The Running Man(42)
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 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 onecylinder-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 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.