The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

The pain within him had turned into a sickness, a rotten sick feeling that seemed to be growing in the hollows of his body like a green fungus.

Baker, Abraham, and McVries. His circle of friends had come down to those three. And Stebbins, if he was anyone’s friend. Acquaintance, then. Or demigod. Or devil. Or whatever.

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth’s wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death. How would that be? Just how would that be? And suddenly his roiling, agonized muscles, the sweat running down his face, even the pain itself—seemed very sweet and real. Garraty tried harder. He struggled to the top of the hill and gasped raggedly all the way down the far side.

A hand, still strong, clamped on his arm. It was McVries. Of course it would have to be McVries.

A great overhead airburst traced the Major’s face in fire, making Garraty think numbly of God. This was followed by the face of the New Hampshire Provo Governor, a man known for having stormed the German nuclear base in Santiago nearly single-handed back in 1953. He had lost a leg to radiation poisoning.

“Come on,” McVries said. “Don’t be a wise-ass.” “My ass is no wiser than your ass,” Stebbins said solemnly. McVries and Garraty laughed—a little uneasily.

And McVries was caving in. Garraty was not sure when it had begun; it might have happened in a second, while his back was turned. At one moment he had still been strong (Garraty remembered the clamp of McVries’s fingers on his lower arm when Baker had fallen), and now he was like an old man.

Stebbins was now walking beside him. My guardian angel, Garraty thought wryly.

“I’d expect,” McVries said, “that you’d donate two or three hundred grand to the Society for Intensifying Cruelty to Animals.”

Stebbins’s mouth pursed tightly—just for a moment, but Garraty saw it. He had gotten under Stebbins’s skin. He felt an incredible surge of elation. The mother lode at last.

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

The pomp and thunder of the border crossing slowly passed behind them. The rain continued, constant and monotonous. The wind howled and ripped with all the young, unknowing cruelty of spring. It lifted caps from the crowd and whirled them, saucerlike, in brief and violent arcs across the whitewash-colored sky.

Garraty’s head seemed to be playing jazz. Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Cannonball Adderly—the Banned Noisemakers that everybody kept under the table and played when the party got noisy and drunk.

It seemed that he had once been loved, once he himself had loved. But now it was just jazz and the rising drumbeat in his head and his mother had only been stuffed straw in a fur coat, Jan nothing but a department store dummy. It was over. Even if he won, if he managed to outlast McVries and Stebbins and Baker, it was over. He was never going home again.

Okay buzzcut season by lorde

“If you win, will you do something for me? I’m scairt to ask anyone else.” And Baker made a sweeping gesture at the deserted road as if the Walk was still rich with its dozens. For a chilling moment Garraty wondered if maybe they were all there still, walking ghosts that Baker could now see in his moment of extremis.

Garraty put his hands over his face and had to bend over to keep walking. The sobs ripped out of him and made him ache with a pain that was far beyond anything the Walk had been able to inflict. He hoped he wouldn’t hear the shots. But he did.

He looked around. McVries’s head had dropped, and he was walking at the crowd, fast asleep. “Hey!” Garraty shouted. “Hey, Pete! Pete!” “Let him alone,” Stebbins said. “You made the promise like the rest of us.” “Fuck you,” Garraty said distinctly, and darted to McVries’s side.

“No!” Garraty screamed. He tried to pick McVries up, but, thin as he was, McVries was much too heavy. McVries wouldn’t even look at him. His eyes were shut. And suddenly two of the soldiers were wrenching McVries away from him. They were putting their guns to McVries’s head. “No!” Garraty screamed again. “Me! Me! Shoot me!” But instead, they gave him his third warning.

“If there are such things as souls, his is still close. You could catch up.”

The way that this sounds like a tumblr 2012 poem

He shambled along, bulge-eyed, jaw hanging agape, rain swishing in. For a misty, shutterlike moment he thought he saw someone he knew, knew as well as himself, weeping and beckoning in the dark ahead, but it was no use. He couldn’t go on.