The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

“Warning! Warning 47!” “Warning! Warning 61!” McVries was pulling at him. It was McVries again. “Get up, Ray, get up, you can’t help him, for God’s sake get up!”

They walked quietly for ten minutes or so, Garraty drawing a low-key comfort just from McVries’s presence.

“The reason all of this is so horrible,” McVries said, “is because it’s just trivial. You know? We’ve sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren’t mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.”

Garraty wished—not for the first time—that he had made no friends on the Long Walk. It was going to make it hard. In fact, it was already hard.

He caught up with McVries and walked beside him, head down. “Tough?” McVries asked. There was unmistakable admiration in his voice.

Parker looked haggard but tougher than ever. Baker seemed almost ethereal.

He had had pneumonia when he was five.

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 used to carry a switchblade back at my high school on account of guys wanting to tear my ass.

It was the touch of human in Barkovitch that scared him. For some reason it scared him. He didn’t know why.

“You and your friend McVries stand out in this motley crew, Garraty. I don’t understand how either of you got here. I’m willing to bet it runs deeper than you think, though.

Stebbins laughed delightedly. “You’re the bee’s knees, Ray. Olson had no secrets.”

“I admit nothing, except your own basic foolishness. Go ahead and tell yourself it’s a straight game.” Thin color had come into Stebbins’s cheeks. “Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”

“Garraty?” It was McVries. He sounded scared… surely that was only an illusion?

All gone. The carny just left town, pulled stakes in the middle of everything and blew town, no one left but this here kid Garraty to face the emptiness of flattened candy wrappers and squashed cigarette butts and discarded junk prizes. All gone except one soldier, young and blond and handsome in a remote sort of way. His silver chronometer was in one hand, his rifle in the other. No mercy in that face.

The finger of the soldier tightened on the trigger and whitened. He glanced down at the solid-state computer on his waist, a gadget that included a tiny but sophisticated sonar device. Garraty had once read an article about them in Popular Mechanix. They could read out a single Walker’s speed as exactly as you would have wanted, to four numbers to the right of the decimal point.

He caught up with McVries, who glanced around. “I thought you were out of it, kiddo,” McVries said.

“All right. You want company?” “If you’ve got the energy.” McVries laughed. “I got the time if you got the money, honey.”

“Yes, I know,” McVries said, and laughed—but his eyes were dark.

I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and—it’s cruel—but I don’t know how we’d’ve gotten along if he’d’ve lived.

And then I got the call and I knew I was a Walker. I was Prime.” “I wasn’t.” “No?” “No. Twelve of the original Walkers used the April 31st backout. I was number twelve, backup. I got the call just past 11 PM four days ago.”

“How many you or I have outlasted doesn’t matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn’t matter what I think, see? I used to have a good time smearing away with oil paints. I wasn’t too bad, either. Then one day—bingo. I didn’t taper off, I just stopped. Bingo. There was no urge to go on even another minute. I went to bed one night liking to paint and when I woke up it was nowhere.”

“Staying alive hardly qualifies as a hobby.” “I don’t know about that. How about skin divers? Big-game hunters? Mountain climbers? Or even some half-witted millworker whose idea of a good time is picking fights on Saturday night? All of those things reduce staying alive to a hobby. Part of the game.”

my little sister Katrina. She’s only four.

Once Garraty caught a warm whiff of pipesmoke that brought back a hidden, bittersweet memory of his father.

Like a badly treated guitar that has been knocked about by an unfeeling musician, the strings were not broken but only out of tune, discordant, chaotic.

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.

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.

Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshiped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.

And at the height of the excitement, at the top of the first hill on 202, overlooking the mobbed turnpike behind and the gorged and glutted town at their feet, two huge purple-white spotlights split the air ahead of them and the Major was there, drawing away from them in his jeep like an hallucination, holding his salute ramrod stiff, incredibly, fantastically oblivious of the crowd in the gigantic throes of its labor all around him.

“We getting close to your girl?” Parker asked. He had not weakened, but he had mellowed. Garraty liked him okay now.

“He thinks we’re queer for each other,” McVries said, amused. “He what?” Garraty’s head snapped up. “He’s not such a bad guy,” McVries said thoughtfully. He cocked a humorous eye at Garraty. “Maybe he’s even half-right. Maybe that’s why I saved your ass. Maybe I’m queer for you.”

“Oh, shut up,” McVries said crossly. “Where do you get off with all this self-righteous shit? I’m not even going to make it any easier by letting you know if I’m joking. What say?”

Queer, not queer, that didn’t seem to matter now that they were all busy dying. All that mattered was McVries. He didn’t want McVries to touch him, not that way.

McVries laughed. “I’m supposed to feel like a heel because you owe me something and I’m taking advantage? Is that it?” “Do what you want,” Garraty said shortly. “But quit playing games.” “Does that mean yes?”

“He wants to be hurt, do you think?” “Jesus, what do you think? He ought to be wearing a BEAT ME HARD sign. I wonder what he’s trying to make up for.”

“I thought maybe you’d wish for friends,” Garraty said sadly. A heady sense of triumph, suffocating and enthralling, roared through him.

It was crazy, crazy, as if his whole head was flying off, it was like when he had swung the barrel of the air rifle at Jimmy, the blood… Jimmy screamed… his whole head had gone heat-hazy with the savage, primitive justice of it.

“Now you did it,” Collie Parker said reproachfully. “You made him cry, Abe, you bad boy. He’s gonna go home and tell his mommy.” Barkovitch continued to sob. It was an empty, ashy sound that made Garraty’s skin crawl. There was no hope in it.

Isn’t it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”

“I walk, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked,” McVries chanted. “Shall I translate into Latin?”

“Doesn’t it seem strange to you? Being back on your home stomping grounds after all of this?” Garraty felt the worm of excitement wriggle and turn again. “No,” he said. “It seems like the most natural thing in the world.”

“Well, nothing,” Garraty said. “I was looking for Baker and found you instead. McVries says he thinks you’ll win.” “McVries is an idiot,” Stebbins said casually.

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

McVries strode away. Garraty wanted to call him back but couldn’t.

An arm brought him up short. It was McVries.

“Not into the crowd!” McVries’s lips were against Garraty’s ear and he was shouting. A lancet of pain pierced into Garraty’s head. “Let me go!” “I won’t let you kill yourself, Ray!” “Let me go goddammit!”

Tubbins had gone insane. Tubbins was a short boy with glasses and a faceful of freckles. He wore hip-hanging bluejeans that he had been constantly hitching up. He hadn’t said much, but he had been a nice enough sort before he went insane.

He was walking next to McVries, but McVries had spoken only in monosyllables since Freeport. Garraty hardly dared speak to him. He was indebted again, and it shamed him. It shamed him because he knew he would not help McVries if the chance came.

It was growing very cold. Garraty began to wonder if there really was such a thing as a sun, or if he had dreamed it. Even Jan was a dream to him now—a summer dream of a summer that never was.