The Long Walk

by Stephen King

They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”

“We want to die, that’s why we’re doing it. Why else, Garraty? Why else?”

“Ask your cracker friend, Art Baker. A mule doesn’t like to plow. But he likes carrots. So you hang a carrot in front of his eyes. A mule without a carrot gets exhausted. A mule with a carrot spends a long time being tired. You get it?”

Stebbins smiled again. “You will. Watch Olson. He’s lost his appetite for the carrot. He doesn’t quite know it yet, but he has. Watch Olson, Garraty. You can learn from Olson.”

Garraty swallowed. “Is it a very important lesson, would you say?” Stebbins stopped laughing. He caught Garraty’s wrist in a strong grip. “The most important lesson you’ll ever learn, maybe. The secret of life over death. Reduce that equation and you can afford to die, Garraty. You can spend your life like a drunkard on a spree.”

Love this. Always have to have a carrot

A sound began to beat its way into the night then, savage and orgiastic. It was a voice, it was many voices, and it was repeating the same thing over and over. Garraty! Garraty! GARRATY! GARRATY! GARRATY! It was God or his father, about to cut the legs out from under him before he could learn the secret, the secret, the secret of— Like thunder: GARRATY! GARRATY! GARRATY! It wasn’t his father and it wasn’t God. It was what appeared to be the entire student body of Oldtown High School, chanting his name in unison. As they caught sight of his white, weary, and strained face, the steady beating cry dissolved into wild cheering. Cheerleaders fluttered pompoms. Boys whistled shrilly and kissed their girls. Garraty waved back, smiled, nodded, and craftily crept closer to Olson.

Awesome

“Please,” Garraty said. “Try hard.” “Ga. Go. God. God’s garden—” “God’s garden,” Garraty repeated doubtfully. “What about God’s garden, Olson?” “It’s full. Of. Weeds,” Olson said sadly. His head bounced against his chest. “I.” Garraty said nothing. He could not. They were going up another hill now and he was panting again. Olson did not seem to be out of breath at all. “I don’t. Want. To die,” Olson finished.

“They’ll drop out tonight,” he said. “They’ll go like bugs on a wall tonight.” “I wouldn’t count on it,” Collie Parker said, and now he sounded worn and tired—subdued at last. “Why not?” “It’s like shaking a box of crackers through a sieve, Garraty. The crumbs fall through pretty fast. Then the little pieces break up and they go, too. But the big crackers”—Parker’s grin was a crescent flash of saliva-coated teeth in the darkness—“the whole crackers have to bust off a crumb at a time.”

“I still want to live,” Parker said roughly. “So do you, don’t shit me, Garraty. You and that guy McVries can walk down the road and bullshit the universe and each other, so what, it’s all a bunch of phony crap but it passes the time. But don’t shit me. The bottom line is you still want to live. So do most of the others. They’ll die slow. They’ll die one piece at a time. I may get it, but right now I feel like I could walk all the way to New Orleans before I fell down on my knees for those wet ends in their kiddy car.” “Really?” He felt a wave of despair wash over him. “Really?” “Yeah, really. Settle down, Garraty. We still got a long way to go.”

Man that's cold

In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there was still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.

Interesting insight

Scramm looked at them dumbly, then shook his head slowly from side to side. “Why’d I have to get sick? I was going good, I really was. Odds-on favorite. Even when I’m tired I like to walk. Look at folks, smell the air… why? Is it God? Did God do it to me?” “I don’t know,” Abraham said.

So brutal

“Hey Ma! Look at the big guy! Look at that moose, Ma! Hey Ma! Look!” Garraty’s eyes swept the crowd briefly and picked out the boy in the first row. He was wearing a Randy the Robot T-shirt and goggling around a half-eaten jam sandwich. Scramm waved at him. “Kids’re nice,” he said. “Yeah. I hope Cathy has a boy. We both wanted a boy. A girl would be all right, but you guys know… a boy… he keeps your name and passes it on. Not that Scramm’s such a great name.” He laughed, and Garraty thought of what Stebbins had said, about bulwarks against mortality.

The lights filled the sky with a bubblelike pastel glow that was frightening and apocalyptic, reminding Garraty of pictures he had seen in the history books of the German air-blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II.

There was a raw redness in that swelling sound of Crowd. A hunger that was numbing. Garraty had a vivid and scary image of the great god Crowd clawing its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs and devouring them all alive.

Only Crowd, a creature with no body, no head, no mind. Crowd was nothing but a Voice and an Eye, and it was not surprising that Crowd was both God and Mammon. Garraty felt it. He knew the others were feeling it. It was like walking between giant electrical pylons, feeling the tingles and shocks stand every hair on end, making the tongue jitter nuttily in the mouth, making the eyes seem to crackle and shoot off sparks as they rolled in their beds of moisture. Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshiped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.

The guns blasted and they all jumped. “It was Barkovitch or Quince,” Pearson said. “I can’t tell… one of them’s still walking… it’s—” Barkovitch laughed out of the darkness, a high, gobbling sound, thin and terrifying. “Not yet, you whores! I ain’t gone yet! Not yeeeeeetttttt…” His voice kept climbing and climbing. It was like a fire whistle gone insane. And Barkovitch’s hands suddenly went up like startled doves taking flight and Barkovitch ripped out his own throat. “My Jesus!” Pearson wailed, and threw up over himself. They fled from him, fled and scattered ahead and behind, and Barkovitch went on screaming and gobbling and clawing and walking, his feral face turned up to the sky, his mouth a twisted curve of darkness. Then the fire-whistle sound began to fail, and Barkovitch failed with it. He fell down and they shot him, dead or alive.

Jeeeeeesus

“I hope it won’t be dark,” Baker said. “That’s all I hope. If there is an… an after, I hope it’s not dark. And I hope you can remember. I’d hate to wander around in the dark forever, not knowing who I was or what I was doin’ there, or not even knowing that I’d ever had anything different.”

This was followed by the face of the New Hampshire Provo Governor, a man known for having stormed the German nuclear base in Santiago nearly single-handed back in 1953. He had lost a leg to radiation poisoning.

It seemed that he had once been loved, once he himself had loved. But now it was just jazz and the rising drumbeat in his head and his mother had only been stuffed straw in a fur coat, Jan nothing but a department store dummy. It was over. Even if he won, if he managed to outlast McVries and Stebbins and Baker, it was over. He was never going home again.

“I’m going to die now, Garraty.” “All right.” “If you win, will you do something for me? I’m scairt to ask anyone else.” And Baker made a sweeping gesture at the deserted road as if the Walk was still rich with its dozens. For a chilling moment Garraty wondered if maybe they were all there still, walking ghosts that Baker could now see in his moment of extremis. “Anything.” Baker put a hand on Garraty’s shoulder, and Garraty began weeping uncontrollably. It seemed that his heart would burst out of his chest and weep its own tears. Baker said, “Lead-lined.”

“Maybe I’ll see you, man,” Baker said, and wiped slick blood from his face absently. Garraty lowered his head and wept. “Don’t watch ’em do it,” Baker said. “Promise me that, too.” Garraty nodded, beyond speech. “Thanks. You’ve been my friend, Garraty.” Baker tried to smile. He stuck his hand blindly out, and Garraty shook it with both of his. “Another time, another place,” Baker said. Garraty put his hands over his face and had to bend over to keep walking. The sobs ripped out of him and made him ache with a pain that was far beyond anything the Walk had been able to inflict. He hoped he wouldn’t hear the shots. But he did.