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It all seemed to have a heightened intensity about it, a sharper contrast of colors and light and shadow.
They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”
“Man, I’m not sure of anything,” Garraty said. “I didn’t know much when I started, and I know less now.”
Man, they were so ugly they could have stopped clocks.
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.
His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.
It was odd. This was the first time he could remember wanting to win. Not even at the start, when he had been fresh (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), had he consciously wanted to win. There had only been the challenge. But the guns didn’t produce little red flags with BANG written on them. It wasn’t baseball or Giant Step; it was all real.
Shortly after, the aqueous symphony of dawn began. The last day of the Walk came up wet and overcast. The wind howled down the almost-empty alley of the road like a lost dog being whipped through a strange and terrible place.
The rain fell steadily, dripping off their noses, hanging in droplets on their earlobes like earrings.
His face seemed to have melted in the rain. It had become Olson’s face, Abraham’s face, Barkovitch’s face… then, terribly, Garraty’s own face, hopeless and drained, sunken and crenellated in on itself, the face of a rotten scarecrow in a long-since-harvested field.
