“Would I what?” Garraty had lost track of the conversation. His left leg had begun to feel decidedly strange.
“Would you go double or nothing against this here fella?”
“Why not? After all, he's too dumb to cheat you.”
“Garraty, I thought you were my friend,” Abraham said coldly.
“Okay, dollar fifty, double or nothing,” Baker said, and that was when the monstrous pain bolted up Garraty's left leg, making all the pain of the last thirty hours seem like a mere whisper in comparison.
“My leg, my leg, my leg!” he screamed, unable to help himself.
“Oh, Jesus, Garraty,” Baker had time to say - nothing in his voice but mild surprise, and then they had passed beyond him, it seemed that they were all passing him as he stood here with his left leg turned to clenched and agonizing marble, passing him, leaving him behind.
“Warning! Warning 47!”
Don't panic. If you panic now you've had the course.
He sat down on the pavement, his left leg stuck out woodenly in front of him. He began to massage the big muscles. He tried to knead them. It was like trying to knead ivory.
“Garraty?” It was McVries. He sounded scared... surely that was only an illusion? “What is it? Charley horse?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Keep going. It'll be all right.”
Time. Time was speeding up for him, but everyone else seemed to have slowed to a crawl, to the speed of an instant replay on a close play at first base. McVries was picking up his pace slowly, one heel showing, then the other, a glint from the worn nails, a glimpse of cracked and tissue-thin shoeleather. Barkovitch was passing by slowly, a little grin on his face, a wave of tense quiet came over the crowd slowly, moving outward in both directions from where he had sat down, like great glassy combers headed for the beach. My second warning, Garraty thought, my second warning's coming up, come on leg, come on goddam leg. I don't want to buy a ticket, what do you say, come on, gimme a break.
“Warning! Second warning, 47!”
Yeah, I know, you think I can't keep score, you think I'm sitting here trying to get a suntan?
The knowledge of death, as true and unarguable as a photograph, was trying to get in and swamp him. Trying to paralyze him. He shut it out with a desperate coldness. His thigh was excruciating agony, but in his concentration he barely felt it. A minute left. No, fifty seconds now, no, forty-five, it's dribbling away, my time's going.
With an abstract, almost professorly expression on his face, Garraty dug his fingers into the frozen straps and harnesses of muscle. He kneaded. He flexed. He talked to his leg in his head. Come on, come on, come on, goddam thing. His fingers began to ache and he did not notice that much either. Stebbins passed him and murmured something. Garraty did not catch what it was. It might have been good luck. Then he was alone, sitting on the broken white line between the travel lane and the passing lane.
All gone. The carny just left town, pulled stakes in the middle of everything and blew town, no one left but this here kid Garraty to face the emptiness of flattened candy wrappers and squashed cigarette butts and discarded junk prizes.
All gone except one soldier, young and blond and handsome in a remote sort of way. His silver chronometer was in one hand, his rifle in the other. No mercy in that face.
“Warning! Warning 47! Third warning, 47!”
The muscle was not loosening at all. He was going to die. After all this, after ripping his guts out, that was the fact, after all.
He let go of his leg and stared calmly at the soldier. He wondered who was going to win. He wondered if McVries would outlast Barkovitch. He wondered what a bullet in the head felt like, if it would just be sudden darkness or if he would actually feel his thoughts being ripped apart.
The last few seconds began to drain away.
The cramp loosened. Blood flowed back into the muscle, making it tingle with needles and pins, making it warm. The blond soldier with the remotely handsome face put away the pocket chronometer. His lips moved soundlessly as he counted down the last few seconds.
But I can't get up, Garraty thought. It's too good just to sit. Just sit and let the phone ring, the hell with it, why didn't I take the phone off the hook?
Garraty let his head fall back. The soldier seemed to be looking down at him, as if from the mouth of a tunnel or over the lip of a deep well. In slow motion he transferred the gun to both hands and his right forefinger kissed over the trigger, then curled around it and the barrel started to come around. The soldier's left hand was solid on the stock. A wedding band caught a glimmer of sun. Everything was slow. So slow. Just... hold the phone.
This, Garraty thought.
This is what it's like. To die.
The soldier's right thumb was rotating the safety catch to the off position with exquisite slowness. Three scrawny women were directly behind him, three weird sisters, hold the phone. Just hold the phone a minute longer, I've got something to die here. Sunshine, shadow, blue sky. Clouds rushing up the highway. Stebbins was just a back now, just a blue workshirt with a sweatstain running up between the shoulder blades, goodbye, Stebbins.
Sounds thundered in on him. He had no idea if it was his imagination, or heightened sensibility, or simply the fact of death reaching out for him. The safety catch snapped off with a sound like a breaking branch. The rush of indrawn air between his teeth was the sound of a wind tunnel. His heartbeat was a drum. And there was a high singing, not in his ears but between them, spiraling up and up, and he was crazily sure that it was the actual sound of brainwaves—
He scrambled to his feet in a convulsive flying jerk, screaming. He threw himself into an accelerating, gliding run. His feet were made of feathers. The finger of the soldier tightened on the trigger and whitened. He glanced down at the solidstate computer on his waist, a gadget that included a tiny but sophisticated sonar device. Garraty had once read an article about them in Popular Mechanix. They could read out a single Walker's speed as exactly as you would have wanted, to four numbers to the right of the decimal point.
The soldier's finger loosened.
Garraty slowed to a very fast walk, his mouth cottony dry, his heart pounding at triphammer speed. Irregular white flashes pulsed in front of his eyes, and for a sick moment he was sure he was going to faint. It passed. His feet, seemingly furious at being denied their rightful rest, screamed at him rawly. He gritted his teeth and bore the pain. The big muscle in his left leg was still twitching alarmingly, but he wasn't limping. So far.
He looked at his watch. It was 2:17 PM. For the next hour he would be less than two seconds from death.
“Back to the land of the living,” Stebbins said as he caught up.
“Sure,” Garraty said numbly. He felt a sudden wave of resentment. They would have gone on walking even if he had bought his ticket. No tears shed for him. Just a name and number to be entered in the official records - GARRATY, RAYMOND, #47, ELIMINATED 218th MILE. And a human-interest story in the state newspapers for a couple of days. GARRATY DEAD; “MAINE's OWN” BECOMES 61ST TO FALL!
“I hope I win,” Garraty muttered.
“Think you will?”
Garraty thought of the blond soldier's face. It had shown as much emotion as a plate of potatoes.
“I doubt it,” he said. “I've already got three strikes against me. That means you're out, doesn't it?”
“Call the last one a foul tip,” Stebbins said. He was regarding his feet again. Garraty picked his own feet up, his two-second margin like a stone in his head. There would be no warning this time. Not even time for someone to say, you better pick it up, Garraty, you're going to draw one.
He caught up with McVries, who glanced around. “I thought you were out of it, kiddo,” McVries said.
“So did I.”
“That close?”
“About two seconds, I think.”
McVries pursed a silent whistle. “I don't think I'd like to be in your shoes right now. How's the leg?”
“B
etter. Listen, I can't talk. I'm going up front for a while.”
“It didn't help Harkness any.”
Garraty shook his head. “I have to make sure I'm topping the speed.”
“All right. You want company?”
“If you've got the energy.”
McVries laughed. “I got the time if you got the money, honey.”
“Come on, then. Let's pick it up while I've still got the sack for it.”
Garraty stepped up his pace until his legs were at the point of rebellion, and he and McVries moved quickly through the front-runners. There was a space between the boy who had been walking second, a gangling, evil-faced boy named Harold Quince, and the survivor of the two leather boys, Joe. Closer to, his complexion was startlingly bronzed. His eyes stared steadily at the horizon, and his features were expressionless. The many zippers on his jacket jingled, like the sound of faraway music.
“Hello, Joe,” McVries said, and Garraty had an hysterical urge to add, whaddaya know?
“Howdy,” Joe said curtly.
They passed him and then the road was theirs, a wide double-barreled strip of composition concrete stained with oil and broken by the grassy median strip, bordered on both sides by a steady wall of people.
“Onward, ever onward,” McVries said. “Christian soldiers, marching as to war. Ever hear that one, Ray?”
“What time is it?”
McVries glanced at his watch. “2:20, Look, Ray, if you're going to—”
“God, is that all? I thought—” He felt panic rising in his throat, greasy and thick. He wasn't going to be able to do it. The margin was just too tight.
“Look, if you keep thinking about the time, you're gonna go nuts and try to run into the crowd and they'll shoot you dog-dead. They'll shoot you with your tongue hanging out and spit running down your chin. Try to forget about it.”
“I can't.” Everything was bottling up inside him, making him feel jerky and hot and sick. “Olson... Scramm... they died. Davidson died. I can die too, Pete. I believe it now. It's breathing down my fucking back!”
“Think about your girl. Jan, what's-her-face. Or your mother. Or your goddam kitty-cat. Or don't think about anything. Just pick 'em up and put 'em down. Just keep on walking down the road. Concentrate on that.”
Garraty fought for control of himself. Maybe he even got a little. But he was unraveling just the same. His legs didn't want to respond smoothly to his mind's commands anymore, they seemed as old and as flickery as ancient lightbulbs.
“He won't last much longer,” a woman in the front row said quite audibly.
“Your tits won't last much longer!” Garraty snapped at her, and the crowd cheered him.
“They're screwed up,” Garray muttered. “They're really screwed up. Perverted. What time is it, McVries?”
“What was the first thing you did when you got your letter of confirmation?” McVries asked softly. “What did you do when you knew you were really in?”
Garraty frowned, wiped his forearm quickly across his forehead, and then let his mind free of the sweaty, terrifying present to that sudden, flashing moment.
“I was by myself. My mother works. It was a Friday afternoon. The letter was in the mailbox and it had a Wilmington, Delaware, postmark, so I knew that had to be it. But I was sure it said I'd flunked the physical or the mental or both. I had to read it twice. I didn't go into any fits of joy, but I was pleased. Real pleased. And confident. My feet didn't hurt then and my back didn't feel like somebody had shoved a rake with a busted handle into it. I was one in a million. I wasn't bright enough to realize the circus fat lady is, too.”
He broke off for a moment, thinking, smelling early April.
“I couldn't back down. There were too many people watching. I think it must work the same with just about everyone. It's one of the ways they tip the game, you know. I let the April 15th backout date go by and the day after that they had a big testimonial dinner for me at the town hall - all my friends were there and after dessert everyone started yelling Speech! Speech! And I got out and mumbled something down at my hands about how I was gonna do the best I could if I got in, and everyone applauded like mad. It was like I'd laid the fucking Gettysburg Address on their heads. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know,” McVries said, and laughed - but his eyes were dark.
Behind them the guns thunder-clapped suddenly. Garraty jumped convulsively and nearly froze in his tracks. Somehow he kept walking. Blind instinct this time, he thought. What about next time?
“Son of a bitch,” McVries said softly. “It was Joe.”
“What time is it?” Garraty asked, and before McVries could answer he remembered that he was wearing a watch of his own. It was 2:38. Christ. His two-second margin was like an iron dumbbell on his back.
“No one tried to talk you out of it?” McVries asked. They were far out beyond the rest now, better than a hundred yards beyond Harold Quince. A soldier had been dispatched to keep tabs on them. Garraty was very glad it wasn't the blond guy. “No one tried to talk you into using the April 31st backout?”
“Not at first. My mother and Jan and Dr. Patterson - he's my mother's special friend, you know, they've been keeping company for the last five years or so - they just kind of soft-pedaled it at first. They were pleased and proud because most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes. And that still leaves thousands of kids and they can use two hundred - one hundred Walkers and a hundred backups. And there's no skill in getting picked, you know that.”
“Sure, they draw the names out of that cocksucking drum. Big TV spectacular.” McVries's voice cracked a little.
“Yeah. The Major draws the two hundred names, but the names're all they announce. You don't know if you're a Walker or just a backup.”
“And no notification of which you are until the final backout date itself,” McVries agreed, speaking of it as if the final backout date had been years ago instead of only four days. “Yeah, they like to stack the deck their way.”
Somebody in the crowd had just released a flotilla of balloons. They floated up to the sky in a dissolving area of reds, blues, greens, yellows. The steady south wind carried them away with taunting, easy speed.
“I guess so,” Garraty said. “We were watching the TV when the Major drew the names. I was number seventy-three out of the drum. I fell right out of my chair. I just couldn't believe it.”
“No, it can't be you,” McVries agreed. “Things like that always happen to the other guy.”
“Yeah, that's the feeling. That's when everybody started in on me. It wasn't like the first backout date when it was all speeches and pie in the sky by-and-by. Jan...”
He broke off. Why not? He'd told everything else. It didn't matter. Either he or McVries was going to be dead before it was over. Probably both of them. “Jan said she'd go all the way with me, any time, any way, as often as I wanted if I'd take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and then she cried a lot. And begged me.” Garraty looked up at McVries. “I don't know. Anything else she could have asked me, I would have tried to do it. But this one thing... I couldn't. It was like there was a stone caught in my throat. After a while she knew I couldn't say Yes, okay, I'll call the 800 number. I think she started to understand. Maybe as well as I did myself, which God knows wasn't — isn't — very well.”
“Then Dr. Patterson started in. He's a diagnostician, and he's got a wicked logical mind. He said, 'Look here, Ray. Figuring in the Prime group and the backups, your chance of survival is fifty-to-one. Don't do this to your mother, Ray.' I was polite with him for as long as I could, but finally I told him to just kiss off. I said I figured the odds on him ever marrying my mother were pretty long, but I never noticed him backing off because of that.”
Garraty ran both hands through the straw-thatch of his hair. He had forgotten about the two-second ma
rgin.
“God, didn't he get mad. He ranted and raved and told me if I wanted to break my mother's heart to just go ahead. He said I was as insensitive as a... a wood tick, I think that's what he said, insensitive as a wood tick, maybe it's a family saying of his or something, I don't know. He asked me how it felt to be doing the number on my mom and on a nice girl like Janice. So I countered with my own unarguable logic.”
“Did you,” McVries said, smiling. “What was that?”
“I told him if he didn't get out I was going to hit him.”
“What about your mother?”
“She didn't say much at all. I don't think she could believe it. And the thought of what I'd get if I won. The Prize - everything you want for the rest of your life - that sort of blinded her, I think. I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and - it's cruel - but I don't know how we'd've gotten along if he'd've lived. And... I guess she just kept thinking I'd be able to back out of it if I did turn out to be Prime. The Major is a nice man. That's what she said. I'm sure he'd let you out of it if he understood the circumstances. But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it. And then I got the call and I knew I was a Walker. I was Prime.”
“I wasn't.”
“No?”
“No. Twelve of the original Walkers used the April 31st backout. I was number twelve, backup. I got the call just past 11 PM four days ago.”
“Jesus! Is that so?”
“Uh-huh. That close.”
“Doesn't it make you... bitter?”
McVries only shrugged.
Garraty looked at his watch. It was 3:02. It was going to be all right. His shadow, lengthening in the afternoon sun, seemed to move a little more confidently. It was a pleasant, brisk spring day. His leg felt okay now.
“Do you still think you might just... sit down?” he asked McVries. “You've outlasted most of them. Sixty-one of them.”
“How many you or I have outlasted doesn't matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn't matter what I think, see? I used to have a good time smearing away with oil paints. I wasn't too bad, either. Then one day - bingo. I didn't taper off, I just stopped. Bingo. There was no urge to go on even another minute. I went to bed one night liking to paint and when I woke up it was nowhere.”
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