The Running Man

by Stephen King

  Following were tapes of Laughlin’s riddled, sagging body being carried out of the shed, which had been reduced to matchwood by concentrated fire. There were mingled cheers, boos, and hisses from the studio audience.

  Richards turned away sickly, nauseated. Thin, invisible fingers seemed to press against his temples.

  From a distance, the words rolled on. The body was being displayed in the rotunda of the Kansas statehouse. Already long lines of citizens were filing past the body. An interviewed policeman who had been in at the kill said Laughlin hadn’t put up much of a fight.

  Ah, how nice for you, Richards thought, remembering Laughlin, his sour voice, the straight-ahead, jeering look in his eyes.

  A friend of mine from the car pool.

  Now there was only one big show. The big show was Ben Richards. He didn’t want any more of his Meatloaf Supreme.

  …Minus 054 and COUNTING…

  He had a very bad dream that night, which was unusual. The old Ben Richards had never dreamed.

  What was even more peculiar was the fact that he did not exist as a character in the dream. He only watched, invisible.

  The room was vague, dimming off to blackness at the edges of vision. It seemed that water was dripping dankly. Richards had an impression of being deep underground.

  In the center of the room, Bradley was sitting in a straight wooden chair with leather straps over his arms and legs. His head had been shaved like that of a penitent. Surrounding him were figures in black hoods. The Hunters, Richards thought with budding dread. Oh dear God, these are the Hunters.

  “I ain’t the man,” Bradley said.

  “Yes you are, little brother,” one of the hooded figures said gently, and pushed a pin through Bradley’s cheek. Bradley screamed.

  “Are you the man?”

  “Suck it.”

  A pin slid easily into Bradley’s eyeball and was withdrawn dribbling colorless fluid. Bradley’s eye took on a punched, flattened look.

  “Are you the man?”

  “Poke it up your ass.”

  An electric move-along touched Bradley’s neck. He screamed again, and his hair stood on end. He looked like a comical caricature black, a futuristic Stepinfetchit.

  “Are you the man, little brother?”

  “Nose filters give you cancer,” Bradley said. “You’re all rotted inside, honkies.”

  His other eyeball was pierced. “Are you the man?”

  Bradley, blind, laughed at them.

  One of the hooded figures gestured, and from the shadows Bobby and Mary Cowles came tripping gaily. They began to skip around Bradley, singing: “‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf?’”

  Bradley began to scream and twist in the chair. He seemed to be trying to hold his hands up in a warding-off gesture. The song grew louder and louder, more echoing. The children were changing. Their heads were elongating, growing dark with blood. Their mouths were open and in the caves within, fangs twinkled like razor-blades.

  “I’ll tell!” Bradley screamed. “I’ll tell! I’ll tell! I ain’t the man! Ben Richards is the man! I’ll tell! God…oh…G-G-God…”

  “Where is the man, little brother?”

  “I’ll tell! I’ll tell! He’s in—”

  But the words were drowned by the singing voices. They were lunging toward Bradley’s straining, corded neck when Richards woke up, sweating.

  …Minus 053 and COUNTING…

  It was no good in Manchester anymore.

  He didn’t know if it was the news of Laughlin’s brutal midwestern end, or the dream, or only a premonition.

  But on Tuesday morning he stayed in, not going to the library. It seemed to him that every minute he stayed in this place was an invitation to quick doom. Looking out the window, he saw a Hunter with a black hood inside every old beaner and slumped taxi driver. Fantasies of gunmen creeping soundlessly up the hall toward his door tormented him. He felt a huge clock was ticking in his head.

  He passed the point of indecision shortly after eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. It was impossible to stay. He knew they knew.

  He got his cane and tapped clumsily to the elevators and went down to the lobby.

  “Going out, Father Grassner?” the day clerk asked with his usual pleasant, contemptuous smile.

  “Day off,” Richards said, speaking at the day clerk’s shoulder. “Is there a picture show in this town?”

  He knew there were at least ten, eight of them showing 3-D perverto shows.

  “Well,” the clerk said cautiously, “there’s the Center. I think they show Disneys—”

  “That will be fine,” Richards said briskly, and bumped into a potted plant on his way out.

  Two blocks from the hotel he went into a drugstore and bought a huge roll of bandage and a pair of cheap aluminum crutches. The clerk put his purchases in a long fiber-board box, and Richards caught a taxi on the next corner.

  The car was exactly where it had been, and if there was a stakeout at the U-Park-It, Richards could not spot it. He got in and started up. He had a bad moment when he realized he lacked a driver’s license in any name that wasn’t hot, and then dismissed it. He didn’t think his new disguise would get him past close scrutiny anyway. If there were roadblocks, he would try to crash them. It would get him killed, but he was going to get killed anyway if they tabbed him.

  He tossed the Ogden Grassner glasses in the glove box and drove out, waving noncommittally at the boy on duty at the gate. The boy barely looked up from the skin magazine he was reading.

  He stopped for a full compressed-air charge on the high-speed urban sprawl on the northern outskirts of the city. The air jockey was in the midst of a volcanic eruption of acne, and seemed pathetically anxious to avoid looking at Richards. So far, so good.

  He switched from 91 to Route 17, and from there to a blacktop road with no name or number. Three miles farther along he pulled onto a rutted dirt turnaround and killed the engine.

  Tilting the rearview mirror to the right angle, he wrapped the bandage around his skull as quickly as he could, holding the end and clipping it. A bird twitted restlessly in a tired-looking elm.

  Not too bad. If he got breathing time in Portland, he could add a neck brace.

  He put the crutches beside him on the seat and started the car. Forty minutes later he was entering the traffic circle at Portsmouth. Headed up Route 95, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled piece of ruled paper that Bradley had left him. He had written on it in the careful script of the self-educated, using a soft lead pencil:

  94 State Street, Portland

  THE BLUE DOOR, GUESTS

  Elton Parrakis (& Virginia Parrakis)

  Richards frowned at it a moment, then glanced up. A black-and-yellow police unit was cruising slowly above the traffic on the turnpike, in tandem with a heavy ground-unit below. They bracketed him for a moment and then were gone, zig-zagging across the six lanes in a graceful ballet. Routine traffic patrol.

  As the miles passed, a queasy, almost reluctant sense of relief formed in his chest. It made him feel like laughing and throwing up at the same time.

  …Minus 052 and COUNTING…

  The drive to Portland was without incident.

  But by the time he reached the edge of the city, driving through the built-up suburbs of Scarborough (rich homes, rich streets, rich private schools surrounded by electrified fences), the sense of relief had begun to fade again. They could be anywhere. They could be all around him. Or they could be nowhere.

  State Street was an area of blasted, ancient brownstones not far from an overgrown, junglelike park—a hangout, Richards thought, for this small city’s muggers, lovers, hypes, and thieves. No one would venture out on State Street after dark without a police dog on a leash, or a score of fellow gang-members.

  Number 94 was a crumbling, soot-encrusted building with ancient green shades pulled down over its windows. To Richards the house looked like a very old man who had
died with cataracts on his eyes.

  He pulled to the curb and got out. The street was dotted with abandoned air cars, some of them rusted down to almost formless hulks. On the edge of the park, a Studebaker lay on its side like a dead dog. This was not police country, obviously. If you left your car unattended, it would gain a clot of leaning, spitting, slate-eyed boys in fifteen minutes. In half an hour some of the leaning boys would have produced crow-bars and wrenches and screwdrivers. They would tap them, compare them, twirl them, have mock swordfights with them. They would hold them up into the air thoughtfully, as if testing the weather or receiving mysterious radio transmission through them. In an hour the car would be a stripped carcass, from aircaps and cylinders to the steering wheel itself.

  A small boy ran up to Richards as he was setting his crutches under himself. Puckered, shiny burn scars had turned one side of the boy’s face into a hairless Frankenstein horror.

  “Scag, mister? Good stuff. Put you on the moon.” He giggled secretly, the lumped and knobbed flesh of his burnt face bobbing and writhing grotesquely.

  “Fuck off,” Richards said briefly.

  The boy tried to kick one of his crutches out from under him, and Richards swung one of them in a low arc, swatting the boy’s bottom. He ran off, cursing.

  He made his way up the pitted stone steps slowly and looked at the door. It had once been blue, but now the paint had faded and peeled to a tired desert sky color. There had once been a doorbell, but some vandal had taken care of that with a cold chisel.

  Richards knocked and waited. Nothing. He knocked again.

  It was late afternoon now, and cold was creeping slowly up the street. Faintly, from the park beyond the end of the block, came the bitter clacking of October branches losing their leaves.

  There was no one here. It was time to go.

  Yet he knocked again, curiously convinced that there was someone in there.

  And this time he was rewarded with the slow shuffling of house slippers. A pause at the door. Then: “Who’s out there? I don’t buy nothin. Go away.”

  “I was told to visit you,” Richards said.

  A peephole swung open with a minute squeak and a brown eye peeked through. Then the peephole closed with a snap.

  “I don’t know you.” Flat dismissal.

  “I was told to ask for Elton Parrakis.”

  Grudgingly: “Oh. You’re one of those—”

  Behind the door locks began to turn, bolts began to be unbolted, one by one. Chains dropped. There was the clock of revolving tumblers in one Yale lock and then another. The chunk-slap of the heavy-duty TrapBolt being withdrawn.

  The door swung open and Richards looked at a scrawny woman with no breasts and huge, knotted hands. Her face was unlined, almost cherubic, but it looked as if it had taken hundreds of invisible hooks and jabs and uppercuts in a no-holds-barred brawl with time itself. Perhaps time was winning, but she was not an easy bleeder. She was almost six feet tall, even in her flat, splayed slippers, and her knees were swollen into treestumps with arthritis. Her hair was wrapped in a bath turban. Her brown eyes, staring at him from under a deep ledge of brow (the eyebrows themselves clung to the precipice like desperate mountain bushes, struggling against the aridity and the altitude), were intelligent and wild with what might have been fear or fury. Later he understood she was simply muddled, afraid, tottering on the edge of insanity.

  “I’m Virginia Parrakis,” she said flatly. “I’m Elton’s mother. Come in.”

  …Minus 051 and COUNTING…

  She did not recognize him until she had led him into the kitchen to brew tea.

  The house was old and crumbling and dark, furnished in a decor he recognized immediately from his own environment: Modern junkshop.

  “Elton isn’t here now,” she said, brooding over the battered aluminum teapot on the gas ring. The light was stronger here, revealing the brown waterstains that blotched the wallpaper, the dead flies, souvenirs of summer past, on the window-sills, the old linoleum creased with black lines, the pile of wet wrapping paper under the leaking drain pipe. There was an odor of disinfectant that made Richards think of last nights in sickrooms.

  She crossed the room, and her swollen fingers made a painful search through the heaped junk on the countertop until they found two tea bags, one of them previously used. Richards got the used one. He was not surprised.

  “He works,” she said, faintly accentuating the first word and making the statement an accusation. “You’re from that fellow in Boston, the one Eltie writes to about pollution, aintcha?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Parrakis.”

  “They met in Boston. My Elton services automatic vending machines.” She preened for a moment and then began her slow trek back across the dunes of linoleum to the stove. “I told Eltie that what that Bradley was doing was against the law. I told him it would mean prison or even worse. He doesn’t listen to me. Not to his old mom, he doesn’t.” She smiled with dark sweetness at this calumny. “Elton was always building things, you know…. He built a treehouse with four rooms out back when he was a boy. That was before they cut the elm down, you know. But it was that darky’s idea that he should build a pollution station in Portland.”

  She popped the bags into cups and stood with her back to Richards, slowly warming her hands over the gas ring. “They write each other. I told him the mails aren’t safe. You’ll go to prison or even worse, I said. He said but Mom, we do it in code. He asks for a dozen apples, I tell him my uncle is a little worse. I said: Eltie, do you think they can’t figure that Secret Spy stuff out? He doesn’t listen. Oh, he used to. I used to be his best friend. But things have changed. Since he got to pooberty, things have changed. Dirty magazines under his bed and all that business. Now this darky. I suppose they caught you testing smogs or carcinogens or something and now you’re on the run.”

  “I—”

  “It don’t matter!” she said fiercely at the window. It looked out on a backyard filled with rusting pieces of junk and tire rims and some little boy’s sandbox that now, many years later, was filled with scruffy October woods.

  “It don’t matter!” she repeated. “It’s the darkies.” She turned to Richards and her eyes were hooded and furious and bewildered. “I’m sixty-five, but I was only a fresh young girl of nineteen when it began to happen. It was nineteen seventy-nine and the darkies were everywhere! Everywhere! Yes they were!” she nearly screamed, as if Richards had taken issue with her. “Everywhere! They sent those darkies to school with the whites. They set em high in the government. Radicals, rabble-rousing, and rebellion. I ain’t so—”

  She broke off as if the words had been splintered from her mouth. She stared at Richards, seeing him for the first time.

  “OhGodhavemercy,” she whispered.

  “Mrs. Parrakis—”

  “Nope!” she said in a fear-hoarsened voice. “Nope! Nope! Oh, nope!” She began advancing on him, pausing at the counter to pick up a long, gleaming butcher knife out of the general clutter. “Out! Out! Out!” He got up and began to back away slowly, first through the short hall between the kitchen and shadowy living room, then through the living room itself.

  He noticed that an ancient pay telephone hung on the wall from the days when this had been a bona fide inn. The Blue Door, Guests. When was that? Richards wondered. Twenty years ago? Forty? Before the darkies had gotten out of hand, or after?

  He was just beginning to back down the hall between the living room and the front door when a key rattled in the lock. They both froze as if some celestial hand had stopped the film while deciding what to do next.

  The door opened, and Elton Parrakis walked in. He was immensely fat, and his lackluster blond hair was combed back in preposterous waves from his forehead to show a round baby face that held an element of perpetual puzzlement. He was wearing the blue and gold uniform of the Vendo-Spendo Company. He looked thoughtfully at Virginia Parrakis.

  “Put that knife down, Mom.”

  “Nope!” she cried
, but already the crumbling of defeat had begun to putty her face.

  Parrakis closed the door and began walking toward her. He jiggled.

  She shrank away. “You have to make him go, son. He’s that badman. That Richards. It’ll mean prison or worse. I don’t want you to go!” She began to wail, dropped the knife, and collapsed into his arms.

  He enfolded her and began to rock her gently as she wept. “I’m not going to jail,” he said. “Come on, Mom, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He smiled at Richards over one of her hunched and shaking shoulders, an embarrassed awfully-sorry-about-this smile. Richards waited.

  “Now,” Parrakis said, when the sobs had died to sniffles. “Mr. Richards is Bradley Throckmorton’s good friend, and he is going to be with us for a couple of days, Mom.”

  She began to shriek, and he clapped a hand over her mouth, wincing as he did so.

  “Yes, Mom. Yes he is. I’m going to drive his car into the park and wire it. And you’ll go out tomorrow morning with a package to mail to Cleveland.”

  “Boston,” Richards said automatically. “The tapes go to Boston.”

  “They go to Cleveland now,” Elton Parrakis said, with a patient smile. “Bradley’s on the run.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “You’ll be on the run, too!” Mrs. Parrakis howled at her son. “And they’ll catch you, too! You’re too fat!”

  “I’m going to take Mr. Richards upstairs and show him his room, Mom.”

  “Mr. Richards? Mr. Richards? Why don’t you call him by his right name? Poison!”

  He disengaged her with great gentleness, and Richards followed him obediently up the shadowy staircase. “There are a great many rooms up here,” he said, panting slightly as his huge buttocks flexed and clenched. “This used to be a rooming house many years ago—when I was a baby. You’ll be able to watch the street.”

  “Maybe I better go,” Richards said. “If Bradley’s blown, your mother may be right.”