“It was gray,” Garraty said. “It seems like we've been on this road forever. It was Olson's hair getting... getting that way that made me think of it first, but... maybe this is some crazy kind of immortality.” The thought was terribly depressing. He stared straight ahead into the darkness, feeling the soft wind against his face.
“I walk, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked,” McVries chanted. “Shall I translate into Latin?”
We're suspended in time, Garraty thought.
Their feet moved but they did not. The cherry cigarette glows in the crowd, the occasional flashlight or flaring sparkler might have been stars, weird low constellations that marked their existence ahead and behind, narrowing into nothing both ways.
“Bruh,” Garraty said, shivering. “A guy could go crazy.”
“That's right,” Pearson agreed, and then laughed nervously. They were starting up a long, twisting hill. The road was now expansion-jointed concrete, hard on the feet. It seemed to Garraty that he felt every pebble through the paper-thinness of his shoes. The frisky wind had scattered shallow drifts of candy wrappers, popcorn boxes, and other assorted muck in their way. At some places they almost had to fight their way through. It's not fair, Garraty thought self-pityingly.
“What's the layout up ahead?” McVries asked him apologetically.
Garraty closed his eyes and tried to make a map in his head. “I can't remember all the little towns. We come to Lewiston, that's the second-biggest city in the state, bigger than Augusta. We go right down the main drag. It used to be Lisbon Street, but now it's Cotter Memorial Avenue. Reggie Cotter was the only guy from Maine to ever win the Long Walk. It happened a long time ago.”
“He died, didn't he?” Baker said.
“Yeah. He hemorrhaged in one eye and finished the Walk half-blind. It turned out he had a blood clot on his brain. He died a week or so after the Walk.” And in a feeble effort to remove the onus, Garraty repeated: “It was a long time ago.”
No one spoke for a while. Candy wrappers crackled under their feet like the sound of a faraway forest fire. A cherry bomb went off in the crowd. Garraty could see a faint lightness on the horizon that was probably the twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn, the land of Dussettes and Aubuchons and Lavesques, the land of Nous parlons francais ici. Suddenly Garraty had a nearly obsessive craving for a stick of gum.
“What's after Lewiston?”
“We go down Route 196, then along 126 to Freeport, where I'm going to see my mom and my girl. That's also where we get on U.S. 1. And that's where we stay until it's over.”
“The big highway,” McVries muttered. “Sure.”
The guns blasted and they all jumped.
“It was Barkovitch or Quince,” Pearson said. “I can't tell... one of them's still walking... it's—”
Barkovitch laughed out of the darkness, a high, gobbling sound, thin and terrifying. “Not yet, you whores! I ain't gone yet! Not yeeeeeetttttt...”
His voice kept climbing and climbing. It was like a fire whistle gone insane. And Barkovitch's hands suddenly went up like startled doves taking flight and Barkovitch ripped out his own throat.
“My Jesus!” Pearson wailed, and threw up over himself.
They fled from him, fled and scattered ahead and behind, and Barkovitch went on screaming and gobbling and clawing and walking, his feral face turned up to the sky, his mouth a twisted curve of darkness.
Then the fire-whistle sound began to fail, and Barkovitch failed with it. He fell down and they shot him, dead or alive.
Garraty turned around and walked forward again. He was dimly grateful that he hadn't been warned. He saw a carbon copy of his horror on the faces of all about him. The Barkovitch part of it was over. Garraty thought it did not bode well for the rest of them, for their future on this dark and bloody road.
“I don't feel good,” Pearson said. His voice was flat. He dry-retched and walked doubled over for a moment. “Oh. Not so good. Oh God. I don't. Feel. So good. Oh.”
McVries looked straight ahead. “I think... I wish I were insane,” he said thoughtfully.
Only Baker said nothing. And that was odd, because Garraty suddenly got a whiff of Louisiana honeysuckle. He could hear the croak of the frogs in the bottoms. He could feel the sweaty, lazy hum of cicadas digging into the tough cypress bark for their dreamless seventeen-year sleep. And he could see Baker's aunt rocking back and forth, her eyes dreamy and smiley and vacant, sitting on her porch and listening to the static and hum and faraway voices on an old Philco radio with a chipped and cracked mahogany cabinet. Rocking and rocking and rocking. Smiling, sleepy. Like a cat that has been into the cream and is well satisfied.
CHAPTER 15
“I don't care if you win or lose, just as long as you win.”
Daylight came in creeping through a white, muted world of fog. Garraty was walking by himself again. He no longer even knew how many had bought it in the night. Five, maybe. His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.
And still there was a worm of excitement growing in his guts: they were now only thirteen miles out of Freeport. They were in Porterville now, and the crowd could barely see them through the dense fog, but they had been chanting his name rhythmically since Lewiston. It was like the pulse of a giant heart.
Freeport and Jan, he thought.
“Garraty?” The voice was familiar but washed out. It was McVries. His face was a furry skull. His eyes were glittering feverishly. “Good morning,” McVries croaked. “We live to fight another day.”
“Yeah. How many got it last night, McVries?”
“Six.” McVries dug a jar of bacon spread out of his belt and began to finger it into his mouth. His hands were shaking badly. “Six since Barkovitch.” He put the jar back with an old man's palsied care. “Pearson bought it.”
“Yeah?”
“There's not many of us left, Garraty. Only twenty-six.”
“No, not many.” Walking through the fog was like walking through weightless clouds of mothdust.
“Not many of us, either. The Musketeers. You and me and Baker and Abraham. Collie Parker. And Stebbins. If you want to count him in. Why not? Why the fuck not? Let's count Stebbins in, Garraty. Six Musketeers and twenty spearcarriers.”
“Do you still think I'll win?”
“Does it always get this foggy up here in the spring?”
“What's that mean?”
“No, I don't think you'll win. It's Stebbins, Ray. Nothing can wear him down, he's like diamonds. The word is Vegas likes him nine-to-one now that Scramm's out of it. Christ, he looks almost the same now as when we started.”
Garraty nodded as if expecting this. He found his tube of beef concentrate and began to eat it. What he wouldn't have given for some of McVries's long-gone raw hamburger.
McVries snuffled a little and wiped a hand across his nose. “Doesn't it seem strange to you? Being back on your home stomping grounds after all of this?”
Garraty felt the worm of excitement wriggle and turn again. “No,” he said. “It seems like the most natural thing in the world.”
They walked down a long hill, and McVries glanced up into white drive-in screen nothing. “The fog's getting worse.”
“It's not fog,” Garraty said. “It's rain now.”
The rain fell softly, as if it had no intention of stopping for a very long time.