The Long Walk

time, is all I’m saying. If people just took it a day at a time, they’d be a lot happier.”
    “Oh, such a golden flood of bullshit,” McVries said.
    “Is that so?” Garraty cried. “How much planning are you doing?”
    “Well, right now I’ve sort of adjusted my horizons, that’s true—”
    “You bet it is,” Garraty said grimly. “The only difference is we’re involved in dying right now.”
    Total silence followed that. Harkness took off his glasses and began to polish them. Olson looked a shade paler. Garraty wished he hadn’t said it; he had gone too far.
    Then someone in back said quite clearly: “Hear, hear!”
    Garraty looked around, sure it was Stebbins even though he had never heard Stebbins’s voice. But Stebbins gave no sign. He was looking down at the road.
    “I guess I got carried away,” Garraty muttered, even though he wasn’t the one who had gotten carried away. That had been Zuck. “Anyone want a cookie?”
    He handed the cookies around, and it got to be five o’clock. The sun seemed to hang suspended halfway over the horizon. The earth might have stopped turning. The three or four eager beavers who were still ahead of the pack had dropped back until they were less than fifty yards ahead of the main group.
    It seemed to Garraty that the road had become a sly combination of upgrades with no corresponding downs. He was thinking that if that were true they’d all end up breathing through oxygen faceplates before long when his foot came down on a discarded belt of food concentrates. Surprised, he looked up. It had been Olson’s. His hands were twitching at his waist. There was a look of frowning surprise on his face.
    “I dropped it,” he said. “I wanted something to eat and I dropped it.” He laughed, as if to show what a silly thing that had been. The laugh stopped abruptly. “I’m hungry,” he said.
    No one answered. By that time everyone had gone by and there was no chance to pick it up. Garraty looked back and saw Olson’s food belt lying across the broken white passing line.
    “I’m hungry,” Olson repeated patiently.
    The Major likes to see someone who’s raring to rip, wasn’t that what Olson had said when he came back from getting his number? Olson didn’t look quite so raring to rip anymore. Garraty looked at the pockets of his own belt. He had three tubes of concentrate left, plus the Snappy Crackers and the cheese. The cheese was pretty cruddy, though.
    “Here,” he said, and gave Olson the cheese.
    Olson didn’t say anything, but he ate the cheese.
    “Musketeer,” McVries said, with that same slanted grin.
    By five-thirty the air was smoky with twilight. A few early lightning bugs flitted aimlessly through the air. A groundfog had curdled milkily in the ditches and lower gullies of the fields. Up ahead someone asked what happened if it got so foggy you walked off the road by mistake.
    Barkovitch’s unmistakable voice came back quickly and nastily: “What do you think, Dumbo?”
    Four gone, Garraty thought. Eight and a half hours on the road and only four gone. There was a small, pinched feeling in his stomach. I’ll never outlast all of them, he thought. Not all of them. But on the other hand, why not. Someone had to.
    Talk had faded with the daylight. The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools . . . for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn’t even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.
    The mucus ball was in his throat again, making it hard to swallow. He realized that someone up ahead was sobbing softly. He had not heard the sound begin, and no one had called his attention to it; it was as if it had been there all along.
    Ten miles to Caribou now, and at least there would be lights. The thought cheered Garraty a little. It was okay after all, wasn’t it? He was alive, and there was no sense thinking ahead to a time when he might not be. As McVries had said, it was all a matter of adjusting your horizons.
    At quarter of six the word came back on a boy named Travin, one of the early leaders who was now falling slowly back through the main group. Travin had diarrhea.