The Long Walk

. . . would . . . and the Major would say April Fool and we’d all go home. Do you get what I’m saying at all?”
    Garraty thought of his own rending shock when Curley had gone down in a spray of blood and brains like oatmeal, brains on the pavement and the white line. “Yes,” he said. “I know what you’re saying.”
    “It took me a while to figure it out, but it was faster after I got around that mental block. Walk or die, that’s the moral of this story. Simple as that. It’s not survival of the physically fittest, that’s where I went wrong when I let myself get into this. If it was, I’d have a fair chance. But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty.” McVries’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It isn’t man or God. It’s something . . . in the brain.”
    A whippoorwill called once in the darkness. The groundfog was lifting.
    “Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he’s worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he’s as fresh as a daisy. I don’t think I can do that. I’m not tired—not really tired—yet. But I will be.” The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness. “And I think . . . when I get tired enough . . . I think I’ll just sit down.”
    Garraty was silent, but he felt alarmed. Very alarmed.
    “I’ll outlast Barkovitch, though,” McVries said, almost to himself. “I can do that, by Christ.”
    Garraty glanced at his watch and saw it was 11:30. They passed through a deserted crossroads where a sleepy-looking constable was parked. The possible traffic he had been sent out to halt was nonexistent. They walked past him, out of the bright circle of light thrown by the single mercury lamp. Darkness fell over them like a coalsack again.
    “We could slip into the woods now and they’d never see us,” Garraty said thoughtfully.
    “Try it,” Olson said. “They’ve got infrared sweep-scopes, along with forty other kinds of monitoring gear, including high-intensity microphones. They hear everything we’re saying. They can almost pick up your heartbeat. And they see you like daylight, Ray.”
    As if to emphasize his point, a boy behind them was given second warning.
    “You take all the fun outta livin’,” Baker said softly. His faint Southern drawl sounded out of place and foreign to Garraty’s ears.
    McVries had walked away. The darkness seemed to isolate each of them, and Garraty felt a shaft of intense loneliness. There were mutters and half-yelps every time something crashed through the woods they were going past, and Garraty realized with some amusement that a late evening stroll through the Maine woods could be no picnic for the city boys in the crew. An owl made a mysterious noise somewhere to their left. On the other side something rustled, was still, rustled again, was still, and then made a crashing break for less populated acreage. There was another nervous cry of “What was that?”
    Overhead, capricious spring clouds began to scud across the sky in mackerel shapes, promising more rain. Garraty turned up his collar and listened to the sound of his feet pounding the pavement. There was a trick to that, a subtle mental adjustment, like having better night vision the longer you were in the dark. This morning the sound of his feet had been lost to him. They had been lost in the tramp of ninety-nine other pairs, not to mention the rumble of the halftrack. But now he heard them easily. His own particular stride, and the way his left foot scraped the pavement every now and then. It seemed to him that the sound of his footfalls had become as loud to his ears as the sound of his own heartbeat. Vital, life and death sound.
    His eyes felt grainy, trapped in their sockets. The lids were heavy. His energy seemed to be draining down some sinkhole in the middle of him. Warnings were droned out with monotonous regularity, but no one was shot. Barkovitch had shut up. Stebbins was a ghost again, not even visible in back of them.
    The hands on his watch read 11:40.
    On up toward the hour of witches, he thought. When churchyards yawn and give up their