by Stephen King
Richards helped him. He pushed and heaved and his hands slipped and squelched in Elton’s blood. The front seat was an abbatoir. And Elton (who would have thought anyone could have so much blood in him?) continued to bleed.
Then he was wedged behind the wheel and the air car was rising jaggedly, turning. The brake lights blinked on and off, on and off, and the car bunted at trees lightly before Elton found the road out.
Richards thought he would hear the crash, but there was none. The erratic thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of the air cylinders grew fainter, beating in the deadly one-cylinder-flat rhythm that would burn out the others in an hour or so. The sound faded. Then there was no sound at all but the faraway buzz of a plane. Richards realized belatedly that he had left the crutches he had purchased for disguise purposes in the back of the car.
The constellations whirled indifferently overhead.
He could see his breath in small, frozen puffs; it was colder tonight.
He turned from the road and plunged into the jungle of the construction site.
…Minus 047 and COUNTING…
He spied a pile of cast-off insulation lying in the bottom of a cellar hole and climbed down, using the protruding core rods for handholds. He found a stick and pounded the insulation to scare out the rats. He was rewarded with nothing but a thick, fibrous dust that made him sneeze and yelp with the pain-burst in his badly used nose. No rats. All the rats were in the city. He uttered a harsh bray of laughter that sounded jagged and splintered in the big dark.
He wrapped himself in strips of the insulation until he looked like a human igloo—but it was warm. He leaned back against the wall and fell into a half-doze.
When he roused fully, a late moon, no more than a cold scrap of light, hung over the eastern horizon. He was still alone. There were no sirens. It might have been three o’clock.
His arm throbbed uneasily, but the flow of blood had stopped on its own; he saw this after pulling the arm out of the insulation and brushing the fibers gently away from the clot. The Sten gun bullet had apparently ripped a fairly large triangular hunk of meat from the side of his arm just above the elbow. He supposed he was lucky that the bullet hadn’t smashed the bone. But his ankle throbbed with a steady, deep ache. The foot itself felt strange and ethereal, barely attached. He supposed the break should be splinted.
Supposing, he dozed again.
When he woke, his head was clearer. The moon had risen halfway up in the sky, but there was still no sign of dawn, true or false. He was forgetting something—
It came to him in a nasty, jolting realization.
He had to mail two tape clips before noon, if they were to get to the Games Building by the six-thirty air time. That meant traveling or defaulting the money.
But Bradley was on the run, or captured.
And Elton Parrakis had never given him the Cleveland name.
And his ankle was broken.
Something large (a deer? weren’t they extinct in the east?) suddenly crashed through the underbrush off to his right, making him jump. Insulation slid off him like snakes, and he pulled it back around himself miserably, snuffling through his broken nose.
He was a city-dweller sitting in a deserted Development gone back to the wild in the middle of nowhere. The night suddenly seemed alive and malevolent, frightening of its own self, full of crazed bumps and creaks.
Richards breathed through his mouth, considering his options and their consequences.
1. Do nothing. Just sit here and wait for things to cool off. Consequence: The money he was piling up, a hundred dollars an hour, would be cut off at six tonight. He would be running for free, but the hunt wouldn’t stop, not even if he managed to avoid them for the whole thirty days. The hunt would continue until he was carried off on a board.
2. Mail the clips to Boston. It couldn’t hurt Bradley or the family, because their cover was already blown. Consequences: (1) The tapes would undoubtedly be sent to Harding by the Hunters watching Bradley’s mail, but (2) they would still be able to trace him directly to wherever he mailed the tapes from, with no intervening Boston postmark.
3. Mail the tapes directly to the Games Building in Harding. Consequences: The hunt would go on, but he would probably be recognized in any town big enough to command a mailbox.
They were all lousy choices.
Thank you, Mrs. Parrakis. Thank you.
He got up, brushing the insulation away, and tossed the useless head bandage on top of it. As an afterthought, he buried it in the insulation.
He began hunting around for something to use as a crutch (the irony of leaving the real crutches in the car struck him again), and when he found a board that reached approximately to armpit height, he threw it over the lip of the cellar foundation and began to climb laboriously back up the core rods.
When he got to the top, sweating and shivering simultaneously, he realized that he could see his hands. The first faint gray light of dawn had begun to probe the darkness. He looked longingly at the deserted Development, thinking: It would have made such a fine hiding place—
No good. He wasn’t supposed to be a hiding man; he was a running man. Wasn’t that what kept the ratings up?
A cloudy, cataractlike ground mist was creeping slowly through the denuded trees. Richards paused to get his directions and then struck off toward the woods that bordered the abandoned Super Mall on the north.
He paused only once to wrap his coat around the top of his crutch and then continued.
…Minus 046 and COUNTING…
It had been full daylight for two hours and Richards had almost convinced himself he was going around in large circles when he heard, through the rank brambles and ground bushes up ahead, the whine of air cars.
He pushed on cautiously and then peered out on a two-lane macadam highway. Cars rushed to and fro with fair regularity. About a half a mile up, Richards could make out a cluster of houses and what was either an air station or an old general store with pumps in front.
He pushed on, paralleling the highway, falling over occasionally. His face and hands were a needlepoint of blood from briars and brambles, and his clothes were studded with brown sticker-balls. He had given up trying to brush them away. Burst milkweed pods floated lightly from both shoulders, making him look as if he had been in a pillow fight. He was wet from top to toe; he had made it through the first two brooks, but in the third his “crutch” had slipped on the treacherous bottom and he had fallen headlong. The camera of course was undamaged. It was waterproof and shockproof. Of course.
The bushes and trees were thinning. Richards got down on his hands and knees and crawled. When he had gone as far as he thought he safely could, he studied the situation.
He was on a slight rise of land, a peninsula of the scrubby second-growth weeds he had been walking through. Below him was the highway, a number of ranch-type houses, and a store with air pumps. A car was in there now, being attended to while the driver, a man in a suede windbreaker, chatted with the air jockey. Beside the store, along with three or four gumball machines and a Maryjane vendor, stood a blue and red mailbox. It was only two hundred yards away. Looking at it, Richards realized bitterly that if he had arrived before first light he could have probably done his business unseen.
Well, spilt milk and all that. The best laid plans of mice and men.
He withdrew until he could set up his camera and do his taping without being seen.
“Hello, all you wonderful people out there in Free-Vee land,” he began. “This is jovial Ben Richards, taking you on my annual nature hike. If you look closely you may see the fearless scarlet tanager or a great speckled cowbird. Perhaps even a yellow-bellied pig bird or two.” He paused. “They may let that part through, but not the rest. If you’re deaf and read lips, remember what I’m saying. Tell a neighbor or a friend. Spread the word. The Network is poisoning the air you breathe and denying you cheap protection because—”
He recorded both tapes and put them in his pants pocket. Okay. What
next? The only possible way to do it was to go down with the gun drawn, deposit the tapes, and run. He could steal a car. It wasn’t as if they weren’t going to know where he was anyway.
Randomly, he wondered how far Parrakis had gotten before they cut him down. He had the gun out and in his fist when he heard the voice, startlingly close, seemingly in his left ear: “Come on, Rolf!”
There was a sudden volley of barks that made Richards jump violently and he had just time to think: Police dogs, Christ, they’ve got police dogs, when something huge and black broke cover and arrowed at him.
The gun was knocked into the brush and Richards was on his back. The dog was on top of him, a big German shepherd with a generous streak of mongrel, lapping his face and drooling on his shirt. His tail flagged back and forth in vigorous semaphores of joy.
“Rolf! Hey Rolf! Rol—oh Gawd!” Richards caught an obscured glimpse of running legs in blue jeans, and then a small boy was dragging the dog away. “Jeez, I’m sorry, mister. Jeez, he don’t bite, he’s too dumb to bite, he’s just friendly, he ain’t…Gawd, ain’t you a mess! You get lost?”
The boy was holding Rolf by the collar and staring at Richards with frank interest. He was a good-looking boy, well made, perhaps eleven, and there was none of the pale and patched inner city look on his face. There was something suspicious and alien in his features, yet familiar also. After a moment Richards placed it. It was innocence.
“Yes,” he said dryly. “I got lost.”
“Gee, you sure must have fallen around some.”
“That I did, pal. You want to take a close look at my face and see if it’s scratched up very badly? I can’t see it, you know.”
The boy leaned forward obediently and scanned Richards’s face. No sign of recognition flickered there. Richards was satisfied.
“It’s all burr-caught,” the boy said (there was a delicate New England twang in his voice; not exactly Down East, but lightly springy, sardonic), “but you’ll live.” His brow furrowed. “You escaped from Thomaston? I know you ain’t from Pineland cause you don’t look like a retard.”
“I’m not escaped from anywhere,” Richards said, wondering if that was a lie or the truth. “I was hitchhiking. Bad habit, pal. You never do it, do you?”
“No way,” the boy said earnestly. “There’s crazy dudes running the roads these days. That’s what my dad says.”
“He’s right,” Richards said. “But I just had to get to…uh…” He snapped his fingers in a pantomime of it-just-slipped-my-mind. “You know, jetport.”
“You must mean Voigt Field.”
“That’s it.”
“Jeez, that’s over a hundred miles from here, mister. In Derry.”
“I know,” Richards said ruefully, and ran a hand over Rolf’s fur. The dog rolled over obligingly and played dead. Richards fought an urge to utter a morbid chuckle. “I picked up a ride at the New Hampshire border with these three maggots. Real tough guys. They beat me up, stole my wallet and dumped me at some deserted shopping center—”
“Yeah, I know that place. Cripes, you wanna come down to the house and have some breakfast?”
“I’d like to, bucko, but time’s wasting. I have to get to that jetport by tonight.”
“You going to hitch another lift?” The boy’s eyes were round.
“Got to.” Richards started to get up, then settled back as if a great idea had struck him. “Listen, do me a favor?”
“I guess so,” the boy said cautiously.
Richards took out the two exposed tape-clips. “These are chargeplate cash vouchers,” he said glibly. “If you drop them in a mailbox for me, my company will have a lump of cash waiting for me in Derry. Then I’ll be on my merry way.”
“Even without an address?”
“These go direct,” Richards said.
“Sure. Okay. There’s a mailbox down at Jarrold’s Store.” He got up, his inexperienced face unable to disguise the fact that he thought Richards was lying in his teeth. “Come on, Rolf.”
He let the boy get fifteen feet and then said: “No. Come here again.”
The boy turned and came back with his feet dragging. There was dread on his face. Of course, there were enough holes in Richards’s story to drive a truck through.
“I’ve got to tell you everything, I guess,” Richards said. “I was telling you the truth about most of it, pal. But I didn’t want to risk the chance that you might blab.”
The morning October sun was wonderfully warm on his back and neck and he wished he could stay on the hill all day, and sleep sweetly in fall’s fugitive warmth. He pulled the gun from where it had fallen and let it lie loosely on the grass. The boy’s eyes went wide.
“Government,” Richards said quietly.
“Jee-zus!” The boy whispered. Rolf sat beside him, his pink tongue lolling rakishly from the side of his mouth.
“I’m after some pretty hard guys, kid. You can see that they worked me over pretty well. Those clips you got there have got to get through.”
“I’ll mail em,” the boy said breathlessly. “Jeez, wait’ll I tell—”
“Nobody,” Richards said. “Tell nobody for twenty-four hours. There might be reprisals,” he added ominously. “So until tomorrow this time, you never saw me. Understand?”
“Yeah! Sure!”
“Then get on it. And thanks, pal.” He held out his hand and the boy shook it awefully.
Richards watched them trot down the hill, a boy in a red plaid shirt with his dog crashing joyfully through the goldenrod beside him. Why can’t my Cathy have something like that?
His face twisted into a terrifying and wholly unconscious grimace of rage and hate, and he might have cursed God Himself if a better target had not interposed itself on the dark screen of his mind: the Games Federation. And behind that, like the shadow of a darker god, the Network.
He watched until he saw the boy, made tiny with distance, drop the tapes into the mailbox.
Then he got up stiffly, propping his crutch under him, and crashed back into the brush, angling toward the road.
The jetport, then. And maybe someone else would pay some dues before it was all over.
…Minus 045 and COUNTING…
He had seen an intersection a mile back and Richards left the woods there, making his way awkwardly down the gravel bank between the woods and the road.
He sat there like a man who has given up trying to hook a ride and has decided to enjoy the warm autumn sun instead. He let the first two cars go by; both of them held two men, and he figured the odds were too high.
But when the third one approached the stop sign, he got up. The closing-in feeling was back. This whole area had to be hot, no matter how far Parrakis had gotten. The next car could be police, and that would be the ballgame.
It was a woman in the car, and she was alone. She would not look at him; hitchhikers were distasteful and thus to be ignored. He ripped the passenger door open and was in even as the car was accelerating again. He was picked up and thrown sideways, one hand holding desperately onto the doorjamb, his good foot dragging.
The thumping hiss of brakes; the air car swerved wildly. “What—who—you can’t—”
Richards pointed the gun at her, knowing he must look grotesque close up, like a man who had been run through a meat grinder. The fierce image would work for him. He dragged his foot in and slammed the door, gun never swerving. She was dressed for town, and wore blue wraparound sunglasses. Good looking from what he could see.
“Wheel it,” Richards said.
She did the predictable; slammed both feet on the brake and screamed. Richards was thrown forward, his bad ankle scraping excruciatingly. The air car juddered to a stop on the shoulder, fifty feet beyond the intersection.
“You’re that…you’re…R-R-R—”
“Ben Richards. Take your hands off the wheel. Put them in your lap.”
She did it, shuddering convulsively. She would not look at him. Afraid, Richards supposed, that she w
ould be turned to stone.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“A-Amelia Williams. Don’t shoot me. Don’t kill me, I…I…you can have my money only for God’s sake don’t kill meeeeeeee—”
“Shhhhh,” Richards said soothingly. “Shhhhh, shhhhhh.” When she had quieted a little he said: “I won’t try to change your mind about me, Mrs. Williams. Is it Mrs.?”
“Yes,” she said automatically.
“But I have no intention of harming you. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” she said, suddenly eager. “You want the car. They got your friend and now you need a car. You can take it—it’s insured—I won’t even tell. I swear I won’t. I’ll say someone stole it in the parking lot—”
“We’ll talk about it,” Richards said. “Begin to drive. Go up Route 1 and we’ll talk about it. Are there roadblocks?”
“N—yes. Hundreds of them. They’ll catch you.”
“Don’t lie, Mrs. Williams. Okay?”
She began to drive, erratically at first, then more smoothly. The motion seemed to soothe her. Richards repeated his question about roadblocks.
“Around Lewiston,” she said with frightened unhappiness. “That’s where they got that other mag—fellow.”
“How far is that?”
“Thirty miles or more.”
Parrakis had gotten farther than Richards would have dreamed.
“Will you rape me?” Amelia Williams asked so suddenly that Richards almost barked with laughter.
“No,” he said; then, matter-of-factly: “I’m married.”
“I saw her,” she said with a kind of smirking doubtfulness that made Richards want to smash her. Eat garbage, bitch. Kill a rat that was hiding in the breadbox, kill it with a whiskbroom and then see how you talk about my wife.