The Long Walk

by Stephen King

He waved back and then as she pulled out he just stood there with his arms at his sides, conscious of how fine and brave and alone he must look. But when the car had passed back through the gate, forlornness struck him and he was only a sixteen-year-old boy again, alone in a strange place.

He wondered who they were that said the heavier guys got tired quicker, almost asked, and decided not to. The Walk was one of those things that existed on apocrypha, talismans, legend.

“You don’t understand,” Garraty said, more exasperated than ever. “Potato soup or sirloin tips, a mansion or a hovel, once you’re dead that’s it, they put you on a cooling board like Zuck or Ewing and that’s it. You’re better to take it a day at a time, is all I’m saying. If people just took it a day at a time, they’d be a lot happier.”

How do you know you’ll make it? I’ll make it, I’ll make it.

For no reason Garraty could put a finger on, he felt as if he had just walked through a Shirley Jackson short story.

Hail Mary full of grace, let us blow this goddam place.”

There were three of them in a fatigue-ridden conga line: Barkovitch at the front, still trying to look cocky but flaking a bit around the edges; McVries with his head slumped, hands half-clenched, favoring his left foot a little now; and, bringing up the rear, the star of The Ray Garraty Story himself.

In the words of the great rock and roll poet, I gave her my heart, she tore it apart, and who gives a fart.”

Pearson joined them. “I’ve been thinking.” “Save your strength,” McVries said. “Feeble, man. That is feeble.”

There ought to be a runner-up Prize, that’s what I think.” “What?” McVries asked flatly. “I dunno.” “How about his life?” Garraty asked. “Who’d walk for that?” “Nobody, before the Walk started, maybe. But right now I’d be happy enough with just that, the hell with the Prize, the hell with having my every heart’s desire. How about you?”

“We’re all crazy or we wouldn’t be here.

And almost all of them had that intent, frightened look stamped on their faces. Garraty had come to know that look so well.

In a way he supposed it would be poetic justice if Olson won. He could see the headlines: LONG WALK WON BY DEAD MAN.

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.

“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”

Even when you’re walking with no warnings, there’s only two minutes between you and the inside of a cemetery fence. That’s not much time.”

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.

There was no bustling Italian man here to throw slices of watermelon. 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.

Barkovitch continued to sob. It was an empty, ashy sound that made Garraty’s skin crawl. There was no hope in it.

“It’s like practicing pole-vaulting all your life and then getting to the Olympics and saying, ‘What the hell do I want to jump over that stupid bar for?’ ”

“I think… I wish I were insane,” he said thoughtfully.

“The rabbit turns out to be flesh and blood after all. I walk. I talk. And I suppose if all this doesn’t end soon, I’ll be crawling on my belly like a reptile.”

He wanted to be with them, stay with them, until he died.

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.

He didn’t even have any tears left to cry.

By eight that evening they were walking through Danvers, and Garraty finally knew. It was almost done, because Stebbins could not be beaten.

For a misty, shutterlike moment he thought he saw someone he knew, knew as well as himself, weeping and beckoning in the dark ahead, but it was no use. He couldn’t go on.