by Stephen King
…Minus 075 and COUNTING…
When he woke up it was just after 4 P.M.—the hunt was on, then. Had been for three hours, figuring for the time difference. The thought sent a chill through his middle.
He put a new tape in the camera, took down the Gideon Bible, and read the Ten Commandments over and over for ten minutes with the pillow slip on his head.
There were envelopes in the desk drawer, but the name and address of the hotel was on them. He hesitated, and knew it made no difference. He would have to take Killian’s word that his location, as revealed by postmarks or return addresses, would not be revealed to McCone and his bird dogs by the Games Authority. He had to use the postal service. They had supplied him with no carrier pigeons.
There was a mail drop by the elevators, and Richards dropped the clips into the out-of-town slot with huge misgivings. Although postal authorities were not eligible for any Games money for reporting the whereabouts of contestants, it still seemed like a horribly risky thing to do. But the only other thing was default, and he couldn’t do that, either.
He went back to his room, shut off the shower (the bathroom was as steamy as a tropical jungle), and lay down on the bed to think.
How to run? What was the best thing to do?
He tried to put himself in the place of an average contestant. The first impulse, of course, was pure animal instinct: Go to earth. Make a den and cower in there.
And so he had done. The Brant Hotel.
Would the Hunters expect that? Yes. They would not be looking for a running man at all. They would be looking for a hiding man.
Could they find him in his den?
He wanted very badly to answer no, but he could not. His disguise was good, but hastily put together. Not many people are observant, but there are always some. Perhaps he had been tabbed already. The desk clerk. The bellboy who had brought his breakfast. Perhaps even by one of the faceless men in the perverto show on Forty-second Street.
Not likely, but possible.
And what about his real protection, the false I.D. Molie had provided? Good for how long? Well, the taxi driver who had taken him from the Games Building could put him in South City. And the Hunters were fearfully, dreadfully good. They would be leaning hard on everyone he knew, from Jack Crager to that bitch Eileen Jenner down the hall. Heavy heat. How long until somebody, maybe a head-softie like Flapper Donnigan, let it slip that had forged papers on occasion? And if they found Molie, he was blown. The pawnbroker would hold out long enough to take a belting around; he was canny enough to want a few visible battle scars to sport around the neighborhood. Just so his place didn’t have a bad case of spontaneous combustion some night. Then? A simple check of Harding’s three jetports would uncover John G. Springer’s midnight jaunt to Freak City.
If they found Molie.
You assume they will. You have to assume they will.
Then run. Where?
He didn’t know. He had spent his entire life in Harding. In the Midwest. He didn’t know the East Coast; there was no place here he could run to and feel that he was on familiar turf. So where? Where?
His teased and unhappy mind drifted into a morbid daydream. They had found Molie with no trouble at all. Pried the Springer name out of him in an easy five minutes, after pulling two fingernails, filling his navel with lighter fluid and threatening to strike a match. They had gotten Richards’s flight number with one quick call (handsome, nondescript men in garbardine coats of identical cut and make) and had arrived in New York by 2:30 E.S.T. Advance men had already gotten the address of the Brant by a telex canvass of the New York City hotel-listings, which were computer tabulated day by day. They were outside now, surrounding the place. Busboys and bellboys and clerks and bartenders had been replaced by Hunters. Half a dozen coming up the fire escape. Another fifty packing all three elevators. More and more, pulling up in air cars all around the building. Now they were in the hall, and in a moment the door would crash open and they would lunge in, a tape machine grinding enthusiastically away on a rolling tripod above their muscular shoulders, getting it all down for posterity as they turned him into hamburger.
Richards sat up, sweating. Didn’t even have a gun, not yet.
Run. Fast.
Boston would do, to start.
…Minus 074 and COUNTING…
He left his room at 5:00 P.M. and went down to the lobby. The desk clerk smiled brightly, probably looking forward to his evening relief.
“Afternoon, Mr., uh—”
“Springer.” Richards smiled back. “I seem to have struck oil, my man. Three clients who seem…receptive. I’ll be occupying your excellent facility for an additional two days. May I pay in advance?”
“Certainly, sir.”
Dollars changed hands. Still beaming, Richards went back up to his room. The hall was empty. Richards hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob and went quickly to the fire stairs.
Luck was with him and he met no one. He went all the way to the ground floor and slipped out the side entrance unobserved.
The rain had stopped, but the clouds still hung and lowered over Manhattan. The air smelled like a rancid battery. Richards walked briskly, discarding the limp, to the Port Authority Electric Bus terminal. A man could still buy a ticket on a Greyhound without signing his name.
“Boston,” he said to the bearded ticket-vendor.
“Twenty-three bucks, pal. Bus pulls out at six-fifteen sharp.”
He passed over the money; it left him with something less than three thousand New Dollars. He had an hour to kill, and the terminal was chock-full of people, many of them Vol-Army, with their blue berets and blank, boyish, brutal faces. He bought a Pervert Mag, sat down, and propped it in front of his face. For the next hour he stared at it, turning a page occasionally to try and avoid looking like a statue.
When the bus rolled up to the pier, he shuffled toward the open doors with the rest of the nondescript assortment.
“Hey! Hey, you!”
Richards stared around; a security cop was approaching on the run. He froze, unable to take flight. A distant part of his brain was screaming that he was about to be cut down right here, right here in this shitty bus terminal with wads of gum on the floor and casual obscenities scrawled on the dirt-caked walls; he was going to be some dumb flatfoot’s fluke trophy.
“Stop him! Stop that guy!”
The cop was veering. It wasn’t him at all. Richards saw. It was a scruffy-looking kid who was running for the stairs, swinging a lady’s purse in one hand and bowling bystanders this way and that like tenpins.
He and his pursuer disappeared from sight, taking the stairs three by three in huge leaps. The knot of embarkers, debarkers, and greeters watched them with vague interest for a moment and then picked up the threads of what they had been doing, as if nothing had happened.
Richards stood in line, trembling and cold.
He collapsed into a seat near the back of the coach, and a few minutes later the bus hummed smoothly up the ramp, paused, and joined the flow of traffic. The cop and his quarry had disappeared into the general mob of humanity.
If I’d had a gun. I would have burned him where he stood, Richards thought. Christ. Oh, Christ.
And on the heels of that: Next time it won’t be a purse snatcher. It’ll be you.
He would get a gun in Boston anyway. Somehow.
He remembered Laughlin saying that he would push a few of them out a high window before they took him.
The bus rolled north in the gathering darkness.
…Minus 073 and COUNTING…
The Boston Y.M.C.A. stood on upper Huntington Avenue. It was huge, black with years, old-fashioned, and boxy. It stood in what used to be one of Boston’s better areas in the middle of the last century. It stood there like a guilty reminder of another time, another day, its old-fashioned neon still winking its letters toward the sinful theater district. It looked like the skeleton of a murdered idea.
When Richards walked into t
he lobby, the desk clerk was arguing with a tiny, scruffly black boy in a killball jersey so big that it reached down over his blue jeans to midshin. The disputed territory seemed to be a gum machine that stood inside the lobby door.
“I loss my nickel, honky. I loss my muh-fuhn nickel!”
“If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the house detective, kid. That’s all. I’m done talking to you.”
“But that goddam machine took my nickel!”
“You stop swearing at me, you little scumbag!” The clerk, who looked an old, cold thirty, reached down and shook the jersey. It was too huge for him to be able to shake the boy inside, too. “Now get out of here. I’m through talking.”
Seeing he meant it, the almost comic mask of hate and defiance below the dark sunburst of the kid’s afro broke into a hurt, agonized grimace of disbelief. “Lissen, thass the oney muh-fuhn nickel I got. That gumball machine ate my nickel! That—”
“I’m calling the house dick right now.” The clerk turned toward the switchboard. His jacket, a refugee from some bargain counter, flapped tiredly around his thin butt.
The boy kicked the plaxteel post of the gum machine, then ran. “Muh-fuhn white honky sum bitch!”
The clerk looked after him, the security button, real or mythical unpressed. He smiled at Richards, showing an old keyboard with a few missing keys. “You can’t talk to niggers anymore. I’d keep them in cages if I ran the Network.”
“He really lose a nickel?” Richards asked, signing the register as John Deegan from Michigan.
“If he did, he stole it,” the clerk said. “Oh, I suppose he did. But if I gave him a nickel, I’d have two hundred pickaninnies in here by nightfall claiming the same thing. Where do they learn that language? That’s what I want to know. Don’t their folks care what they do? How long will you be staying, Mr. Deegan?”
“I don’t know. I’m in town on business.” He tried on a greasy smile, and when it felt right, he widened it. The desk clerk recognized it instantly (perhaps from his own reflection looking up at him from the depths of the fake-marble counter, which had been polished by a million elbows) and gave it back to him.
“That’s $15.50, Mr. Deegan.” He pushed a key attached to a worn wooden tongue across the counter to Richards. “Room 512.”
“Thank you.” Richards paid cash. Again, no I.D. Thank God for the Y.M.C.A.
He crossed to the elevators and looked down the corridor to the Christian Lending Library on the left. It was dimly lit with flyspecked yellow globes, and an old man wearing an overcoat and galoshes was perusing a tract, turning the pages slowly and methodically with a trembling, wetted finger. Richards could hear the clogged whistle of his breathing from where he was by the elevators, and felt a mixture of sorrow and horror.
The elevator clunked to a stop, and the doors opened with wheezy reluctance. As he stepped in, the clerk said loudly: “It’s a sin and a shame. I’d put them all in cages.”
Richards glanced up, thinking the clerk was speaking to him, but the clerk was not looking at anything.
The lobby was very empty and very silent.
…Minus 072 and COUNTING…
The fifth floor hall stank of pee.
The corridor was narrow enough to make Richards feel claustrophobic, and the carpet, which might have been red, had worn away in the middle to random strings. The doors were industrial gray, and several of them showed the marks of fresh kicks, smashes, or attempts to jimmy. Signs at every twenty paces advised that there would be NO SMOKING IN THIS HALL BY ORDER OF FIRE MARSHAL. There was a communal bathroom in the center, and the urine stench became suddenly sharp. It was a smell Richards associated automatically with despair. People moved restlessly behind the gray doors like animals in cages—animals too awful, too frightening, to be seen. Someone was chanting what might have been the Hail Mary over and over in a drunken voice. Strange gobbling noises came from behind another door. A country-western tune from behind another (“I ain’t got a buck for the phone and I’m so alone…”). Shuffling noises. The solitary squeak of bedsprings that might mean a man in his own hand. Sobbing. Laughter. The hysterical grunts of a drunken argument. And from behind these, silence. And silence. A man with a hideously sunken chest walked past Richards without looking at him, carrying a bar of soap and a towel in one hand, wearing gray pajama bottoms tied with string. He wore paper slippers on his feet.
Richards unlocked his room and stepped in. There was a police bar on the inside, and he used it. There was a bed with almost-white sheets and an Army surplus blanket. There was a bureau from which the second drawer was missing. There was a picture of Jesus on one wall. There was a steel rod with two coathangers kitty-cornered in the right angle of two walls. There was nothing else but the window, which looked out on blackness. It was 10:15.
Richards hung up his jacket, slipped off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. His lips began to tremble, and then he cried a little.
He didn’t put it on tape. He lay looking at the ceiling, which was cracked into a million crazy scrawls, like a bad potter’s-glaze. They had been after him for over eight hours now. He had earned eight hundred dollars of his stake money. Christ, not even out of the hole yet.
And he’d missed himself on Free-Vee. Christ, yes. The bag-over-the-head spectacular.
Where were they? Still in Harding? New York? Or on their way to Boston? No, they couldn’t be on their way here, could they? The bus had not passed through any road-blocks. He had left the biggest city in the world anonymously, and he was here under an assumed name. They couldn’t be onto him. No way.
The Boston Y might be safe for as long as two days. After that he could move north toward New Hampshire and Vermont, or south toward Hartford or Philadelphia or even Atlanta. Further east was the ocean, and beyond it was Britain and Europe. It was an intriguing idea, but probably out of reach. Passage by plane required I.D., what with France under martial law, and while stowing-away might be possible, discovery would mean a quick and final end to the whole thing. And west was out. West was where the heat was the hottest.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Who had said that? Molie would know. He snickered a little and felt better.
The disembodied sound of a radio came to his ears.
It would be good to get the gun now, tonight, but he was too tired. The ride had tired him. Being a fugitive tired him. And he knew in an animal way that went deeper than the rational that very soon he might be sleeping in an October-cold culvert or in a weed-and cinder-choked gully.
The gun tomorrow night.
He turned off the light and went to bed.
…Minus 071 and COUNTING…
It was showtime again.
Richards stood with his buttocks toward the video recorder, humming the theme music to The Running Man. A Y.M.C.A. pillowslip was over his head, turned inside out so the name stamped on its hem wouldn’t show.
The camera had inspired Richards to a kind of creative humor that he never would have believed he possessed. The self-image he’d always held was that of a rather dour man, with little or no humor in his outlook. The prospect of his approaching death had uncovered a solitary comedian hiding inside.
When the clip popped out, he decided to save the second for afternoon. The solitary room was boring, and perhaps something else would occur to him.
He dressed slowly and then went to the window and looked out.
Thursday morning traffic hustled busily up and down Huntington Avenue. Both sidewalks were crowded with slowly moving pedestrians. Some of them were scanning bright-yellow Help-Wanted Fax. Most of them just walked. There was a cop, it seemed, on every corner. Richards could hear them in his mind: Move along. Ain’t you got someplace to go? Pick it up, maggot.
So you moved on to th
e next corner, which was just like the last corner, and were moved along again. You could try to get mad about it, but mostly your feet hurt too much.
Richards debated the risk of going down the hall and showering. He finally decided it would be okay. He went down with a towel over his shoulder, met no one, and walked into the bathroom.
Essence of urine, shit, puke, and disinfectant mingled. All the crapper doors had been yanked off, of course. Someone had scrawled FUK THE NETWORK in foot-high letters above the urinal. It looked as though he might have been angry when he did it. There was a pile of feces in one of the urinals. Someone must have been really drunk, Richards thought. A few sluggish autumn flies were crawling over it. He was not disgusted; the sight was too common; but he was matter-of-factly glad he had worn his shoes.
He also had the shower room to himself. The floor was cracked porcelain, the walls gouged tile with thick runnels of decay near the bottoms. He turned on a rust-clogged showerhead, full hot, and waited patiently for five minutes until the water ran tepid, and then showered quickly. He used a scrap of soap he found on the floor, the Y had either neglected to supply it or the chambermaid had walked off with his.
On his way back to his room, a man with a harelip gave him a tract.
Richards tucked his shirt in, sat on his bed, and lit a cigarette. He was hungry but would wait until dusk to go out and eat.
Boredom drove him to the window again. He counted different makes of cars—Fords, Chevies, Wints, VW’s, Plymouths, Studebakers, Rambler-Supremes. First one to a hundred wins. A dull game, but better than no game.
Further up Huntington Avenue was Northeastern University, and directly across the street from the Y was a large automated bookshop. While he counted cars, Richards watched the students come and go. They were in sharp contrast to the Wanted-Fax idlers; their hair was shorter, and they all seemed to be wearing tartan jumpers, which were this year’s kampus kraze. They walked through the milling ruck and inside to make their purchases with an air of uncomfortable patronization and hail-fellow that left a curdled amusement in Richards’s mouth. The five-minute spaces in front of the store filled and emptied with sporty, flashy cars, often of exotic make. Most of them had college decals in the back windows: Northeastern, M.I.T., Boston College, Harvard. Most of the news-fax bums treated the sporty cars as part of the scenery, but a few looked at them with dumb and wretched longing.