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The walkers knew what they were getting into, so why are they angry at the soldiers and the Major?
I wonder if the walkers ever did rebel against the soldiers and succeeded. I suppose the walkers would automatically go on the show "The Running Man" and be hunted down.
"Where's the Major?" someone screamed. The voice was on the raw edge of panic. It belonged to a bulletheaded boy named Gribble number 48. "I want to see the Major, goddammit! Where is he?"
The soldiers walking along the verge of the road did not answer. No one answered.
"Is he making another speech?" Gribble stormed. "Is that what he's doing? Well, he's a murderer! That's what he is, a murderer! I ... I'll tell him! You think I won't? I'll tell him to his face! I'll tell him right to his face!"
McVries angry at the soldiers
"Come on down here! Put down those rifles and come on down here! I'll show you what's funny!"
"Come on!" McVries screamed. "Come on down here! One at a time or all at once, I don't give a shit!"
"Warning! Third Warning, 61, final warning."
"Fuck your warnings!"
What did you expect, Baker???
"You've got no right to hate the Major. He didn't force you."
"Force me? FORCE me? He's KILLING me, that's all!"
"Warning! Warning 47!"
"I hear you," Garraty snapped crossly, and picked up his feet.
The police restrain Dom with the watermelons
"Stinking sonsofbitches!" Garraty shrieked at them. "I wish your mothers had miscarried you stinking whoresons!"
He wished heartily that the blond had been the one Parker had ticketed.
"You rotten sonsabitches!" somebody screamed. "My Prize is gonna be your public castration!"
"I fucked your mother and she sure was fine!" Scramm cried.
Parker tried killing the soldiers
One of the soldiers had fallen off and lay staring up at the sky with empty, expressionless eyes. There was a neat blue hole surrounded by a corona of powder burns in the center of his forehead.
"Goddam bastards!" Parker was screaming.
"Piss on the Major," Garraty said. "Everybody wants to piss on the Major. When he comes through again we'll gang up on him and drag him down and all unzip and drown him in-"
"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."
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.
He wished heartily that the blond had been the one Parker had ticketed.
"Get'em!" McVries was screaming savagely up ahead. "Get'em, Olson! Kill'em! Kill'em!"
The rest of them alternately cheered those who had managed to get some of it, or cursed the wooden-faced soldiers, whose expressions were now satisfyingly interpreted to hold subtle chagrin.
disrespect for the Major
"Knock, knock, Garraty."
"Who's there?"
"Major."
"Major who?"
"Major buggers his mother before breakfast," Bruce Pastor said, and laughed uproariously. Garraty chuckled and passed it back to McVries, who passed it to Olson. When the joke came back the second time, the Major was buggering his grandmother before breakfast. The third time he was buggering Sheila, the Bedlington terrier that appeared with him in so many of his press releases.