The Long Walk

forth across the white line.

“McVries,” Olson said. His voice had gotten softer in the last couple of hours. Garraty had decided he liked Olson in spite of Olson’s brass-balls outer face. He didn’t like to see Olson getting scared, but there could be no doubt that he was.

“What?” McVries said.

“It isn’t going away. That baggy feeling I told you about. It isn’t going away.”

McVries didn’t say anything. The scar on his face looked very white in the light of the setting sun.

“It feels like my legs could just collapse. Like a bad foundation. That won’t happen, will it? Will it?” Olson’s voice had gotten a little shrill.

McVries didn’t say anything.

“Could I have a cigarette?” Olson asked. His voice was low again.

“Yeah. You can keep the pack.”

Olson lit one of the Mellows with practiced ease, cupping the match, and thumbed his nose at one of the soldiers watching him from the halftrack. “They’ve been giving me the old hairy eyeball for the last hour or so. They’ve got a sixth sense about it.” He raised his voice again. “You like it, don’t you, fellas? You like it, right? That goddam right, is it?”

Several of the Walkers looked around at him and then looked away quickly. Garraty wanted to look away too. There was hysteria in Olson’s voice. The soldiers looked at Olson impassively. Garraty wondered if the word would go back on Olson pretty quick, and couldn’t repress a shudder.

By four-thirty they had covered thirty miles. The sun was half-gone, and it had turned blood red on the horizon. The thunderheads had moved east, and overhead the sky was a darkening blue. Garraty thought about his hypothetical drowning man again. Not so hypothetical at that. The coming night was like water that would soon cover them.

A feeling of panic rose in his gullet. He was suddenly and terribly sure that he was looking at the last daylight in his life. He wanted it to stretch out. He wanted it to last. He wanted the dusk to go on for hours.

“Warning! Warning 100! Your third warning, 100!”

Zuck looked around. There was a dazed, uncomprehending look in his eyes. His right pants leg was caked with dried blood. And then, suddenly, he began to sprint. He weaved through the Walkers like a broken-field runner carrying a football. He ran with that same dazed expression on his face.

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.

When they got up over the rise they saw the halftrack sitting on the shoulder half a mile away. Blue smoke was coming from its dual exhaust pipes. Of Zuck there was no sign. No sign at all.

“Where’s the Major?” someone screamed. The voice was on the raw edge of panic. It belonged to a bulletheaded boy named Gribble, number 48. “I want to see the Major, goddammit! Where is he?”

The soldiers walking along the verge of the road did not answer. No one answered.

“Is he making another speech?” Gribble stormed. “Is that what he’s doing? Well, he’s a murderer! That’s what he is, a murderer! I… I’ll tell him! You think I won’t? I’ll tell him to his face! I’ll tell him right to his face!” In his excitement he had fallen below the pace, almost stopping, and the soldiers became interested for the first time.

“Warning! Warning 48!”

Gribble faltered to a stop, and then his legs picked up speed. He looked down at his feet as he walked. Soon they were up to where the halftrack waited. It began to crawl along beside them again.

At about 4:45, Garraty had supper-a tube of processed tuna fish, a few Snappy Crackers with cheese spread, and a lot of water. He had to force himself to stop there. You could get a canteen anytime, but there would be no fresh concentrates until tomorrow morning at nine o’clock… and he might want a midnight snack. Hell, he might need a midnight snack.

“It may be a matter of life and death,” Baker said, “but it sure isn’t hurtin’ your appetite any.”

“Can’t afford to let it,” Garraty answered. “I don’t like the idea of fainting about two o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Now there was a genuinely unpleasant thought. You wouldn’t know anything, probably. Wouldn’t feel anything. You’d just wake up in eternity.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Baker said softly.

Garraty looked at him. In the fading daylight, Baker’s face was soft and young and beautiful. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about a whole hell of a lot of things.”

“Such as?”

“Him, for one,” Garraty said, and jerked his head toward Stebbins, who was still walking along at the same pace he had been walking at when they started out. His pants were drying on him. His face was shadowy. He was still saving his last half-sandwich.

“What about him?”

“I wonder why he’s here, why he doesn’t say anything. And whether he’ll live or die.”

“Garraty, we’re all going to die.”

“But hopefully not tonight,” Garraty said. He kept his voice light, but a shudder suddenly wracked him. He didn’t know if Baker saw it or not. His kidneys contracted. He turned around, unzipped his fly, and began walking backward.

“What do you think about the Prize?” Baker asked.

“I don’t see much sense thinking about it,” Garraty said, and began to urinate. He finished, zipped his fly, and turned around again, mildly pleased that he had accomplished the operation without drawing a warning.

“I think about it,” Baker said dreamily. “Not so much the Prize itself as the money. All that money.”

“ Rich men don’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” Garraty said. He watched his feet, the only things that were keeping him from finding out if there really was a Kingdom of Heaven or not.

“Hallelujah,” Olson said. “There’ll be refreshments after the meetin’.”

“You a religious fella?” Baker asked Garraty.

“No, not particularly. But I’m no money freak.”

“You might be if you grew up on potato soup and collards,” Baker said. “Sidemeat only when your daddy could afford the ammunition.”

“Might make a difference,” Garraty agreed, and then paused, wondering whether to say anything else. “But it’s never really the important thing.” He saw Baker looking at him uncomprehendingly and a little scornfully.

“You can’t take it with you, that’s your next line,” McVries said.

Garraty glanced at him. McVries was wearing that irritating, slanted smile again. “It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “We don’t bring anything into the world and we sure as shit don’t take anything out.”

“Yes, but the period in between those two events is more pleasant in comfort, don’t you think?” McVries said.

“Oh, comfort, shit,” Garraty said. “If one of those goons riding that overgrown Tonka toy over there shot you, no doctor in the world could revive you with a transfusion of twenties or fifties.”

“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?”

Harkness had come over and was now walking beside Olson. “Not me, babe,” he said. “First thing I’d do is buy a whole fleet of Checkers. If I win this, I may never walk again.”

“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.”

“Oh, such a golden flood of bullshit,” McVries said.

“Is that so?” Garraty cried. “How much planning are you doing?”

“Well, right now I’ve sort of adjusted my horizons, that’s true-”

“You bet it is,” Garraty said grimly. “The only difference is we’re involved in dying right now.”

Total silence followed that. Harkness took off his glasses and began to polish them. Olson looked a shade paler. Garraty wished he hadn’t said it; he had gone too far.

Then someone in back said quite clearly: “Hear, hear!”

Garraty looked around, sure it was Stebbins even though he had never heard Stebbins’s voice. But Stebbins gave no sign. He was looking down at the road.

“I guess I got carried away,” Garraty muttered, even though he wasn’t the one who had gotten carried away. That had been Zuck. “Anyone want a cookie?”

He handed the cookies around, and it got to be five o’clock. The sun seemed to hang suspended halfway over the horizon. The earth might have stopped turning. The three or four eager beavers who were still ahead of the pack had dropped back until they were less than fifty yards ahead of the main group.

It seemed to Garraty that the road had become a sly combination of upgrades with no corresponding downs. He was thinking that if that were true they’d all end up breathing through oxygen faceplates before long when his foot came down on a discarded belt of food concentrates. Surprised, he looked up. It had been Olson’s. His hands were twitching at his waist. There was a look of frowning surprise on his face.

“I dropped it,” he said. “I wanted something to eat and I dropped it.” He laughed, as if to show what a silly thing that had been. The laugh stopped abruptly.