by Stephen King
A policeman hit him with a waist-high flying tackle and the man in the plaid shirt crunched to the sidewalk. His movie camera flew into the gutter and a moment later three bullets shattered it into winking pieces. A clockspring of unexposed film unwound lazily from the remains. Then the fire flagged again, uncertainly.
"Fenner, let them set up! " he hollered. His throat felt raw and badly used, like the rest of him. His hand hurt and a deep, throbbing ache had begun to emanate outward from his thigh.
"Come out first! " Fenner yelled back. "We'll let you tell your side of it! "
Rage washed over him in a red wave at this barefaced lie. "GODDAMMIT, I'VE GOTA BIG GUN HERE AND I'LL START SHOOTING AT GAS TANKS YOU SHITBIRD AND THERE'LL BE A FUCKING BARBECUE WHEN I GET DONE! "
Shocked silence.
Then, cautiously, Fenner said: "What do you want?"
"Send that guy you tackled in here! Let the camera crew set up! "
"Absolutely not! We're not giving you a hostage to play games with all day!"
A cop ran over to the listing green sedan bent low and disappeared behind it. There was a consultation.
A new voice yelled: "There's thirty men behind your house, guy! They've got shotguns! Come out or I'll send them in!" Time to play his one ratty trump. "You better not! The whole house is wired with explosive. Look at this!"
He held the red alligator clip up in the window.
"Can you see it?"
"You're bluffing! " the voice called back confidently.
"If I hook this up to the car battery beside me on the floor, everything goes!"
Silence. More consultation.
"Hey!" someone yelled. "Hey, get that guy!" He poked his head up to look and here came the man in the plaid shirt and jeans, right out into the street, no protection, either heroically sure of his own profession or crazy. He had long black hair that fell almost to his collar and a thin dark moustache.
Two cops started to charge around the V-parked cruisers and thought better of it when he put a shot over their heads.
"Jesus Christ what a snafu! " somebody cried out in shrill disgust.
The man in the plaid shirt was on his lawn now, kicking up snow-bursts. Something buzzed by his ear, followed by a report, and he realized he was still looking over the chair. He heard the front door being tried, and then the man in the plaid shirt was hammering on it.
He scrambled across the floor, which was now spotted with grit and plaster that had been knocked out of the walls. His right leg hurt like a bastard and when he looked down he saw his pants leg was bloody from thigh to knee. He turned the lock in the chewed-up door and released the bolt from its catch.
"Okay!" he said, and the man in the plaid shirt burst in.
Up close he didn't look scared although he was panting hard. There was a scrape on his cheek from where the policeman had tackled him, and the left arm of his shirt was ripped. When the man in the plaid shirt was inside he scrambled back into the living room, picked up the rifle, and fired twice blindly over the top of the chair. Then he turned around. The man in the plaid shirt was standing in the doorway, looking incredibly calm. He had taken a large notebook out of his back pocket.
"All right, man," he said. "What shit goes down?"
"What's your name?"
"Dave Albert."
"Has that white van got more film equipment in it?"
"Yes. "
"Go to the window. Tell the police to let a camera crew set up on the Quinns' lawn. That's the house across the street. Tell them if it isn't done in five minutes, you got trouble."
"Do I?"
"Sure."
Albert laughed. "You don't look like you could kill time, fella."
"Tell them."
Albert walked to the shattered living room window and stood framed there for a second, obviously relishing the moment.
"He says for my camera crew to set up across the street! " he yelled. "He say's he's going to kill me if you don't let them!"
"No!" Fenner yelled back furiously. "No, no, n-"
Somebody muzzled him. Silence for a beat.
"All right!" This was the voice that had accused him of bluffing about the explosive. "Will you let two of our men go up and get them?"
He thought it over and nodded at the reporter.
"Yes!" Albert called.
There was a pause, and then two uniformed policemen trotted self-consciously up toward where the news van waited, its engine smugly idling. In the meantime two more cruisers had pulled up, and by leaning far to the right he could see that the downhill end of Crestallen Street West had been blocked off. A large crowd of people was standing behind the yellow crash barriers.
"Okay," Albert said, sitting down. "We got a minute. What do you want? A plane?"
"Plane?" he echoed stupidly.
Albert flapped his arms, still holding his notebook. "Fly away, man. Just FLYYYYY away."
"Oh." He nodded to show that he understood. "No, I don't want a plane."
"Then what do you want?"
"I want," he said carefully, "to be just twenty with a lot of decisions to make over again." He saw the look in Albert's eyes and said, "I know I can't. I'm not that crazy."
"You're shot."
"Yes."
"Is that what you said it is?" He was pointing at the master fuse and the battery.
"Yes. The main fuse goes to all the rooms in the house. Also the garage."
"Where did you get the explosive?" Albert's voice was amiable but his eyes were alert.
"Found it in my Christmas stocking."
He laughed. "Say, that's not bad. I'm going to use that in my story."
"Fine. When you go back out, tell all the policemen that they better move away. "
"Are you going to blow yourself up?" Albert asked. He looked interested, nothing more.
"I am contemplating it. "
"You know what, fellow? You've seen too many movies. "
"I don't go to the movies much anymore. I did see The Exorcist, though. I wish I hadn't. How are your movie guys coming out there?"
Albert peered out the window. "Pretty good. We've got another minute. Your name is Dawes?"
"Did they tell you that?"
Albert laughed contemptuously. "They wouldn't tell me if I had cancer. I read it on the doorbell. Would you mind telling me why you're doing all this?"
"Not at all. It's roadwork."
"The extension?" Albert's eyes glowed brighter. He began to scribble in his book.
"Yes, that's right. "
"They took your house?"
"They tried. I'm going to take it."
Albert wrote it down, then snapped his book closed and stuffed it into his back pocket again. "That's pretty stupid, Mr. Dawes. Do you mind my saying that? Why don't you just come out of here with me?"
"You've got an exclusive," he said tiredly. "What are you trying for, the Pulitzer Prize?"
"I'd take it if they offered it." He smiled brightly and then sobered. "Come on, Mr. Dawes. Come on out. I'll see that your side gets told. I'll see-"
"There is no side."
Albert frowned. "What was that?"
"I have no side. That's why I'm doing this." He peered over the chair and looked into a telephoto lens, mounted on a tripod that was sunk into the snow of the Quinns' lawn. "Go on now. Tell them to go away."
"Are you really going to pull the string?"
"I really don't know."
Albert walked to the living nom door and then turned around. "Do I know you from somewhere? Why do I keep feeling like I know you?"
He shook his head. He thought he had never seen Albert before in his life.
Watching the newsman walk back across his lawn, slightly at an angle so the camera across the street would get his good side, he wondered what Olivia was doing at that precise second.
He waited fifteen minutes. Their fire had intensified, but no one charged at the back of the house. The main purpose of the fire seemed to be to cover their retreat int
o the houses across the street. The camera crew remained where it was for a while, grinding impassively away, and then the white Econoline van drove up onto the Quinns' side lawn and the man behind the camera folded the tripod, took it behind the truck, and began to film again.
Something black and tubular whizzed through the air, landed on his lawn about midway between the house and the sidewalk, and began to spurt gas. The wind caught it and carried it off down the street in tattered rifts. A second shell landed short, and then he heard one dunk on the roof. He caught a whiff of that one as it fell into the snow covering Mary's begonias. His nose and eyes filled with crocodile tears.
He scurried across the living room on his hands and knees again, hoping to God he had said nothing to that newsman, Albert, that could be misconstrued as profound. There was no good place to make your stand in the world. Look at Johnny Walker, dying in a meaningless intersection smashup. What had he died for, so that the sheets could go through? Or that woman in the supermarket. The fucking you got was never worth the screwing you took.
He turned on the stereo and the stereo still worked. The Rolling Stones album was still on the turntable and he put on the last cut, missing the right groove the first time when a bullet smacked into the quilt covering the Zenith TV with a thud.
When he had it right, the last bars of "Monkey Man" fading into nothingness, he scurried back to the overturned chair and threw the rifle out the window. He picked up the Magnum and threw that out after it. Good-bye, Nick Adams.
"You can't always get what you want," the stereo sang, and he knew that to be a fact. But that didn't stop you from wanting it. A tear gas canister arched through the window, struck the wall over the couch, and exploded in white smoke.
"But if you try something, you might find,
You get what you need. "
Well, let's just see, Fred. He grasped the red alligator clip in his hand. Let's see if I get what I need.
"Okay," he muttered, and jammed the red clip on the negative pole of the battery.
He closed his eyes and his last thought was that the world was not exploding around him but inside him, and while the explosion was cataclysmic, it was not larger than, say, a good-sized walnut.
Then white.
Epilogue
The WHLM newsteam won a Pultizer Prize for their coverage of what they called "Dawes' Last Stand" on the evening news, and for a half-hour documentary presented three weeks later. The documentary was called "Roadwork" and it examined the necessity-or lack of it-for the 784 extension. The documentary pointed out that one reason the road was being built had nothing to do with traffic patterns or commuter convenience or anything else of such a practical sort. The municipality had to build so many miles of road per year or begin losing federal money on all interstate construction. And so the city had chosen to build. The documentary also pointed out that the city was quietly beginning a litigation against the widow of Barton George Dawes to recover as much of their money as was recoverable. In the wake of the outcry the city dropped its suit.
Still photographs of the wreckage ran on the AP wire and most of the newspapers in the country carried them. In Las Vegas, a young girl who had only recently enrolled in a business school saw the photographs while on her lunch hour and fainted.
Despite the pictures and the words, the extension went ahead and was completed eighteen months later, ahead of schedule. By that time most of the people in the city had forgotten the "Roadwork" documentary, and the city's news force, including Pulitzer winner David Albert, had gone on to other stories and crusades. But few people who had been watching the original newsclip broadcast on the evening news ever forgot that; they remembered even after the facts surrounding it grew blurry in their minds.
That news clip showed a plain white suburban house, sort of a ranch house with an asphalt driveway to the right leading to a one-car garage. A nice-looking house, but totally ordinary. Not a house you'd crane to look at if you happened to be on a Sunday drive. But in the news footage the picture window is shattered. Two guns, a rifle and a pistol, come flying out of it to lie in the snow. For one second you see the hand that has flung them, the fingers held limply up like the hand of a drowning man. You see white smoke blowing around the house, Mace or teargas or something. And then there is a huge belch of orange flame and all the walls of the house seem to bulge out in an impossible cartoon convexity and there is a huge detonation and the camera shakes a little, as if in horror. Peripherally the viewer is aware that the garage has been destroyed in a single ripping blast. For a second it seems (and slow motion replays prove that the eye's split-second impression is correct) that the roof of the house has lifted off its eaves like a Saturn rocket. Then the entire house blows outward and upward, shingles flying, hunks of wood lofted into the air and then returning to earth, something that looks like a quilt twisting lazily in the air like a magic carpet as debris rattle to the ground in a thudding, contrapuntal drum roll.
There is stillness.
Then the shocked, tear-streaming face of Mary Dawes fills the screen; she is looking with drugged and horrified bewilderment at the forest of microphones being thrust into her face, and we have been brought safely back to human things once more.
THE RUNNING MAN
Richard Bachman
[05 feb 2001 – scanned for #bookz, proofread and released – v1]
In the year 2025, the best men don't run for President. They run for their lives...
Minus 100 and COUNTING
She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window. Beyond her, in the drizzle, the other highrises in Co-Op City rose like the gray turrets of a penitentiary. Below, in the airshaft, clotheslines flapped with ragged wash. Rats and plump alley cats circulated through the garbage.
She looked at her husband. He was seated at the table, staring up at the FreeVee with steady, vacant concentration. He had been watching it for weeks now. It wasn't like him. He hated it, always had. Of course, every Development apartment had one-it was the law-but it was still legal to turn them off. The Compulsory Benefit Bill of 2021 had failed to get the required two-thirds majority by six votes. Ordinarily they never watched it. But ever since Cathy had gotten sick, he had been watching the big-money giveaways. It filled her with sick fear.
Behind the compulsive shrieking of the half-time announcer narrating the latest newsie flick, Cathy's flue-hoarsened wailing went on and on.
"How bad is it?" Richards asked.
"Not so bad. "
"Don't shit me."
"It's a hundred and four."
He brought both fists down on the table. A plastic dish jumped into the air and clattered down.
"We'll get a doctor. Try not to worry so much. Listen-"She began to babble frantically to distract him; he had turned around and was watching the Free-Vee again. Half-time was over, and the game was on again. This wasn't one of the big ones, of course, just a cheap daytime come-on called Treadmill to Bucks. They accepted only chronic heart, liver, or lung patients, sometimes throwing in a crip for comic relief. Every minute the contestant could stay on the treadmill (keeping up a steady flow of chatter with the emcee), he won ten dollars. Every two minutes the emcee asked a Bonus Question in the contestant's category (the current pal, a heart-murmur from Hackensack, was an American history buff) which was worth fifty dollars. If the contestant, dizzy, out of breath, heart doing fantastic rubber acrobatics in his chest, missed the question, fifty dollars was deducted from his winnings and the treadmill was speeded up.
"We'll get along. Ben. We will. Really. I . . . I'll . . . "
"You'll what?" He looked at her brutally. "Hustle? No more. Shelia- She's got to have a real doctor. No more block midwife with dirty hands and whiskey breath. All the modern equipment. I'm going to see to it."
He crossed the room, eyes swiveling hypnotically to the Free-Vee bolted into one peeling wall above the sink. He took his cheap denim jacket off its hook and pulled it on with fretful gestures.
/> "No! No, I won't . . . won't allow it. You're not going to-"
"Why not? At worst you can get a few oldbucks as the head of a fatherless house. One way or the other you'll have to see her through this."
She had never really been a handsome woman, and in the years since her husband had not worked she had grown scrawny, but in this moment she looked beautiful . . . imperious. "I won't take it. I'd rather sell the govie a two-dollar piece of tail when he comes to the door and send him back with his dirty blood money in his pocket. Should I take a bounty on my man?"
He turned on her, grim and humorless, clutching something that set him apart, an invisible something for which the Network had ruthlessly calculated. He was a dinosaur in this time. Not a big one, but still a throwback, an embarrassment. Perhaps a danger. Big clouds condense around small particles.
He gestured at the bedroom. "How about her in an unmarked pauper's grave? Does that appeal to you?"
It left her with only the argument of insensate sorrow. Her face cracked and dissolved into tears.
"Ben, this is just what they want, for people like us, like you-"
"Maybe they won't take me," he said, opening the door. "Maybe I don't have whatever it is they look for. "
"If you go now, they'll kill you. And I'll be here watching it. Do you want me watching that with her in the next room?" She was hardly coherent through her tears.
"I want her to go on living. " He tried to close the door, but she put her body in the way.
"Give me a kiss before you go, then."
He kissed her. Down the hall, Mrs. Jenner opened her door and peered out. The rich odor of corned beef and cabbage, tantalizing, maddening, drifted to them. Mrs. Jenner did well-she helped out at the local discount drug and had an almost uncanny eye for illegal-card carriers.
"You'll take the money?" Richards asked. "You won't do anything stupid?"
"I'll take it," she whispered. "You know I'll take it."
He clutched her awkwardly, then turned away quickly, with no grace, and plunged down the crazily slanting, ill-lighted stairwell.