The Running Man

MINUS 050 AND COUNTING

He dozed a little but could not sleep. Darkness was almost full when he heard Elton’s heavy tread on the stairs again, and Richards swung his feet onto the floor with relief.

When he knocked and stepped in, Richards saw that Parrakis had changed into a tentlike sports shirt and a pair of jeans.

“I did it,” he said. “It’s in the park.”

“Will it be stripped?”

“No,” Elton said. “I have a gadget. A battery and two alligator clips. If anyone puts his hand or a crowbar on it, they’ll get a shock and a short blast on a siren. Works good. I built it myself.” He seated himself with a heavy sigh.

“What’s this about Cleveland?” Richards demanded (it was easy, he found, to demand of Elton).

Parrakis shrugged. “Oh, he’s a fellow like me. I met him once in Boston, at the library with Bradley. Our little pollution club. I suppose Mom said something about that.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled unhappily.

“She said something,” Richards agreed.

“She’s… a little dim,” Parrakis said. “She doesn’t understand much of what’s been happening for the last twenty years or so. She’s frightened all the time. I’m all she has.”

“Will they catch Bradley?”

“I don’t know. He’s got quite a.. uh, intelligence network.” But his eyes slipped away from Richards’s.

“You-”

The door opened and Mrs. Parrakis stood there. Her arms were crossed and she was smiling, but her eyes were haunted. “I’ve called the police,” she said. “Now you’ll have to go.”

Elton’s face drained to a pearly yellowish-white. “You’re lying.”

Richards lurched to his feet and then paused, his head cocked in a listening gesture.

Faintly, rising, the sound of sirens.

“She’s not lying,” he said. A sickening sense of futility swept him. Back to square one. “Take me to my car.”

“She’s lying,” Elton insisted. He rose, almost touched Richards’s arm, then withdrew his hand as if the other man might be hot to the touch. “They’re fire trucks.”

“Take me to my car. Quick.”

The sirens were becoming louder, rising and falling, wailing. The sound filled Richards with a dreamlike horror, locked in here with these two crazies while-

“Mother-” His face was twisted, beseeching.

“I called them!” She blatted, and seized one of her son’s bloated arms as if to shake him. “I had to! For you! That darky has got you all mixed up! We’ll say he broke in and we’ll get the reward money-”

“Come on,” Elton grunted to Richards, and tried to shake free of her.

But she clung-stubbornly, like a small dog bedeviling a Percheron. “I had to. You’ve got to stop this radical business, Eltie! You’ve got to-”

“Eltie!” He screamed. “Elbe!” And he flung her away. She skidded across the room and fell across the bed.

“Quick,” Elton said, his face full of terror and misery. “Oh, come quick.”

They crashed and blundered down the stairs and out the front door, Elton breaking into gigantic, quivering trot. He was beginning to pant again.

And upstairs, filtering both through the closed window and the open door downstairs, Mrs. Parrakis’s scream rose to a shriek which met and mixed and blended with the approaching sirens: “I DID IT FOR YOOOOOOOOO-”