The Running Man

by Stephen King

  “Can I get off here?” she asked pleadingly, and he felt a trifle sorry for her again.

  “No,” he said. “You’re my protection, Mrs. Williams. I have to get to Voigt Field, in a place called Derry. You’re going to see that I get there.”

  “That’s a hundred and fifty miles!” she wailed.

  “Someone else told me a hundred.”

  “They were wrong. You’ll never get through to there.”

  “I might,” Richards said, and then looked at her. “And so might you, if you play it right.”

  She began to tremble again but said nothing. Her attitude was that of a woman waiting to wake up.

  …Minus 044 and COUNTING…

  They traveled north through autumn burning like a torch.

  The trees were not dead this far north, murdered by the big, poisonous smokes of Portland, Manchester, and Boston; they were all hues of yellow, red, brilliant starburst purple. They awoke in Richards an aching feeling of melancholy. It was a feeling he never would have suspected his emotions could have harbored only two weeks before. In another month the snow would fly and cover all of it.

  Things ended in fall.

  She seemed to sense his mood and said nothing. The driving filled the silence between them, lulled them. They passed over the water at Yarmouth, then there were only woods and trailers and miserable poverty shacks with outhouses tacked on the sides (yet one could always spot the Free-Vee cable attachment, bolted on below a sagging, paintless windowsill or beside a hinge-smashed door, winking and heliographing in the sun) until they entered Freeport.

  There were three police cruisers parked just outside of town, the cops meeting in a kind of roadside conference. The woman stiffened like a wire, her face desperately pale, but Richards felt calm.

  They passed the police without notice, and she slumped.

  “If they had been monitoring traffic, they would have been on us like a shot,” Richards said casually. “You might as well paint BEN RICHARDS IS IN THIS CAR on your forehead in Day-Glo.”

  “Why can’t you let me go?” she burst out, and in the same breath: “Have you got a jay?”

  Rich folks blow Dokes. The thought brought a bubble of ironic laughter and he shook his head.

  “You’re laughing at me?” she asked, stung. “You’ve got some nerve, don’t you, you cowardly little murderer! Scaring me half out of my life, probably planning to kill me the way you killed those poor boys in Boston—”

  “There was a full gross of those poor boys,” Richards said. “Ready to kill me. That’s their job.”

  “Killing for pay. Ready to do anything for money. Wanting to overturn the country. Why don’t you find decent work? Because you’re too lazy! Your kind spit in the face of anything decent.”

  “Are you decent?” Richards asked.

  “Yes!” She stormed. “Isn’t that why you picked on me? Because I was defenseless and…and decent? So you could use me, drag me down to your level and then laugh about it?”

  “If you’re so decent, how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girl dies of the flu?”

  “What—” She looked startled. Her mouth started to open and she closed it with a snap. “You’re an enemy of the Network,” she said. “It says so on the Free-Vee. I saw some of those disgusting things you did.”

  “You know what’s disgusting?” Richards asked, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you. It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you sterile. It’s disgusting to sit home and watch your wife earning the grocery money on her back. It’s disgusting to know the Network is killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw.”

  “You lie,” she said. Her knuckles had gone white on the wheel.

  “When this is over,” Richards said, “you can go back to your nice split-level duplex and light up a Doke and get stoned and love the way your new silverware sparkles in the highboy. No one fighting rats with broomhandles in your neighborhood or shitting by the back stoop because the toilet doesn’t work. I met a little girl five years old with lung cancer. How’s that for disgusting? What do—”

  “Stop!” she screamed at him. “You talk dirty!”

  “That’s right,” he said, watching as the countryside flowed by. Hopelessness filled him like cold water. There was no base of communication with these beautiful chosen ones. They existed up where the air was rare. He had a sudden raging urge to make this woman pull over: knock her sunglasses onto the gravel, drag her through the dirt, make her eat a stone, rape her, jump on her, knock her teeth into the air like startled digits, strip her nude and ask her if she was beginning to see the big picture, the one that runs twenty-four hours a day on channel one, where the national anthem never plays before the sign-off.

  “That’s right,” he muttered. “Dirty-talking old me.”

  …Minus 043 and COUNTING…

  They got farther than they had any right to, Richards figured. They got all the way to a pretty town by the sea called Camden over a hundred miles from where he had hitched a ride with Amelia Williams.

  “Listen,” he said as they were entering Augusta, the state capital. “There’s a good chance they’ll sniff us here. I have no interest in killing you. Dig it?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then, with bright hate: “You need a hostage.”

  “Right. So if a cop pulls out behind us, you pull over. Immediately. You open your door and lean out. Just lean. Your fanny is not to leave that seat. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You holler: Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give him free passage he’ll kill me.”

  “And you think that will work?”

  “It better,” he said with tense mockery. “It’s your ass.”

  She bit her lip and said nothing.

  “It’ll work. I think. There will be a dozen free-lance cameramen around in no time, hoping to get some Games money or even the Zapruder Award itself. With that kind of publicity, they’ll have to play it straight. Sorry you won’t get to see us go out in a hail of bullets so they can talk about you sanctimoniously as Ben Richards’s last victim.”

  “Why do you say these things?” she burst out.

  He didn’t reply; only slid down in his seat until just the top of his head showed and waited for the blue lights in the rear-view mirror.

  But there were no blue lights in Augusta. They continued on for another hour and a half, skirting the ocean as the sun began to wester, catching little glints and peaks of the water, across fields and beyond bridges and through heavy firs.

  It was past two o’clock when they rounded a bend not far from the Camden town line and saw a roadblock; two police cars parked on either side of the road. Two cops were checking a farmer in an old pick-up and waving it through.

  “Go another two hundred feet and then stop,” Richards said. “Do it just the way I told you.”

  She was pallid but seemingly in control. Resigned, maybe. She applied the brakes evenly and the air car came to a neat stop in the middle of the road fifty feet from the checkpoint.

  The trooper holding the clipboard waved her forward imperiously. When she didn’t come, he glanced inquiringly at his companion. A third cop, who had been sitting inside one of the cruisers with his feet up, suddenly grabbed the hand mike under the dash and began to speak rapidly.

  Here we go, Richards thought. Oh God, here we go.

  …Minus 042 and COUNTING…

  The day was very bright (the constant rain of Harding seemed light-years away) and everything was very sharp and clearly defined. The troopers’ shadows might have been drawn with black Crayolas. They were unhooking the narrow straps that crossed their gunbutts.

  Mrs. Williams swung open the door and leaned out. “Don’t shoot, please,” she said, and for the first time Richards realized how cultur
ed her voice was, how rich. She might have been in a drawing room except for the pallid knuckles and the fluttering, birdlike pulse in her throat. With the door open he could smell the fresh, invigorating odor of pine and timothy grass.

  “Come out of the car with your hands over your head,” the cop with the clipboard said. He sounded like a well-programmed machine. General Atomics Model 6925–A9, Richards thought. The Hicksville Trooper. 16-psm Iridium Batteries included. Comes in White Only. “You and your passenger, ma’am. We see him.”

  “My name is Amelia Williams,” she said very clearly. “I can’t get out as you ask. Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give him free passage, he says he’ll kill me.”

  The two cops looked at each other, and something barely perceptible passed between them. Richards, with his nerves strung up to a point where he seemed to be operating with a seventh sense, caught it.

  “Drive!” he screamed.

  She stared around at him, bewildered. “But they won’t—”

  The clipboard clattered to the road. The two cops fell into the kneeling posture almost simultaneously, guns out, gripped in right hands, left hands holding right wrists. One on each side of the solid white line.

  The sheets of flimsy on the clipboard fluttered errantly.

  Richards tromped his bad foot on Amelia Williams’s right shoe, his lips drawing back into a tragedy mask of pain as the broken ankle grated. The air car ripped forward.

  The next moment two hollow punching noises struck the car, making it vibrate. A moment later the windshield blew in, splattering them both with bits of safety glass. She threw both hands up to protect her face and Richards leaned savagely against her, swinging the wheel.

  They shot through the gap between the veed cars with scarcely a flirt of the rear deck. He caught a crazy glimpse of the troopers whirling to fire again and then his whole attention was on the road.

  They mounted a rise, and then there was one more hollow thunnn! as a bullet smashed a hole in the trunk. The car began to fishtail and Richards hung on, whipping the wheel in diminishing arcs. He realized dimly that Williams was screaming.

  “Steer!” he shouted at her. “Steer, goddammit! Steer! Steer!”

  Her hands groped reflexively for the wheel and found it. He let go and batted the dark glasses away from her eyes with an openhanded blow. They hung on one ear for a moment and then dropped off.

  “Pull over!”

  “They shot at us.” Her voice began to rise. “They shot at us. They shot at—”

  “Pull over!”

  The scream of sirens rose behind them.

  She pulled over clumsily, sending the car around in a shuddering half-turn that spumed gravel into the air.

  “I told them and they tried to kill us,” she said wonderingly. “They tried to kill us.”

  But he was out already, out and hopping clumsily back the way they had come, gun out. He lost his balance and fell heavily, scraping both knees.

  When the first cruiser came over the rise he was in a sitting position on the shoulder of the road, the pistol held firmly at shoulder level. The car was doing eighty easily, and still accelerating; some backroad cowboy at the wheel with too much engine up front and visions of glory in his eyes. They perhaps saw him, perhaps tried to stop. It didn’t matter. There were no bulletproof tires on these. The one closest to Richards exploded as if there had been dynamite inside. The cruiser took off like a big-ass bird, gunning across the shoulder in howling, uncontrolled flight. It crashed into the hole of a huge elm. The driver’s side door flew off. The driver rammed through the windshield like a torpedo and flew thirty yards before crashing into the puckerbrush.

  The second car came almost as fast, and it took Richards four shots to find a tire. Two slugs splattered sand next to his spot. This one slid around in a smoking half-turn and rolled three times, spraying glass and metal.

  Richards struggled to his feet, looked down and saw his shirt darkening slowly just above the belt. He hopped back toward the air car, and then dropped on his face as the second cruiser exploded, spewing shrapnel above and around him.

  He got up, panting and making strange whimpering noises in his mouth. His side had begun to throb in slow, aching cycles.

  She could have gotten away, perhaps, but she had made no effort. She was staring, transfixed, at the burning police car in the road. When Richards got in, she shrank from him.

  “You killed them. You killed those men.”

  “They tried to kill me. You too. Drive. Fast.”

  “THEY DID NOT TRY TO KILL ME!”

  “Drive!”

  She drove.

  The mask of the well-to-do young hausfrau on her way back from the market now hung in tatters and shreds. Beneath it was something from the cave, something with twitching lips and rolling eyes. Perhaps it had been there all along.

  They drove about five miles and came to a roadside store and air station.

  “Pull in,” Richards said.

  …Minus 041 and COUNTING…

  “Get out.”

  “No.”

  He jammed the gun against her right breast and she whimpered. “Don’t. Please.”

  “I’m sorry. But there’s no more time for you to play prima donna. Get out.”

  She got out and he slid after her.

  “Let me lean on you.”

  He slung an arm around her shoulders and pointed with the gun at the telephone booth beside the ice dispenser. They began shuffling toward it, a grotesque two-man vaudeville team. Richards hopped on his good foot. He felt tired. In his mind he saw the cars crashing, the body flying like a torpedo, the leaping explosion. These scenes played over and over again, like a continuous loop of tape.

  The store’s proprietor, an old pal with white hair and scrawny legs hidden by a dirty butcher’s apron, came out and stared at them with worried eyes.

  “Hey,” he said mildly. “I don’t want you here. I got a fam’ly. Go down the road. Please I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Go inside, pop,” Richards said. The man went.

  Richards slid loosely into the booth, breathing through his mouth, and fumbled fifty cents into the coin horn. Holding the gun and receiver in one hand, he punched O.

  “What exchange is this, operator?”

  “Rockland, sir.”

  “Put me through to the local newsie hookup, please.”

  “You may dial that, sir. The number is—”

  “You dial it.”

  “Do you wish—”

  “Just dial it!”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, unruffled. There were clicks and pops in Richards’s ear. Blood had darkened his shirt to a dirty purple color. He looked away from it. It made him feel ill.

  “Rockland Newsie,” a voice said in Richards’s ear. “Free-Vee Tabloid Number 6943.”

  “This is Ben Richards.”

  There was a long silence. Then: “Look, maggot, I like a joke as well as the next guy, but this has been a long, hard d—”

  “Shut up. You’re going to get confirmation of this in ten minutes at the outside. You can get it now if you’ve got a policeband radio.”

  “I…just a second.” There was the clunk of a dropping phone on the other end, and a faint wailing sound. When the phone was picked up, the voice was hard and businesslike, with an undercurrent of excitement.

  “Where are you, fella? Half the cops in eastern Maine just went through Rockland…at about a hundred and ten.”

  Richards craned his neck at the sign over the store. “A place called Gilly’s Town Line Store & Airstop on U.S. 1. You know it?”

  “Yeah. Just—”

  “Listen to me, maggot. I didn’t call to give you my life story. Get some photogs out here. Quick. And get this on the air. Red Newsbreak Top. I’ve got a hostage. Her name is Amelia Williams. From—” He looked at her.

  “Falmouth,” she said miserably.

  “From Falmouth. Safe conduct or I’ll kill her.”

 
“Jesus, I smell the Pulitzer Prize!”

  “No, you just shit your pants, that’s all,” Richards said. He felt lightheaded. “You get the word out. I want the State Pigs to find out everyone knows I’m not alone. Three of them at a roadblock tried to blow us up.”

  “What happened to the cops!”

  “I killed them.”

  “All three? Hot damn!” The voice, pulled away from the phone, yelled distantly: “Dicky, open the national cable!”

  “I’m going to kill her if they shoot,” Richards said, simultaneously trying to inject sincerity into his voice and to remember all the old gangster movies he had seen on tee-vee as a kid. “If they want to save the girl, they better let me through.”

  “When—”

  Richards hung up and hopped clumsily out of the booth. “Help me.”

  She put an arm around him, grimacing at the blood. “See what you’re getting yourself into?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is madness. You’re going to be killed.”

  “Drive north,” he mumbled. “Just drive north.”

  He slid into the car, breathing hard. The world insisted on going in and out. High, atonal music jangled in his ears. She pulled out and onto the road. His blood had smeared on her smart green and black-striped blouse. The old man, Gilly, cracked the screen door open and poked out a very old Polaroid camera. He clicked the shutter, pulled the tape, and waited. His face was painted with horror and excitement and delight.

  In the distance, rising and converging, sirens.

  …Minus 040 and COUNTING…

  They traveled five miles before people began running out onto their lawns to watch them pass. Many had cameras and Richards relaxed.

  “They were shooting at the aircaps at that roadblock,” she said quietly. “It was a mistake. That’s what it was. A mistake.”

  “If that maggot was aiming for an aircap when he put out the windshield, there must have been a sight on that pistol three feet high.”