When they crossed into Massachusetts, they were seven: Garraty, Baker, McVries, a struggling, hollow-eyed skeleton named George Fielder, Bill Hough (“pronounce that Huff,” he had told Garraty much earlier on), a tallish, muscular fellow named Milligan who did not seem to be in really serious shape yet, and Stebbins.
The pomp and thunder of the border crossing slowly passed behind them. The rain continued, constant and monotonous. The wind howled and ripped with all the young, unknowing cruelty of spring. It lifted caps from the crowd and whirled them, saucerlike, in brief and violent arcs across the whitewash-colored sky.
A very short while ago-just after Stebbins had made his confession-Garraty had experienced an odd, light lifting of his entire being. His feet seemed to remember what they had once been. There was a kind of frozen cessation to the blinding pains in his back and neck. It was like climbing up a final sheer rock face and coming out on the peak-out of the shifting mist of clouds and into the cold sunshine and the bracing, undernourished air… with noplace to go but down, and that at flying speed.
The halftrack was a little ahead of them. Garraty looked at the blond soldier crouched under the big canvas umbrella on the back deck. He tried to project all the ache, all the rainsoaked misery out of himself and into the Major’s man. The blond stared back at him indifferently.
Garraty glanced over at Baker and saw that his nose was bleeding badly. Blood painted his cheeks and dripped from the line of his jaw.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” Stebbins said.
“Sure,” McVries answered. “They’ve all been dying, didn’t you know?”
A hard gust of wind sheeted rain across them, and McVries staggered. He drew a warning. The crowd cheered on, unaffected and seemingly impervious. At least there had been fewer firecrackers today. The rain had put a stop to that happy bullshit.
The road took them around a big, banked curve, and Garraty felt his heart lurch. Faintly he heard Milligan mutter, “Good Jesus!”
The road was sunk between two sloping hills. The road was like a cleft between two rising breasts. The hills were black with people. The people seemed to rise above them and around them like the living walls of a huge dark slough.
George Fielder came abruptly to life. His skull-head turned slowly this way and that on his pipestem neck. “They’re going to eat us up,” he muttered. “They’re gonna fall in on us and eat us up.”
“I think not,” Stebbins said shortly. “There has never been a-”
“They’re gonna eat us up! Eat us up! Eatusup! Up! Up! Eatusupeatusup-” George Fielder whirled around in a huge, rambling circle, his arms flapping madly. His eyes blazed with mousetrap terror. To Garraty he looked like one of those video games gone crazy.
“Eatusupeatusupeatusup-”
He was screeching at the top of his voice, but Garraty could barely hear him. The waves of sound from the hills beat down on them like hammers. Garraty could not even hear the gunshots when Fielder bought out; only the savage scream from the throat of Crowd. Fielder’s body did a gangling but strangely graceful rhumba in the center of the road, feet kicking, body twitching, shoulders jerking. Then, apparently too tired to dance anymore, he sat down, legs spread wide, and he died that way, sitting up, his chin tucked down on his chest like a tired little boy caught by the sandman at playtime.
“Garraty,” Baker said. “Garraty, I’m bleeding.” The hills were behind them now and Garraty could hear him-badly.
“Yeah,” he said. It was a struggle to keep his voice level. Something inside Art Baker had hemorrhaged. His nose was gushing blood. His cheeks and neck were lathered with gore. His shirt collar was soaked with it.
“It’s not bad, is it?” Baker asked him. He was crying with fear. He knew it was bad.
“No, not too bad,” Garraty said.
“The rain feels so warm,” Baker said. “I know it’s only rain, though. It’s only rain, right, Garraty?”
“Right,” Garraty said sickly.
“I wish I had some ice to put on it,” Baker said, and walked away. Garraty watched him go.
Bill Hough (“you pronounce that Huff”) bought a ticket at quarter of eleven, and Milligan at eleven-thirty, just after the Flying Deuces precision-flying team rocketed overhead in six electric blue F-11 Is. Garraty had expected Baker to go before either of them. But Baker continued on, although now the whole top half of his shirt was soaked through.
Garraty’s head seemed to be playing jazz. Dave Brubeck, Thelonius Monk, Cannonball Adderly-the Banned Noisemakers that everybody kept under the table and played when the party got noisy and drunk.
It seemed that he had once been loved, once he himself had loved. But now it was just jazz and the rising drumbeat in his head and his mother had only been stuffed straw in a fur coat, Jan nothing but a department store dummy. It was over. Even if he won, if he managed to outlast McVries and Stebbins and Baker, it was over. He was never going home again.
He began to cry a little bit. His vision blurred and his feet tangled up and he fell down. The pavement was hard and shockingly cold and unbelievably restful. He was warned twice before he managed to pick himself up, using a series of drunken, crablike motions. He got his feet to work again. He broke wind-along, sterile rattle that seemed to bear no relationship at all to an honest fart.
Baker was zigging and zagging drunkenly across the road and back. McVries and Stebbins had their heads together. Garraty was suddenly very sure they were plotting to kill him, the way someone named Barkovitch had once killed a faceless number named Rank.
He made himself walk fast and caught up with them. They made room for him wordlessly. (You’ve stopped talking about me, haven’t you? But you were. Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I am nuts?), but there was a comfort. He wanted to be with them, stay with them, until he died.
They passed a sign now which seemed to summarize to Garraty’s dumbly wondering eyes all the screaming insanity there might be in the universe, all the idiot whistling laughter of the spheres, and this sign read: 49 MILES TO BOSTON! WALKERS YOU CAN MAKE IT! He would have shrieked with laughter if he had been able. Boston! The very sound was mythic, rich with unbelievability.
Baker was beside him again. “Garraty?”
“What?”
“Are we in?"
"Huh?'
“In, are we in? Garraty, please.”
Baker’s eyes pleaded. He was an abattoir, a raw-blood machine.
“Yeah. We’re in. We’re in, Art.” He had no idea what Baker was talking about. “I’m going to die now, Garraty.”
“All right.”
“If you win, will you do something for me? I’m scairt to ask anyone else.” And Baker made a sweeping gesture at the deserted road as if the Walk was still rich with its dozens. For a chilling moment Garraty wondered if maybe they were all there still, walking ghosts that Baker could now see in his moment of extremis.
“Anything.”
Baker put a hand on Garraty’s shoulder, and Garraty began weeping uncontrollably. It seemed that his heart would burst out of his chest and weep its own teats.
Baker said, “Lead-lined.”
“Walk a little bit longer,” Garraty said through his teeth. “Walk a little longer, Art.”
“No-I can’t.”
“All right.”
“Maybe I’ll see you, man,” Baker said, and wiped slick blood from his face absently.
Garraty lowered his head and wept.
“Don’t watch ’em do it,” Baker said. “Promise me that, too.”
Garraty nodded, beyond speech.
“Thanks. You’ve been my friend, Garraty.” Baker tried to smile. He stuck his hand blindly out, and Garraty shook it with both of his.
“Another time, another place,” Baker said.
Garraty put his hands over his face and had to bend over to keep walking. The sobs ripped out of him and made him ache with a pain that was far beyond anything the Walk had been able to inflict.