Stephen King - The Long Walk

He had also taught her how to rhumba and cha-cha, skills he had learned on endless Saturday mornings at Mrs. Amelia Dorgens’s School for Modern Dance… that had been his mother’s idea, one he had objected to strenuously. His mother had stuck to her guns, thank God.

He thought now of the patterns of light and shadow on the nearly perfect oval of her face, the way she walked, the lift and fall of her voice, the easy, desirable swing of one hip, and he wondered in terror what he was doing here, walking down this dark road. He wanted her now. He wanted to do it all over again, but differently. Now, when he thought of the Major’s tanned face, the salt-and-pepper mustache, the mirrored sunglasses, he felt a horror so deep it made his legs feel rubbery and weak. Why am I here? he asked himself desperately, and there was no answer, so he asked the question again: Why am-

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.

McVries had Barkovitch to keep him going. He would concentrate on Jan. He would walk to Jan. They reserved space for Long Walkers' relatives and loved ones in the front lines. He would see her.

He thought about kissing that other girl and was ashamed.

How do you know you’ll make it? A cramp… blisters… a bad cut or a nosebleed that just won’t quit… a big hill that was just too big and too long. How do you know you’ll make it?

I’ll make it, I’ll make it.

“Congratulations,” McVries said at his shoulder, making him jump.

“Huh?”

“It’s midnight. We live to fight another day, Garraty.”

“And many of ’em,” Abraham added. “For me, that is. Not that I begrudge you, you understand.”

“A hundred and five miles to Oldtown, if you care,” Olson put in tiredly.

“Who gives a shit about Oldtown?” McVries demanded. “You ever been there, Garraty?”

“No.-

“How about Augusta? Christ, I thought that was in Georgia.”

“Yeah, I’ve been in Augusta. It’s the state capital-”

“Regional,” Abraham said.

“And the Corporate Governor’s mansion, and a couple of traffic circles, and a couple of movies-”

“You have those in Maine?” McVries asked.

“Well, it’s a small state capital, okay?” Garraty said, smiling.

“Wait’ll we hit Boston,” McVries said.

There were groans.

From up ahead there came cheers, shouts, and catcalls. Garraty was alarmed to hear his own name called out. Up ahead, about half a mile away, was a ramshackle farmhouse, deserted and fallen down. But a battered Klieg light had been plugged in somewhere, and a huge sign, lettered with pine boughs across the front of the house read:

GARRATY’s OUR MAN!!!

Aroostook County Parents' Association

“ Hey, Garraty, where’s the parents?” someone yelled.

“Back home making kids,” Garraty said, embarrassed. There could be no doubt that Maine was Garraty country, but he found the signs and cheers and the gibes of the others all a little mortifying. He had found-among other things-in the last fifteen hours that he didn’t much crave the limelight. The thought of a million people all over the state rooting for him and laying bets on him (at twelve-to-one, the highway worker had said… was that good or bad?) was a little scary.

“You’d think they would have left a few plump, juicy parents lying around somewhere,” Davidson said.

“Poontang from the PTA?” Abraham asked.

The ribbing was halfhearted and didn’t last very long. The road killed most ribbing very quickly. They crossed another bridge, this time a cement one that spanned a good-sized river. The water rippled below them like black silk. A few crickets chirred cautiously, and around fifteen past midnight, a spatter of light, cold rain fell.

Up ahead, someone began to play a harmonica. It didn’t last long (Hint 6: Conserve Wind), but it was pretty for the moment it lasted. It sounded a little like Old Black Joe, Garraty thought. Down in de cornflel', here dat mournful sour'. All de darkies am aweeping, Ewing’s in de cole, cole groun'.

No, that wasn’t Old Black Joe, that tune was some other Stephen Foster racist classic. Good old Stephen Foster. Drank himself to death. So did Poe, it had been reputed. Poe the necrophiliac, the one who had married his fourteen-year-old cousin. That made him a pedophile as well. All-around depraved fellows, he and Stephen Foster both. If only they could have lived to see the Long Walk, Garraty thought. They could have collaborated on the world’s first Morbid Musical. Massa’s on De Cold, Cold Road, or The Tell-Tale Stride, or-

Up ahead someone began to scream, and Garraty felt his blood go cold. It was a very young voice. It was not screaming words. It was only screaming. 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. Stebbins laughed. Garraty felt suddenly furious with Stebbins, and wanted to turn to him and ask him how he’d like someone laughing at his death. It was something you’d expect of Barkovitch. Barkovitch had said he’d dance on a lot of graves, and there were sixteen he could dance on already.

I doubt that he’ll have much left of his feet to dance with, Garraty thought. A sharp twinge of pain went through the arch of his right foot. The muscle there tightened heart-stoppingly, then loosened. Garraty waited with his heart in his mouth for it to happen again. It would hit harder. It would turn his foot into a block of useless wood. But it didn’t happen.

“I can’t walk much further,” Olson croaked. His face was a white blur in the darkness. No one answered him.

The darkness. Goddam the darkness. It seemed to Garraty they had been buried alive in it. Immured in it. Dawn was a century away. Many of them would never see the dawn. Or the sun. They were buried six feet deep in the darkness. All they needed was the monotonous chanting of the priest, his voice muffled but not entirely obscured by the new-packed darkness, above which the mourners stood. The mourners were not even aware that they were here, they were alive, they were screaming and scratching and clawing at the coffin-lid darkness, the air was flaking and costing away, the air was turning into poison gas, hope fading until hope itself was a darkness, and above all of it the nodding chapel-bell voice of the priest and the impatient, shuffling feet of mourners anxious to be off into the warm May sunshine. Then, overmastering that, the sighing, shuffling chorus of the bugs and the beetles, squirming their way through the earth, come for the feast.

I could go crazy, Garraty thought. I could go right the fuck off my cocker.

A little breeze soughed through the pines.

Garraty turned around and urinated. Stebbins moved over a little, and Harkness made a coughing, snoring sound. He was walking half-asleep.

Garraty became acutely conscious of all the little sounds of life: someone hawked and spat, someone else sneezed, someone ahead and to the left was chewing something noisily. Someone asked someone else softly how he felt. There was a murmured answer. Yannick was singing at a whisper level, soft and very much off-key.