The Running Man

by Stephen King

  They took a right, went straight for a little, then turned again. The bottom dropped out of Richards’s stomach as the car dipped down a sharp incline. The echoing of the cylinders told him that they were inside. They had gotten to the garage.

  A little helpless sound of relief escaped him.

  “Got your check, buddy?” A voice asked.

  “Right here, pal.”

  “Rampway 5.”

  “Thanks.”

  They bore right. The car went up, paused, turned right again, then left. They settled into idle, then the car dropped with a soft bump as the engine died. Journey’s end.

  There was a pause, then the hollow sound of Bradley’s door opening and closing. His footsteps clicked toward the trunk, then the chink of light in front of Richards’s eyes disappeared as the key slid home.

  “You there, Bennie?”

  “No,” he croaked. “You left me back at the state line. Open this goddam thing.”

  “Just a second. Place is empty right now. Your car’s parked next to us. On the right. Can you get out quick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try hard. Here we go.”

  The trunk lid popped up, letting in dim garage light. Richards got up on one arm, got one leg over the edge, and could go no farther. His cramped body screamed. Bradley took one arm and hauled him out. His legs wanted to buckle. Bradley hooked him under the armpit and half led, half pushed him to the battered green Wint on the right. He propped open the driver’s side door, shoved Richards in, and slammed it shut. A moment later Bradley also slid in.

  “Jesus,” he said softly. “We got here, man. We got here.”

  “Yeah,” Richards said. “Back to Go. Collect two hundred dollars.”

  They smoked in the shadows, their cigarettes gleaming like eyes. For a little while, neither of them said anything.

  …Minus 058 and COUNTING…

  “We almost got it at that first roadblock,” Bradley was saying as Richards tried to massage feeling back into his arm. It felt as if phantom nails had been pushed into it. “That cop almost opened it. Almost.” He blew out smoke in a huge huff. Richards said nothing.

  “How do you feel?” Bradley asked presently.

  “It’s getting better. Take my wallet out for me. I can’t make my arm work just right yet.”

  Bradley shooed the words away with one hand. “Later. I want to tell you how Rich and I set it up.”

  Richards lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. A dozen charley horses were loosening slowly.

  “There’s a hotel room reserved for you on Winthrop Street. The Winthrop House is the name of the place. Sounds fancy. It ain’t. The name is Ogden Grassner. Can you remember that?”

  “Yes. I’ll be recognized immediately.”

  Bradley reached into the back seat, got a box and dropped it in Richard’s lap. It was long, brown, tied with string. To Richards it looked like the kind of box that rented graduation gowns come in. He looked at Bradley questioningly.

  “Open it.”

  He did. There was a pair of thick, blue-tinted glasses lying on top of a drift of black cloth. Richards put the glasses on the dashboard and took out the garment. It was a priest’s robe. Beneath it, lying on the bottom of the box, was a rosary, a Bible, and a purple stole.

  “A priest?” Richards asked.

  “Right. You change right here. I’ll help you. There’s a cane in the backseat. Your act ain’t blind, but it’s pretty close. Bump into things. You’re in Manchester to attend a Council of Churches meeting on drug abuse. Got it?”

  “Yes,” Richard said. He hesitated, fingers on the bottoms of his shirt. “Do I wear my pants under this rig?”

  Bradley burst out laughing.

  …Minus 057 and COUNTING…

  Bradley talked rapidly as he drove Richards across town.

  “There’s a box of gummed mailing labels in your suitcase,” he said. “That’s in the trunk. The stickers say: After five days return to Brickhill Manufacturing Company, Manchester, N.H. Rich and another guy ran em off. They got a press at the Stabbers’ headquarters on Boylston Street. Every day you send your two tapes to me in a box with one of those stickers. I’ll mail em to Games from Boston. Send me the stuff Speed Delivery. That’s one they’ll never figure out.”

  The car cozied up to the curb in front of the Winthrop House. “This car will be back in the U-Park-It. Don’t try to drive out of Manchester unless you change your disguise. You got to be a chameleon, man.”

  “How long do you think it will be safe here?” Richards asked. He thought: I’ve put myself in his hands. It didn’t seem that he could think rationally for himself anymore. He could smell mental exhaustion on himself like body odor.

  “Your reservation’s for next week. That might be okay. It might not. Play it by ear. There’s a name and an address in the suitcase. Fella in Portland, Maine. They’ll hide you for a day or two. It’ll cost, but they’re safe. I gotta go, man. This is a five-minute zone. Money time.”

  “How much?” Richards asked.

  “Six hundred.”

  “Bullshit. That doesn’t even cover expenses.”

  “Yes it does. With a few bucks left over for the family.”

  “Take a thousand.”

  “You need your dough, pal. Uh-uh.”

  Richards looked at him helplessly. “Christ, Bradley—”

  “Send us more if you make it. Send us a million. Put us on easy street.”

  “Do you think I will?”

  Bradley smiled a soft, sad smile and said nothing.

  “Then why?” Richards asked flatly. “Why are you doing so much? I can understand you hiding me out. I’d do that. But you must have busted your club’s arm.”

  “They didn’t mind. They know the score.”

  “What score?”

  “Ought to naught. That score. If we doan stick out our necks for our own, they got us. No need to wait for the air. We could just as well run a pipe from the stove to the livin room, turn on the Free-Vee and wait.”

  “Someone’ll kill you,” Richards said. “Someone will stool on you and you’ll end up on a basement floor with your guts beat out. Or Stacey. Or Ma.”

  Bradley’s eyes flashed dimly. “A bad day is comin, though. A bad day for the maggots with their guts full of roast beef. I see blood on the moon for them. Guns and torches. A mojo that walks and talks.”

  “People have been seeing those things for two thousand years.”

  The five-minute buzzer went off and Richards fumbled for the door handle. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t know how to say it any other way—”

  “Go on,” Bradley said, “before I get a ticket.” A strong brown hand clutched the robe. “An when they get you, take a few along.”

  Richards opened the rear door and popped the trunk to get the black satchel inside. Bradley handed him a cordovan-colored cane wordlessly.

  The car pulled out into traffic smoothly. Richards stood on the curb for a moment, watching him go—watching him myopically, he hoped. The taillights flashed once at the corner, then the car swung out of sight, back to the parking lot where Bradley would leave it and pick up the other to go back to Boston.

  Richards had a weird sensation of relief and realized that he was feeling empathy for Bradley—how glad he must be to have me off his back, finally!

  Richards made himself miss the first step up to the Winthrop House’s entrance, and the doorman assisted him.

  …Minus 056 and COUNTING…

  Two days passed.

  Richards played his part well—that is to say, as if his life depended on it. He took dinner at the hotel both nights in his room. He rose at seven, read his Bible in the lobby, and then went out to his “meeting.” The hotel staff treated him with easy, contemptuous cordiality—the kind reserved for half-blind, fumbling clerics (who paid their bills) in this day of limited legalized murder, germ warfare in Egypt and South America, and the notorious have-one-kill-one Nevada aborti
on law. The Pope was a muttering old man of ninety-six whose driveling edicts concerning such current events were reported as the closing humorous items on the seven o’clock newsies.

  Richards held his one-man “meetings” in a rented library cubicle where, with the door locked, he was reading about pollution. There was very little information later than 2002, and what there was seemed to jell very badly with what had been written before. The government, as usual, was doing a tardy but efficient job of double thinking.

  At noon he made his way down to a luncheonette on the corner of a street not far from the hotel, bumping into people and excusing himself as he went. Some people told him it was quite all right, Father. Most simply cursed in an uninterested way and pushed him aside.

  He spent the afternoons in his room and ate dinner watching The Running Man. He had mailed four filmclips while enroute to the library during the mornings. The forwarding from Boston seemed to be going smoothly.

  The producers of the program had adopted a new tactic for killing Richards’s pollution message (he persisted with it in a kind of grinning frenzy—he had to be getting through to the lip-readers anyway): now the crowd drowned out the voice with a rising storm of jeers, screams, obscenities, and vituperation. Their sound grew increasingly more frenzied; ugly to the point of dementia.

  In his long afternoons, Richards reflected that an unwilling change had come over him during his five days on the run. Bradley had done it—Bradley and the little girl. There was no longer just himself, a lone man fighting for his family, bound to be cut down. Now there were all of them out there, strangling on their own respiration—his family included.

  He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands, like those half-assed college kids with their cute buttons and their neo-rock groups.

  Richards’s father had slunk into the night when Richards was five. Richards had been too young to remember him in anything but flashes. He had never hated him for it. He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride—if responsibility robs him of his manhood. A man can’t stick around and watch his wife earning supper on her back. If a man can’t do any more than pimp for the woman he married, Richards judged, he might as well walk out of a high window.

  He had spent the years between five and sixteen hustling, he and his brother Todd. His mother had died of syphilis when he was ten and Todd was seven. Todd had been killed five years later when a newsie airtruck had lost its emergency brake on a hill while Todd was loading it. The city had fed both mother and son into the Municipal Crematorium. The kids on the street called it either the Ash Factory or the Creamery; they were bitter but helpless, knowing that they themselves would most likely end up being belched out of the stacks and into the city’s air. At sixteen Richards was alone, working a full eight-hour shift as an engine wiper after school. And in spite of his back-breaking schedule, he had felt a constant panic that came from knowing he was alone and unknown, drifting free. He awoke sometimes at three in the morning to the rotted-cabbage smell of the one-room tenement flat with terror lodged in the deepest chamber of his soul. He was his own man.

  And so he had married, and Sheila had spent the first year in proud silence while their friends (and Richards’s enemies; he had made many by his refusal to go along on mass-vandalizing expeditions and join a local gang) waited for the Uterus Express to arrive. When it didn’t, interest flagged. They were left in that particular limbo that was reserved for newlyweds in Co-Op City. Few friends and a circle of acquaintances that reached only as far as the stoop of their own building. Richards did not mind this; it suited him. He threw himself into his work wholly, with grinning intensity, getting overtime when he could. The wages were bad, there was no chance of advancement, and inflation was running wild—but they were in love. They remained in love, and why not? Richards was that kind of solitary man who can afford to expend gigantic charges of love, affection, and, perhaps, psychic domination on the woman of his choice. Up until that point his emotions had been almost entirely untouched. In the eleven years of their marriage, they had never argued significantly.

  He quit his job in 2018 because the chances of ever having children decreased with every shift he spent behind the leaky G-A old-style lead shields. He might have been all right if he answered the foreman’s aggrieved “Why are you quitting?” with a lie. But Richards had told him, simply and clearly, what he thought of General Atomics, concluding with an invitation to the foreman to take all his gamma shields and perform a reverse bowel movement with them. It ended in a short, savage scuffle. The foreman was brawny and looked tough, but Richards made him scream like a woman.

  The blackball began to roll. He’s dangerous. Steer clear. If you need a man bad, put him on for a week and then get rid of him. In G-A parlance, Richards had Shown Red.

  During the next five years he had spent a lot of time rolling and loading newsies, but the work thinned to a trickle and then died. The Free-Vee killed the printed word very effectively. Richards pounded the pavement. Richards was moved along. Richards worked intermittently for day-labor outfits.

  The great movements of the decade passed by him ignored, like ghosts to an unbeliever. He knew nothing of the Housewife Massacre in ’24 until his wife told him about it three weeks later—two hundred police armed with tommy guns and high-powered move-alongs had turned back an army of women marching on the Southwest Food Depository. Sixty had been killed. He was vaguely aware that nerve gas was being used in the Mideast. But none of it affected him. Protest did not work. Violence did not work. The world was what it was, and Ben Richards moved through it like a thin scythe, asking for nothing, looking for work. He ferreted out a hundred miserable day and half-day jobs. He worked cleaning jellylike slime from under piers and in sump ditches when others on the street, who honestly believed they were looking for work, did nothing.

  Move along, maggot. Get lost. No job. Get out. Put on your boogie shoes. I’ll blow your effing head off, daddy. Move.

  Then the jobs dried up. Impossible to find anything. A rich man in a silk singlet, drunk, accosted him on the street one evening as Richards shambled home after a fruitless day, and told him he would give Richards ten New Dollars if Richards would pull down his pants so he could see if the street freaks really did have peckers a foot long. Richards knocked him down and ran.

  It was then, after nine years of trying, that Sheila conceived. He was a wiper, the people in the building said. Can you believe he was a wiper for six years and knocked her up? It’ll be a monster, the people in the building said. It’ll have two heads and no eyes. Radiation, radiation, your children will be monsters—

  But instead, it was Cathy. Round, perfect, squalling. Delivered by a midwife from down the block who took fifty cents and four cans of beans.

  And now, for the first time since his brother had died, he was drifting again. Every pressure (even, temporarily, the pressure of the chase) had been removed.

  His mind and his anger turned toward the Games Federation, with their huge and potent communications link to the whole world. Fat people with nose filters, spending their evenings with dollies in silk underpants. Let the guillotine fall. And fall. And fall. Yet there was no way to get them. They towered above all of them dimly, like the Games Building itself.

  Yet, because he was who he was, and because he was alone and changing, he thought about it. He was unaware, alone in his room, that while he thought about it he grinned a huge white-wolf grin that in itself seemed powerful enough to buckle streets and melt buildings. The same grin he had worn on that almost-forgotten day when he had knocked a rich man down and then fled with his pockets empty and his mind burning.

  …Minus 055 and COUNTING…

  Monday was exactly the same as Sunday—the working world took no one particular day off anymore—until six-thirty.

  Father Ogden Grassner
had Meatloaf Supreme sent up (the hotel’s cuisine, which would have seemed execrable to a man who had been weaned on anything better than fast-food hamburgers and concentrate pills, tasted great to Richards) with a bottle of Thunderbird wine and settled down to watch The Running Man. The first segment, dealing with Richards himself, went much as it had on the two nights previous. The audio on his clips was drowned out by the studio audience. Bobby Thompson was urbane and virulent. A house-to-house search was taking place in Boston. Anyone found harboring the fugitive would be put to death. Richards smiled without humor as they faded to a Network promo. It wasn’t so bad; it was even funny, in a limited way. He could stand anything if they didn’t broadcast the cops again.

  The second half of the program was markedly different. Thompson was smiling broadly. “After the latest tapes sent to us by the monster that goes under the name of Ben Richards, I’m pleased to give you some good news—”

  They had gotten Laughlin.

  He had been spotted in Topeka on Friday, but an intensive search of the city on Saturday and Sunday had not turned him up. Richards had assumed that Laughlin had slipped through the cordon as he had himself. But this afternoon, Laughlin had been observed by two kids. He had been cowering in a Highway Department road shed. He had broken his right wrist at some point.

  The kids, Bobby and Mary Cowles, were shown grinning broadly into the camera. Bobby Cowles had a tooth missing. I wonder if the tooth fairy brought him a quarter, Richards thought sickly.

  Thompson announced proudly that Bobby and Mary, “Topeka’s number one citizens,” would be on The Running Man tomorrow night to be presented Certificates of Merit, a life-time supply of FunTwinks cereal, and checks for a thousand New Dollars each, by Hizzoner the Governor of Kansas. This brought wild cheers from the audience.