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“Ray, I don’t think I’d do it again if the Major put his pistol up against my nates. This is the next thing to suicide, except that a regular suicide is quicker.” “True,” Olson said. “How true.” He smiled a hollow, concentration-camp smile that made Garraty’s belly crawl.
Ten minutes later they passed under a huge red-and-white banner that proclaimed: 100 MILES!! CONGRATULATIONS FROM THE JEFFERSON PLANTATION CHAMBER OF COMMERCE! CONGRATULATIONS TO THIS YEAR’S “CENTURY CLUB” LONG WALKERS!!
I could die, he thought. I could just die laughing, wouldn’t that be a scream?
Once, in the eighth grade, he had read a story by a man named Ray Bradbury, and this story was about the crowds that gather at the scenes of fatal accidents, about how these crowds always have the same faces, and about how they seem to know whether the wounded will live or die. I’m going to live a little longer, Garraty told them. I’m going to live. I’m going to live a little longer.
The Walk went on. The heat went on. The sun hung suspended just above the line of trees the road cut its way through. Their shadows were stubby dwarves. Around ten o’clock, one of the soldiers disappeared through the back hatch of the halftrack and reappeared with a long pole. The upper two thirds of the pole was shrouded in cloth. He closed the hatch and dropped the end of the pole into a slot in the metal. He reached under the cloth and did something… fiddled something, probably a stud. A moment later a large, dun-colored sun umbrella popped up. It shaded most of the halftrack’s metal
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Garraty cleared his throat twice but said nothing. He thought that the longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence.
He screamed again, a high, incredibly thin note that seemed sharp enough to shatter glass and what he was screaming was: “My feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—” “Jesus,” Garraty muttered. “Why doesn’t he stop that?” The screams went on and on.
“You don’t know,” McVries said. “You’re dying and you don’t know why.” “It’s not important after you’re dead.” “Yeah, maybe,” McVries said, “but there’s one thing you ought to know, Ray, so it won’t be all so pointless.” “What’s that?” “Why, that you’ve been had. You mean you really didn’t know that, Ray? You really didn’t?”
One hundred and fifteen miles traveled. They were forty-five miles north of Oldtown, a hundred and twenty-five miles north of Augusta, the state capital, one hundred and fifty to Freeport (or more… he was terribly afraid there were more than twenty-five miles between Augusta and Freeport), probably two-thirty to the New Hampshire border. And the word was that this Walk was sure to go that far.
“Fordy fibe,” Scramm said, joining them. “I don’t thing we’ll even get to Pordland ad this rade.”
2:30 PM. They had walked a hundred and twenty-one miles.
Directly above them the sky had gone a sick yellow. A tornado sky, Garraty thought. Wouldn’t that be the living end. What would they do if a tornado just came tearing ass down the road and carried them all off to Oz in a whirling cloud of dirt, flapping shoeleather, and whirling watermelon seeds?
“Is there a provision in the rules for an act of God?” McVries considered. “No, I don’t think so.” He began buttoning his jacket. “What happens if we get struck by lightning?” McVries threw back his head and cackled. “We’ll be dead!”
Lightning forked again, an almost pink streak that left the air smelling of ozone. A moment later the storm smote them again. But it wasn’t rain this time. It was hail. In a space of five seconds they were being pelted by hailstones the size of small pebbles. Several of the boys cried out, and Garraty shielded his eyes with one hand. The wind rose to a shriek. Hailstones bounced and smashed against the road, against faces and bodies.
“Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah.” —The Count Sesame Street
He could see the headlines: LONG WALK WON BY DEAD MAN.
The muscles seemed to be softening, melting like Jell-O left out in a hot sun. They trembled almost helplessly. They twitched like badly controlled puppets.
Slowly, reflectively, Olson gained his feet, hands crossed on his belly. He seemed to sniff the air for direction, turned slowly in the direction of the Walk, and began to stagger along. “Put him out of it!” a shocked voice screamed hoarsely. “For Christ’s sake put him out of it!” The blue snakes of Olson’s intestines were slowly slipping through his fingers. They dropped like link sausages against his groin, where they flapped obscenely. He stopped, bent over as if to retrieve them (retrieve them, Garraty thought in a near ecstasy of wonder and horror), and threw up a huge glut of blood and
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“He talked to me, Pete. He wasn’t dead until they shot him. He was alive.” Now it seemed that was the most important thing about the Olson experience. He repeated it. “Alive.” “I don’t think it makes any difference,” McVries said with a tired sigh. “He’s just a number. Part of the body count. Number fifty-three. It means we’re a little closer and that’s all it means.”
Guns to shoulders, pointed skyward above them in a steely arch. Everyone instinctively huddled together against the crash which meant death—it had been Pavloved into them. “Fire!”
Four hundred guns in the night, stupendous, ear-shattering. Garraty fought down the urge to put his hands to his head. “Fire!”
For a terrifying moment he thought it was all going to be for nothing anyway—a false alarm—but then it was all right. He was able to take care of business. Then, with a grunting half-sob, he rose to his feet and stumbled into a half-walk, half-run, cinching his pants tight again, leaving part of him behind to steam in the dark, eyed avidly by a thousand people—bottle it! put it on your mantel! The shit of a man with his life laid straight out in the line! This is it, Betty, I told you we had something special in the game room… right up here, over the stereo. He was shot twenty minutes later…
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.
“Just about two hundred miles down the road,” McVries added.
“Okay, dollar fifty, double or nothing,” Baker said, and that was when the monstrous pain bolted up Garraty’s left leg, making all the pain of the last thirty hours seem like a mere whisper in comparison. “My leg, my leg, my leg!” he screamed, unable to help himself.
He looked at his watch. It was 2:17 PM. For the next hour he would be less than two seconds from death.
“Hello, Joe,” McVries said, and Garraty had an hysterical urge to add, whaddaya know?
Jan…” He broke off. Why not? He’d told everything else. It didn’t matter. Either he or McVries was going to be dead before it was over. Probably both of them. “Jan said she’d go all the way with me, any time, any way, as often as I wanted if I’d take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and then she cried a lot. And begged me.”
He ranted and raved and I just sat there and nodded and agreed and pretty soon there was a knock on the door and when my mom opened it, two of the biggest, meanest-looking soldiers you ever saw were standing on the porch. Man, they were so ugly they could have stopped clocks. My dad took one look at them and said, ‘Petie, you better go upstairs and get your Boy Scout pack.’ ” McVries jolted the pack up and down on his shoulders and laughed at the memory. “And just about the next thing any of us knew, we were on that plane, even my little sister Katrina.
I just zipped along, bullshitting in good order, you know, and I come to this essay about why I feel qualified to participate. I couldn’t think of a thing. So finally some bastard in an army coat strolls by and says, ‘Five minutes. Will everyone finish up, please?’ So I just put down, ‘I feel qualified to participate in the Long Walk because I am one useless S.O.B. and the world would be better off without me, unless I happened to win and get rich in which case I would buy a Van Gogh to put in every room of my manshun and order up sixty high-class horrs and not bother anybody.’ I thought about
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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.
“He just can’t get enough,” Pearson said tiredly. “Huh?” “Almost two hundred and fifty miles,”
“Your leg hurt?” Garraty asked softly. “Say, isn’t that awful.” “Just thirty-five left to walk down. They’re all going to fall apart tonight. You’ll see. There won’t be a dozen left on the road when the sun comes up. You’ll see. You and your diddy-bop friends, Garraty. All dead by morning. Dead by midnight.”
“Did you see Olson’s… did you see his hair? Before he bought it?” “What about his hair?” Baker asked. “It was going gray.” “No, that’s crazy,” McVries said, but he suddenly sounded very scared. “No, it was dust or something.” “It was gray,” Garraty said. “It seems like we’ve been on this road forever. It was Olson’s hair getting… getting that way that made me think of it first, but… maybe this is some crazy kind of immortality.” The thought was terribly depressing. He stared straight ahead into the darkness, feeling the soft wind against his face.
We come to Lewiston, that’s the second-biggest city in the state, bigger than Augusta. We go right down the main drag. It used to be Lisbon Street, but now it’s Cotter Memorial Avenue. Reggie Cotter was the only guy from Maine to ever win the Long Walk. It happened a long time ago.” “He died, didn’t he?” Baker said. “Yeah. He hemorrhaged in one eye and finished the Walk half-blind. It turned out he had a blood clot on his brain. He died a week or so after the Walk.” And in a feeble effort to remove the onus, Garraty repeated: “It was a long time ago.”
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.
“I don’t care if you win or lose, just as long as you win.” —Vince Lombardi Ex–Green Bay Packers Head Coach
But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.
“There’s not many of us left, Garraty. Only twenty-six.”
Why did we do it, Garraty? We must have been insane.” “I don’t think there was any good reason.” “All we are is mice in a trap.”
through. I have to find out. I have to—” “Just take it easy is all I’m saying. Stebbins would get his own mother to drink a Lysol cocktail if it would help him win. Don’t listen to him. She’ll be there. It makes great PR, for one thing.”
“You. Ba. Bas. Bast. Ba.” He died, staring viciously at them as they passed by. “What happened?” Garraty cried out to no one in particular. “What happened to him?” “He snuck up on ’em,” McVries said. “That’s what happened. He must have known he couldn’t make it. He snuck right up behind ’em and caught ’em sleep at the switch.” McVries’s voice hoarsened. “He wanted us all up there with him, Garraty. And I think we could have done it.”
Of the other ten, five seemed to have drawn into that special netherworld that Olson had discovered—one step beyond pain and the comprehension of what was coming to them. They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn’t like to look at them. They were the walking dead.
The concentrates were being passed out for the fifth and last time. It took only one of the soldiers to pass them out now. There were only nine Walkers left.
“We’re going to make it into Massachusetts, I think,” McVries said sickly. Stebbins nodded. “The first Walk to do it in seventeen years. They’ll go crazy.”
“How come I know so much about the Long Walk? I know all about the Long Walk! I ought to! The Major is my father, Garraty! He’s my father!”
“What time is it?” Stebbins asked. His face seemed to have melted in the rain. It had become Olson’s face, Abraham’s face, Barkovitch’s face… then, terribly, Garraty’s own face, hopeless and drained, sunken and crenellated in on itself, the face of a rotten scarecrow in a long-since-harvested field.
“It’s twenty until ten,” McVries said. He grinned—a ghostly imitation of his old cynical grin. “Happy day five to you, suckers.”
