The Long Walk

her, and the crowd cheered him.
    “ They’re screwed up,” Garraty muttered. “They’re really screwed up. Perverted. What time is it, McVries?”
    “What was the first thing you did when you got your letter of confirmation?” McVries asked softly. “What did you do when you knew you were really in?”
    Garraty frowned, wiped his forearm quickly across his forehead, and then let his mind free of the sweaty, terrifying present to that sudden, flashing moment.
    “I was by myself. My mother works. It was a Friday afternoon. The letter was in the mailbox and it had a Wilmington, Delaware, postmark, so I knew that had to be it. But I was sure it said I’d flunked the physical or the mental or both. I had to read it twice. I didn’t go into any fits of joy, but I was pleased. Real pleased. And confident. My feet didn’t hurt then and my back didn’t feel like somebody had shoved a rake with a busted handle into it. I was one in a million. I wasn’t bright enough to realize the circus fat lady is, too.”
    He broke off for a moment, thinking, smelling early April.
    “I couldn’t back down. There were too many people watching. I think it must work the same with just about everyone. It’s one of the ways they tip the game, you know. I let the April 15th backout date go by and the day after that they had a big testimonial dinner for me at the town hall—all my friends were there and after dessert everyone started yelling Speech! Speech! And I got out and mumbled something down at my hands about how I was gonna do the best I could if I got in, and everyone applauded like mad. It was like I’d laid the fucking Gettysburg Address on their heads. You know what I mean?”
    “Yes, I know,” McVries said, and laughed—but his eyes were dark.
    Behind them the guns thunderclapped suddenly. Garraty jumped convulsively and nearly froze in his tracks. Somehow he kept walking. Blind instinct this time, he thought. What about next time?
    “Son of a bitch,” McVries said softly. “It was Joe.”
    “What time is it?” Garraty asked, and before McVries could answer he remembered that he was wearing a watch of his own. It was 2:38. Christ. His two-second margin was like an iron dumbbell on his back.
    “No one tried to talk you out of it?” McVries asked. They were far out beyond the rest now, better than a hundred yards beyond Harold Quince. A soldier had been dispatched to keep tabs on them. Garraty was very glad it wasn’t the blond guy. “No one tried to talk you into using the April 31st blackout?”
    “Not at first. My mother and Jan and Dr. Patterson—he’s my mother ’s special friend, you know, they’ve been keeping company for the last five years or so—they just kind of soft-pedaled it at first. They were pleased and proud because most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes. And that still leaves thousands of kids and they can use two hundred—one hundred Walkers and a hundred backups. And there’s no skill in getting picked, you know that.”
    “Sure, they draw the names out of that cock-sucking drum. Big TV spectacular.” McVries’s voice cracked a little.
    “Yeah. The Major draws the two hundred names, but the names’re all they announce. You don’t know if you’re a Walker or just a backup.”
    “And no notification of which you are until the final backout date itself,” McVries agreed, speaking of it as if the final backout date had been years ago instead of only four days. “Yeah, they like to stack the deck their way.”
    Somebody in the crowd had just released a flotilla of balloons. They floated up to the sky in a dissolving arc of reds, blues, greens, yellows. The steady south wind carried them away with taunting, easy speed.
    “I guess so,” Garraty said. “We were watching the TV when the Major drew the names, I was number seventy-three out of the drum. I fell right out of my chair. I just couldn’t believe it.”
    “No, it can’t be you, ” McVries agreed. “Things like that always happen to the other guy.”
    “Yeah, that’s the feeling. That’s when everybody started in on me. It wasn’t like the first backout date when it was all speeches and pie in the sky by-and-by. Jan . . .”
    He broke off. Why not? He’d told everything else. It didn’t matter. Either he or McVries was going to be dead before it was over. Probably both of them. “Jan said she’d go all the way with me, any time, any way, as often as I