“What’re you doing?” Garraty repeated patiently.
“Counting my change.”
“How much you got?”
Baker clinked the money in his cupped hands and smiled. “Dollar twenty-two,” he said.
Garraty grinned. “A fortune. What you going to do with it?”
Baker didn’t smile back. He looked into the cold darkness dreamily. “Git me one of the big ones,” he said. His light Southern drawl had thickened appreciably.
“Git me a lead-lined one with pink silk insides and a white satin headpillow.” He blinked his empty doorknob eyes. “Wouldn’t never rot then, not till Judgment Trump, when we are as we were. Clothed in flesh incorruptible.”
Garraty felt a warm trickle of horror. “Baker? Have you gone nuts, Baker?”
“You cain’t beat it. We-uns was all crazy to try. You cain’t beat the rottenness of it. Not in this world. Lead-lined, that’s the ticket…”
“If you don’t get hold of yourself, you’ll be dead by morning.”
Baker nodded. His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones, giving him the aspect of a skull. “That’s the ticket. I wanted to die. Didn’t you? Isn’t that why?”
“Shut up!” Garraty yelled. He had the shakes again.
The road sloped sharply up then, cutting off their talk. Garraty leaned into the hill, cold and hot, his spine hurting, his chest hurting. He was sure his muscles would flatly refuse to support him much longer. He thought of Baker’s lead-lined box, sealed against the dark millennia, and wondered if it would be the last thing he ever thought of. He hoped not, and struggled for some other mental track.
Warnings cracked out sporadically. The soldiers on the halftrack were back up to the mark; the one Parker had killed had been unobtrusively replaced. The crowd, cheered monotonously. 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.
At 11:40 Marty Wyman bought his hole. Garraty had forgotten all about Wyman, who hadn’t spoken or gestured for the last twenty-four hours. He didn’t die spectacularly. He just lay down and got shot. And someone whispered, that was Wyman. And someone else whispered, that’s eighty-three, isn’t it? And that was all.
By midnight they were only eight miles from the New Hampshire border. They passed a drive-in theater, a huge white oblong in the darkness. A single slide blazed from the screen: THE MANAGEMENT OF THIS THEATRE SALUTES THIS YEAR’s LONG WALKERS! At 12:20 in the morning it began to rain again, and Abraham began to cough-the same kind of wet, ragged cough that had gotten Scramm not long before he bought out. By one o’clock the rain had become a hard, steady downpour that stung Garraty’s eyes and made his body ache with a kind of internal ague. The wind drove at their backs.
At quarter past the hour, Bobby Sledge tried to scutter quietly into the crowd under the cover of the dark and the driving rain. He was holed quickly and efficiently. Garraty wondered if the blond soldier who had almost sold him his ticket had done it. He knew the blond was on duty; he had seen his face clearly in the glare from the drive-in spotlights. He wished heartily that the blond had been the one Parker had ticketed.
At twenty of two Baker fell down and hit his head on the paving. Garraty started to go to him without even thinking. A hand, still strong, clamped on his arm. It was McVries. Of course it would have to be McVries.
“No,” he said. “No more musketeers. And now it’s real.”
They walked on without looking back.
Baker collected three warnings, and then the silence stretched out interminably. Garraty waited for the guns to come down, and when they didn’t, he checked his watch. Over four minutes had passed. Not long after, Baker walked past him and McVries, not looking at anything. There was an ugly, trickling wound on his forehead, but his eyes looked saner. The vacuous, dazed look was gone.
A little before two AM they crossed into New Hampshire amid the greatest pandemonium yet. Cannons went off. Fireworks burst in the rainy sky, lighting a multitude that stretched away as far as the eye could see in a crazy feverlight. Competing brass bands played martial airs. The cheers were thunder. 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 singlehanded back in 1953. He had lost a leg to radiation poisoning.
Garraty dozed again. His thoughts grew incoherent. Freaky D'Allessio was crouched beneath the rocking chair of Baker’s aunt, curled in a tiny coffin. His body was that of a plump Cheshire cat. He was grinning toothily. Faintly, in the fur between his slightly off-center green eyes, were the healed brand-marks of an old baseball wound. They were watching Garraty’s father being led to an unmarked black van. One of the soldiers flanking Garraty’s father was the blond soldier. Garraty’s father was wearing only undershorts. The other soldier looked back over his shoulder and for a moment Garraty thought it was the Major. Then he saw it was Stebbins. He looked back and the Cheshire cat with Freaky’s head had disappeared-all but the grin, which hung crescently in the air under the rocker like the outside edge of a watermelon…
The guns were shooting again, God, they were shooting at him now, he felt the air from that one, it was over, all over-
He snapped full awake and took two running steps, sending jolts of pain all the way up from his feet to his groin before he realized they had been shooting at someone else, and the someone else was dead, facedown in the rain.
“Hail Mary,” McVries muttered.
“Full of grace,” Stebbins said from behind them. He had moved up, moved up for the kill, and he was grinning like the Cheshire cat in Garraty’s dream. “Help me win this stock-car race.”
“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.
“Well,” Stebbins said, “maybe a little.”
“Pick ’em up, put ’em down, shut your mouth,” McVries chanted. He passed a shaky hand across his face and walked on, eyes straight ahead, his shoulders like a broken bow.
One more bought out before three o’clock-shot down in the rain and windy darkness as he went to his knees somewhere near Portsmouth. Abraham, coughing steadily, walked in a hopeless glitter of fever, a kind of death-glow, a brightness that made Garraty think of streaking meteorites. He was going to burn up instead of burning out-that was how tight it had gotten now.
Baker walked with steady, grim determination, trying to get rid of his warnings before they got rid of him. Garraty could just make him out through the slashing rain, limping along with his hands clenched at his sides.
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 fingers on his lower arm when Baker had fallen), and now he was like an old man. It was unnerving.
Stebbins was Stebbins. He went on and on, like Abraham’s shoes. He seemed to be favoring one leg slightly, but it could have been Garraty’s imagination.
Of the other ten, five seemed to have drawn into that special netherworld that Olson had discovered-one step beyond pain and the comprehension of what was coming to them. They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn’t like to look at them. They were the walking dead.
Just before dawn, three of them went down at once. The mouth of the crowd roared and belched anew with enthusiasm as the bodies spun and thumped like chunks of cut cordwood. To Garraty it seemed the beginning of a dreadful chain reaction that might sweep through them and finish them all. But it ended. It ended with Abraham crawling on his knees, eyes turned blindly up to the halftrack and the crowd beyond, mindless and filled with confused pain. They were the eyes of a sheep caught in a barbed wire fence. Then he fell on his face. His heavy Oxfords drummed fitfully against the wet road and then stopped.
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.
PART THREE: THE RABBIT
CHAPTER 17
“Mother! Mother! Mother! Mother!”
The concentrates were being passed out for the fifth and last time. It took only one of the soldiers to pass them out now. There were only nine Walkers left. Some of them looked at the belts dully, as if they had never seen such things, and let them slide out of their hands like slippery snakes. It took Garraty what seemed like hours to make his hands go through the complicated ritual of snapping the belt closed around his waist, and the thought of eating made his cramped and shriveled stomach feel ugly and nauseated.
Stebbins was now walking beside him. My guardian angel, Garraty thought wryly. As Garraty watched, Stebbins smiled widely and crammed two crackers smeared with peanut butter into his mouth. He ate noisily. Garraty felt sick.
