Chapter 17

" Mother! Mother! Mother! Mother! "

The Reverend Jim Jones, at the moment of his apostasy

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, anti 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.

" I'm the rabbit, " Stebbins repeated. " You've seen them, Garraty. The little gray mechanical rabbits that the greyhounds chase at the dog races. No matter how fast the dogs run, they can never quite catch the rabbit. Because the rabbit isn't flesh and blood and they are. The rabbit, he's just a cutout on a stick attached to a bunch of cogs and wheels. In the old days, in England, they used to use a real rabbit, but sometimes the dogs caught it. More reliable the new way."

" He fooled me."

Stebbins's pale blue eyes stared into the falling rain.

" Maybe you could even say... he conjured me. He changed me into a rab­bit. Remember the one in Alice in Wonderland? But maybe you're right, Garraty. Time to stop being rabbits and grunting pigs and sheep and to be people... even if we can only rise to the level of whore-masters and the perverts in the balconies of the theaters on 42nd Street." Stebbins's eyes grew wild and gleeful, and now he looked at Garraty and McVries‑ and they flinched away from that stare. Steb­bins was crazy. In that instant there could be no doubt of it. Stebbins was totally mad.

His low‑ pitched voice rose to a pulpit shout.

" How come I know so much about the Long Walk? I know all about the Long Walk! I ought to! The Major is my father, Garraty! He's my father! "

The crowd's voice rose in a mindless cheer that was mountainous and mindless in its intensity; they might have been cheering what Stebbins had said, if they could have heard it. The guns blasted. That was what the crowd was cheering. The guns blasted and Pastor rolled over dead.

Garraty felt a crawling in his guts and scrotum.

" Oh my God, " McVries said. " Is it true? " He ran his tongue over his cracked lips.

" It's true, " Stebbins said, almost genially, " I'm his bastard. You see... I didn't think he knew. I didn't think he knew I was his son. That was where I made my mistake. He's a randy old sonofabitch, is the Major. I understand he's got doz­ens of little bastards. What I wanted was to spring it on him‑ spring it on the world. Surprise, surprise. And when I won, the Prize I was going to ask for was to be taken into my father's house."

" But he knew everything? " McVries whispered.

" He made me his rabbit. A little gray rabbit to make the rest of the dogs run faster... and further. And I guess it worked. We're going to make it into Mas­sachusetts. "

" And now? " Garraty asked.

Stebbins shrugged. " The rabbit turns out to be flesh and blood after all. I walk. I talk. And I suppose if all this doesn't end soon, I'll be crawling on my belly like a reptile. "

They passed under a heavy brace of power lines. A number of men in climbing boots clung to the support posts, above the crowd, like grotesque praying man­tises.

" What time is it? " Stebbins asked. His face seemed to have melted in the rain. It had become Olson's face, Abraham's face, Barkovitch's face... then, ter­ribly, Garraty's own face, hopeless and drained, sunken and crenellated in on it­self, the face of a rotten scarecrow in a long‑ since‑ harvested field.

" It's twenty until ten, " McVries said. He grinned‑ a ghostly imitation of his old cynical grin. " Happy day five to you, suckers."

Stebbins nodded. " Will it rain all day, Garraty? "

" Yeah, I think so. It looks that way."

Stebbins nodded slowly. " I think so, too."

" Well, come on in out of the rain, " McVries said suddenly.

" All right. Thanks."

They walked on, somehow in step, although all three of them were bent forever in different shapes by the pains that pulled them.

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.

He hoped he wouldn't hear the shots. But he did.