by Stephen King
“I’m not laughing.”
“At first we only read sexbooks. Then when Cassie first started getting sick, I got into this pollution stuff. They’ve got all the books on impurity counts and smog levels and nose filters in the reserve section. We got a key made from a wax blank. Man, did you know that everybody in Tokyo had to wear a nose filter by 2012?”
“No.”
“Rich and Dink Moran built a pollution counter. Dink drew the picture out of the book, and they did it from coffee cans and some stuff they boosted out of cars. It’s hid out in an alley. Back in 1978 they had an air pollution scale that went from one to twenty. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“When it got up to twelve, the factories and all the pollution-producing shit had to shut down till the weather changed. It was a federal law until 1987, when the Revised Congress rolled it back.” The shadow on the bed rose up on its elbow. “I bet you know a lot of people with asthma, that right?”
“Sure,” Richards said cautiously. “I’ve got a touch myself. You get that from the air. Christ, everybody knows you stay in the house when it’s hot and cloudy and the air doesn’t move—”
“Temperature inversion,” Bradley said grimly.
“—and lots of people get asthma, sure. The air gets like cough syrup in August and September. But lung cancer—”
“You ain’t talkin about asthma,” Bradley said. “You talkin bout emphysema.”
“Emphysema?” Richards turned the word over in his mind. He could not assign a meaning to it, although the word was faintly familiar.
“All the tissues in your lungs swell up. You heave an heave an heave, but you’re still out of breath. You know a lot of people who get like that?”
Richards thought. He did. He knew a lot of people who had died like that.
“They don’t talk about that one,” Bradley said, as if he had read Richards’s thought. “Now the pollution count in Boston is twenty on a good day. That’s like smoking four packs of cigarettes a day just breathing. On a bad day it gets up as high as forty-two. Old dudes drop dead all over town. Asthma goes on the death certificate. But it’s the air, the air, the air. And they’re pouring it out just as fast as they can, big smokestacks going twenty-four hours a day. The big boys like it that way.
“Those two-hundred-dollar nose filters aren’t worth shit. They’re just two pieces of screen with a little piece of metholated cotton between them. That’s all. The only good ones are from General Atomics. The only ones who can afford them are the big boys. They gave us the Free-Vee to keep us off the streets so we can breathe ourselves to death without making any trouble. How do you like that? The cheapest G-A nose filter on the market goes for six thousand New Dollars. We made one for Stacey for ten bucks from that book. We used an atomic nugget the size of the moon on your fingernail. Got it out of a hearing aid we bought in a hockshop for seven bucks. How do you like that?”
Richards said nothing. He was speechless.
“When Cassie boots off, you think they’ll put cancer on the death certificate? Shit they’ll put asthma. Else somebody might get scared. Somebody might kife a library card and find out lung cancer is up seven hundred percent since 2015.”
“Is that true? Or are you making it up?”
“I read it in a book. Man, they’re killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. It’s like a magician getting you to watch the cakes falling outta his helper’s blouse while he pulls rabbits out of his pants and puts ’em in his hat.” He paused and then said dreamily: “Sometimes I think that I could blow the whole thing outta the water with ten minutes talktime on the Free-Vee. Tell em. Show em. Everybody could have a nose filter if the Network wanted em to have em.”
“And I’m helping them,” Richards said.
“That ain’t your fault. You got to run.”
Killian’s face, and the face of Arthur M. Burns rose up in front of Richards. He wanted to smash them, stomp them, walk on them. Better still, rip out their nose filters and turn them into the street.
“People’s mad,” Bradley said. “They’ve been mad at the honkies for thirty years. All they need is a reason. A reason…one reason…”
Richards drifted off to sleep with the repetition in his ears.
…Minus 062 and COUNTING…
Richards stayed in all day while Bradley was out seeing about the car and arranging with another member of the gang to drive it to Manchester.
Bradley and Stacey came back at six, and Bradley thumbed on the Free-Vee. “All set, man. We go tonight.”
“Now?”
Bradley smiled humorlessly. “Don’t you want to see yourself coast-to-coast?”
Richards discovered he did, and when The Running Man lead-in came on, he watched, fascinated.
Bobby Thompson stared deadpan at the camera from the middle of a brilliant post in a sea of darkness. “Watch,” he said. “This is one of the wolves that walks among you.”
A huge blowup of Richards’s face appeared on the screen. It held for a moment, then dissolved to a second photo of Richards, this time in the John Griffen Springer disguise.
Dissolve back to Thompson, looking grave. “I speak particularly to the people of Boston tonight. Yesterday afternoon, five policemen went to a blazing, agonized death in the basement of the Boston Y.M.C.A. at the hands of this wolf, who had set a clever, merciless trap. Who is he tonight? Where is he tonight? Look! Look at him!”
Thompson faded into the first of the two clips which Richards had filmed that morning. Stacey had dropped them in a mailbox on Commonwealth Avenue, across the city. He had let Ma hold the camera in the back bedroom, after he had draped the window and all the furniture.
“All of you watching this,” Richards’s image said slowly. “Not the technicos, not the people in the penthouses—I don’t mean you shits. You people in the Developments and the ghettos and the cheap highrises. You people in the cycle gangs. You people without jobs. You kids getting busted for dope you don’t have and crimes you didn’t commit because the Network wants to make sure you aren’t meeting together and talking together. I want to tell you about a monstrous conspiracy to deprive you of the very breath in y—”
The audio suddenly became a mixture of squeaks, pops, and gargles. A moment later it died altogether. Richards’s mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.
“We seem to have lost our audio,” Bobby Thompson’s voice came smoothly, “but we don’t need to listen to any more of this murderer’s radical ravings to understand what we’re dealing with, do we?”
“No!” The audience screamed.
“What will you do if you see him on your street?”
“TURN HIM IN!”
“And what are we going to do when we find him?”
“KILL HIM!”
Richards pounded his fist against the tired arm of the only easy chair in the apartment’s kitchen-living room. “Those bastards,” he said helplessly.
“Did you think they’d let you go on the air with it?” Bradley asked mockingly. “Oh no, man. I’m s’prised they let you get away with as much as they did.”
“I didn’t think,” Richards said sickly.
“No, I guess you didn’t,” Bradley said.
The first clip faded into the second. In this one, Richards had asked the people watching to storm the libraries, demand cards, find out the truth. He had read off a list of books dealing with air pollution and water pollution that Bradley had given him.
Richards’s image opened its mouth. “Fuck every one of you,” his image said. The lips seemed to be moving around different words, but how many of the two hundred million people watching were going to notice that? “Fuck all pigs. Fuck the Games Commission. I’m gonna kill every pig I see. I’m gonna—” There was more, enough so that Richards wanted to plug his ears and run out of the room. He couldn’t tell if it was the voice of a mimic, or a harangue made up of spliced bits of audio tape.
The clip faced to a split-sc
reen of Thompson’s face and the still photo of Richards. “Behold the man,” Thompson said. “The man who would kill. The man who would mobilize an army of malcontents like himself to run riot through your streets, raping and burning and overturning. The man would lie, cheat, kill. He has done all these things.
“Benjamin Richards!” The voice cried out with a cold, commanding Old Testament anger. “Are you watching? If so, you have been paid your dirty blood money. A hundred dollars for each hour—now number fifty-four—that you have remained free. And an extra five hundred dollars. One hundred for each of these five men.”
The faces of young, clear-featured policemen began appearing on the screen. The still had apparently been taken at a Police Academy graduation exercise. They looked fresh, full of sap and hope, heart-breakingly vulnerable. Softly, a single trumpet began to play Taps.
“And these…” Thompson’s voice was now low and hoarse with emotion, “…these were their families.”
Wives, hopefully smiling. Children that had been coaxed to smile into the camera. A lot of children. Richards, cold and sick and nauseated, lowered his head and pressed the back of his hand over his mouth.
Bradley’s hand, warm and muscular, pressed his neck. “Hey, no. No, man. That’s put on. That’s all fake. They were probably a bunch of old harness bulls who—”
“Shut up,” Richards said. “Oh shut up. Just. Please. Shut up.”
“Five hundred dollars,” Thompson was saying, and infinite hate and contempt filled his voice. Richards’s face on the screen again, cold, hard, devoid of all emotion save an expression of bloodlust that seemed chiefly to be in the eyes. “Five police, five wives, nineteen children. It comes to just about seventeen dollars and twenty-five cents for each of the dead, the bereaved, the heartbroken. Oh yes, you work cheap, Ben Richards. Even Judas got thirty pieces of silver, but you don’t even demand that. Somewhere, even now, a mother is telling her little boy that daddy won’t be home ever again because a desperate, greedy man with a gun—”
“Killer!” A woman was sobbing. “Vile, dirty murderer! God will strike you dead!”
“Strike him dead!” The audience over the chant: “Behold the man! He has been paid his blood money—but the man who lives by violence shall die by it. And let every man’s hand be raised against Benjamin Richards!”
Hate and fear in every voice, rising in a steady, throbbing roar. No, they wouldn’t turn him in. They would rip him to shreds on sight.
Bradley turned off the screen and faced him. “Thass what you’re dealing with, man. How about it.”
“Maybe I’ll kill them,” Richards said in a thoughtful voice. “Maybe, before I’m done, I’ll get up to the ninetieth floor of that place and just hunt up the maggots who wrote that. Maybe I’ll just kill them all.”
“Don’t talk no more!” Stacey burst out wildly. “Don’t talk no more about it!”
In the other room, Cassie slept her drugged, dying sleep.
…Minus 061 and COUNTING…
Bradley had not dared drill any holes in the floor of the trunk, so Richards curled in a miserable ball with his mouth and nose pressed toward the tiny notch of light which was the trunk’s keyhole. Bradley had also pulled out some of the inner trunk insulation around the lid, and that let in a small draft.
The car lifted with a jerk, and he knocked his head against the upper deck. Bradley had told him the ride would be at least an hour and a half, with two stops for roadblocks, perhaps more. Before he closed the trunk, he gave Richards a large revolver.
“Every tenth or twelfth car, they give it a heavy looking over,” he said. “They open the trunk to poke around. Those are good odds, eleven to one. If it don’t come up, plug you some pork.”
The car lurched and heaved over the potholed, cracked-crazed streets of the inner city. Once a kid jeered and there was the thump of a thrown piece of paving. Then the sounds of increasing traffic all around them and more frequent stops for lights.
Richards lay passively, holding the pistol lightly in his right hand, thinking how different Bradley had looked in the gang suit. It was a sober Dillon Street double-breasted, as gray as bank walls. It was rounded off with a maroon tie and a small gold N.A.A.C.P pin. Bradley had made the leap from scruffy gang-member (pregnant ladies stay away; some of us’ns eat fetuses) to a sober black business fellow who would know exactly who to Tom.
“You look good,” Richards said admiringly. “In fact, it’s damn incredible.”
“Praise Gawd,” Ma said.
“I thought you’d enjoy the transformation, my good man,” Bradley said with quiet dignity. “I’m the district manager for Raygon Chemicals, you know. We do a thriving business in this area. Fine city, Boston. Immensely convivial.”
Stacey burst into giggles.
“You best shut up, nigger,” Bradley said. “Else I make you shit in yo boot an eat it.”
“You Tom so good, Bradley,” Stacey giggled, not intimidated in the least. “You really fuckin funky.”
Now the car swung right, onto a smoother surface, and descended in a spiraling arc. They were on an entrance ramp. Going onto 495 or a feeder expressway. Copper wires of tension were stuffed into his legs.
One in eleven. That’s not bad odds.
The car picked up speed and height, kicked into drive, then slowed abruptly and kicked out. A voice, terrifyingly close, yelling with monotonous regularity: “Pull over…have your license and registration ready…pull over…have your—”
Already. Starting already.
You so hot, man.
Hot enough to check the trunk on one car in eight? Or six? Or maybe every one?
The car came to a full stop. Richards’s eyes moved like trapped rabbits in their sockets. He gripped the revolver.
…Minus 060 and COUNTING…
“Step out your vehicle, sir,” the bored, authoritative voice was saying. “License and registration, please.”
A door opened and closed. The engine thrummed softly, holding the car an inch off the paving.
“—district manager for Raygon Chemicals—”
Bradley going into his song and dance. Dear God, what if he didn’t have the papers to back it up? What if there was no Raygon Chemicals?
The back door opened, and someone began rummaging in the back seat. It sounded as if the cop (or was it the Government Guard that did this, Richards wondered half coherently) was about to crawl right into the trunk with him.
The door slammed. Feet walked around to the back of the car. Richards licked his lips and held the gun tighter. Visions of dead policemen gibbered before him, angelic faces on twisted, porcine bodies. He wondered if the cop would hose him with machine-gun bullets when he opened the trunk and saw Richards lying here like a curled-up salamander. He wondered if Bradley would take off, try to run. He was going to piss himself. He hadn’t done that since he was a kid and his brother would tickle him until his bladder let go. Yes, all those muscles down there were loosening. He would put the bullet right at the juncture of the cop’s nose and forehead, splattering brains and splintered skull-fragments in startled streamers to the sky. Make a few more orphans. Yes. Good. Jesus loves me, this I know, for my bladder tells me so. Christ Jesus, what’s he doing, ripping the seat out? Sheila, I love you so much and how far will six grand take you? A year, maybe, if they don’t kill you for it. Then on the street again, up and down, cross on the corner, swinging the hips, flirting with the empty pocketbook. Hey mister, I go down, this is clean kitty, kid, teach you how—
A hand whacked the top of the trunk casually in passing. Richards bit back a scream. Dust in his nostrils, throat, tickling. High school biology, sitting in the back row, scratching his initials and Sheila’s on the ancient desk-top: The sneeze is a function of the involuntary muscles. I’m going to sneeze my goddam head off but it’s pointblank and I can still put that bullet right through his squash and—
“What’s in the trunk, mister?”
Bradley’s voice, jocular, a little b
ored: “A spare cylinder that doesn’t work half right. I got the key on my ring. Wait, I’ll get it.”
“If I wanted it, I’d ask.”
Other back door opened; closed.
“Drive on.”
“Hang tight, fella. Hope you get him.”
“Drive on, mister. Move your ass.”
The cylinders cranked up. The car lifted and accelerated. It slowed once and must have been waved on. Richards jolted a little as the car rose, sailed a little, and kicked into drive. His breath came in tired little moans. He didn’t have to sneeze anymore.
…Minus 059 and COUNTING…
The ride seemed much longer than an hour and a half, and they were stopped twice more. One of them seemed to be a routine license check. At the next one a drawling cop with a dull-witted voice talked to Bradley for some time about how the goddam commie bikers were helping that guy Richards and probably the other one, too. Laughlin had not killed anyone, but it was rumored that he had raped a woman in Topeka.
After that there was nothing but the monotonous whine of the wind and the scream of his own cramped and frozen muscles. Richards did not sleep, but his punished mind did finally push him into a dazed semiconsciousness. There was no carbon monoxide with the air cars, thank God for that.
Centuries after the last roadblock, the car kicked into a lower gear and banked up a spiraling exit ramp. Richards blinked sluggishly and wondered if he was going to throw up. For the first time in his life he felt carsick.
They went through a sickening series of loops and dives that Richards supposed was a traffic interchange. Another five minutes and city sounds took over again. Richards tried repeatedly to shift his body into a new position, but it was impossible. He finally subsided, waiting numbly for it to be over. His right arm, which was curled under him, had gone to sleep an hour ago. Now it felt like a block of wood. He could touch it with the tip of his nose and feel only the pressure on his nose.
