The Long Walk

by Stephen King

A light wind soughed through the pines. The sky was pure blue. The road was just ahead and the simple stone post that marked the border between America and Canada. Suddenly his anticipation was greater than his fear, and he wanted to get going, get the show on the road.

https://stephenking.fandom.com/wiki/The_Long_Walk#The_Route

He turned back toward the road. The other boy, the dark-haired one, was watching his folks pull out. He had a bad scar along one cheek. Garraty walked over to him and said hello. The dark-haired boy gave him a glance. “Hi.” “I’m Ray Garraty,” he said, feeling mildly like an asshole. “I’m Peter McVries.” “You are ready?” Garraty asked. McVries shrugged. “I feel jumpy. That’s the worst.” Garraty nodded. The two of them walked toward the road and the stone marker. Behind them, other cars were pulling out. A woman began screaming abruptly. Unconsciously, Garraty and McVries drew closer together. Neither of them looked back. Ahead of them was the road, wide and black.

“You see that spot right by the marker post?” Olson said suddenly. They all looked. The breeze made moving shadow-patterns across the road. Garraty didn’t know if he saw anything or not. “That’s from the Long Walk the year before last,” Olson said with grim satisfaction. “Kid was so scared he just froze up at nine o’clock.” They considered the horror of it silently. “Just couldn’t move. He took his three warnings and then at 9:02 AM they gave him his ticket. Right there by the starting post.”

A dun-colored jeep drove up to the stone marker and stopped. It was followed by a strange, tread-equipped vehicle that moved much more slowly. There were toy-sized radar dishes mounted on the front and back of this halftrack. Two soldiers lounged on its upper deck, and Garraty felt a chill in his belly when he looked at them. They were carrying army-type heavy-caliber carbine rifles.

The Major got out of the jeep. He was a tall, straight man with a deep desert tan that went well with his simple khakis. A pistol was strapped to his Sam Browne belt, and he was wearing reflector sunglasses. It was rumored that the Major’s eyes were extremely light-sensitive, and he was never seen in public without his sunglasses.

You couldn’t help admiring the Major. Garraty’s father, before the Squads took him away, had been fond of calling the Major the rarest and most dangerous monster any nation can produce, a society-supported sociopath. But he had never seen the Major in person.

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.

The halftrack clanked along the soft shoulder, throwing thin dust. The tiny radar dishes turned busily, monitoring each Walker’s speed with a sophisticated on-board computer. Low speed cutoff was exactly four miles an hour. “Warning! Warning 88!” Garraty started and looked around. It was Stebbins. Stebbins was 88. Suddenly he was sure Stebbins was going to get his ticket right here, still in sight of the starting post. “Smart.” It was Olson. “What?” Garraty asked. He had to make a conscious effort to move his tongue. “The guy takes a warning while he’s still fresh and gets an idea of where the limit is. And he can sluff it easy enough—you walk an hour without getting a fresh warning, you lose one of the old ones. You know that.” “Sure I know it,” Garraty said. It was in the rule book. They gave you three warnings. The fourth time you fell below four miles an hour you were… well, you were out of the Walk. But if you had three warnings and could manage to walk for three hours, you were back in the sun again.

Four carbines fired. They were very loud. The noise traveled away like bowling balls, struck the hills, and rolled back. Curley’s angular, pimply head disappeared in a hammersmash of blood and brains and flying skull-fragments. The rest of him fell forward on the white line like a sack of mail.

But he couldn’t help wondering. He wondered if it had hurt Curley. He wondered if Curley had felt the gas-tipped slugs hitting home or if he had just been alive one second and dead the next. 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.

“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.” He laughed and unstrapped his canteen. “You’ve got a point there,” Garraty agreed. “You mean I don’t have a point there. The whole thing is pointless.” “You don’t really mean that,” Garraty said confidently. “If you had it to do all over again—” “Yeah, yeah, I’d still do it, but—”

Only six Long Walks in history had ended over the state line in New Hampshire, and only one had gotten into Massachusetts, and the experts said that was like Hank Aaron hitting seven hundred and thirty home runs, or whatever it was… a record that would never be equaled. 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.”

Garraty could see tiny jewels of perspiration gleaming in Ewing’s natural. With something like horror, Garraty observed that Ewing was wearing sneakers. Hint 3: Do not, repeat, do not wear sneakers. Nothing will give you blisters faster than sneakers on a Long Walk. “He rode up with us,” Baker said. “He’s from Texas.” Baker picked up his pace until he was walking with Ewing. He talked with Ewing for quite a while. Then he dropped back slowly to avoid getting warned himself. His face was bleak. “He started to blister up two miles out. They started to break back in Limestone. He’s walkin’ in pus from broken blisters.”

Ewing was in the spotlight. The back of his T-shirt, startlingly white against his black skin, was sweat-stained gray straight down the middle. Garraty could see the big muscles in his back ripple as he walked. Muscles enough to last for days, and Baker said he was walking in pus. Blisters and charley horses. Garraty shivered. Sudden death. All those muscles, all the training, couldn’t stop blisters and charley horses. What in the name of God had Ewing been thinking about when he put on those P.F. Flyers?

By quarter of four the sky had cleared and there was a rainbow in the west, where the sun was sitting below gold-edged clouds. Slanting rays of the late afternoon sunlight colored the newly turned fields they were passing, making the furrows sharp and black where they contoured around the long, sloping hills.

“It seems like we’ve been walking forever, doesn’t it?” “Yeah.” Garraty licked his lips, wanting to express himself and not knowing just how. “Did you ever hear that bit about a drowning man’s life passing before his eyes?” “I think I read it once. Or heard someone say it in a movie.” “Have you ever thought that might happen to us? On the Walk?” McVries pretended to shudder. “Christ, I hope not.” Garraty was silent for a moment and then said, “Do you think… never mind. The hell with it.” “No, go on. Do I think what?” “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.”

The halftrack picked up speed. Zuck heard it coming and ran faster. It was a queer, shambling, limping run. The wound on his knee broke open again, and as he burst into the open ahead of the main pack, Garraty could see the drops of fresh blood splashing and flying from the cuff of his pants. Zuck ran up the next rise, and for a moment he was starkly silhouetted against the red sky, a galvanic black shape, frozen for a moment in midstride like a scarecrow in full flight. Then he was gone and the halftrack followed. The two soldiers that had dropped off it trudged along with the boys, their faces empty. Nobody said a word. They only listened. There was no sound for a long time. An incredibly, unbelievably long time. Only a bird, and a few early May crickets, and somewhere behind them, the drone of a plane. Then there was a single sharp report, a pause, then a second. “Making sure,” someone said sickly.

“I ain’t dead,” Baker said softly. “Yeah, but you could be.” Suddenly it was very important to Garraty that he put this across. “What if you won? What if you spent the next six weeks planning what you were going to do with the cash—never mind the Prize, just the cash—and what if the first time you went out to buy something, you got flattened by a taxicab?”

“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.”

By five-thirty the air was smoky with twilight. A few early lightning bugs flitted aimlessly through the air. A groundfog had curdled milkily in the ditches and lower gullies of the fields. Up ahead someone asked what happened if it got so foggy you walked off the road by mistake. Barkovitch’s unmistakable voice came back quickly and nastily: “What do you think, Dumbo?”

The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools… for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn’t even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

They were passing a graveyard situated atop a small grassy knoll. A fieldstone wall surrounded it, and now the mist was creeping slowly around the leaning gravestones. An angel with a broken wing stared at them with empty eyes. A nuthatch perched atop a rust flaking flagholder left over from some patriotic holiday and looked them over perkily.

Jan had long hair, almost to her waist. She was sixteen. Her breasts were not as big as those of the girl who had kissed him. He had played with her breasts a lot. It drove him crazy. She wouldn’t let him make love to her, and he didn’t know how to make her. She wanted to, but she wouldn’t. Garraty knew that some boys could do that, could get a girl to go along, but he didn’t seem to have quite enough personality—or maybe not quite enough will—to convince her.

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

“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! And when you get like Fenter and Zuck—”

Up ahead, a boy named Larson, 60, suddenly sat down on the road. He got a warning. The other boys split and passed around him, like the Red Sea around the Children of Israel. “I’m just going to rest for a while, okay?” Larson said with a trusting, shellshocked smile. “I can’t walk anymore right now, okay?” His smile stretched wider, and he turned it on the soldier who had jumped down from the halftrack with his rifle unslung and the stainless steel chronometer in his hand. “Warning, 60,” the soldier said. “Second warning.” “Listen, I’ll catch up,” Larson hastened to assure him. “I’m just resting. A guy can’t walk all the time. Not all the time. Can he, fellas?” Olson made a little moaning noise as he passed Larson, and shied away when Larson tried to touch his pants cuffs. Garraty felt his pulse beating warmly in his temples. Larson got his third warning… now he’ll understand, Garraty thought, now he’ll get up and start flogging it. And at the end, Larson did realize, apparently. Reality came crashing back in. “Hey!” Larson said behind them. His voice was high and alarmed. “Hey, just a second, don’t do that, I’ll get up. Hey, don’t! D—” The shot. They walked on up the hill.

Up ahead Toland fainted and was shot after the soldier left beside him had warned his unconscious body three times.

“I saw the end four years ago,” Stebbins said. “I was thirteen. It ended about sixteen miles over the New Hampshire border. They had the National Guard out and Sixteen Federal Squads to augment the State Police. They had to. The people were packed sixty deep on both sides of the road for fifty miles. Over twenty people were trampled to death before it was all over. It happened because people were trying to move with the Walkers, trying to see the end of it. I had a front-row seat. My dad got it for me.”

“It was the big blond that lost. I saw it all. They were just a little past me. He threw both of his arms up, like he was Superman. But instead of flying he just fell flat on his face and they gave him his ticket after thirty seconds because he was walking with three. They were both walking with three.

A few minutes later the guns rammed their steel-death sound into the night. This time it was a short boy in a flapping red and white football jersey. For a moment Garraty thought Percy’s mom would not have to wonder or worry anymore, but it wasn’t Percy—it was a boy named Quincy or Quentin or something like that.

Cries of “Break it up!” and “Cut the shit!” filled the air, but Rank took no notice. He went for Barkovitch with his head down, bellowing. Barkovitch sidestepped him. Rank went stumbling and pinwheeling across the soft shoulder, skidded in the sand, and sat down with his feet splayed out. He was given a third warning. “Come on, Dumbo!” Barkovitch goaded. “Get up!” Rank did get up. Then he slipped somehow and fell over on his back. He seemed dazed and woozy. The third thing that happened around eleven o’clock was Rank’s death. There was a moment of silence when the carbines sighted in, and Baker’s voice was loud and clearly audible: “There, Barkovitch, you’re not a pest anymore. Now you’re a murderer.” The guns roared. Rank’s body was thrown into the air by the force of the bullets. Then it lay still and sprawled, one arm on the road.

“It took me a while to figure it out, but it was faster after I got around that mental block. Walk or die, that’s the moral of this story. Simple as that. It’s not survival of the physically fittest, that’s where I went wrong when I let myself get into this. If it was, I’d have a fair chance. But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty.” McVries’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It isn’t man or God. It’s something… in the brain.” A whippoorwill called once in the darkness. The groundfog was lifting. “Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he’s worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he’s as fresh as a daisy. I don’t think I can do that. I’m not tired—not really tired—yet. But I will be.” The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness. “And I think… when I get tired enough… I think I’ll just sit down.”

The guns crashed in the darkness, and there was the unmistakable mailsack thud of a body falling on the concrete. The fear was on him again, the hot, throat-choking fear that made him want to run blindly, to dive into the bushes and just keep on running until he found Jan and safety.

The boy with 45 on his trenchcoat fell over again, this time on his face. When he got up, there were scratches on his forehead, slowly welling blood. He was behind Garraty’s group now, but they heard it when he got his final warning. They passed through a hollow of deeper darkness that was a railroad overpass. Rain dripped somewhere, hollow and mysterious in this stone throat. It was very damp. Then they were out again, and Garraty saw with gratitude that there was a long, straight, flat stretch ahead. 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.

Seven more had gotten tickets since the boy in the trenchcoat. At one time, around two in the morning, three had gone down almost together, like dried cornshocks in the first hard autumn wind. They were seventy-five miles into the Walk, and there were twenty-four gone. But none of that mattered. All that mattered was dead ebb. Three-thirty and the dead ebb. Another warning was given, and shortly after, the guns crashed once more. This time the face was a familiar one. It was 8, Davidson, who claimed he had once sneaked into the hoochie-kooch tent at the Steubenville State Fair. Garraty looked at Davidson’s white, blood-spattered face for just a moment and then he looked back at the road.

The pavement fascinated him. How good and easy it would be to sit on that pavement. You’d start by squatting, and your stiff knee-joints would pop like toy air-pistols. Then you’d put bracing hands back on the cool, pebbled surface and snuggle your buttocks down, you’d feel the screaming pressure of your one hundred and sixty pounds leave your feet… and then to lie down, just fall backward and lie there, spread-eagled, feeling your tired spine stretch… looking up at the encircling trees and the majestic wheel of the stars…

Someone up ahead was given a third warning and Garraty thought, I don’t have any! I could sit down for a minute or a minute and a half. I could— But he’d never get up. Yes I would, he answered himself. Sure I would. I’d just— Just die.

Someone else was shot down… behind him, this time. The aim was bad, and the unlucky ticket-holder screamed hoarsely for what seemed a very long time before another bullet cut off the sound. For no reason at all Garraty thought of bacon, and heavy, sour spit came into his mouth and made him feel like gagging.

Garraty became entranced with the coming dawn. He watched as the sky and the land lightened by degrees. He watched the white band on the horizon deepen a delicate pink, then red, then gold. The guns roared once more before the last of the night was finally banished, but Garraty barely heard. The first red arc of sun was peering over the horizon, faded behind a fluff of cloud, then came again in an onslaught. It looked to be a perfect day, and Garraty greeted it only half-coherently by thinking: Thank God I can die in the daylight.

Thinking, Garraty thought. That’s the day’s business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them. It was enough to make you wonder what Socrates had thought about right after he had tossed off his hemlock cocktail.

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence. - Cioran

Garraty walked with him. “I thought you were going to buy it, that’s all,” he said. “But I didn’t, thanks to the musketeer,” McVries said sullenly. His hand went to the scar. “Fuck, we’re all going to buy it.” “Somebody wins. It might be one of us.” “It’s a fake,” McVries said, his voice trembling. “There’s no winner, no Prize. They take the last guy out behind a barn somewhere and shoot him too.” “Don’t be so fucking stupid!” Garraty yelled at him furiously. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re sa—” “Everyone loses,” McVries said.

“Look behind us.” Garraty did. A second halftrack had rolled up, and as he looked, a third fell in behind it, coming in off a side road. “The Major’s coming,” Stebbins said, “and everybody will cheer.” He smiled, and his smile was oddly lizardlike. “They don’t really hate him yet. Not yet. They just think they do. They think they’ve been through hell. But wait until tonight. Wait until tomorrow.” Garraty looked at Stebbins uneasily. “What if they hiss and boo and throw canteens at him, or something?” “Are you going to hiss and boo and throw your canteen?” “No.” “Neither will anyone else. You’ll see.”

He had lived in Maine all his life, in a little town called Porterville, just west of Freeport. Population 970 and not so much as a blinker light and just what’s so damn special about Joliet, Illy-noy anyway? Garraty’s father used to say Porterville was the only town in the county with more graveyards than people. But it was a clean place. The unemployment was high, the cars were rusty, and there was plenty of screwing around going on, but it was a clean place. The only action was Wednesday Bingo at the grange hall (last game a coverall for a twenty-pound turkey and a twenty-dollar bill), but it was clean. And it was quiet. What was wrong with that?

He felt a loosening in his chest all the same, and heard Baker let out his breath. It was stupid to feel that way. The sooner Harkness stopped walking, the sooner he could stop walking. That was the simple truth. That was logic. But something went deeper, a truer, more frightening logic. Harkness was a part of the group that Garraty was a part of, a segment of his subclan. Part of a magic circle that Garraty belonged to. And if one part of that circle could be broken, any part of it could be broken.

“There was a guidance counselor at school, he gave me a lot of shit about sticking with it and not being a ditch digger, but he had more important things to do besides keep me in school. I guess you could say he gave me the soft sell. Besides, somebody has to dig ditches, right?” He waved enthusiastically at a group of little girls who were going through a spastic cheerleader routine, pleated skirts and scabbed knees flying. “Anyhow, I never did dig no ditch. Never dug a one in my whole career. Went to work for a bedsheet factory out in Phoenix, three dollars an hour. Me and Cathy, we’re happy people.” Scramm smiled. “Sometimes we’ll be watching TV and Cath will grab me and say, ‘We’re happy people, honey.’ She’s a peach.”

“And me?” Garraty asked. Scramm looked troubled. “Aw, hell…” “No, go on.” “Well, the way I see it, you don’t know why you are walking, either. It’s the same thing. You’re going now because you’re afraid, but… that’s not enough. That wears out.” Scramm looked down at the road and rubbed his hands together. “And when it wears out, I guess you’ll buy a ticket like all the rest, Ray.” Garraty thought about McVries saying, When I get tired… really tired… why, I guess I will sit down. “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.

Up ahead, quite suddenly and as if to illustrate the subject they had been discussing, a boy in a black turtleneck sweater suddenly had a convulsion. He fell on the road and began to snap and sunfish and jackknife viciously. His limbs jerked and flopped. There was a funny gargling noise in his throat, aaa-aaa-aaa, a sheeplike sound that was entirely mindless. As Garraty hurried past, one of the fluttering hands bounced against his shoe and he felt a wave of frantic revulsion. The boy’s eyes were rolled up to the whites. There were splotches of foam splattered on his lips and chin. He was being second-warned, but of course he was beyond hearing, and when his two minutes were up they shot him like a dog.

Two girls stood beside a battered MG at the bottom of one dip. They were wearing tight summer shorts, middy blouses, and sandals. There were cheers and whistles. The faces of these girls were hot, flushed, and excited by something ancient, sinuous, and, to Garraty, erotic almost to the point of insanity. He felt animal lust rising in him, an aggressively alive thing that made his body shake with a palsied fever all its own. It was Gribble, the radical among them, that suddenly dashed at them, his feet kicking up spurts of dust along the shoulder. One of them leaned back against the hood of the MG and spread her legs slightly, tilting her hips at him. Gribble put his hands over her breasts. She made no effort to stop him. He was warned, hesitated, and then plunged against her, a jamming, hurtling, frustrated, angry, frightened figure in a sweaty white shirt and cord pants. The girl hooked her ankles around Gribble’s calves and put her arms lightly around his neck. They kissed. Gribble took a second warning, then a third, and then, with perhaps fifteen seconds of grace left, he stumbled away and broke into a frantic, shambling run. He fell down, picked himself up, clutched at his crotch and staggered back onto the road. His tin face was hectically flushed. “Couldn’t,” he was sobbing. “Wasn’t enough time and she wanted me to and I couldn’t… I…” He was weeping and staggering, his hands pressed against his crotch. His words were little more than indistinct wails. “So you gave t...

Garraty opened his mouth to reply when a hollow, poom-poom sound echoed back from far ahead. It was rifle fire. The word came back. Harkness had burnt out. There was an odd, elevatorish sensation in Garraty’s stomach as he passed the word on back. The magic circle was broken. Harkness would never write his book about the Long Walk. Harkness was being dragged off the road someplace up ahead like a grain bag or was being tossed into a truck, wrapped securely in a canvas bodybag. For Harkness, the Long Walk was over.

“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.” “Did he smoke?” Abraham asked, waving at a family of four and their cat. The cat was on a leash. It was a Persian cat. It looked mean and pissed off. “No, not even a pipe,” Baker said. “He was afraid it would give him cancer.”