The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

His mother was also tall, but too thin. Her breasts were almost nonexistent: token nubs.

classic king; the first thing we ever learn about his women is their chest size and whether or not they're fuckable

“We’ll see who gets his ticket first, you or me,” he said. “It’s all in my Plan.” “Your Plan and the stuff that comes out of my asshole bear a suspicious resemblance to each other,” Olson said, and Baker chuckled.

It was mean, and unsporting, he supposed, but he wanted to be sure someone got a ticket before he did. Who wants to bow out first?

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.

“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.

“The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed.” —Chuck Barris Game show creator MC of The Gong Show

“I wonder where the Major is?” “Shacked up in Augusta,” Olson said. They all grinned, and Garraty reflected how strange it was about the Major, who had gone from God to Mammon in just ten hours.

“Wait!” Olson cried out. His voice was as shrill as broken glass. “You wait just one goddam second! Love is a put-on! It’s nothing! One big fat el zilcho! You got it?”

“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!

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.

He ate the last of his mom’s cookies, balled up the foil, and pitched it into the brush at the side of the road. Just another litterbug on the great tomato plant of life.

“Has a Long Walk ever been stopped for anything?” Harkness asked. “I don’t think so,” Garraty said. “More material for the book?” “No,” Harkness said. He sounded tired. “Just personal information.” “It stops every year,” Stebbins said from behind them. “Once.” There was no reply to that.

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.

“Hey, Garraty, where’s the parents?” someone yelled. “Back home making kids,” Garraty said, embarrassed.

A dark figure broke from the pack, pelted across the shoulder of the road in front of the halftrack (Garraty could not even remember when the halftrack had rejoined their march after the repaired bridge), and dived for the woods. The guns roared. There was a rending crash as a dead weight fell through the juniper bushes and underbrush to the ground. One of the soldiers jumped down and dragged the inert form up by the hands. Garraty watched apathetically and thought, even the horror wears thin. There’s a surfeit even of death. The harmonica player started in satirically on Taps and somebody—Collie Parker, by the sound—told him angrily to shut the fuck up.

45 fell down again. Footsteps quickened as boys scattered. Not long after, the guns roared. Garraty decided the boy’s name must not have been important anyway.

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

“You’ll have to walk a long time to walk me down,” Garraty said, but Scramm’s simple assessment of the situation had scared him badly. “I,” Scramm said, “am ready to walk a long time.”

“He was an undertaker,” Baker said. “Good deal,” Abraham said disinterestedly. “When I was a kid, I always used to wonder,” Baker said vaguely. He seemed to lose track of his thought, then glanced at Garraty and smiled. It was a peculiar smile. “Who’d embalm him, I mean. Like you wonder who cuts the barber’s hair or who operates on the doctor for gallstones. See?” “It takes a lot of gall to be a doctor,” McVries said solemnly.

“Come on,” McVries said. “Don’t keep us hanging. Who buried him?” “This is the oldest joke in the world,” Abraham said. “Baker says, whatever made you think he was dead?” “He is, though,” Baker said. “Lung cancer. Six years ago.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” McVries said, “who buried him? Tell us so we can discuss world problems, or baseball, or birth control or something.” “I think birth control is a world problem,” Garraty said seriously. “My girlfriend is a Catholic and—” “Come on!” McVries bellowed. “Who the fuck buried your grandfather, Baker?” “My uncle. He was my uncle. My grandfather was a lawyer in Shreveport. He—” “I don’t give a shit,” McVries said. “I don’t give a shit if the old gentleman had three cocks, I just want to know who buried him so we can get on.” “Actually, nobody buried him. He wanted to be cremated.” “Oh my aching balls,” Abraham said, and then laughed a little.

“My aunt’s got his ashes in a ceramic vase. At her house in Baton Rouge. She tried to keep the business going—the undertaking business—but nobody much seemed to cotton to a lady undertaker.” “I doubt if that was it,” McVries said. “No?” “No. I think your uncle jinxed her.” “Jinx? How do you mean?” Baker was interested. “Well, you have to admit it wasn’t a very good advertisement for the business.” “What, dying?” “No,” McVries said. “Getting cremated.”

At that moment, Olson began begging one of the guards to let him rest.

“Let this ground be seeded with salt,” McVries said suddenly, very rapidly. “So that no stalk of corn or stalk of wheat shall ever grow. Cursed be the children of this ground and cursed be their loins. Also cursed be their hams and hocks. Hail Mary full of grace, let us blow this goddam place.” McVries began to laugh.

“Sure they’re animals. You think you just found out a new principle? Sometimes I wonder just how naive you really are. The French lords and ladies used to screw after the guillotinings. The old Romans used to stuff each other during the gladiatorial matches. That’s entertainment, Garraty. It’s nothing new.” He laughed again. Garraty stared at him, fascinated.

“Then why are you doing it?” Garraty asked him. “If you know that much, and if you’re that sure, why are you doing it?” “The same reason we’re all doing it,” Stebbins said. He smiled gently, almost lovingly. His lips were a little sun-parched; otherwise, his face was still unlined and seemingly invincible. “We want to die, that’s why we’re doing it. Why else, Garraty? Why else?”

It was strange—in spite of all the noise he could still hear the warnings clearly.

concentrating only on putting one foot out in front of the other. Once, in the eighth grade, he had read a story by a man named Ray Bradbury, and this story was about the crowds that gather at the scenes of fatal accidents, about how these crowds always have the same faces, and about how they seem to know whether the wounded will live or die. I’m going to live a little longer, Garraty told them. I’m going to live. I’m going to live a little longer.

“Meanwhile, down in buttoning, Pris was keeping herself busy. Some nights she’d talk for hours about her girlfriends, and it was usually the same tune. How much this one was making. How much that one was making. And most of all, how much she was making. And she was making plenty. So I got to find out how much fun it is to be in competition with the girl you want to marry. At the end of the week I’d go home with a check for $64.40 and put some Cornhusker’s Lotion on my blisters. She was making something like ninety a week, and socking it away as fast as she could run to the bank. And when I suggested we go someplace dutch, you would have thought I’d suggested ritual murder.

“Well, you were damned unfair to ask her.” “Sure I was unfair!” McVries said savagely. “I knew that. I wanted to make her feel like a greedy, self-centered little bitch because she was making me feel like a failure.”

pussy

Pearson joined them. “I’ve been thinking.” “Save your strength,” McVries said. “Feeble, man. That is feeble.”

Garraty looked at his watch, but it was stopped at 10:16. He had forgotten to wind it. “Anybody got the time?” he asked. “Lemme see.” Pearson squinted at his watch. “Just happast an asshole, Garraty.”

One of the Troopers made a grab for the watermelons Dom held in his hands. Another buttonhooked around him and slammed the cargo door of the wagon shut. “You bastards!” Garraty screamed with all his force. His shriek sped through the bright day like a glass spear, and one of the Troopers looked around, startled and… well, almost hangdog. “Stinking sonsofbitches!” Garraty shrieked at them. “I wish your mothers had miscarried you stinking whoresons!”

“Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah.” —The Count Sesame Street

Garraty’s toes were numb. He wiggled them against the shredded inner linings of his shoes and could feel nothing. The real pain was not in his toes now. It was in his arches. A sharp, blatting pain that knifed up into his calves each time he took a step. It made him think of a story his mother had read him when he was small. It was about a mermaid who wanted to be a woman. Only she had a tail and a good fairy or someone said she could have legs if she wanted them badly enough. Every step she took on dry land would be like walking on knives, but she could have them if she wanted them, and she said yeah, okay, and that was the Long Walk.

“They gut-shot him,” Stebbins said from behind Garraty. “They’ll do that. It’s deliberate. To discourage anybody else from trying the old Charge of the Light Brigade number.”

Olson went to his knees. His head hung between his arms, which were propped on the road. One of the rifles roared, and a bullet clipped asphalt beside Olson’s left hand and whined away. He began to climb slowly, wearily, to his feet again. They’re playing with him, Garraty thought. All of this must be terribly boring for them, so they are playing with Olson. Is Olson fun, boys? Is Olson keeping you amused?

“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.” “You’re as bad as Stebbins,” Garraty said resentfully. “I wish Priscilla had killed me,” McVries said. “At least that wouldn’t have been—” “Trivial,” Garraty finished.

Garraty moved over to the left lane, where most of them were walking. Two more halftracks had rattled onto the turnpike at the Orono entrance to fully cover the forty-six Walkers now left. They didn’t expect you to walk on the grass. Another joke on you, Garraty old sport. Nothing vital, just another little disappointment. Trivial, really. Just… don’t dare wish for anything, and don’t count on anything. The doors are closing. One by one, they’re closing.

His bowels contracted again, strongly and hurtfully, perhaps affirming the fact that he was still essentially healthy in spite of the pounding his body had taken. He forced himself to go on until he had passed out of the merciless glare of the nearest overhead. He nervously unbuckled his belt, paused, then, grimacing, shoved his pants down with one hand held protectively across his genitals, and squatted. His knees popped explosively. The muscles in his thighs and calves protested screamingly and threatened to knot as they were bullied unwillingly in a new direction. “Warning! Warning 47!” “John! Hey Johnny, look at that poor bastard over there.”

Then, with a grunting half-sob, he rose to his feet and stumbled into a half-walk, half-run, cinching his pants tight again, leaving part of him behind to steam in the dark, eyed avidly by a thousand people—bottle it! put it on your mantel! The shit of a man with his life laid straight out in the line! This is it, Betty, I told you we had something special in the game room… right up here, over the stereo. He was shot twenty minutes later…

“I was counting my toes,” Stebbins said companionably. “They are fabulously good company because they always add up the same way.

In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there was still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.

Garraty felt the death-fascination coming over him again, and was repulsed. He tried to shake it off. It wasn’t fair. Not when it was a friend.

“Kids’re nice,” he said. “Yeah. I hope Cathy has a boy. We both wanted a boy. A girl would be all right, but you guys know… a boy… he keeps your name and passes it on. Not that Scramm’s such a great name.” He laughed, and Garraty thought of what Stebbins had said, about bulwarks against mortality.

“I don’t think I’d like to be in your shoes right now. How’s the leg?” “Better. Listen, I can’t talk. I’m going up front for a while.” “It didn’t help Harkness any.” Garraty shook his head. “I have to make sure I’m topping the speed.” “All right. You want company?” “If you’ve got the energy.” McVries laughed. “I got the time if you got the money, honey.”

“He won’t last much longer,” a woman in the front row said quite audibly. “Your tits won’t last much longer!” Garraty snapped at her, and the crowd cheered him.

They were pleased and proud because most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes. And that still leaves thousands of kids and they can use two hundred—one hundred Walkers and a hundred backups. And there’s no skill in getting picked, you know that.”

“Jan said she’d go all the way with me, any time, any way, as often as I wanted if I’d take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and then she cried a lot. And begged me.”

“Then Dr. Patterson started in. He’s a diagnostician, and he’s got a wicked logical mind. He said, ‘Look here, Ray. Figuring in the Prime group and the backups, your chance of survival is fifty-to-one. Don’t do this to your mother, Ray.’ I was polite with him for as long as I could, but finally I told him to just kiss off. I said I figured the odds on him ever marrying my mother were pretty long, but I never noticed him backing off because of that.”