The Long Walk

to visualize McVries buying it, or Baker. Or Harkness with his silly book idea. His mind shied away from the thought.
    Once Caribou was behind them, the road became all but deserted. They walked through a country crossroads with a single lightpole rearing high above, spotlighting them and making crisp black shadows as they passed through the glare. Far away a train whistle hooted. The moon cast a dubious light on the groundfog, leaving it pearly and opalescent in the fields.
    Garraty took a drink of water.
    “Warning! Warning 12! This is your final warning, 12!”
    12 was a boy named Fenter who was wearing a souvenir T-shirt which read I RODE THE MT. WASHINGTON COG RAILWAY. Fenter was licking his lips. The word was that his foot had stiffened up on him badly. When he was shot ten minutes later, Garraty didn’t feel much. He was too tired. He walked around Fenter. Looking down he saw something glittering in Fenter ’s hand. A St. Christo pher ’s medal.
    “If I get out of this,” McVries said abruptly, “you know what I’m going to do?”
    “What?” Baker asked.
    “Fornicate until my cock turns blue. I’ve never been so horny in my life as I am right this minute, at quarter of eight on May first.”
    “You mean it?” Garraty asked.
    “I do,” McVries assured. “I could even get horny for you, Ray, if you didn’t need a shave.”
    Garraty laughed.
    “Prince Charming, that’s who I am,” McVries said. His hand went to the scar on his cheek and touched it. “Now all I need is a Sleeping Beauty. I could awake her with a biggy sloppy soul kiss and the two of us would ride away into the sunset. At least as far as the nearest Holiday Inn.”
    “Walk,” Olson said listlessly.
    “Huh?”
    “Walk into the sunset.”
    “Walk into the sunset, okay,” McVries said. “True love either way. Do you believe in true love, Hank dear?”
    “I believe in a good screw,” Olson said, and Art Baker burst out laughing.
    “I believe in true love,” Garraty said, and then felt sorry he had said it. It sounded naive.
    “You want to know why I don’t?” Olson said. He looked up at Garraty and grinned a scary, furtive grin. “Ask Fenter. Ask Zuck. They know.”
    “That’s a hell of an attitude,” Pearson said. He had come out of the dark from someplace and was walking with them again. Pearson was limping, not badly, but very obviously limping.
    “No, it’s not,” McVries said, and then, after a moment, he added cryptically: “Nobody loves a deader.”
    “Edgar Allan Poe did,” Baker said. “I did a report on him in school and it said he had tendencies that were ne-necro—”
    “Necrophiliac,” Garraty said.
    “Yeah, that’s right.”
    “What’s that?” Pearson asked.
    “It means you got an urge to sleep with a dead woman,” Baker said. “Or a dead man, if you’re a woman.”
    “Or if you’re a fruit,” McVries put in.
    “How the hell did we get on this?” Olson croaked. “Just how in the hell did we get on the subject of screwing dead people? It’s fucking repulsive.”
    “Why not?” A deep, somber voice said. It was Abraham, 2. He was tall and disjointed-looking; he walked in a perpetual shamble. “I think we all might take a moment or two to stop and think about whatever kind of sex life there may be in the next world.”
    “I get Marilyn Monroe,” McVries said. “You can have Eleanor Roosevelt, Abe old buddy.”
    Abraham gave him the finger. Up ahead, one of the soldiers droned out a warning.
    “Just a second now. Just one motherfucking second here.” Olson spoke slowly, as if he wrestled with a tremendous problem in expression. “You’re all off the subject. All off.”
    “The Transcendental Quality of Love, a lecture by the noted philosopher and Ethiopian jug-rammer Henry Olson,” McVries said. “Author of A Peach Is Not a Peach without a Pit and other works of—”
    “Wait!” Olson cried out. His voice was as shrill as broken glass. “You wait just one goddam second! Love is a put-on! It’s nothing! One big fat el zilcho! You got it?”
    No one replied. Garraty looked out ahead of him, where the dark charcoal hills met the star-punched darkness of the sky. He wondered if he couldn’t feel the first faint twinges of a charley horse in the arch of his left foot. I want to sit down, he thought irritably. Damn it all, I want to sit down.
    “Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw,