The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

It was guilt, guilt taking the face of anxiety.

halt her son’s madness in its seedling stage—to

Not all right, but too late. There was nothing anyone could do.

trying to give her what she needed to have.

He didn’t think so, but it was a thing you wouldn’t know for sure until the time came, and it was a terrible thought.

There was a living silence.

breathed deep of the spring air.

the rarest and most dangerous monster any nation can produce, a society-supported sociopath.

volcanic complexion.

He looked suddenly pale and sweaty, not so awesomely fit as he had earlier. He was trying to smile and not making it. The scar stood out on his cheek like a wild punctuation mark.

“There’s one cuckoo in every clock,

“Your Plan and the stuff that comes out of my asshole bear a suspicious resemblance to each other,”

hooded and reptilian old men’s eyes.

He had eaten six hotdogs and when he finally saw the Walkers coming he had wet his pants.

shouting thickly at someone into the telephone, the way he did when he was being drunk or political,

Garraty thought that was a pretty goddam sick thing to be doing.

The soldiers on the back of the slow-moving halftrack raised their guns. The crowd gasped, as if they hadn’t known this was the way it was, and the Walkers gasped, as if they hadn’t known, and Garraty gasped with them, but of course he had known, of course they had all known, it was very simple, Curley was going to get his ticket. The safeties clicked off. Boys scattered from around Curley like quail. He was suddenly alone on the sunwashed road.

He wondered if it had hurt Curley. He wondered if Curley had felt the gas-tipped slugs hitting home or if he had just been alive one second and dead the next. But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered.

Garraty wondered if it was embarrassing, being shot in front of people, and guessed by the time you got to that you probably didn’t give a tin whistle.

“It isn’t very big, is it?” Baker said. Olson laughed. “It’s probably a nice place to live,” Garraty said defensively. “God spare me from nice places to live,” McVries said, but he was smiling.

Garraty touched the carbine slung over the soldier’s back. He did it furtively. But McVries saw him. “Why’d you do that?” Garraty grinned and felt confused. “I don’t know. Like knocking on wood, maybe.” “You’re a dear boy, Ray,” McVries said,

Garraty was getting a firsthand lesson in the psychology of the grapevine. Someone found something out, and suddenly it was all over. Rumors were created by mouth-to-mouth respiration. It looks like rain. Chances are it’s going to rain. It’s gonna rain pretty soon. The guy with the radio says it’s gonna shit potatoes pretty quick. But it was funny how often the grapevine was right. And when the word came back that someone was slowing up, that someone was in trouble, the grapevine was always right.

He looked over his shoulder at Stebbins. Stebbins was walking hunched over, his hands hooked against his belly, and at first Garraty thought he had a cramp. For a moment Garraty was in the grip of a strong panicky feeling, nothing at all like he had felt when Curley and Ewing bought it. He didn’t want Stebbins to fold up early anymore. Then he saw Stebbins was only protecting the last half of his jelly sandwich, and he faced forward again, feeling relieved. He decided Stebbins must have a pretty stupid mother not to wrap his goddam sandwiches in foil, just in case of rain.

He goggled in that myopic, defenseless way that people with very poor eyesight have when their glasses are off.

Up ahead, McVries was urinating. He was walking backward while he did it, spraying the shoulder considerately away from the others.

“How far to Caribou, Maniac?” somebody asked him. Garraty looked around. It was Barkovitch. He had tucked his rainhat into his back pocket where it flapped obscenely. “How the hell should I know?” “You live here, don’t you?” “It’s about seventeen miles,” McVries told him. “Now go peddle your papers, little man.” Barkovitch put on his insulted look and moved away.

A groundfog had curdled milkily in the ditches and lower gullies of the fields.

One of the girls had very large breasts. Her boyfriend was watching them jiggle as she jumped up and down. Garraty decided that he was turning in to a sex maniac. “Look at them jahoobies,” Pearson said. “Dear, dear me.”

He wondered how many of the others here were virgins. Gribble had called the Major a murderer. He wondered if Gribble was a virgin. He decided Gribble probably was.

“Oh, shut up,” Pearson said. “Who asked you, long, tall and ugly?” Barkovitch said. “Go away,” McVries said. “You give me a headache.” Insulted once more, Barkovitch moved on up the line and grabbed Collie Parker. “Did he ask you what—” “Get out of here before I pull your fucking nose off and make you eat it,” Collie Parker snarled. Barkovitch moved on quickly. The word on Collie Parker was that he was one mean son of a bitch.

with taste so bad it was almost grisly,

gone from God to Mammon in just ten hours.

“If I get out of this,” McVries said abruptly, “you know what I’m going to do?” “What?” Baker asked. “Fornicate until my cock turns blue. I’ve never been so horny in my life as I am right this minute, at quarter of eight on May first.” “You mean it?” Garraty asked. “I do,” McVries assured. “I could even get horny for you, Ray, if you didn’t need a shave.”

Do you believe in true love, Hank dear?” “I believe in a good screw,” Olson said, and Art Baker burst out laughing.

“Edgar Allan Poe did,” Baker said. “I did a report on him in school and it said he had tendencies that were ne-necro—” “Necrophiliac,” Garraty said. “Yeah, that’s right.” “What’s that?” Pearson asked. “It means you got an urge to sleep with a dead woman,” Baker said. “Or a dead man, if you’re a woman.” “Or if you’re a fruit,” McVries put in.

“Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that’s all!

Somewhere up ahead Barkovitch called out merrily: “Step into it, brothers! Who wants to race me to the top?” “Shut your goddam mouth, you little freak,” someone said quietly.

“Barkovitch,” Baker said hoarsely. “That was Barkovitch, I’m sure it was.” “Wrong, redneck!” Barkovitch yelled out of the darkness. “One hundred per cent dead wrong!”

an old man with a deeply seamed brow, a hatchet-faced woman in a bulky cloth coat, three teenaged children who all looked half-witted.

Up ahead Toland fainted and was shot after the soldier left beside him had warned his unconscious body three times.

Garraty could feel the soldier’s expressionless marble eyes sizing him up. “Get away,” he said rudely, taking the canteen. “You get paid to shoot me, not to look at me.”

They were his things and he still had them.

The guy next to me either pissed himself or jacked off in his pants, you couldn’t tell which.

Conversation, which had died violently at the end of Stebbins’s story, picked up again.

Garraty supposed a person could do a lot of things when his life was at stake.

There was a moment of silence when the carbines sighted in, and Baker’s voice was loud and clearly audible: “There, Barkovitch, you’re not a pest anymore. Now you’re a murderer.”

“It was his own fault!” Barkovitch yelled. “You saw him, he swung first! Rule 8! Rule 8!” No one said anything. “Go fuck yourselves! All of you!” McVries said easily: “Go on back and dance on him a little, Barkovitch. Go entertain us. Boogie on him a little bit, Barkovitch.” “Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street too, scarface,” Barkovitch said hoarsely. “Can’t wait to see your brains all over the road,” McVries said quietly. His hand had gone to the scar and was rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. “I’ll cheer when it happens, you murdering little bastard.”

Muscles, genitals, brain all cowering away from the oblivion a bloodbeat away.

An owl made a mysterious noise somewhere to their left.

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.