The Long Walk

stared at Parker as if he had begun to speak in a foreign language. And now one of the soldiers who had jumped when Parker swarmed up the side of the ’track now carefully shot Collie Parker in the back.
    “Parker!” McVries screamed. It was as if he alone understood what had happened, and a chance that might have been missed. “Oh, no! Parker! ”
    Parker grunted as if someone had hit him in the back with a padded Indian club. The bullet mushroomed and there was Collie Parker, standing on top of the halftrack with his guts all over his torn khaki shirt and blue jeans. One hand was frozen in the middle of a wide, sweeping gesture, as if he was about to deliver an angry philippic.
    “God.
    “Damn,” Parker said.
    He fired the rifle he had wrenched away from the dead soldier twice into the road. The slugs snapped and whined, and Garraty felt one of them tug air in front of his face. Someone in the crowd screamed in pain. Then the gun slid from Parker ’s hands. He made an almost military half-turn and then fell to the road where he lay on his side, panting rapidly like a dog that has been struck and mortally wounded by a passing car. His eyes blazed. He opened his mouth and struggled through blood for some coda.
    “You. Ba. Bas. Bast. Ba.” He died, staring viciously at them as they passed by.
    “What happened?” Garraty cried out to no one in particular. “What happened to him?”
    “He snuck up on ’em,” McVries said. “That’s what happened. He must have known he couldn’t make it. He snuck right up behind ’em and caught ’em sleep at the switch.” McVries’s voice hoars ened. “He wanted us all up there with him, Garraty. And I think we could have done it.”
    “What are you talking about?” Garraty asked, suddenly terrified.
    “You don’t know?” McVries asked. “You don’t know ?”
    “Up there with him? . . . What? . . .”
    “Forget it. Just forget it.”
    McVries walked away. Garraty had a sudden attack of the shivers. He couldn’t stop them. He didn’t know what McVries was talking about. He didn’t want to know what McVries was talking about. Or even think about it.
    The Walk went on.
    By nine o’clock that night the rain had stopped, but the sky was starless. No one else had gone down, but Abraham had begun to moan inarticu lately. It was very cold, but no one offered to give Abraham something to wear. Garraty tried to think of it as poetic justice, but it only made him feel sick. The pain within him had turned into a sickness, a rotten sick feeling that seemed to be growing in the hollows of his body like a green fungus. His concentrate belt was nearly full, but it was all he could do to eat a small tube of tuna paste without gagging.
    Baker, Abraham, and McVries. His circle of friends had come down to those three. And Stebbins, if he was anyone’s friend. Acquaintance, then. Or demi-god. Or devil. Or whatever. He wondered if any of them would be here by morning, and if he would be alive to know.
    Thinking such things, he almost ran into Baker in the dark. Something clinked in Baker ’s hands.
    “What you doing?” Garraty asked.
    “Huh?” Baker looked up blankly.
    “What’re you doing?” Garraty repeated patiently.
    “Counting my change.”
    “How much you got?”
    Baker clinked the money in his cupped hands and smiled. “Dollar twenty-two,” he said.
    Garraty grinned. “A fortune. What you going to do with it?”
    Baker didn’t smile back. He looked into the cold darkness dreamily. “Git me one of the big ones,” he said. His light Southern drawl had thickened appreciably. “Git me a lead-lined one with pink silk insides and a white satin headpillow.” He blinked his empty doorknob eyes. “Wouldn’t never rot then, not till Judgment Trump, when we are as we were. Clothed in flesh incorruptible.”
    Garraty felt a warm trickle of horror. “Baker? Have you gone nuts, Baker?”
    “You cain’t beat it. We-uns was all crazy to try. You cain’t beat the rottenness of it. Not in this world. Lead-lined, that’s the ticket . . .”
    “If you don’t get hold of yourself, you’ll be dead by morning.”
    Baker nodded. His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones, giving him the aspect of a skull. “That’s the ticket. I wanted to die. Didn’t you? Isn’t that why?”
    “Shut up!” Garraty yelled. He had the shakes again.
    The road sloped sharply up then, cutting off their talk. Garraty leaned into the hill, cold and hot, his spine hurting, his