The Long Walk

Garraty and McVries—and they flinched away from that stare. Stebbins was crazy. In that instant there could be no doubt of it. Stebbins was totally mad.
    His low-pitched voice rose to a pulpit shout.
    “How come I know so much about the Long Walk? I know all about the Long Walk! I ought to! The Major is my father, Garraty! He’s my father! ”
    The crowd’s voice rose in a mindless cheer that was mountainous and mindless in its intensity; they might have been cheering what Stebbins had said, if they could have heard it. The guns blasted. That was what the crowd was cheering. The guns blasted and Pastor rolled over dead.
    Garraty felt a crawling in his guts and scrotum.
    “Oh my God,” McVries said. “Is it true?” He ran his tongue over his cracked lips.
    “It’s true,” Stebbins said, almost genially, “I’m his bastard. You see . . . I didn’t think he knew. I didn’t think he knew I was his son. That was where I made my mistake. He’s a randy old sonofabitch, is the Major. I understand he’s got dozens of little bastards. What I wanted was to spring it on him—spring it on the world. Surprise, surprise. And when I won, the Prize I was going to ask for was to be taken into my father ’s house.”
    “But he knew everything ?” McVries whispered.
    “He made me his rabbit. A little gray rabbit to make the rest of the dogs run faster . . . and further. And I guess it worked. We’re going to make it into Massachusetts.”
    “And now?” Garraty asked.
    Stebbins shrugged. “The rabbit turns out to be flesh and blood after all. I walk. I talk. And I suppose if all this doesn’t end soon, I’ll be crawling on my belly like a reptile.”
    They passed under a heavy brace of power lines. A number of men in climbing boots clung to the support posts, above the crowd, like grotesque praying mantises.
    “What time is it?” Stebbins asked. His face seemed to have melted in the rain. It had become Olson’s face, Abraham’s face, Barkovitch’s face . . . then, terribly, Garraty’s own face, hopeless and drained, sunken and crenellated in on itself, the face of a rotten scarecrow in a long-since-harvested field.
    “It’s twenty until ten,” McVries said. He grinned—a ghostly imitation of his old cynical grin. “Happy day five to you, suckers.”
    Stebbins nodded. “Will it rain all day, Garraty?”
    “Yeah, I think so. It looks that way.”
    Stebbins nodded slowly. “I think so, too.”
    “Well, come on in out of the rain,” McVries said suddenly.
    “All right. Thanks.”
    They walked on, somehow in step, although all three of them were bent forever in different shapes by the pains that pulled them.

    When they crossed into Massachusetts, they were seven: Garraty, Baker, McVries, a struggling, hollow-eyed skeleton named George Fielder, Bill Hough (“pronounce that Huff,” he had told Garraty much earlier on), a tallish, muscular fellow named Rattigan who did not seem to be in really serious shape yet, and Stebbins.
    The pomp and thunder of the border crossing slowly passed behind them. The rain continued, constant and monotonous. The wind howled and ripped with all the young, unknowing cruelty of spring. It lifted caps from the crowd and whirled them, saucerlike, in brief and violent arcs across the whitewash-colored sky.
    A very short while ago—just after Stebbins had made his confession—Garraty had experienced an odd, light lifting of his entire being. His feet seemed to remember what they had once been. There was a kind of frozen cessation to the blinding pains in his back and neck. It was like climbing up a final sheer rock face and coming out on the peak—out of the shifting mist of clouds and into the cold sunshine and the bracing, undernourished air . . . with noplace to go but down, and that at flying speed.
    The halftrack was a little ahead of them. Garraty looked at the blond soldier crouched under the big canvas umbrella on the back deck. He tried to project all the ache, all the rainsoaked misery out of himself and into the Major ’s man. The blond stared back at him indifferently.
    Garraty glanced over at Baker and saw that his nose was bleeding badly. Blood painted his cheeks and dripped from the line of his jaw.
    “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” Stebbins said.
    “Sure,” McVries answered. “They’ve all been dying, didn’t you know?”
    A hard gust of wind sheeted rain across them, and McVries staggered. He drew a warning. The crowd cheered on, unaffected