The Long Walk

now.
    “Warning! Warning 9! This is your third warning, 9!”
    The soldiers were watching Ewing carefully now. So were the Walkers. Ewing was in the spotlight. The back of his T-shirt, startlingly white against his black skin, was sweat-stained gray straight down the middle. Garraty could see the big muscles in his back ripple as he walked. Muscles enough to last for days, and Baker said he was walking in pus. Blisters and charley horses. Garraty shivered. Sudden death. All those muscles, all the training, couldn’t stop blisters and charley horses. What in the name of God had Ewing been thinking about when he put on those P.F. Flyers?
    Barkovitch joined them. Barkovitch was looking at Ewing, too. “Blisters!” He made it sound like Ewing’s mother was a whore. “What the hell can you expect from a dumb nigger? Now I ask you.”
    “Move away,” Baker said evenly, “or I’ll poke you.”
    “It’s against the rules,” Barkovitch said with a smirk. “Keep it in mind, cracker.” But he moved away. It was as if he took a small poison cloud with him.
    Two o’clock became two-thirty. Their shadows got longer. They walked up a long hill, and at the crest Garraty could see low mountains, hazy and blue, in the distance. The encroaching thunderheads to the west were darker now, and the breeze had stiffened, making his flesh goosebump as the sweat dried on him.
    A group of men clustered around a Ford pickup truck with a camper on the back cheered them crazily. The men were all very drunk. They all waved back at the men, even Ewing. They were the first spectators they had seen since the swaggering little boy in the patched overalls.
    Garraty broke open a concentrate tube without reading the label and ate it. It tasted slightly porky. He thought about McVries’s hamburger. He thought about a great big chocolate cake with a cherry on the top. He thought about flapjacks. For some crazy reason he wanted a cold flapjack full of apple jelly. The cold lunch his mother always made when he and his father went hunting in November.
    Ewing bought a hole about ten minutes later.
    He was clustered in with a group of boys when he fell below speed for the last time. Maybe he thought the boys would protect him. The soldiers did their job well. The soldiers were experts. They pushed the other boys aside. They dragged Ewing over to the shoulder. Ewing tried to fight, but not much. One of the soldiers pinned Ewing’s arms behind him while the other put his carbine up to Ewing’s head and shot him. One leg kicked convulsively.
    “He bleeds the same color as anyone else,” McVries said suddenly. It was very loud in the stillness after the single shot. His adam’s apple bobbed, and something clicked in his throat.
    Two of them gone now. The odds infinitesimally adjusted in favor of those remaining. There was some subdued talk, and Garraty wondered again what they did with the bodies.
    You wonder too goddam much! he shouted at himself suddenly.
    And realized he was tired.

Part Two
    GOING DOWN THE ROAD

Chapter 3
    “You will have thirty seconds, and please remember that your answer must be in the form of a question.”
    —Art Fleming Jeopardy
     
     
     
     
    It was three o’clock when the first drops of rain fell on the road, big and dark and round. The sky overhead was tattered and black, wild and fascinating. Thunder clapped hands somewhere above the clouds. A blue fork of lightning went to earth somewhere up ahead.
    Garraty had donned his coat shortly after Ewing had gotten his ticket, and now he zipped it and turned up his collar. Harkness, the potential author, had carefully stowed his notebook in a Bag gie. Barkovitch had put on a yellow vinyl rainhat. There was something incredible about what it did to his face, but you would have been hard put to say just what. He peered out from beneath it like a truculent lighthouse keeper.
    There was a stupendous crack of thunder. “Here it comes!” Olson cried.
    The rain came pouring down. For a few moments it was so heavy that Garraty found himself totally isolated inside an undulating shower curtain. He was immediately soaked to the skin. His hair became a dripping pelt. He turned his face up into the rain, grinning. He wondered if the soldiers could see them. He wondered if a person might conceivably—
    While he was still wondering, the first vicious onslaught let up a little and he could see again. He looked over his shoulder at Stebbins. Stebbins was walking hunched over,