The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

She felt that she had been too dry, too tired, or maybe just too taken up with her older sorrows to halt her son’s madness in its seedling stage—to halt it before the cumbersome machinery of the State with its guards in khaki and its computer terminals had taken over, binding himself more tightly to its insensate self with each passing day, until yesterday, when the lid had come down with a final bang.

Unconsciously, Garraty and McVries drew closer together. Neither of them looked back. Ahead of them was the road, wide and black.

The Walk was one of those things that existed on apocrypha, talismans, legend.

There was a living silence. Garraty breathed deep of the spring air. It would be warm. A good day to walk.

When his turn came, the Major gave him number 47 and told him “Good luck.” Up close he smelled very masculine and somehow overpowering. Garraty had an almost insatiable urge to touch the man’s leg and make sure he was real.

“Pretty good,” McVries said, and then winked at Garraty. Garraty wondered what McVries had meant, winking like that. Was he making fun of Olson?

The skinny boy in the tree was named Stebbins. He got his number with his head down, not speaking to the Major at all, and then sat back at the base of his tree. Garraty was somehow fascinated with the boy.

Garraty unclipped his canteen and had a quick swallow of water. It was cool and good. It left beads of moisture on his upper lip and he licked them off. It was good, good to feel things like that.

“I mean, let’s not put this on a Three Musketeers basis. I like you and it’s obvious you’re a big hit with the pretty girls. But if you fall over I won’t pick you up.” “Yeah.” He smiled back, but his smile felt lame. “On the other hand,” Baker drawled softly, “we’re all in this together and we might as well keep each other amused.” McVries smiled. “Why not?”

His eyes were always searching the horizon. When they passed small clusters of people, he waved and smiled his thin-lipped smile. He showed no signs of tiring.

Stebbins, you bastard, Garraty thought, you were supposed to get your ticket first, didn’t you know? Then Garraty looked away. He didn’t want to be sick. He didn’t want to vomit.

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 took out his cookies, and for a moment turned the foil package over in his hands. He thought homesickly of his mother, then stuffed the feeling aside.

“I have no idea what I’ll want if I do win this,” McVries said. “There’s nothing that I really need. I mean, I don’t have a sick old mother sitting home or a father on a kidney machine, or anything. I don’t even have a little brother dying gamely of leukemia.”

“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. “Well, what turns you on,” Garraty said lamely.

Stebbins had gotten into his head like a snatch of pop music that goes around and around until you think you’re going to go crazy with it.

Maybe he would die here, too. Maybe he would. But that was different. Native soil. He had an idea the Major would like that. “He died on his native soil.”

One of the soldiers jumped off the halftrack and brought over a fresh canteen. When he turned away, 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, and then put on some speed and caught up with Olson, leaving Garraty to walk alone, feeling more confused than ever.

There was a blankness in his eyes, the same blankness that had been in Curley’s eyes while he was losing his fight with the charley horse. He’s tired, Garraty thought. He knows it, and he’s scared. Garraty suddenly felt his stomach tip over and right itself slowly.

Their shadows walked alongside them now. It was quarter of two. Nine in the morning, cool, sitting on the grass in the shade, was a month back.

Barkovitch had put on a yellow vinyl rainhat. There was something incredible about what it did to his face, but you would have been hard put to say just what. He peered out from beneath it like a truculent lighthouse keeper.

The rain came pouring down. For a few moments it was so heavy that Garraty found himself totally isolated inside an undulating shower curtain. He was immediately soaked to the skin. His hair became a dripping pelt. He turned his face up into the rain, grinning. He wondered if the soldiers could see them. He wondered if a person might conceivably— While he was still wondering, the first vicious onslaught let up a little and he could see again.

Thunder cracked stridently, artillery practice in the sky. Garraty felt exhilarated, and some of his tiredness seemed to wash away with the sweat from his body.

“Relax,” McVries said. “It happened to me a couple of hours ago. It passes off.” Relief showed in Olson’s eyes. “Does it?” “Yeah, sure it does.”

McVries said, “Just go on dancing with me like this forever, Garraty, and I’ll never tire. We’ll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.” He blew Garraty a kiss and walked away. Garraty looked after him. He didn’t know what to make of McVries.

Barkovitch put on his insulted look and moved away.

“Do you think we could live the rest of our lives on this road? That’s what I meant. The part we would have had if we hadn’t… you know.”

A feeling of panic rose in his gullet. He was suddenly and terribly sure that he was looking at the last daylight in his life. He wanted it to stretch out. He wanted it to last. He wanted the dusk to go on for hours.

Garraty glanced at him. McVries was wearing that irritating, slanted smile again.

may never walk again.” “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.” “Oh, such a golden flood of bullshit,” McVries said.

Barkovitch’s unmistakable voice came back quickly and nastily: “What do you think, Dumbo?”

Garraty decided that he was turning in to a sex maniac.

“Yeah, I’m remembering,” McVries said, and gave Garraty his tight, slanted smile… only this time there was absolutely no humor in it at all. Suddenly McVries looked furious, and Garraty was almost afraid of him.

“Did he ask you?” a strident voice inquired of Garraty. With a feeling of great weariness, Garraty looked down at Gary Barkovitch.

“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.

“You know what you can do with Rule 8,” Olson said with a pallid smile. “Watch out,” McVries grinned, “you’re starting to sound pretty lively again.”

A small, evil-sounding high school band struck up the National Anthem, then a medley of Sousa marches, and then, with taste so bad it was almost grisly, Marching to Pretoria.

“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.” Garraty laughed. “Prince Charming, that’s who I am,” McVries said.

“I believe in true love,” Garraty said, and then felt sorry he had said it. It sounded naive.

“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. “How the hell did we get on this?” Olson croaked. “Just how in the hell did we get on the subject of screwing dead people? It’s fucking repulsive.”

He remembered his mother singing him an Irish lullaby when he was very small… something about cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.

Jan was gone. Her face became that of Jimmy Owens, the kid down the block from them. He had been five and Jimmy had been five and Jimmy’s mother had caught them playing Doctor’s Office in the sandpit behind Jimmy’s house.

“It’s your mind,” McVries said, “using the old escape hatch. Don’t you wish your feet could?”

Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scuffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of.

“They’re playing your song, Olson,” McVries said between pants. “Pick up your feet. I want to see you dance up this hill like Fred Astaire.” “What do you care?” Olson asked fiercely. McVries didn’t answer.

The only thing that mattered was the cool breeze blowing over the top of the hill. And the sound of a bird. And the feel of his damp shirt against his skin. And the memories in his head. Those things mattered, and Garraty clung to them with desperate awareness. They were his things and he still had them.

“Stop. For God’s sake, stop it.” It was McVries. He sounded dazed and sick. “You wanted to know,” Stebbins said, almost genially. “Didn’t you say that?”

I knew the odds. But I didn’t figure on people.

“You take all the fun outta livin’,” Baker said softly. His faint Southern drawl sounded out of place and foreign to Garraty’s ears.