The Long Walk

the darkness: INTERSTATE 95 AUGUSTA PORTLAND PORTSMOUTH POINTS SOUTH.
    “That’s us,” Abraham whispered. “God help us an’ points south.”
    The exit ramp tilted up under their feet. They passed into the first splash of light from the overhead arcs. The new paving was smoother beneath their feet, and Garraty felt a familiar lift-drop of excitement.
    The soldiers of the color guard had displaced the crowd along the upward spiral of the ramp. They silently held their rifles to high port. Their dress uniforms gleamed resplendently; their own soldiers in their dusty halftrack looked shabby by comparison.
    It was like rising above a huge and restless sea of noise and into the calm air. The only sound was their footfalls and the hurried pace of their breathing. The entrance ramp seemed to go on forever, and always the way was fringed by soldiers in scarlet uniforms, their arms held in high-port salute.
    And then, from the darkness somewhere, came the Major’s electronically amplified voice: “Pre sent harms!”
    Weapons slapped flesh.
    “Salute ready !”
    Guns to shoulders, pointed skyward above them in a steely arch. Everyone instinctively huddled together against the crash which meant death—it had been Pavloved into them.
    “Fire!”
    Four hundred guns in the night, stupendous, ear-shattering. Garraty fought down the urge to put his hands to his head.
    “Fire!”
    Again the smell of powder smoke, acrid, heavy with cordite. In what book did they fire guns over the water to bring the body of a drowned man to the surface?
    “My head,” Scramm moaned. “Oh Jesus my head aches.”
    “Fire!”
    The guns exploded for the third and last time.
    McVries immediately turned around and walked backward, his face going a spotty red with the effort it cost him to shout. “Pre- sent harms!”
    Forty tongues pursed forty sets of lips.
    “Salute ready!”
    Garraty drew breath into his lungs and fought to hold it.
    “Fire!”
    It was pitiful, really. A pitiful little noise of defiance in the big dark. It was not repeated. The wooden faces of their color guard did not change, but seemed all the same to indicate a subtle reproach.
    “Oh, screw it,” said McVries. He turned around and began to walk frontwards again, with his head down.
    The pavement leveled off. They were on the turnpike. There was a brief vision of the Major ’s jeep spurting away to the south, a flicker of cold fluorescent light against black sunglasses, and then the crowd closed in again, but farther from them now, for the highway was four lanes wide, five if you counted the grassy median strip.
    Garraty angled to the median quickly, and walked in the close-cropped grass, feeling the dew seep through his cracked shoes and paint his ankles. Someone was warned. The turnpike stretched ahead, flat and monotonous, stretches of concrete tubing divided by this green inset, all of it banded together by strips of white light from the arc-sodiums above. Their shadows were sharp and clear and long, as if thrown by a summer moon.
    Garraty tipped his canteen up, swigged deep, recapped it, and began to doze again. Eighty, maybe eighty-four miles to Augusta. The feel of the wet grass was soothing . . .
    He stumbled, almost fell, and came awake with a jerk. Some fool had planted pines on the median strip. He knew it was the state tree, but wasn’t that taking it a little far? How could they expect you to walk on the grass when there were—
    They didn’t of course.
    Garraty moved over to the left lane, where most of them were walking. Two more halftracks had rattled onto the turnpike at the Orono entrance to fully cover the forty-six Walkers now left. They didn’t expect you to walk on the grass. Another joke on you, Garraty old sport. Nothing vital, just another little disappointment. Trivial, really. Just . . . don’t dare wish for anything, and don’t count on anything. The doors are closing. One by one, they’re closing.
    “They’ll drop out tonight,” he said. “They’ll go like bugs on a wall tonight.”
    “I wouldn’t count on it,” Collie Parker said, and now he sounded worn and tired—subdued at last.
    “Why not?”
    “It’s like shaking a box of crackers through a sieve, Garraty. The crumbs fall through pretty fast. Then the little pieces break up and they go, too. But the big crackers”—Parker’s grin was a crescent flash of saliva-coated teeth in the darkness—“the whole crackers have to bust off a crumb at a time.”
    “But