The guns were shooting again, God, they were shooting at him now, he felt the air from that one, it was over, all over—
He snapped full awake and took two running steps, sending jolts of pain all the way up from his feet to his groin before he realized they had been shooting at someone else, and the someone else was dead, facedown in the rain.
“Hail Mary,” McVries muttered.
“Full of grace,” Stebbins said from behind them. He had moved up, moved up for the kill, and he was grinning like the Cheshire cat in Garraty's dream. “Help me win this stock-car race.”
“Come on,” McVries said. “Don't be a wise-ass.”
“My ass is no wiser than your ass,” Stebbins said solemnly.
McVries and Garraty laughed - a little uneasily.
“Well,” Stebbins said, “maybe a little.”
“Pick 'em up, put 'em down, shut your mouth,” McVries chanted. He passed a shaky hand across his face and walked on, eyes straight ahead, his shoulders like a broken bow.
One more bought out before three o'clock - shot down in the rain and windy darkness as he went to his knees somewhere near Portsmouth. Abraham, coughing steadily, walked in a hopeless glitter of fever, a kind of death-glow, a brightness that made Garraty think of streaking meteorites. He was going to burn up instead of burning out - that was how tight it had gotten now.
Baker walked with steady, grim determination, trying to get rid of his warnings before they got rid of him. Garraty could just make him out through the slashing rain, limping along with his hands clenched at his sides.
And McVries was caving in. Garraty was not sure when it had begun; it might have happened in a second, while his back was turned. At one moment he had still been strong (Garraty remembered the clamp of McVries fingers on his lower arm when Baker had fallen), and now he was like an old man. It was unnerving.
Stebbins was Stebbins. He went on and on, like Abraham's shoes. He seemed to be favoring one leg slightly, but it could have been Garraty's imagination.
Of the other ten, five seemed to have drawn into that special netherworld that Olson had discovered - one step beyond pain and the comprehension of what was coming to them. They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.
Just before dawn, three of them went down at once. The mouth of the crowd roared and belched anew with enthusiasm as the bodies spun and thumped like chunks of cut cordwood. To Garraty it seemed the beginning of a dreadful chain reaction that might sweep through them and finish them all. But it ended. It ended with Abraham crawling on his knees, eyes turned blindly up to the halftrack and the crowd beyond, mindless and filled with confused pain. They were the eyes of a sheep caught in a barbed wire fence. Then he fell on his face. His heavy Oxfords drummed fitfully against the wet road and then stopped.
Shortly after, the aqueous symphony of dawn began. The last day of the Walk came up wet and overcast. The wind howled down the almost empty alley of the road like a lost dog being whipped through a strange and terrible place.
PART THREE: THE RABBIT
CHAPTER 17
“Mother! Mother! Mother! Mother!”
The concentrates were being passed out for the fifth and last time. It took only one of the soldiers to pass them out now. There were only nine Walkers left. Some of them looked at the belts dully, as if they had never seen such things, and let them slide out of their hands like slippery snakes. It took Garraty what seemed like hours to make his hands go through the complicated ritual of snapping the belt closed around his waist, and the thought of eating made his cramped and shriveled stomach feel ugly and nauseated.
Stebbins was now walking beside him. My guardian angel, Garraty thought wryly. As Garraty watched, Stebbins smiled widely and crammed two crackers smeared with peanut butter into his mouth. He ate noisily. Garraty felt sick.
“Wassa matter?” Stebbins asked around his sticky mouthful. “Can't take it?”
“What business is it of yours?”
Stebbins swallowed with what looked to Garraty like real effort. “None. If you faint from malnutrition, all the better for me.”
“We're going to make it into Massachusetts, I think,” McVries said sickly.
Stebbins nodded. “The first Walk to do it in seventeen years. They'll go crazy.”
“How do you know so much about the Long Walk?” Garraty asked abruptly.
Stebbins shrugged. “It's all on record. They don't have anything to be ashamed of. Now do they?”
“What'll you do if you win, Stebbins?” McVries asked.
Stebbins laughed. In the rain, his thin, fuzzed face, lined with fatigue, looked lionlike. “What do you think? Get a big yella Cadillac with a purple top and a color TV with stereo speakers for every room of the house?”
“I'd expect,” McVries said, “that you'd donate two or three hundred grand to the Society for Intensifying Cruelty to Animals.”
“Abraham looked like a sheep,” Garraty said abruptly. “Like a sheep caught on barbed wire. That's what I thought.”
They passed under a huge banner that proclaimed they were now only fifteen miles from the Massachusetts border—there was really not much of New Hampshire along U.S. 1, only a narrow neck of land separating Maine and Massachusetts.
“Garraty,” Stebbins said amiably, “why don't you go have sex with your mother?”
“Sorry, you're not pushing the right button anymore.” He deliberately selected a bar of chocolate from his belt and crammed it whole into his mouth. His stomach knotted furiously, but he swallowed the chocolate. And after a short, tense struggle with his own insides, he knew he was going to keep it down. “I figure I can walk another full day if I have to,” he said casually, “and another two if I need to. Resign yourself to it, Stebbins. Give up the old psy-war. It doesn't work. Have some more crackers and peanut butter.”
Stebbins's mouth pursed tightly - just for a moment, but Garraty saw it. He had gotten under Stebbins's skin. He felt an incredible surge of elation. The mother lode at last.
“Come on, Stebbins,” he said. “Tell us why you're here. Seeing as how we won't be together much longer. Tell us. Just between the three of us, now that we know you're not Superman.”
Stebbins opened his mouth and with shocking abruptness he threw up the crackers and peanut butter he had eaten, almost whole and seemingly untouched by digestive juices. He staggered, and for only the second time since the Walk began, he was warned.
Garraty felt hard blood drumming in his head. “Come on, Stebbins. You've thrown up. Now own up. Tell us.”
Stebbins's face had gone the color of old cheesecloth, but he had his composure back. “Why am I here? You want to know?”
McVries was looking at him curiously. No one was near; the closest was Baker, who was wandering along the edge of the crowd, looking intently into its mass face.
“Why am I here or why do I walk? Which do you want to know?”
“I want to know everything,” Garraty said. It was only the truth.
“I'm the rabbit,” Stebbins said. The rain fell steadily, dripping off their noses, hanging in droplets on their earlobes like earrings. Up ahead a barefoot boy, his feet purple patchworks of burst veins, went to his knees, crawled along with his head bobbing madly up and down, tried to get up, fell, and finally made it. He plunged onward. It was Pastor, Garraty noted with some amazement. Still with us.