He tweaked the wheel just a little. The floor fell away to the left. He lurched in Holloway’s seat and almost fell out. He turned the wheel back, overcorrected again, and the floor fell away to the right. The horizon was tilting crazily.

  Now the pedals. Yes. Better.

  He pushed the wheel in gingerly. A dial in front of his eyes moved from 2000 to 1500 in the wink of an eye. He eased the wheel back. He had very little sight left. His right eye was almost completely gone. Strange that they should go one at a time.

  He pushed the wheel in again. Now it seemed that the plane was floating, weightless. The dial slipped from 1500 to 1200 to 900. He pulled it back out.

  “C-one-niner-eight-four.” The voice was very alarmed now. “What’s wrong? Acknowledge!”

  “Speak, boy,” Richards croaked. “Rowf! Rowf!”

  …Minus 002 and COUNTING…

  The big plane cruised through the night like a sliver of ice and now Co-Op City was spread out below like a giant broken carton.

  He was coming at it, coming at the Games Building.

  …Minus 001 and COUNTING…

  Now the jet cruised across the canal, seemingly held up by the hand of God, giant, roaring. A Push freak in a doorway stared up and thought he was seeing a hallucination, the last dope dream, come to take him away, perhaps to General Atomics heaven where all the food was free and all the piles were clean breeders.

  The sound of its engine
s drove people into doorways, their faces craning upwards like pale flames. Glass show-windows jingled and fell inward. Gutter litter was sucked down bowling-alley streets in dervishes. A cop dropped his move-along and wrapped his hands around his head and screamed and could not hear himself.

  The plane was still dropping and now it moved over rooftops like a cruising silver bat; the starboard wingtip missed the side of the Glamour Column Store by a bare twelve feet.

  All over Harding, Free-Vees went white with interference and people stared at them with stupid, fearful incredulity.

  The thunder filled the world.

  Killian looked up from his desk and stared into the wall-to-wall window that formed one entire side of the room.

  The twinkling vista of the city, from South City to Crescent, was gone. The entire window was filled with an on-coming Lockheed TriStar jet. Its running lights blinked on and off, and for just a moment, an insane moment of total surprise and horror and disbelief, he could see Richards staring out at him. His face smeared with blood, his black eyes burning like the eyes of a demon.

  Richards was grinning.

  And giving him the finger.

  “—Jesus—” was all Killian had time to get out.

  …Minus 000 and COUNTING…

  Heeling over slightly, the Lockheed struck the Games Building dead on, three quarters of the way up. Its tanks were still better than a quarter full. Its speed was slightly over five hundred miles an hour.

  The explosion was tremendous, lighting up the night like the wrath of God, and it rained fire twenty blocks away.