The Long Walk

sang a nightmarish duet.
    Tension filled Garraty’s veins, stuffed them full of copper wire. He could hear his heart thudding, now in his guts, now in his throat, now right between the eyes. Two hundred yards. They were screaming his name again (RAY-RAY-ALL-THE-WAY!) but he had not seen a familiar face in the crowd yet.
    He drifted over to the right until the clutching hands of Crowd were inches from him—one long and brawny arm actually twitched the cloth of his shirt, and he jumped back as if he had almost been drawn into a threshing machine—and the soldiers had their guns on him, ready to let fly if he tried to disappear into the surge of humanity. Only a hundred yards to go now. He could see the big brown Woolman’s sign, but no sign of his mother or of Jan. God, oh God God, Stebbins had been right . . . and even if they were here, how was he going to see them in this shifting, clutching mass?
    A shaky groan seeped out of him, like a disgorged strand of flesh. He stumbled and almost fell over his own loose legs. Stebbins had been right. He wanted to stop here, to not go any further. The disappointment, the sense of loss, was so staggering it was hollow. What was the point? What was the point now?
    Fire siren blasting, Crowd screaming, Klingerman shrieking, rain falling, and his own little tortured soul, flapping through his head and crashing blindly off its walls.
    I can’t go on. Can’t, can’t, can’t. But his feet stumbled on. Where am I? Jan? Jan? . . . JAN!
    He saw her. She was waving the blue silk scarf he had gotten her for her birthday, and the rain shimmered in her hair like gems. His mother was beside her, wearing her plain black coat. They had been jammed together by the mob and were being swayed helplessly back and forth. Over Jan’s shoulder a TV camera poked its idiot snout.
    A great sore somewhere in his body seemed to burst. The infection ran out of him in a green flood. He burst into a shambling, pigeon-toed run. His ripped socks flapped and slapped his swollen feet.
    “Jan! Jan!”
    He could hear the thought but not the words in his mouth. The TV camera tracked him enthusiastically. The din was tremendous. He could see her lips form his name, and he had to reach her, had to—
    An arm brought him up short. It was McVries. A soldier speaking through a sexless bullhorn was giving them both first warning.
    “Not into the crowd!” McVries’s lips were against Garraty’s ear and he was shouting. A lancet of pain pierced into Garraty’s head.
    “Let me go!”
    “I won’t let you kill yourself, Ray!”
    “Let me go goddammit!”
    “Do you want to die in her arms? Is that it?”
    The time was fleeting. She was crying. He could see the tears on her cheeks. He wrenched free of McVries. He started for her again. He felt hard, angry sobs coming up from inside him. He wanted sleep. He would find it in her arms. He loved her.
    Ray, I love you.
    He could see the words on her lips.
    McVries was still beside him. The TV camera glared down. Now, peripherally, he could see his high school class, and they were unfurling a huge banner and somehow it was his own face, his yearbook photo, blown up to Godzilla size, he was grinning down at himself as he cried and struggled to reach her.
    Second warning, blared from the loudhailer like the voice of God.
    Jan—
    She was reaching out to him. Hands touching. Her cool hand. Her tears—
    His mother. Her hands, reaching—
    He grasped them. In one hand he held Jan’s hand, in the other his mother ’s hand. He touched them. It was done.
    It was done until McVries’s arm came down around his shoulder again, cruel McVries.
    “Let me go ! Let me go !”
    “Man, you must really hate her!” McVries screamed in his ear. “What do you want? To die knowing they’re both stinking with your blood? Is that what you want? For Christ’s sake, come on!”
    He struggled, but McVries was strong. Maybe McVries was even right. He looked at Jan and now her eyes were wide with alarm. His mother made shooing gestures. And on Jan’s lips he could read the words like a damnation: Go on! Go on!
    Of course I must go on, he thought dully. I am Maine’s Own. And in that second he hated her, although if he had done anything, it was no more than to catch her—and his mother—in the snare he had laid for himself.
    Third warning for him and McVries, rolling majestically like thunder; the crowd hushed a little and looked on with wet-eyed eagerness. Now there was panic