The Running Man

MINUS 046 AND COUNTING

It had been full daylight for two hours and Richards had almost convinced himself he was going around in large circles when he heard, through the rank brambles and ground bushes up ahead, the whine of air cars.

He pushed on cautiously and then peered out on a two-lane macadam highway. Cars rushed to and fro with fair regularity. About a half a mile up, Richards could make out a cluster of houses and what was either an air station or an old general store with pumps in front.

He pushed on, paralleling the highway, falling over occasionally. His face and hands were a needlepoint of blood from briars and brambles, and his clothes were studded with brown sticker-balls. He had given up trying to brush them away. Burst milkweed pods floated lightly from both shoulders, making him look as if he had been in a pillow fight. He was wet from top to toe; he had made it through the first two brooks, but in the third his “crutch” had slipped on the treacherous bottom and he had fallen headlong. The camera of course was undamaged. It was waterproof and shockproof. Of course.

The bushes and trees were thinning. Richards got down on his hands and knees and crawled. When he had gone as far as he thought he safely could, he studied the situation.

He was on a slight rise of land, a peninsula of the scrubby second-growth weeds he had been walking through. Below him was the highway, a number of ranch-type houses, and a store with air pumps. A car was in there now, being attended to while the driver, a man in a suede windbreaker, chatted with the air jockey. Beside the store, along with three or four gumball machines and a Maryjane vendor, stood a blue and red mailbox. It was only two hundred yards away. Looking at it, Richards realized bitterly that if he had arrived before first light he could have probably done his business unseen.

Well, spilt milk and all that. The best laid plans of mice and men.

He withdrew until he could set up his camera and do his taping without being seen.

“Hello, all you wonderful people out there in Free-Vee land,” he began. “This is jovial Ben Richards, taking you on my annual nature hike. If you look closely you may see the fearless scarlet tanager or a great speckled cowbird. Perhaps even a yellow-bellied pig bird or two.” He paused. “They may let that part through, but not the rest. If you’re deaf and read lips, remember what I’m saying. Tell a neighbor or a friend. Spread the word. The Network is poisoning the air you breathe and denying you cheap protection because-”

He recorded both tapes and put them in his pants pocket. Okay. What next? The only possible way to do it was to go down with the gun drawn, deposit the tapes, and run. He could steal a car. It wasn’t as if they weren’t going to know where he was anyway.

Randomly, he wondered how far Parrakis had gotten before they cut him down. He had the gun out and in his fist when he heard the voice, startlingly close, seemingly in his left ear: “Come on, Rolf!”

There was a sudden volley of barks that made Richards jump violently and he had just time to think: Police dogs, Christ, they’ve got police dogs, when something huge and black broke cover and arrowed at him.

The gun was knocked into the brush and Richards was on his back. The dog was on top of him, a big German shepherd with a generous streak of mongrel, lapping his face and drooling on his shirt. His tail flagged back and forth in vigorous semaphores of joy.

“Rolf! Hey Rolf! Rol-oh Gawd!” Richards caught an obscured glimpse of running legs in blue jeans, and then a small boy was dragging the dog away. “Jeez, I’m sorry, mister. Jeez, he don’t bite, he’s too dumb to bite, he’s just friendly, he ain’t… Gawd, ain’t you a mess! You get lost?”

The boy was holding Rolf by the collar and staring at Richards with frank interest. He was a good-looking boy, well made, perhaps eleven, and there was none of the pale and patched inner city look on his face. There was something suspicious and alien in his features, yet familiar also. After a moment Richards placed it. It was innocence.

“Yes,” he said dryly. “I got lost.”

“Gee, you sure must have fallen around some.”

“That I did, pal. You want to take a close look at my face and see if it’s scratched up very badly? I can’t see it, you know.”

The boy leaned forward obediently and scanned Richards’s face. No sign of recognition flickered there. Richards was satisfied.

“It’s all burr-caught,” the boy said (there was a delicate New England twang in his voice; not exactly Down East, but lightly springy, sardonic), “but you’ll live.” His brow furrowed. “You escaped from Thomaston? I know you ain’t from Pineland cause you don’t look like a retard.”

“I’m not escaped from anywhere,” Richards said, wondering if that was a lie or the truth. “I was hitchhiking. Bad habit, pal. You never do it, do you?”

“No way,” the boy said earnestly. “There’s crazy dudes running the roads these days. That’s what my dad says.”

“He’s right,” Richards said. “But I just had to get to… uh…” He snapped his fingers in a pantomime of it-just-slipped-my-mind. “You know, jetport.”

“You must mean Voigt Field.”

“That’s it.”

“Jeez, that’s over a hundred miles from here, mister. In Derry.”

“I know,” Richards said ruefully, and ran a hand over Rolf s fur. The dog rolled over obligingly and played dead. Richards fought an urge to utter a morbid chuckle. “I picked up a ride at the New Hampshire border with these three maggots. Real tough guys. They beat me up, stole my wallet and dumped me at some deserted shopping center-”

“Yeah, I know that place. Cripes, you wanna come down to the house and have some breakfast?”

“I’d like to, bucko, but time’s wasting. I have to get to that jetport by tonight.”

“You going to hitch another lift?” The boy’s eyes were round.

“Got to.” Richards started to get up, then settled back as if a great idea had struck him. “Listen, do me a favor?”

“I guess so,” the boy said cautiously.

Richards took out the two exposed tape-clips. “These are chargeplate cash vouchers,” he said glibly. “If you drop them in a mailbox for me, my company will have a lump of cash waiting for me in Derry. Then I’ll be on my merry way.”

“Even without an address?”

“These go direct,” Richards said.

“Sure. Okay. There’s a mailbox down at Jarrold’s Store.” He got up, his inexperienced face unable to disguise the fact that he thought Richards was lying in his teeth. “Come on, Rolf.”

He let the boy get fifteen feet and then said: “No. Come here again.”

The boy turned and came back with his feet dragging. There was dread on his face. Of course, there were enough holes in Richards’s story to drive a truck through.

“I’ve got to tell you everything, I guess,” Richards said. “I was telling you the truth about most of it, pal. But I didn’t want to risk the chance that you might blab.”

The morning October sun was wonderfully warm on his back and neck and he wished he could stay on the hill all day, and sleep sweetly in fall’s fugitive warmth.

He pulled the gun from where it had fallen and let it lie loosely on the grass. The boy’s eyes went wide.

“Government,” Richards said quietly.

“Jee-zus!” The boy whispered. Rolf sat beside him, his pink tongue lolling rakishly from the side of his mouth.

“I’m after some pretty hard guys, kid. You can see that they worked me over pretty well. Those clips you got there have got to get through.”

“I’ll mail em,” the boy said breathlessly. “Jeez, wait’ll I tell-”

“Nobody,” Richards said. “Tell nobody for twenty-four hours. There might be reprisals,” he added ominously. “So until tomorrow this time, you never saw me. Understand?”

“Yeah! Sure!”

“Then get on it. And thanks, pal.” He held out his hand and the boy shook it awefully.

Richards watched them trot down the hill, a boy in a red plaid shirt with his dog crashing joyfully through the golden-rod beside him. Why can’t my Cathy have something like that?

His face twisted into a terrifying and wholly unconscious grimace of rage and hate, and he might have cursed God Himself if a better target had not interposed itself on the dark screen of his mind: the Games Federation. And behind that, like the shadow of a darker god, the Network.

He watched until he saw the boy, made tiny with distance, drop the tapes into the mailbox.

Then he got up stiffly, propping his crutch under him, and crashed back into the brush, angling toward the road.

The jetport, then. And maybe someone else would pay some dues before it was all over.