Stephen King - The Running Man

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

“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 Richards’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 back seat. 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,” Richards said. He hesitated, fingers on the buttons of his shirt. “Do I wear my pants under this rig?”

Bradley burst out laughing.

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 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 a 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.

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 abortion 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.