The Running Man

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 YMCA 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 tun 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 faded to a split-screen 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 ditty 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.