Stephen King - The Long Walk

Garraty didn’t know his name or number. He thought the word would come back on that, but it never did. Maybe nobody knew. Maybe he had been a loner like Stebbins.

Now they were twenty-five miles into the Long Walk. The scenery blended into a continuous mural of woods and fields, broken by an occasional house or a crossroads where waving, cheering people stood in spite of the dying drizzle. One old lady stood frozenly beneath a black umbrella, neither waving nor speaking nor smiling. She watched them go by with gimlet eyes. There was not a sign of life or movement about her except for the wind-twitched hem of her black dress. On the middle finger of her right hand she wore a large ring with a purple stone. There was a tarnished cameo at her throat.

They crossed a railroad track that had been abandoned long ago-the rails were rusty and witch-grass was growing in the cinders between the ties. Somebody stumbled and fell and was warned and got up and went on walking with a bleeding knee.

It was only nineteen miles to Caribou, but dark would come before that. No rest for the wicked, Garraty thought, and that struck him funny. He laughed.

McVries looked at him closely. “Getting tired?”

“No,” Garraty said. “I’ve been tired for quite a while now.” He looked at McVries with something like animosity. “You mean you’re not?”

McVries said, “Just go on dancing with me like this forever, Garraty, and I’ll never tire. We’ll scrape our shoes on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.”

He blew Garraty a kiss and walked away.

Garraty looked after him. He didn’t know what to make of McVries.

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.

The sound of the halftrack was quiet, almost soothing. Garraty let his head drop forward and semi-dozed as he walked. Somewhere up ahead was Freeport. Not tonight or tomorrow, though. Lot of steps. Long way to go. He found himself still with too many questions and not enough answers. The whole Walk seemed nothing but one looming question mark. He told himself that a thing like this must have some deep meaning. Surely it was so. A thing like this must provide an answer to every question; it was just a matter of keeping your foot on the throttle. Now if he could only-

He put his foot down in a puddle of water and started fully awake again. Pearson looked at him quizzically and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “You know that guy that fell down and cut himself when we were crossing the tracks?”

“Yeah. It was Zuck, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. I just heard he’s still bleeding.”

“How far to Caribou, Maniac?” somebody asked him. Garraty looked around. It was Barkovitch. He had tucked his rainhat into his back pocket where it flapped obscenely.

“How the hell should I know?”

“You live here, don’t you?”

“It’s about seventeen miles,” McVries told him. “Now go peddle your papers, little man.”

Barkovitch put on his insulted look and moved away.

“He’s some hot ticket,” Garraty said.

“Don’t let him get under your skin,” McVries replied. “Just concentrate on walking him into the ground.”

“Okay, coach.”

McVries patted Garraty on the shoulder. “You’re going to win this one for the Gipper, my boy.”

“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.”

McVries fumbled in his pocket and came up with a package of Mellow cigarettes. “Smoke?”

“I don’t.”

“Neither do I,” McVries said, and then put a cigarette into his mouth. He found a book of matches with a tomato sauce recipe on it. He lit the cigarette, drew smoke in, and coughed it out. Garraty thought of Hint 10: Save your wind. If you smoke ordinarily, try not to smoke on the Long Walk.

“I thought I’d learn,” McVries said defiantly.

“It’s crap, isn’t it?” Garraty said sadly.

McVries looked at him, surprised, and then threw the cigarette away. “Yeah,” he said. “I think it is.”

The rainbow was gone by four o’clock. Davidson, 8, dropped back with them. He was a good-looking boy except for the rash of acne on his forehead. “That guy Zuck’s really hurting,” Davidson said. He had had a packsack the last time Garraty saw him, but he noticed that at some point Davidson had cast it away.

“Still bleeding?” McVries asked.

“Like a stuck pig.” Davidson shook his head. “It’s funny the way things turn out, isn’t it? You fall down any other time, you get a little scrape. He needs stitches.” He pointed to the road. “Look at that.”

Garraty looked and saw tiny dark spots on the drying hardtop. “Blood?”

“It ain’t molasses,” Davidson said grimly.

“Is he scared?” Olson asked in a dry voice.

“He says he doesn’t give a damn,” Davidson said. “But I’m scared.” His eyes were wide and gray. “I’m scared for all of us.”

They kept on walking. Baker pointed out another Garraty sign.

“Hot shit,” Garraty said without looking up. He was following the trail of Zuck’s blood, like Dan’s bone tracking a wounded Indian. It weaved slowly back and 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.