The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

You just adjust, that’s all. Adjustment is the key word here. Remember where you heard that first.”

“He bleeds the same color as anyone else,” McVries said suddenly. It was very loud in the stillness after the single shot.

It seemed to him that the sound of his footfalls had become as loud to his ears as the sound of his own heartbeat. Vital, life and death sound.

The hands on his watch read 11:40. On up toward the hour of witches, he thought. When churchyards yawn and give up their moldy dead. When all good little boys are sacked out. When wives and lovers have given up the carnal pillowfight for the evening. When passengers sleep uneasy on the Greyhound to New York. When Glenn Miller plays uninterrupted on the radio and bartenders think about putting the chairs up on the tables, and—

Garraty watched apathetically and thought, even the horror wears thin. There’s a surfeit even of death.

It looked to be a perfect day, and Garraty greeted it only half-coherently by thinking: Thank God I can die in the daylight.

The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them. It was enough to make you wonder what Socrates had thought about right after he had tossed off his hemlock cocktail.

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

“Listen, I got off on the wrong foot with you guys. I didn’t mean to. Shit, I’m a good enough guy when you get to know me, I’m always gettin’ off on the wrong foot, I never had much of a crowd back home. In my school, I mean. Christ, I don’t know why. I’m a good enough guy when you get to know me, as good as anyone else, but I always just, you know, seem to get off on the wrong foot. I mean a guy’s got to have a couple of friends on a thing like this. It’s no good to be alone, right?

"Im not a violent dog. I dont know why I bite."

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.

“But me no buts, Ray. Slow down and live.”

They walked on, somehow in step, although all three of them were bent forever in different shapes by the pains that pulled them.