The Running Man

by Richard Bachman

Uptown there was only one function for a man in baggy gray pants and a cheap bowl haircut and sunken eyes. That purpose was the Games.

The cop relaxed, his face subtle and Chinese with disappointment.

Another cop sat on a small stool reading a 3-D Pervert Mag in a small bulletproof cubicle

Books were regarded with suspicion at best, especially when carried by someone from south of the Canal. Pervert Mags were safer.

Soon they all stood stripped and anonymous, penises dangling between their legs like forgotten war-clubs.

When the entire group was wearing them, Ben Richards felt as if he had lost his face.

Maybe only because it needed to be said once, to make it coalesce and take concrete shape, as things do when a man forces himself to translate unformed emotional reactions into spoken words.

Arthur M. Burns chuckled porkily

“The program is one of the surest ways the Network has of getting rid of embryo troublemakers such as yourself, Mr. Richards. We’ve been on for six years. To date, we have no survivals. To be brutally honest, we expect to have none.”

You keep forgetting you’re an anachronism, Mr. Richards. People won’t be in the bars and hotels or gathering in the cold in front of appliance stores rooting for you to get away. Goodness! No. They want to see you wiped out, and they’ll help if they can.

“What if I could go up?” he asked, and gestured with his head toward the ceiling and the eighty stories above the ceiling. “Who could I kill up there? Who could I kill if I went right to the top?” Killian laughed softly and punched the button beside the elevator; the doors popped open. “That’s what I like about you, Richards. You think big.”

“I remember when Mick Jagger was a big name. You don’t even know who he was, do ya?”

Would the Hunters expect that? Yes. They would not be looking for a running man at all. They would be looking for a hiding man.

“You still a sucker,” Bradley said with flat and somehow uncanny emphasis. “You suckin off half the world and they comin in your mouth every night at six-thirty. Your little girl would be better off like Cassie in this world.”

He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride—if responsibility robs him of his manhood.

They looked oddly incomplete, like pictures with holes for eyes or a jigsaw puzzle with a minor piece missing. It was a lack of desperation, Richards thought. No wolves howled in these bellies. These minds were not filled with rotted, crazed dreams or mad hopes.

“Ben,” Killian said with infinite gentleness, “your wife and daughter are dead. They’ve been dead for over ten days.”