The runner is given $4,800 and a pocket video camera before he leaves the studio. He can travel anywhere in the world, and each day he must videotape two messages and mail them back to the studio for broadcasting. If he neglects to send the messages, he will be held in default of his Games contract and stop accumulating prize money, but will continue to be hunted indefinitely. Killian states that no contestant has survived long enough to claim the grand prize, nor does he expect anyone to ever do so. Richards simply hopes that he will last long enough to secure his family's future with his prize money. As the game begins, Richards obtains a disguise and false identification records, traveling first to New York City and then Boston. In Boston, he is tracked down by the Hunters and only narrowly escapes, setting off an explosion in the basement of a YMCA building that kills five police officers. He sneaks away through a sewer pipe and emerges in the city's impoverished ghetto, where he takes shelter with gang member Bradley Throckmorton and his family. Richards learns from Bradley that the air is severely polluted and that the city's poor have become a permanent underclass. Bradley also says that the Network exists only as a propaganda machine to pacify and distract the public. Richards tries to incorporate this information into his video messages, but finds that the Network dubs over his voice with obscenities and threats during the broadcast. Bradley smuggles Richards past a government checkpoint to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he disguises himself as a half-blind priest. In addition, Bradley provides Richards with a set of mailing labels for his videotapes that will leave the Network unable to track him by their postmarks. While spending three days in Manchester, Richards learns that another contestant has been killed, and he dreams that Bradley has betrayed him after being tortured. He travels to a safe house owned by a friend of Bradley in Portland, Maine, but is reported by the owner's mother. As the police and the Hunters close in on the safe house, Richards is wounded, but manages to escape and spends the night sleeping at an abandoned construction site. The next morning, after arranging to mail his videotapes, Richards carjacks a woman named Amelia Williams and takes her hostage. Alerting the media to his presence, he makes his way to an airport in Derry. The police confront Richards, but he bluffs his way onto a plane past both them and the lead Hunter, Evan McCone, by pretending to be carrying an explosive charge powerful enough to destroy the entire facility.