…Minus 071 and COUNTING… It was showtime again. Richards

With seventy-one hours remaining, Ben Richards records another submission for The Running Man. Wearing an inside-out Y.M.C.A. pillowslip over his head to hide the stamped name, he mocks the program for the camera and recognizes that the pressure of likely death has brought out a grim, unexpected humor in him.

Richards dresses, looks down at Huntington Avenue, and sees busy traffic, crowds of unemployed people with Help-Wanted Fax sheets, and police stationed everywhere. He risks leaving his room to shower in the filthy communal bathroom, then returns safely after encountering only a man who hands him a tract.

To endure the boredom and avoid going outside before dusk, Richards watches the street and counts cars. He notices the divide between Northeastern students entering the automated bookshop and the poorer idlers around them. A Ford arrives carrying a crewcut cigar smoker and a passenger in a brown-and-white hunting jacket, but at first Richards treats the scene as part of his idle observation.

A drunken stranger pounds on Richards’s door looking for “Frankie,” terrifying Richards until the man moves on. Richards resumes his window vigil, but the details outside begin to align suspiciously: the man in the hunting jacket lingers by a lamppost, the cigar smoker stands alone at a bus stop when no bus is due, an old man takes position near the building, and more police appear.

Richards realizes the supposedly casual figures are part of a tightening trap. The familiar movement patterns among the loiterers and the police presence make the conclusion unavoidable: the Hunters or their allies have already found and surrounded him.