He caught up with McVries, who glanced around. “I thought you were out of it, kiddo,”
McVries said.
“So did I.”
“That close?”
“About two
seconds, I think.”
McVries pursed a silent whistle. “I don’t think I’d
like to be in your shoes right now. How’s the leg?”
“Better. Listen, I
can’t talk. I’m going up front for a while.”
“It didn’t help
Harkness any.”
Garraty shook his head. “I have to make sure I’m topping the
speed.”
“All right. You want company?”
“If you’ve got the
energy.”
McVries laughed. “I got the time if you got the money, honey.”
“Come
on, then. Let’s pick it up while I’ve still got the sack for it.”
Garraty
stepped up his pace until his legs were at the point of rebellion, and he and McVries moved quickly
through the front-runners. There was a space between the boy who had been walking second, a
gangling, evil-faced boy named Harold Quince, and the survivor of the two leather boys. Joe. Closer
to, his complexion was startlingly bronzed. His eyes stared steadily at the horizon, and his
features were expressionless. The many zippers on his jacket jingled, like the sound of faraway
music.
“Hello, Joe,” McVries said, and Garraty had an hysterical urge to add,
whaddaya know?
“Howdy,” Joe said curtly.
They passed him and then the road
was theirs, a wide double-barreled strip of composition concrete stained with oil and broken by the
grassy median strip, bordered on both sides by a steady wall of people.
“Onward, ever
onward,” McVries said. “Christian soldiers, marching as to war. Ever hear that one,
Ray?”
“What time is it?”
McVries glanced at his watch. “2:20,
Look, Ray, if you’re going to—”
“God, is that all? I
thought—” He felt panic rising in his throat, greasy and thick. He wasn’t going
to be able to do it. The margin was just too tight.
“Look, if you keep thinking about
the time, you’re gonna go nuts and try to run into the crowd and they’ll shoot you
dog-dead. They’ll shoot you with your tongue hanging out and spit running down your chin. Try
to forget about it.”
“I can’t.” Everything was bottling up inside him,
making him feel jerky and hot and sick. “Olson ... Scramm ... they died. Davidson died. I can
die too, Pete! I believe it now. It’s breathing down my fucking back!”
“Think
about your girl. Jan, what’s-her-face. Or your mother. Or your goddam kitty-cat. Or
don’t think about anything. Just pick ’em up and put ’em down. Just keep on
walking down the road. Concentrate on that.”
Garraty fought for control of himself.
Maybe he even got a little. But he was unraveling just the same. His legs didn’t want to
respond smoothly to his mind’s commands anymore, they seemed as old and as flickery as
ancient lightbulbs.
“He won’t last much longer,” a woman in the front row
said quite audibly.
“Your tits won’t last much longer!” Garraty snapped at
her, and the crowd cheered him.
“ They’re screwed up,” Garraty muttered.
“They’re really screwed up. Perverted. What time is it, McVries?”
“What
was the first thing you did when you got your letter of confirmation?” McVries asked softly.
“What did you do when you knew you were really in?”
Garraty frowned, wiped his
forearm quickly across his forehead, and then let his mind free of the sweaty, terrifying present
to that sudden, flashing moment.
“I was by myself. My mother works. It was a Friday
afternoon. The letter was in the mailbox and it had a Wilmington, Delaware, postmark, so I knew
that had to be it. But I was sure it said I’d flunked the physical or the mental or both. I
had to read it twice. I didn’t go into any fits of joy, but I was pleased. Real pleased. And
confident. My feet didn’t hurt then and my back didn’t feel like somebody had shoved a
rake with a busted handle into it. I was one in a million. I wasn’t bright enough to realize
the circus fat lady is, too.”
He broke off for a moment, thinking, smelling early April.
“I
couldn’t back down. There were too many people watching. I think it must work the same with
just about everyone. It’s one of the ways they tip the game, you know. I let the April 15th
backout date go by and the day after that they had a big testimonial dinner for me at the town
hall—all my friends were there and after dessert everyone started yelling Speech! Speech! And
I got out and mumbled something down at my hands about how I was gonna do the best I could if I got
in, and everyone applauded like mad. It was like I’d laid the fucking Gettysburg Address on
their heads. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know,” McVries said, and
laughed—but his eyes were dark.
Behind them the guns thunderclapped suddenly. Garraty
jumped convulsively and nearly froze in his tracks. Somehow he kept walking. Blind instinct this
time, he thought. What about next time?
“Son of a bitch,” McVries said softly.
“It was Joe.”
“What time is it?” Garraty asked, and before McVries
could answer he remembered that he was wearing a watch of his own. It was 2:38. Christ. His
two-second margin was like an iron dumbbell on his back.
“No one tried to talk you out
of it?” McVries asked. They were far out beyond the rest now, better than a hundred yards
beyond Harold Quince. A soldier had been dispatched to keep tabs on them. Garraty was very glad it
wasn’t the blond guy. “No one tried to talk you into using the April 31st
blackout?”
“Not at first. My mother and Jan and Dr. Patterson—he’s my
mother ’s special friend, you know, they’ve been keeping company for the last five
years or so—they just kind of soft-pedaled it at first. They were pleased and proud because
most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes. And that
still leaves thousands of kids and they can use two hundred—one hundred Walkers and a hundred
backups. And there’s no skill in getting picked, you know that.”
“Sure, they
draw the names out of that cock-sucking drum. Big TV spectacular.” McVries’s voice
cracked a little.
“Yeah. The Major draws the two hundred names, but the names’re
all they announce. You don’t know if you’re a Walker or just a backup.”
“And
no notification of which you are until the final backout date itself,” McVries agreed,
speaking of it as if the final backout date had been years ago instead of only four days.
“Yeah, they like to stack the deck their way.”
Somebody in the crowd had just
released a flotilla of balloons. They floated up to the sky in a dissolving arc of reds, blues,
greens, yellows. The steady south wind carried them away with taunting, easy speed.
“I
guess so,” Garraty said. “We were watching the TV when the Major drew the names, I was
number seventy-three out of the drum. I fell right out of my chair. I just couldn’t believe
it.”
“No, it can’t be you,” McVries agreed. “Things like that
always happen to the other guy.”
“Yeah, that’s the feeling. That’s
when everybody started in on me. It wasn’t like the first backout date when it was all
speeches and pie in the sky by-and-by. Jan ...”
He broke off. Why not? He’d told
everything else. It didn’t matter. Either he or McVries was going to be dead before it was
over. Probably both of them. “Jan said she’d go all the way with me, any time, any way,
as often as I wanted if I’d take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel
like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and
then she cried a lot. And begged me.” Garraty looked up at McVries. “I don’t
know. Anything else she could have asked me, I would have tried to do it. But this one thing ... I
couldn’t. It was like there was a stone caught in my throat. After a while she knew I
couldn’t say Yes, okay, I’ll call the 800 number. I think she started to understand.
Maybe as well as I did myself, which God knows wasn’t—isn’t—very well.
“Then
Dr. Patterson started in. He’s a diagnostician, and he’s got a wicked logical mind. He
said, ‘Look here, Ray. Figuring in the Prime group and the backups, your chance of survival
is fifty-to-one. Don’t do this to your mother, Ray.’ I was polite with him for as long
as I could, but finally I told him to just kiss off. I said I figured the odds on him ever marrying
my mother were pretty long, but I never noticed him backing off because of that.”
Garraty
ran both hands through the straw-thatch of his hair. He had forgotten about the two-second margin.
“God,
didn’t he get mad. He ranted and raved and told me if I wanted to break my mother ’s
heart to just go ahead. He said I was as insensitive as a ... a wood tick, I think that’s
what he said, insensitive as a wood tick, maybe it’s a family saying of his or something, I
don’t know. He asked me how it felt to be doing the number on my mom and on a nice girl like
Janice. So I countered with my own unarguable logic.”
“Did you,” McVries
said, smiling. “What was that?”
“I told him if he didn’t get out I was
going to hit him.”
“What about your mother?”
“She didn’t
say much at all. I don’t think she could believe it. And the thought of what I’d get if
I won. The Prize—everything you want for the rest of your life—that sort of blinded
her, I think. I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and—it’s
cruel—but I don’t know how we’d’ve gotten along if he’d’ve
lived. And ... I guess she just kept thinking I’d be able to back out of it if I did turn out
to be Prime. The Major is a nice man. That’s what she said. I’m sure he’d let you
out of it if he understood the circumstances. But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back
out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it. And then I got the call and I knew I was a
Walker. I was Prime.”
“I wasn’t.”
“No?”
“No.
Twelve of the original Walkers used the April 31st backout. I was number twelve, backup. I got the
call just past 11 PM four days ago.”
“Jesus! Is that so?”
“Uh-huh.
That close.”
“Doesn’t it make you ... bitter?”
McVries only
shrugged.
Garraty looked at his watch. It was 3:02. It was going to be all right. His shadow,
lengthening in the afternoon sun, seemed to move a little more confidently. It was a pleasant,
brisk spring day. His leg felt okay now.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For saving your life again?” McVries laughed
merrily.
“Yes, that’s just right.”