The Running Man

He ran and ran. His heart pounded like a wrestler being repeatedly suplexed into the canvas.

The trees were all around him, but they offered no real cover. His only choice was to keep running.

He could hear the helicopter overhead. They knew exactly where he was. He knew he might as well give up, but that wasn’t an option.

The dogs were gaining on him too. He could hear them snarling in the distance like a hungover stag party who arrive at McDonald’s at 10:31am and attempt to order breakfast only to be told they’re too late.

The man in the suit had given him a generous head start. A whole hour. That was yesterday though and now he was tiring.

The dogs were getting closer, sniffing him out like pigs looking for truffles.

He burst out into a clearing and stopped abruptly, his arms resembling Windy Miller’s house in an attempt to stop him falling from where he now stood.

He looked down the gorge over which he’d briefly teetered. It had to be fifty metres or more to the bottom. He was trapped

There was a rustling behind him and he turned.

Two men in military-meets-Milk-Tray-man outfits with aggressive-looking dogs with gargoyle faces now stood just a few feet from him.

The man in the suit appeared moments later.

“Well, well.” The man smiled a crooked smile, like a crack in dry soil on a summer’s day. “Looks like your game’s up.”

“I guess so.”

“You can still pay and all this will be forgotten.”

He looked behind him. An idea came to him. He’d watched The Fugitive recently and was thinking about the part where Harrison Ford swan-dives off the top of a dam. He could do that and escape.

“I don’t think so.”

He turned and dived head-first into the gorge. It was hardly an Olympic-quality dive, or at least not an Olympic-quality dive that would trouble the podium places, and a swan would have been thoroughly embarrassed by it, but that didn’t matter. The last thought he had before he smashed into the rocks like a bag of potatoes was that it wasn’t really Harrison Ford, but a stunt Harrison Ford.

The man in the suit looked down. “So sad,” he deadpanned and walked away. He took a leather-bound book from his inside pocket to see who else hadn’t paid their TV licence.