The second half of the program was markedly different. Thompson was smiling broadly. “After the latest tapes sent to us by the monster that goes under the name of Ben Richards, I’m pleased to give you some good news-”
They had gotten Laughlin.
He had been spotted in Topeka on Friday, but an intensive search of the city on Saturday and Sunday had not turned him up. Richards had assumed that Laughlin had slipped through the cordon as he had himself. But this afternoon, Laughlin had been observed by two kids. He had been cowering in a Highway Department road shed. He had broken his right wrist at some point.
The kids, Bobby and Mary Cowles, were shown grinning broadly into the camera.
Bobby Cowles had a tooth missing. I wonder if the tooth fairy brought him a quarter, Richards thought sickly.
Thompson announced proudly that Bobby and Mary, “Topeka’s number one citizens,”
would be on The Running Man tomorrow night to be presented Certificates of Merit, a life-time supply of FunTwinks cereal, and checks for a thousand New Dollars each, by Hizzoner the Governor of Kansas. This brought wild cheers from the audience.
Following were tapes of Laughlin’s riddled, sagging body being carried out of the shed, which had been reduced to matchwood by concentrated fire. There were mingled cheers, boos, and hisses from the studio audience.
Richards turned away sickly, nauseated. Thin, invisible fingers seemed to press against his temples.
From a distance, the words rolled on. The body was being displayed in the rotunda of the Kansas statehouse. Already long lines of citizens were filing past the body. An interviewed policeman who had been in at the kill said Laughlin hadn’t put up much of a fight.
Ah, how nice for you, Richards thought, remembering Laughlin, his sour voice, the straight-ahead, jeering look in his eyes.
A friend of mine from the car pool.
Now there was only one big show. The big show was Ben Richards. He didn’t want any more of his Meatloaf Supreme.
385
Minus 054 and COUNTING
He had a very bad dream that night, which was unusual. The old Ben Richards had never dreamed.
What was even more peculiar was the fact that he did not exist as a character in the dream. He only watched, invisible.
The room was vague, dimming off to blackness at the edges of vision. It seemed that water was dripping dankly. Richards had an impression of being deep underground.
In the center of the room, Bradley was sitting in a straight wooden chair with leather straps over his arms and legs. His head had been shaved like that of a penitent.
Surrounding him were figures in black hoods. The Hunters, Richards thought with budding dread. Oh dear God, these are the Hunters.
“I ain’t the man,” Bradley said.
“Yes you are, little brother,” one of the hooded figures said gently, and pushed a pin through Bradley’s cheek. Bradley screamed.
“Are you the man?”
“Suck it.”
A pin slid easily into Bradley’s eyeball and was withdrawn dribbling colorless fluid.
Bradley’s eye took on a punched, flattened look.
“Are you the man?”
“Poke it up your ass.”
An electric move-along touched Bradley’s neck. He screamed again, and his hair stood on end. He looked like a comical caricature black, a futuristic Stepinfetchit.
“Are you the man, little brother?”
“Nose filters give you cancer,” Bradley said. “You’re all rotted inside, honkies. ”
His other eyeball was pierced. “Are you the man?”
Bradley, blind, laughed at them.
One of the hooded figures gestured, and from the shadows Bobby and Mary Cowles came tripping gaily. They began to skip around Bradley, singing: “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf?”
Bradley began to scream and twist in the chair. He seemed to be trying to hold his hands up in a warding-off gesture. The song grew louder and louder, more echoing. The children were changing. Their heads were elongating, growing dark with blood. Their mouths were open and in the caves within, fangs twinkled like razor-blades.
“I’ll tell!” Bradley screamed. “I’ll tell! I’ll tell! I ain’t the man! Ben Richards is the man! I’ll tell! God . . . oh . . . G-G-God . . . ”
“Where is the man, little brother?”
386
“I’ll tell! I’ll tell! He’s in-”
But the words were drowned by the singing voices. They were lunging toward Bradley’s straining, corded neck when Richards woke up, sweating.
Minus 053 and COUNTING
It was no good in Manchester anymore.
He didn’t know if it was the news of Laughlin’s brutal mid-western end, or the dream, or only a premonition.
But on Tuesday morning he stayed in, not going to the library. It seemed to him that every minute he stayed in this place was an invitation to quick doom. Looking out the window, he saw a Hunter with a black hood inside every old bearer and slumped taxi driver. Fantasies of gunmen creeping soundlessly up the hall toward his door tormented him. He felt a huge clock was ticking in his head.
He passed the point of indecision shortly after eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. It was impossible to stay. He knew they knew.
He got his cane and tapped clumsily to the elevators and went down to the lobby.
“Going out, Father Grassner?” The day clerk asked with his usual pleasant, contemptuous smile.
“Day off,” Richards said, speaking at the day clerk’s shoulder. “Is there a picture show in this town?”
He knew there were at least ten, eight of them showing 3-D perverto shows.
“Well,” the clerk said cautiously, “there’s the Center. I think they show Disneys-”
“That will be fine,” Richards said briskly, and bumped into a potted plant on his way out.
Two blocks from the hotel he went into a drugstore and bought a huge roll of bandage and a pair of cheap aluminum crutches. The clerk put his purchases in a long fiberboard box, and Richards caught a taxi on the next corner.
The car was exactly where it had been, and if there was a stakeout at the U-ParkIt, Richards could not spot it. He got in and started up. He had a bad moment when he realized he lacked a driver’s license in any name that wasn’t hot, and then dismissed it. He didn’t think his new disguise would get him past close scrutiny anyway. If there were roadblocks, he would try to crash them. It would get him killed, but he was going to get killed anyway if they tabbed him.
He tossed the Ogden Grassner glasses in the glove box and drove out, waving noncommittally at the boy on duty at the gate. The boy barely looked up from the skin magazine he was reading.
He stopped for a full compressed-air charge on the high-speed urban sprawl on the northern outskirts of the city. The air jockey was in the midst of a volcanic eruption of acne, and seemed pathetically anxious to avoid looking at Richards. So far, so good.
387
He switched from 91 to Route 17, and from there to a blacktop road with no name or number. Three miles farther along he pulled onto a rutted dirt turnaround and killed the engine.
Tilting the rearview mirror to the right angle, he wrapped the bandage around his skull as quickly as he could, holding the end and clipping it. A bird twitted restlessly in a tired-looking elm.
Not too bad. If he got breathing time in Portland, he could add a neck brace.
He put the crutches beside him on the seat and started the car. Forty minutes later he was entering the traffic circle at Portsmouth. Headed up Route 95, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled piece of ruled paper that Bradley had left him. He had written on it in the careful script of the self-educated, using a soft lead pencil: 94 State Street, Portland
THE BLUE DOOR, GUESTS
Elton Parrakis (& Virginia Parrakis)
Richards frowned at it a moment, then glanced up. A black-and-yellow police unit was cruising slowly above the traffic on the turnpike, in tandem with a heavy ground-unit below. They bracketed him for a moment and then were gone, zigzagging across the six lanes in a graceful ballet. Routine traffic patrol.
As the miles passed, a queasy, almost reluctant sense of relief formed in his chest. It made him feel like laughing and throwing up at the same time.
Minus 052 and COUNTING
The drive to Portland was without incident.
But by the time he reached the edge of the city, driving through the built-up suburbs of Scarborough (rich homes, rich streets, rich private schools surrounded by electrified fences), the sense of relief had begun to fade again. They could be anywhere. They could be all around him. Or they could be nowhere.
State Street was an area of blasted, ancient brownstones not far from an overgrown, junglelike park-a hangout, Richards thought, for this small city’s muggers, lovers, hypes, and thieves. No one would venture out on State Street after dark without a police dog on a leash, or a score of fellow gang-members.