The Running Man - By Stephen King Page 0,51
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 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