The Running Man - Stephen King [43]
“Those two-hundred-dollar nose filters aren’t worth shit. They’re just two pieces of screen with a little piece of metholated cotton between them. That’s all. The only good ones are from General Atomics. The only ones who can afford them are the big boys. They gave us the Free-Vee to keep us off the streets so we can breathe ourselves to death without making any trouble. How do you like that? The cheapest G-A nose filter on the market goes for six thousand New Dollars. We made one for Stacey for ten bucks from that book. We used an atomic nugget the size of the moon on your fingernail. Got it out of a hearing aid we bought in a hockshop for seven bucks. How do you like that?”
Richards said nothing. He was speechless.
“When Cassie boots off, you think they’ll put cancer on the death certificate? Shit they’ll put asthma. Else somebody might get scared. Somebody might kife a library card and find out lung cancer is up seven hundred percent since 2015.”
“Is that true? Or are you making it up?”
“I read it in a book. Man, they’re killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. It’s like a magician getting you to watch the cakes falling outta his helper’s blouse while he pulls rabbits out of his pants and puts ’em in his hat.” He paused and then said dreamily: “Sometimes I think that I could blow the whole thing outta the water with ten minutes talktime on the Free-Vee. Tell em. Show em. Everybody could have a nose filter if the Network wanted em to have em.”
“And I’m helping them,” Richards said.
“That ain’t your fault. You got to run.”
Killian’s face, and the face of Arthur M. Burns rose up in front of Richards. He wanted to smash them, stomp them, walk on them. Better still, rip out their nose filters and turn them into the street.
“People’s mad,” Bradley said. “They’ve been mad at the honkies for thirty years. All they need is a reason. A reason…one reason…”
Richards drifted off to sleep with the repetition in his ears.
…Minus 062 and COUNTING…
Richards stayed in all day while Bradley was out seeing about the car and arranging with another member of the gang to drive it to Manchester.
Bradley and Stacey came back at six, and Bradley thumbed on the Free-Vee. “All set, man. We go tonight.”
“Now?”
Bradley smiled humorlessly. “Don’t you want to see yourself coast-to-coast?”
Richards discovered he did, and when The Running Man lead-in came on, he watched, fascinated.
Bobby Thompson stared deadpan at the camera from the middle of a brilliant post in a sea of darkness. “Watch,” he said. “This is one of the wolves that walks among you.”
A huge blowup of Richards’s face appeared on the screen. It held for a moment, then dissolved to a second photo of Richards, this time in the John Griffen Springer disguise.
Dissolve back to Thompson, looking grave. “I speak particularly to the people of Boston tonight. Yesterday afternoon, five policemen went to a blazing, agonized death in the basement of the Boston Y.M.C.A. at the hands of this wolf, who had set a clever, merciless trap. Who is he tonight? Where is he tonight? Look! Look at him!”
Thompson faded into the first of the two clips which Richards had filmed that morning. Stacey had dropped them in a mailbox on Commonwealth Avenue, across the city. He had let Ma hold the camera in the back bedroom, after he had draped the window and all the furniture.
“All of you watching this,” Richards’s image said slowly. “Not the technicos, not the people in the penthouses—I don’t mean you shits. You people in the Developments and the ghettos and the cheap highrises. You people in the cycle gangs. You people without jobs. You kids getting busted for dope you don’t have and crimes you didn’t commit because the Network wants to make sure you aren’t meeting together and talking together. I want to tell you about a monstrous conspiracy to deprive you of the very breath in y—”
The audio suddenly became a mixture of squeaks, pops, and gargles. A moment later