“No,” Richards said shortly, not knowing if they would or not. It was twenty minutes of eight. He and Elton had left the Blue Door at ten minutes past seven. It seemed as if decades had passed.
A far distance off, more sirens were joining in the general chorus. The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible, Richards thought disjointedly. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. He had dispatched two police cars singlehanded. Another bonus for Sheila.
Blood money. And Cathy. Would Cathy sicken and die on milk paid for with bounty cash? How are you, my darlings? I love you. Here on this twisting, crazy back road fit only for deer jackers and couples looking for a good make-out spot, I love you and wish that your dreams be sweet. I wish-
“Turn left,” Elton croaked.
Richards swung left up a smooth tarred road that cut through a tangle of denuded sumac and elm, pine and spruce, scrubby nightmare second growth. A river, ripe and sulphurous with industrial waste, smote his nose. Low-hanging branches scraped the roof of the car with skeleton screeches. They passed a sign which read: SUPER PINE TREE
MALL-UNDER CONSTRUCTION-KEEP OUT!TRESPASSERS WILL BE
PROSECUTED!!
They topped a final rise and there was the Super Pine Tree Mall. Work must have stopped at least two years ago, Richards thought, and things hadn’t been too advanced when it did. The place was a maze, a rat warren of half-built stores and shops, discarded lengths of pipe, piles of cinderblock and boards, shacks and rusted Quonset huts, all overgrown with scrubby junipers and laurels and witch-grass and blue spruce, blackberry and blackthorn, devil’s paintbrush and denuded goldenrod. And it stretched on for miles.
Gaping oblong foundation holes like graves dug for Roman gods. Rusted skeleton steel.
Cement walls with steel core-rods protruding like shadowy cryptograms. Bulldozed oblongs that were to be parking lots now grassed over.
Somewhere overhead, an owl flew on stiff and noiseless wings, hunting.
“Help me . . . into the driver’s seat.”
“You’re in no condition to drive,” Richards said, pushing hard on his door to open it.
“It’s the least I can do,” Elton Parrakis said with grave and bloody absurdity. “I’ll play hare . . . drive as long as I can.”
“No,” Richards said.
“Let me go! ” He screamed at Richards, his fat baby face terrible and grotesque. “I’m 398
dying and you just better let me guh-guh-guh-” He trailed off into hideous silent coughs that brought up fresh gouts of blood. It smelled very moist in the car; like a slaughterhouse. “Help me,” he whispered. “I’m too fat to do it by myself. Oh God please help me do this.”
Richards helped him. He pushed and heaved and his hands slipped and squelched in Elton’s blood. The front seat was an abbatoir. And Elton (who would have thought anyone could have so much blood in him?) continued to bleed.
Then he was wedged behind the wheel and the air car was rising jaggedly, turning.
The brake lights blinked on and off, on and off, and the car bunted at trees lightly before Elton found the road out.
Richards thought he would hear the crash, but there was none. The erratic thumps-thumps-thumps of the air cylinders grew fainter, beating in the deadly one–
cylinder-flat rhythm that would burn out the others in an hour or so. The sound faded.
Then there was no sound at all but the faraway buzz of a plane. Richards realized belatedly that he had left the crutches he had purchased for disguise purposes in the back of the car.
The constellations whirled indifferently overhead.
He could see his breath in small, frozen puffs; it was colder tonight.
He turned from the road and plunged into the jungle of the construction site.
Minus 047 and COUNTING
He spied a pile of cast-off insulation lying in the bottom of a cellar hole and climbed down, using the protruding core rods for handholds. He found a stick and pounded the insulation to scare out the rats. He was rewarded with nothing but a thick, fibrous dust that made him sneeze and yelp with the pain-burst in his badly used nose. No rats. All the rats were in the city. He uttered a harsh bray of laughter that sounded jagged and splintered in the big dark.
He wrapped himself in strips of the insulation until he looked like a human igloo-but it was warm. He leaned back against the wall and fell into a half-doze.
When he roused fully, a late moon, no more than a cold scrap of light, hung over the eastern horizon. He was still alone. There were no sirens. It might have been three o’clock.
His arm throbbed uneasily, but the flow of blood had stopped on its own; he saw this after pulling the arm out of the insulation and brushing the fibers gently away from the clot. The Sten gun bullet had apparently ripped a fairly large triangular hunk of meat from the side of his arm just above the elbow. He supposed he was lucky that the bullet hadn’t smashed the bone. But his ankle throbbed with a steady, deep ache. The foot itself felt strange and ethereal, barely attached. He supposed the break should be splinted.
Supposing, he dozed again.
When he woke, his head was clearer. The moon had risen halfway up in the sky, but 399
there was still no sign of dawn, true or false. He was forgetting something-It came to him in a nasty, jolting realization.
He had to mail two tape clips before noon, if they were to get to the Games Building by the six-thirty air time. That meant traveling or defaulting the money.
But Bradley was on the run, or captured.
And Elton Parrakis had never given him the Cleveland name.
And his ankle was broken.
Something large (a deer? weren’t they extinct in the east?) suddenly crashed through the underbrush off to his right, making him jump. Insulation slid off him like snakes, and he pulled it back around himself miserably, snuffling through his broken nose.
He was a city-dweller sitting in a deserted Development gone back to the wild in the middle of nowhere. The night suddenly seemed alive and malevolent, frightening of its own self, full of crazed bumps and creaks.
Richards breathed through his mouth, considering his options and their consequences.
1. Do nothing. Just sit here and wait for things to cool off. Consequence: The money he was piling up, a hundred dollars an hour, would be cut off at six tonight. He would be running for free, but the hunt wouldn’t stop, not even if he managed to avoid them for the whole thirty days. The hunt would continue until he was carried off on a board.
2. Mail the clips to Boston. It couldn’t hurt Bradley or the family, because their cover was already blown. Consequences: (1) The tapes would undoubtedly be sent to Harding by the Hunters watching Bradley’s mail, but (2) they would still be able to trace him directly to wherever he mailed the tapes from, with no intervening Boston postmark.
3. Mail the tapes directly to the Games Building in Harding. Consequences: The hunt would go on, but he would probably be recognized in any town big enough to command a mailbox.
They were all lousy choices.
Thank you, Mrs. Parrakis. Thank you.
He got up, brushing the insulation away, and tossed the useless head bandage on top of it. As an afterthought, he buried it in the insulation.
He began hunting around for something to use as a crutch (the irony of leaving the real crutches in the car struck him again), and when he found a board that reached approximately to armpit height, he threw it over the lip of the cellar foundation and began to climb laboriously back up the core rods.
When he got to the top, sweating and shivering simultaneously, he realized that he could see his hands. The first faint gray light of dawn had begun to probe the darkness.
He looked longingly at the deserted Development, thinking: It would have made such a fine hiding place-No good. He wasn’t supposed to be a hiding man; he was a running man. Wasn’t that what kept the ratings up?
400
A cloudy, cataract-like ground mist was creeping slowly through the denuded trees.
Richards paused to get his directions and then struck off toward the woods that bordered the abandoned Super Mall on the north.
He paused only once to wrap his coat around the top of his crutch and then continued.
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.