The Long Walk

a little. The gangling form was unmistakable.
    “Abraham!” he stage-whispered. “Abraham, you awake?”
    Abraham muttered something.
    “I said, you awake?”
    “Yes goddammit Garraty lea’me alone.”
    At least he was still with them. That feeling of total disorientation passed away.
    Someone up ahead was given a third warning and Garraty thought, I don’t have any! I could sit down for a minute or a minute and a half. I could—
    But he’d never get up.
    Yes I would, he answered himself. Sure I would. I’d just—
    Just die. He remembered promising his mother that he would see her and Jan in Freeport. He had made the promise lightheartedly, almost carelessly. At nine o’clock yesterday morning, his arrival in Freeport had been a foregone conclusion. But it wasn’t a game anymore, it was a three-dimensional reality, and the possibility of walking into Freeport on nothing but a pair of bloody stumps seemed a horribly possible possibility.
    Someone else was shot down . . . behind him, this time. The aim was bad, and the unlucky ticket-holder screamed hoarsely for what seemed a very long time before another bullet cut off the sound. For no reason at all Garraty thought of bacon, and heavy, sour spit came into his mouth and made him feel like gagging. Garraty wondered if twenty-six down was an unusually high or an unusually low number for seventy-five miles into a Long Walk.
    His head dropped slowly between his shoulders, and his feet carried them forward on their own. He thought about a funeral he had gone to as a boy. It had been Freaky D’Allessio’s funeral. Not that his real name had been Freaky, his real name had been George, but all the kids in the neighborhood called him Freaky because his eyes didn’t quite jibe . . .
    He could remember Freaky waiting to be picked up for baseball games, always coming in dead last, his out-of-kilter eyes switching hopefully from one team captain to the other like a spectator at a tennis match. He always stayed deep center field, where not too many balls were hit and he couldn’t do much damage; one of his eyes was almost blind, and he didn’t have enough depth perception to judge any balls hit to him. Once he got under one and jabbed his glove at a hunk of thin air while the ball landed on his forehead with an audible bonk! like a cantaloupe being whocked with the handle of a kitchen knife. The threads on the ball left an imprint dead square on his forehead for a week, like a brand.
    Freaky was killed by a car on U.S. 1 outside of Freeport. One of Garraty’s friends, Eddie Klipstein, saw it happen. He held kids in thrall for six weeks, Eddie Klipstein did, telling them about how the car hit Freaky D’Allessio’s bike and Freaky went up over the handlebars, knocked spang out of his shitkicker boots by the impact, both of his legs flailing out behind him in crippled splendor as his body flew its short, wingless flight from the seat of his Schwinn to a stone wall where Freaky landed and spread his head like a dollop of wet glue on the rocks.
    He went to Freaky’s funeral, and before they got there he almost lost his lunch wondering if he would see Freaky’s head spread in the coffin like a glob of Elmer ’s Glue, but Freaky was all fixed up in his sport coat and tie and his Cub Scouts attendance pin, and he looked ready to step out of his coffin the moment someone said baseball. The eyes that didn’t jibe were closed, and in general Garraty felt pretty relieved.
    That had been the only dead person he had ever seen before all of this, and it had been a clean, neat dead person. Nothing like Ewing, or the boy in the loden trenchcoat, or Davidson with blood on his livid, tired face.
    It’s sick, Garraty thought with dismal realization. It’s just sick.
    At quarter to four he was given first warning, and he slapped himself twice smartly across the face, trying to make himself wake up. His body felt chilled clear through. His kidneys dragged at him, but at the same time he felt that he didn’t quite have to pee yet. It might have been his imagination, but the stars in the east seemed a trifle paler. With real amazement it occurred to him that at this time yesterday he had been asleep in the back of the car as they drove up toward the stone marking post at the border. He could almost see himself stretched out on his back, sprawling there, not even moving. He felt an intense longing to be back there. Just to bring back yesterday morning.
    Ten of four now.
    He