Years and years ago, in conversation with a friend who’s also a fanfic writer, she strongly recommended I give Stephen King another try (I had at that point read Carrie and concluded I didn’t want to read anything else) and specifically mentioned The Long Walk.

She outlined the basic plot: a ritual in an alternate America, where a hundred boys aged between 14 and 18 set out each year at 9am on the 1st of May to walk until all but one is dead. Whenever a boy’s pace falls below four miles an hour, he’s got three warnings, three minutes of grace, and then he’s shot. So, my first jetlagged evening in Montreal, I wandered out from my cheap hotel to find something to eat and found a bookshop. One of the books on sale was a collection of the first four Bachman novels, including of course TLW. So I bought it, and after I had eaten something, wandered back to my hotel and opened it up to read till I went to sleep… and could not stop reading until the last chapter. Could not.

It became one of those books I don’t know how often I’ve read it. So when I saw someone had requested Yuletide fic for TLW this year, I signed up for it, and got:

Request 4: Stephen King – The Long Walk (Hank Olson/Peter McVries/Ray Garraty/Stebbins)
Details: Hank Olson-centric – ‘I believe in a good screw!’ / ‘Love is a fake!’, frank boy-talk about sex with any of the other boys selected.

More detail from my recipient’s Yuletide letter; “Well, Olson-centric is my only true heart’s desire here. It’d be absolutely amazing to read about what goes on in his mind, especially regarding the whys and wherefores of what he says about love. Slashy undertones would be fantastic but of course, not compulsory. Witty dialogue and silliness mixed with serious angsty business. But yes, Olson and anyone else you feel like writing about, please please. Again, you could pretty much write about them all walking on their hands blowing whistles and I’d be happy because I think there’s about one fic for this fandom in existence? XD Heck, I hope you don’t hate Olson. Feel free to go into his death, too – it’s the most emotive part of the book to me.”

(I did not write about them walking on their hands blowing whistles.)

I went back and re-read the source text, and I thought: I can do this. Some of the chapters may be shorter than others, because Hank Olson is mentally not-there quite a bit, but I can do this. (For me, this form of literary gameplay is easily the best part of Yuletide… at least I always think that when it’s safely over.)

And then I discovered, a bit late in the day, that Yuletide wouldn’t be using the old Yuletide Treasure website: it would be jumping to the new beta OTW (Organisation of Transformative Works) archive, for which all yuletiders would now be required to register.

I’m not an OTW fan. I could go on about it much longer, but it’s not really to the point (and if I do go on about it, OTW fans will show up and flame me for it, which will not be fun).

But I had got my story idea! And so I decided I’d: (a) cancel my sign-up (b) write the story anyway.

I wrote the first ten chapters of  The Long Walk as from Hank Olson’s point of view, and while I never got to like Hank, I did get into that state of painful empathy that’s almost worse than liking someone who is in so much pain. This was not a fun story to write. (I don’t think it’s a fun story to read, either, so that’s fair.)

I wrote it late – ironically, family medical emergency, illness, and work pressure, could have made this the year I had to cancel writing for Yuletide anyway, but fortunately having already cancelled I had till Christmas Day to post the first chapter, and then till today to finish posting the rest of it – but I finished it.

Let me know if you enjoyed it. Yuletide stays anonymous till January 1st: I originally posted this anonymously giving the recipient a heads-up by creating a livejournal account for YuletideBachman (which was deleted by me early in January, having served its purpose). My writing journal is here.

Jane Carnall

All Chapters

The road is eating his feet. He looks down. He can see his feet, his shoes, picking up and putting down, carrying him along. What he sees doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what he feels: each time, each footfall, his entire foot is swallowed down by a vast mouth of pain, sucking him into a mouth filled with acid that dissolves his muscles into a liquid.

He hasn’t been able to look away from his feet in longer than he can remember. He’s going to die soon. He looks up at the sun, until the light fills his eyes with dazzle. He’ll never see the sun again. When it’s really dark, he won’t be able to see his feet any more.

Peter will never speak to him again. He keeps walking. The road is dark and full of people: someone keeps calling him by name. Not Peter, not his mom or dad, no one he knows.

The guns will speak to him. He keeps walking.

Voices are speaking to him. The audience is shouting at the stars. A thunderstorm of sound: GAH RAT EY GAR AT AI GAR RAT TY GARRATY rolling over him. He opens his mouth. Hail Mary. Full of grace. Pray for us. The hour of our death. GARRATY! GA RA TEE! GAH RAT AY!

A dry whisper in his ear. His name. “Olson. Olson.”

He thinks he’s going to die when the thunder stops, falling apart like a rotten apple. Like a pile of rainbow fabric. In whistles shrilling at the ear like laughter.

It’s a deathly soft whisper. “Tell me how, Olson. Tell me what to do.”

Henry opens his mouth. “Mary. Grace. Amen,” he says.

“That’s it, talk,” the voice whispers. “Talk to me, Olson. Tell me.” He sounds eager. “Tell me.”

Henry’s mouth is still open. “I’m Henry Olson,” he wants to say. “I’m gay.”

“Please,” the voice says. “Try hard.”

He’s walking uphill. He drops his head, looking downwards to where his feet were. “God’s garden is full of weeds,” he says. “Mary, pray for us weeds now in the hour of our death.”

This silences the voice.

“I don’t want to die,” he confesses.

He turns his head towards where the voice was, and sees the boy from Maine. He thinks of telling him that Peter’s gay. He tries to remember what the boy’s name is. From somewhere, like thunder, it comes to him: “Garraty?”

“Yes, it’s me,”  the boy from Maine says.

He’s known the boy for a very long time. For a lifetime. How long?

“It’s quarter of nine.”

“No,” Henry says, surprised. “No later than that?” They met thirty-six hours ago. He still has trouble remembering the boy’s name.

The boy reaches out and touches his shoulder. “What’s it all about?” the boy asks, his warm hand on Henry’s shoulder, making him shudder. The boy laughs. “What’s it all about?”

He has a thin, warm hand, the boy from Maine. He laughs as if he couldn’t die, and Henry is shaking. He doesn’t know how long they touch on the road, he supposes they must have kept walking, he cannot hear the warnings or the voice of the guns. He remembers the boy’s name, and says it.

The long gap lingers before the boy takes his hand away and stops laughing. He asks “What?”

“What time is it?”

The boy doesn’t answer. He shouts something and looks away.

“Garraty?” Henry says.

“What?” This time Henry hears it, the whispering voice, death eager and quiet. He looks at the boy from Maine doubtfully. But he thinks of the boy’s hand on him. He thinks of Peter. Fuck your warnings. Hail Mary, fuck your warnings, let us blow this goddam place.

“Jesus will save you,”  he tells the boy. Mary is going with him. Amen, Mary. He walks towards the halftrack.

“Warning. Warning 70!”

His feet hurt. The road hurts his feet. He puts his hands over the hard metal edge of the halftrack, and pulls himself up from the road. Full of grace. The four metal dicks point their mouths at him and he takes hold of the nearest big one and yanks, hard, and the gun falls voicelessly away. Blessed art thou. One of the guns speaks. He feels a thump against his midriff, as if one of the soldiers punched him. He feels nothing else: even his feet no longer hurt. He stands up and takes hold of the gun and it speaks: he sees the flash.

Jesus is crying. “Get ‘em! Get’em, Olson! Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!”

Two of the guns speak, both at once, and he’s punched hard in the belly. He lands on the road on his back. His feet still don’t hurt.

All four soldiers are pointing their big metal dicks down at him. He thinks he hears the guns speak again, but no one seems to die. He tries to get up but he can’t quite manage it.

Jesus is sobbing. Mary, full of grace, blessed is the fruit of your womb. “You bastards! You bloody bastards!”

Henry thinks someone is laughing. He tries to get up. He must keep walking. He has one warning. Smart. You take a warning while you’re still fresh and get an idea of where the limit is. And you can sluff one warning easy enough – you walk an hour without getting a fresh warning, you lose one of the old ones. His belly feels loose. He may have dropped his food belt again. He walked all night without it last night. He crosses his hands on his stomach. Something feels strange. He feels loose and wet. He is falling apart like rainbow fabric in a factory, blown to pieces. He must still have his food belt, he can feel it falling off, sliding through his fingers, flopping against his groin. He bends to pick it up but it isn’t on the road. He can’t find it with his hands or see it in the dark. There’s a bolus coming up through his throat: he opens his mouth and lets it splatter on the road. He needs to keep walking. He’s surprised he hasn’t got a second warning yet, but then he hears “Warning! Second warning, 70!”

His legs, which have held him up all this time, give way. He goes down on his face on the road. The guns speak, but he doesn’t die.

“Warning! Warning 47!”

“Warning! Warning 61!”

He can feel hands on him, touching him. Peter. The boy. Jesus. Jesus is saying “Get up, you can’t help him, for God’s sake get up! Come on!”

Jesus will save you, Henry thinks. He can’t save me. I should have gone back. Fuck your warnings. Hail Mary. Let us sow this ground with salt. I’m Henry Olson. Let us blow this goddam place. Fuck your warnings. He pushes himself to his feet again. Walking on two warnings. Adjustment is the key. You heard it here first. He can see Peter. Watching him. Walking and receding from him. Everything is receding from him.

He wants to speak to Peter, one last time. He stares at him across the gap they will never cross. They will never touch each other. Peter is so far away.

“I DID IT WRONG.”

end

All Chapters

Hail Mary full of grace, walking with you, blessed are your feet and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Peter. Peter is the traitor, strike him dead.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, piss on us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Someone is throwing watermelon. Big chunks of pink watermelon. Henry stares up and around him, mystified by this. Someone cries Dom L’Antio loves you all! And the boys are laughing as if they couldn’t die.

Hail Mary full of melon, the Dom is with you, blessed is watermelon. Blessed is fruit. Holy Mary, Mother of God, laugh at us sinners now in the hour of our death. Amen.”

Another thunderstorm, bringing coolth and rain. Henry keeps walking. His tongue doesn’t feel so dry any more. He’s just picking them up and putting them down, anything else is one big fat el zilcho, is nothing but the need to keep walking. Peter you’re gonna die. Nobody loves a deader.

Amen, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Hail.

All Chapters / Chapter Ten

The Maine boy isn’t eating either. He asks “If you had to do it all over again … if you knew you could get this far and still be walking… would you do it?”

Henry nearly laughs.

Peter says “Are you kidding? You must be.”

The boy from Maine says no, he’s serious, and now Peter is laughing. “I don’t think I’d do it again if the Major put his pistol up against my nates. This is the next thing to suicide, except that a regular suicide is quicker.”

Henry looks at the boy from Maine. He wonders how long before the boy dies. He thought the boy was going to die yesterday, back when Henry wasn’t so tired. They are all deaders, all of them walking. They are all here to die. They were conned, the boy with the pennies, the boy from Maine who still believes in true love, himself thinking it wouldn’t matter when he was discovered to be a queerboy, the boy who fell and bled, bled, bled big blotches on the road, the boy who thought it wasn’t fair if you had a charley horse. Conned into killing themselves by walking. Ninety-nine miles, nearly a hundred. And the boy from Maine doesn’t know it yet, he’s still looking at Peter, at him, with a kind of innocence.

They’ve been walking for quarter of an hour after food when they reach a banner that says it’s the century club, one hundred miles into the Walk. A big crowd, a big audience: the hundred mile mark is a draw.

And the boy from Maine starts laughing. He laughs like he can’t stop, laughs like he’s crying, laughs till he’s falling over. He gets a warning. A second warning. He’s going to die.

Henry walks on, not looking back. He hears Peter. He can’t help hearing Peter. He’s hearing Peter get a warning, one minute closer to death. Peter is trying to save the Maine boy’s life. Walk on, he wants to tell Peter out loud, walk on. So you love the boy from Maine, like you loved Ralph, but he’s closer, but like Ralph he’ll cut you in the end, Peter, it’s a put-on, it’s nothing, it’s one big fat el zilcho. Just stay alive. Keep picking ‘em up and putting ‘em down. Don’t die for him.

Peter walks away from the Maine boy on two warnings: the Maine boy is staggering on three. He’ll stumble. The guns speak their unimaginable word.

It’s not the Maine boy they are speaking it to: it is someone else, a boy who falls in the road with one lens of his glasses shattering. The boy from Maine catches them up, walking almost steadily, his face white. He says, to Peter, “I’m not dead.”

Peter says back “Yeah, but you ought to be.”

Henry opens his mouth. “You saved him. Why did you do that?”

He doesn’t expect an answer. Peter looks at him, not giving him an answer.

“Why did you do that?” Henry asks again. He knows the time when Peter would speak to him is gone.

“I’d kill you if I could hate you,” Henry says. He can’t hate Peter.

“You’re gonna die,” Henry says, like a prophecy. “You wait and see.” Hell Mary, full of grace, “God’s gonna strike you dead for what you did.”  He nearly laughs: he nearly cries. “God’s gonna strike you dead as dogshit.”

Peter answers him, finally: “Piss on you. I pay my debts, that’s all.” He says to the boy from Maine, “We’re square, man. It’s the end, right?” and he walks away.

It’s the end.

All Chapters / Chapter Nine

Peter looks at him and shakes his head. “I keep thinking you’re gone. And you keep walking.”  Twenty-eight Walkers are dead.

“I can’t stop now,” Henry says. He smiles. “We’re all dead.”

“ Do you believe in true love?” Peter asks.

Henry shrugs. He wants to say yes.

“All of that romantic shit . . . you know, it’s true.  It was for me. You still want to hear about the scar?”

“I want to know how your dad found out,” Henry said.

“Okay,” Peter says. “His name was Ralph. I used to kiss his fingers. I even took to reading poetry to him out in back of the house, when his old man wasn’t around. His old man kept cows, and the smell of cowshit goes in a peculiar fashion with the works of John Keats. Goes better with Swinburne.” He stops talking for a while, his mouth working. “He was – I was – ”

Henry shrugs again. “You can’t even talk about these things,” he says. “Don Bredes, James Kirkwood… they already wrote all about the  pains of adolescent love.” Not about queers. Who was it said queer writers would always have to transpose? He can’t remember. Peter may know, if Henry remembers to ask.

Peter grins. “J. D. Salinger . . . John Knowles . . . yeah. You just come off sounding like Ron Howard with a hardon.” He laughs a little hysterically.

“Last summer, when school was out, we both wanted to get away from home, away from our parents, and away from the smell of all that cowshit so the Great Romance could bloom in earnest. So we got jobs working for a pajama factory in New Jersey.”

He stops talking again, waves his empty canteen for a fresh one. Then he says: “Our parents kicked about it, but with good summer jobs, they didn’t kick too much. Besides, we were sharing with another guy, who was so straight I’m surprised he didn’t have to take paternity leave from high school. We left on June the third, and we stopped for the night at a Shady Nook motel with only two rooms left. Our straight roomie  got rid of his girlfriend’s virginity in the other room, and Ralph and I spent time trying to bugger each other with spit for lube in the twin bedded room. Ralph acted like he didn’t really want to cornhole, but he wanted to please me. We’d never got to buggery before the Shady Nook motel. Afterwards we took showers in the Shady Nook bathroom and dried ourselves off with Shady Nook towels and slept in separate beds under Shady Nook sheets. It was all very romantic. Ethereal. Then we drove on to Newark, smelling the cowshit. We were so sure it was different cowshit. We couldn’t do a thing in our apartment, because straight boy was always there, so were his straight buds, and there were only two rooms. The next Monday we started in at the Plymouth Sleepwear factory. It stank of raw cloth and my foreman was a bastard and during lunch break we used to throw baling hooks at the rats under the fabric bags. But I didn’t mind because it was love. See? It was love.”

“I was a bagger. See, down in the basement they dyed the raw cloth and sent it up to the fifth floor in these warm-air tubes. They’d ring a bell when one lot was done, and I’d open my bin if it was my bell and there’d be a whole rainbow-coloured load of loose fibre. I’d pitchfork it out, put it in two-hundred-pound sacks, and chain-hoist the sacks onto a big pile of other sacks for the picker machines. They’d separate it, the weaving machines wove it, some other guys cut it and sewed it into pajamas. You may have slept in Plymouth Sleepwear jim jams yourself, Henry.

“They had jobs for girls in the factory. Our straight roomie’s girl had a job sewing on buttons in a room with air conditioning, and pretty pastel walls, part of the factory they let idiot tourists with nothing better to do see on a guided tour for jam jams. Dumbass tourists watched the girls through this glass wall… just like the people are watching us today. I’ve never wanted to be a girl, I never wanted Ralph to be a girl, but I used to envy our roomie’s girl, because she could sit in that room and she could talk about her boyfriend, and go out to dinner with him, and have sex in the car, in the right drive-ins. New Jersey’s pretty built up, at least the part of it where we were, but our roomie had plenty of places he could take his girl to make out. Even when he left us alone, we didn’t risk it in case he smelled what we’d been doing after he came back.”

“When they found out?” Henry said.

“Wait, I’ll tell you. At first, it was joy and bliss and Keatsville all the way. I buggered him three more times, in total. We could buy Vaseline, that made it easier. And I could never get all of the loose fabric out of my hair no matter how many times I shampooed it, and the worst thing was he was getting away from me, going beyond me. I loved him, I really did, I knew it and there was no way I could tell him any more so he’d understand. There was always that smell of cowshit.

“The thing of it was, the factory was on piecework. That means we got lousy wages, but a percentage for all we did over a certain minimum. I wasn’t a very good bagger. I did about twenty-three bags a day, but the norm was usually right around thirty. And this did not endear me to the rest of the boys, because I was fucking them up. Harlan down in the dyehouse couldn’t make piecework because I was tying up his blower with full bins. And Ralph on the picker couldn’t make piecework if  I wasn’t shifting enough bags over to him. It wasn’t pleasant. The other guys saw to it that it wasn’t pleasant. You understand?”

“And Ralph was making plenty, even with me holding him back. So I got to find out how much fun it is to be in competition with the guy you love. At the end of the week I’d go home with a check for like $65.50 and buy some Cornhusker’s Lotion for my blisters. He was making something like ninety a week, and socking it away as fast as he could run to the bank. After a while I stopped making love to him. I’d like to say I stopped going to bed with him, it’s more pleasant, but we never had a bed to go to. There were usually about sixteen guys in our apartment drinking beer and talking about girls, and I couldn’t afford another motel room and he wouldn’t, so it was just hand-jobs in the men’s room at the drive-in. And I could tell he was getting disgusted. And since I knew it and since I had started to hate him even though I still loved him, I asked him to move out with me – for the two of us to rent someplace together. Right then. He started wriggling around, trying to put me off, but I made him come out with it, yes or no.”

“And it was no.”

“Sure it was no. ‘Pete, we can’t afford it. What would my dad say. Pete, we have to wait.’ Pete this and Pete that and all the time the real reason was his money, the money he was making and I wasn’t.”

“Was that it? The money?”

Peter sighs. “I liked to think so. Tell myself he was a miser, he was loony about money.  But mostly I wanted to make him feel like a greedy, self-centered little cunt because he was making me feel like a failure.” He touched his scar. “Only he didn’t have to make me feel like a failure, because I was a failure. I didn’t have anything in particular going for me except a perpetual hardon for him and I couldn’t even make myself feel like a man about that.”

“What happened?”

“Two of the other guys on the pickers, they picked a fight with me. Blacked both my eyes and told me to take off before they broke my arms. Ralph didn’t help me and he didn’t stop them, he just stood at his machine and said he thought that was best. So I turned in my time and waited for Ralph to come home. I asked our straight roomie to take his pals out to the movies, told him I needed time on my own to pack. When Ralph got in I told him I was going home and I asked him to come. He said he couldn’t. I said I wished I’d never seen him.  I told him he was a fool and an unfeeling cunt that couldn’t see any further than the totals in his goddam bank book. Nothing I said was fair, but…. there was some truth in all of it, I guess. Enough. That was the first time we’d ever been alone together in a bedroom since Shady Nook. I tried to take him to bed and he cut my face open with a letter-opener. It was a gag letter-opener, some friend of his sent it to him from England. It had Paddington Bear on it. He cut me like I was trying to rape him. Like I was a disease that would infect him.”

Like he was straight and you were queer. Henry nods.

“I cried,” Peter says. “I cried like a baby. I got down on my knees and held him round the waist and begged him to forgive me, and all the blood was getting on the floor and on his pants, it was a disgusting scene. He gagged and ran off into the bathroom and threw up. I could hear him throwing up. When he came out, he had a towel for my face. He said he never wanted to see me again. I thought he might be crying, but he asked me why I’d done that to him, treated him like that. He said I had no right. There I was with my face cut wide open and he’s asking me why I hurt him.”

“Yeah.” Henry nods again. Peter was in love with a bully.

“I left with the towel still on my face. I had twelve stitches. I drove back home and my dad asked me how it happened and I told him and that’s the story of how my dad found out and about the scar.”

“Did anyone else find out? When he came back from Newark?”

“No one found out. I don’t know if my dad told my mom, she never said anything to me. Ralph never came back from Newark. I never saw him again. He seems really small to me now, really far away. Being queer – being in love with Ralph at this point in my life is basically at a real distance.  Distance lends perspective, don’t they say? Yesterday morning Ralph was still very important to me. Now he’s nothing. That story I just told you, I thought that would hurt. It didn’t hurt. Maybe I could even tell it to Ray. Though I probably won’t.”

Henry looks at him. He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to talk to Peter much any more. He’s so tired all he wants to do is rest. It seems very important to tell Peter what he found out, that it doesn’t matter, that Peter could tell the boy from Maine he’s gay, how he got the scar, but all he finds himself able to do is say “We were had, Peter. We’ve all been had. Even that boy from Maine knows it.”

Peter snorts. Henry drops his eyes to stare at his feet again. It’s going to be a hot, hot day, and his belly is cramping with hunger. Drinking doesn’t help. He wonders, as they walk on, uphill and down, if he and Peter will ever speak to each other again.

Peter isn’t walking near to him when Henry begins to beg the guards to shoot him or let him sit down, kill him or let him rest. Hail Mary, full of grace, shoot me now, my feet hurt, I need food, Jesus. Hell Mary, shoot us sinners now and let us rest in the hour of our death. Two other boys are killed: Henry hears the guns speak. Hell Mary, full of death, speak for us sinners now and give us to rest. Hail Mary, full of grace, let us blow this goddam place.

A third boy, the youngest boy, the boy with the mom who kept trying to find him, Percy, runs away from the Walk: he gets as far as the edge of the woods when he’s shot without warning.

The whole march seems to pause on a beat: Henry looks up, and sees Peter.  “Let this ground be seeded with salt. So that no stalk of corn nor stalk of wheat shall ever grow. Cursed be the children of this ground and cursed be their loins.” He can’t tell whether the prayer comes from himself or from Peter, but he mouths an Amen before he looks down again at his feet. He hears the other boys crying at each other in terror and anger, but he is too tired to listen any more. He hears one of the soldiers eating – biting into a sandwich. He opens his mouth and screams wearily at the men on the halftrack. Screaming hurts his throat but he can’t stop, any more than he can stop walking: the hunger cramps are tearing up his belly from the inside.

And the guns speak again. Still not to Henry. He’s walking near a group of boys, almost a part of it, and he hears one boy say “Thirty-four.”

Sixty-five to go. Not even twenty-four hours. Not even a hundred miles. One third down. Henry looks at the boy when he hears him say “I brought along ninety-nine pennies,” and sees him taking a penny out of one pocket and putting it in the other. “Every time someone buys a ticket, I put one of ‘em in the other pocket.”

Somehow that’s just the worst thing. Not just that some of the boys are still calling that unimaginable sound of death buying a ticket, as if leaving the Walk meant going on a ride, but the boy is counting lives like coins. “That’s gruesome!” Henry says, taking his eyes off his feet. “Where’s your death watch? Where’s your voodoo dolls?”

The boy doesn’t reply. No one except Peter has replied to anything Henry says for a long time. But eventually, the boy says, looking almost embarrassed,  “I didn’t mean to say anything about it. It was for good luck, that was all.”

Henry drops his eyes to his feet again. They are still moving, still hurting him. “It’s dirty,” he says, quietly. “It’s filthy. It’s – ”

“Oh, quit it,” another boy says. “Quit getting on my nerves.”

I will. Sometime soon, I will.

All Chapters /Chapter Eight

His head jerks up. It’s daylight, unless he’s dreaming that too. Peter is looking at him. “Just think of all the cash riding on you, Henry! Think of  the people with a bundle riding right – on – your – skinny – ass.” His voice separates each of the last words out, and it pulls Hank into waking.

“They can all go fuck themselves and shit all over their own dicks,” Hank Olson says.

Three boys laugh. Hank is too tired to get anything out of their laughter. He hopes the bully is one of the boys who was killed in the night. He isn’t too tired to hope for that.

They start passing their audience again: small boys who camped out all night to see the Long Walk pass, waitresses who get whistled at, people standing in their own front gardens: they’re walking through a mixture of countryside and suburbia. There’s a mixture of questions and laughter coming back through the Walk with the day.

“Hey,” Peter says to him. “Knock, knock.”

Henry stares at him in disbelief. He wants to say so much to Peter, and what comes now is a joke. “Who’s there?”

“Major.”

Henry almost looks round for him. “Major who?”

Peter grins. “Major buggers his mother before breakfast.”

Henry remembers the big man, with the big hands and thighs, the big soft cock. He opens his mouth and hears himself laugh. It’s not even funny. The Major is screwing them all, the dead and the deader. He had grinned like that, not because he didn’t mind a queerboy, but because he didn’t care. Because he knew Henry was going to die.

“Knock, knock,” Peter says to him again.

Henry opens his mouth in bewilderment. He wants to ask Peter if he really wants this to be last thing he says to Henry. “Who’s there?”

“Major.”

“Major who?” Henry says, the words coming out without any volition on his part, as his feet keep moving.

Peter grins. “Major buggers his grandmother before breakfast.”

The same laugh comes out of his open mouth.

The next version finishes with “Major buggers his dog before breakfast” and Henry doesn’t know now whether he’s laughing or sobbing.

Peter’s gaze slides away from him. He looks up at the halftrack. His face goes dark with blood as if he is blistering: the scar stands out, white on red. “You think that’s funny?”

The soldiers stare down. They do not answer. “Major buggers himself, that’s what I think! You guys, you probably bugger each other. Pretty funny, huh? Pretty funny, you bunch of motherfuckers, right? Pretty goddam FUNNY, am I right?”

The laughter has died. It feels as if Peter is speaking for him. Henry looks up at the soldiers.

He hears the gasp before his eyes fall and he sees what Peter is doing. Peter is standing still, almost close enough to the halftrack to climb aboard, shaking his fists at the soldiers in a frustrated mockery of attack.

“Warning,” one soldier says. “Warning, 61. Second warning.” The halftrack is moving on. Peter runs to catch up with it. Henry is not  able to stop walking. He wants to stop, to turn, to stand with Peter. They will both die. They are both dead.

“Come on!” Peter screams. “Come on down here! One at a time or all at once, I don’t give a shit! “

“Warning! Third Warning, 61, final warning.”

Henry hears. He wants to turn back. He is walking with no warnings. He knows Peter is about to die.

“Fuck your warnings!” Peter shouts, and Henry’s feet keep walking. He opens his mouth. He mouths the words, Fuck your warnings. Hail, Mary, full of grace. Fuck your warnings.

“Warning, 48. Second warning.”

That’s the boy from Maine. Henry is still walking, away from Peter, trying to stay alive. The boy from Maine is drawing a third warning. Henry hears the boy say “Come on” and Peter yells like he’s still alive “Get out of here, Henry, I’m gonna fight them!”

Except it’s not Henry. Henry is walking away. Four miles an hour. He’s got a pain in the gut that feels like heartburn. Peter is going to get screwed by the Major, and Henry isn’t even watching.

“You’re going to get shot, you asshole,” the boy’s clear voice shouts, and Peter snarls back “Go to hell.”

They are going to get shot. Henry keeps walking. The guns will speak, unimaginably loud for one and then the other.

The guns do not speak. There is silence on the road except for the halftrack and the noises of the morning. When Henry sees Peter again, he is walking with the boy from Maine. Who saved his life. Peter isn’t dead. Henry would have died with him, but the boy saved his life.

Henry looks down at his feet. His feet kept walking. Four miles an hour. He thinks about it, how he can keep walking, even when his heart wants to turn back.

“Warning! Warning, 70!”

His feet step up the pace. He isn’t thinking about it. He looks down at his feet, walking just faster than four miles an hour, keeping him alive. He might be dead now. He and Peter. Resting together.

He hears a second halftrack, and a third, and the sound of the Major’s jeep. Of course the Major is here. To salute the Walkers who survived the night. Some of the boys are cheering him.

Henry keeps his eyes on his feet. He’s afraid if he looks up, and sees the Major, he will start cheering too.

“He’s buggy,” Peter says. Henry isn’t sure who he’s talking about. “Everybody’s buggy this morning. Even me. And it’s a beautiful day. Don’t you agree, Olson?”

Fuck your warnings, Henry tells his feet. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t want to look at Peter.

“Olson’s got bugs, too,” Peter says, as if to someone else. “Olson! Hey, Hank!”

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” another boy asks.

“Hey, Hank! Wanna go for a walk?” Peter shouts. As if everything was normal. As if Henry hadn’t walked away from Peter.

“Go to hell,” Henry says wearily.

“What?” Peter cries merrily, cupping a hand to his ear. “Wha choo say?” Does he hate Henry now? They are all deaders. Nobody loves a deader. Hail Mary. Hell Mary. Fuck your warnings.

“Hell! Hell!” he screams. He looks up at Peter. “Go to hell!”

“Is that what you said.” Peter is nodding, smiling. He looks as if he knows what Henry was thinking.

Henry looks down at his feet again. To hell.

All Chapters / Chapter Seven

The bully picks on another victim. “ – fucking ugly, fucking stupid, fucking smelly, fucking fat, Rankie, hey fucking Rank, you listening to me, dumbo? Fat stupid short fuck – ”

This boy turns, suddenly, and throws a punch. The metallic soldier-voice snaps “Warning! Warning, 83!”

The bully ducks the punch and yells “Come on, you sonofabitch! I’ll dance on your goddam grave! Come on, dumbo, pick up your feet! Don’t make it too easy for me!”

The boy throws another punch. “Warning 83! Second warning, 83!”

The bully sidesteps, nimbly, right into the path of another boy, who trips over him. “Warning 5!” the metallic voice said. You can say anything you like to another Walker, but you can’t get in their way or hit them. Rule 8.

The boy starts to walk faster, not looking at the bully, who follows him  looking furious, yelling  “Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street, dumbo!” The boy turns and runs back, head down. He is yelling wordlessly. The bully sidesteps again, and the boy stumbles, staggers, falls on his ass.

“Third warning, 83!”

“Come on, dumbo!”  the bully yells over his shoulder, moving on, not stopping to draw a second warning. “Get up!”

Henry doesn’t look back. In the silence after the third warning, a boy says “You’re not a pest anymore. Now you’re a murderer. “

The guns speak in a louder voice each time.

“It was his own fault! You saw him, he swung first! Rule 8! Rule 8!” The bully is yelling, as if he supposes something can happen to him, more than what will happen to them all.  “Go fuck yourselves! All of you!”

Peter says “Go on back and dance on him a little, Barkovitch. Go entertain us. Boogie on him a little bit, Barkovitch.”

“Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street too, scarface,” the bully says.

Peter’s hand goes up to touch his scar, and rubs his face, touching the mark. But he says quietly, “Can’t wait to see your brains all over the road. I’ll cheer when it happens, you murdering little bastard.”

The bully is walking alone. No one walks with him. They reach the rise of a hill and look down to where the road crosses a shallow gully. The road is wet and muddy: there was a flash flood here. The plank bridge washes out.  Henry decides now is the time to have a cigarette. “Truly I love that bridge,” he says out loud. True love. Sitting down, resting his feet, not walking. “Truly.”

But it’s nothing, a fake, a put-on, one big fat el zilcho. He throws the cigarette away. One of the bridge’s supports and two of the planks were washed away, but there’s a freshly-cut telegraph pole planted in the middle of the stream, and the tailgate of a truck resting on it. Their feet sound hollow as they walk over the tailgate. They don’t stop.

After the lights used by the highway repair team fade behind them, it is pitch dark. They pass one light at a crossroads, and then it’s dark again. They’re walking under trees, through thick woods: neither starlight nor moonlight penetrates the May foliage.

“We could slip into the woods right now and they’d never see us,” the boy from Maine says.

“Try it,” Henry invites. He can’t believe the boy doesn’t know this. “They’ve got infrared sweepscopes, along with forty other kinds of monitoring gear, including high-intensity microphones. They hear everything we’re saying. They can almost pick up your heartbeat. And they see you like daylight.”

“You take all the fun out of livin’,” another boy says. The boy from Maine says nothing.

May second. Midnight. A hundred and five miles to Oldtown.

“Who gives a shit about Oldtown?” Peter asks.

Henry doesn’t have an answer for him. He just keeps walking. They will get to Oldtown, those who live, after midnight May third. A whole day to walk through.

Ahead, someone starts screaming. In the dark, a barely-visible figure runs through the boys, across the road. It takes less than a minute, and whoever it is must be walking on no warnings. The moment a Walker steps off the road – the dark figure leaps for the underbrush – they get no warnings. The gunshots break the darkness. The boy falls into underbrush, breaking the thin twigs, and two soldiers jerk the body up by the hands and throw it on to the road.

Another Squad has the job of following the Walk to pick up the bodies. Of all the things Henry knows about the Walk, he doesn’t know how the Walkers who don’t make it to the end are disposed of. No one talks about those ones, not once the Walk is done, not by name. For the first time Henry wonders: what the boy who was killed at 9:02 the year before last, the boy who never Walked, what his name was.

What if all the Walkers stopped at nine o’clock on May first? Would they all be shot? Would the Long Walk not have a winner that year?

“I can’t walk much further,” Henry says. He doesn’t know if he says it out loud. No one answers him.

“Why did I get into this?” There is a boy somewhere who wants the Prize, who wants a lot of money on short call, who wants to be able to stand up and not care that he was found in the locker room sucking off another boy, a boy who claimed he was straight, that all the cocksmoking that went on was all Henry’s idea. Henry wants to be able to stand in front of the Major and have the Major’s hands on him, touching him. He wants to feel like Hank Olson, rarin’ to rip.

“Why did I let myself in for this?” His knees had hurt, on the locker-room floor, but he had got up easily. He hadn’t been tired. He’s tired now.

“What’s the matter with you?” There’s another boy walking with him who looks like death. Henry isn’t even sure if he’s real or not. He’s walking like death, weaving across the road, slowly, drawing warnings, number 45.

The guns tell him no. The guns have the answer.

All Chapters / Chapter Six

“Shacked up in Augusta,” Hank cracks. They’re all too tired to laugh, but he gets grins. Augusta is funny as the state capital. Maine is sort of a hokey state, with towns that aren’t really towns.

It’s silent and it’s dark. The noise of the halftrack is almost inaudible to Henry by now. Country darkness: starlight and moonlight. Fenter, the next boy who falls to the sound of the guns, is still clutching his St Christopher medal, silver in silver light.

“If I get out of this,” Peter says suddenly, “you know what I’m going to do?”

One of the boys asks “What?”

To Henry’s surprise, Peter says “Fornicate until my cock turns blue. I’ve never been so horny in my life as I am right this minute, at quarter of eight on May first.”

“You mean it?” the boy from Maine asks.

“I do,” Peter says. He smiles, and the smile is meant for Henry, even though he’s looking at the boy from Maine. “I could even get horny for you, Ray, if you didn’t need a shave.”

Of course the boy from Maine thinks it’s a joke. Straight boys joke like this sometimes.

“Prince Charming, that’s who I am,” Peter says. He touches his scar, the scar he said didn’t come from his dad when his dad found out. “Now all I need is a Sleeping Beauty. I could awake – her,” Henry is pretty sure the pause is too infinitesimal for anyone but him to notice it. “With a biggy sloppy soul kiss and the two of us would ride away into the sunset. At least as far as the nearest Holiday Inn.”

Henry understands he isn’t the Sleeping Beauty. The boy from Maine is Peter’s sleeping beauty. Henry has never been anyone’s idea of beauty. He’s too tired to be jealous, though he feels something he thinks might be it if his legs didn’t feel so baggy, if he weren’t so damn scared. “Walk,” he says.

“Huh?” Peter looks at him, briefly, and his smile flickers. He was telling the story as much to Henry as to his target, wasn’t he? He must be.

“Walk into the sunset,” Henry says.

“Walk into the sunset, okay,” Peter says. His smile is cruel. “True love either way. Do you believe in true love, Hank dear?”

Henry almost laughs. Queerboys don’t love each other. Love is something else, something out of reach. It always was, but on this road it’s clear. When they began this morning, he felt like he was one of a company, part of the group. But he dropped his belt, and he knows now: they are one of a company,  but they all want someone else to die. “I believe in a good screw.”

He hadn’t meant to be funny. But one of the boys laughs, and the others look as if he told a good joke. Only Peter and the boy from Maine don’t look amused: Peter looks as if he’s assessing Henry,  and the boy from Maine looks shocked.

“I believe in true love.” The boy from Maine sounds strange to Henry, saying that in the country road with the halftrack running beside them, the guns pointed at them.

Henry looks at the boy from Maine, the one Peter chose. “You want to know why I don’t?” He grins. He could tell the boy from Maine about Peter, about himself. He thinks Peter is scared he will. “Ask Fenter. Ask Zuck. They know.”

“That’s a hell of an attitude,”  says a boy who’s nearly dead himself. He’s limping. He’ll stumble soon.

“No, it’s not,” Peter says. He nods at Henry, and says, as if he thinks this should be sufficient explanation for Henry, “Nobody loves a deader.”

It is sufficient.  Because we’re going to die, Peter had said. But that was why the boy from Maine sounded so strange. Because he still sounded alive. They were all deaders, heading down the road. There was no love for them, not even among each other. That was why the boy from Maine had given him the cheese. Because he was still alive.

Without understanding, the other boys somehow get on to Edgar Allen Poe, mispronouncing necrophilia but knowing what it means.

“Or a dead man, if you’re a woman,” a boy says.

“Or if you’re a fruit,” Peter adds.

“How the hell did we get on this?” Henry says. Knowing how. No one except Peter and himself had understood what he was talking about. “Just how in hell did we get on the subject of screwing dead people?” He closed his eyes, but he still saw it, the dead boys shaking and jerking as they were screwed, their broken skulls rattling on the road. “It’s fucking repulsive.”

”Why not?” another boy says, deeply.  “I think we might all take a moment or two to stop and think about whatever kind of sex life there might be in the next world.”

They keep talking. It’s all stupid. It’s all repulsive. They are all being screwed. They are all dead. They are all out of love. They did it because they cared about what people thought of them. There may even be other queerboys on the Walk. Fenter could have been one. Or Zuck, the boy who tripped and hurt his knee and bled, bled, bled…

“Just a second now. Just one motherfucking second here.” Henry speaks slowly, because he has no idea how to say what he wants to say. “You’re all off the subject. All off.”

Peter glances at him. His voice takes on a mocking tone. “The Transcendental Quality of Love, a lecture by the noted philosopher and Ethopian jug-rammer Henry Olson. Author of A Peach Is Not A Peach Without A Pit, and other works of – ”

“Wait!” Henry cries out, high and shrill and breaking. “You wait just one goddam second. Love is a put-on! It’s nothing! One big fat el zilcho! You got it?”

No one answered.

“Love is a fake!” Henry screams. He’s wasting breath. They are all dead. Some of them are still walking, but they are all dead.  He is dead. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that’s all! And when you get like Fenter and Zuck – ”

Someone answers, at last. He sounds bored, as if Henry is saying something already too well known to share. “Shut up.”

Henry stops talking. There is no point.

The Maine boy’s number is 47. Henry hears the Warning without thinking about it, but Peter says “That’s you, boy,” and the boy seems to wake up.

Ten minutes later, the Maine boy gets a second Warning. He hasn’t stumbled: he just isn’t walking fast enough. For the next two hours, he is one minute from death. Henry stares at him. He’s never been able to remember the boy’s name, even though he’s heard Peter use it.

“See anything green?” the boy demands. It’s what they say in Henry’s high school too. If you wear green on Thursdays, you’re queer. Of course Henry never has.

“No,” Henry says, looking away. “Course not.”

They’re on a steep slope, and the road keeps running upwards. They can’t afford to slow down. The road turns again and begins to rise, a steep grade, the sort trucks go up in low gear.

The Maine boy is walking with two warnings. Henry’s walking with none. The bully calls out  “Step into it, brothers! Who wants to race me to the top?”

Three minutes from death. One minute from death. They are all deaders, the bully too. The hill is steep and long, Henry says out loud “I don’t think I can climb that hill. Not at four miles an hour.”

But he does. One foot in front of the other. He looks down at his feet and keeps pushing it. No one is talking any more. All Henry can hear is a monotonous panting voice repeating “I can’t do it. I can’t do it any more.”

He keeps expecting to hear “Warning!” but when he does, he almost thinks he’s imagining it. “Warning 70!”

Peter says “They’re playing your song, Hank. Pick up your feet. I want to see you dance up this hill like Fred Astaire.”

You don’t love me, Henry says. Love is a con. We are all getting screwed. We are all getting shit on. We’re being eaten alive by this hill. The surface of the road has teeth and is biting him. “What do you care?” he asks, but he doesn’t get a second warning.

The guns speak three times on the way up the hill. But not to him. Not to Peter. Not to the Maine boy, who gets to the top with only the same two Warnings he began with.

Twelve hours after they began the Walk, they get to the top of the hill, and at last the road starts curving downwards, a gentle slope, easy to walk on. “Hail Mary full of grace,” Henry began again. His legs hurt. “The Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” His feet hurt. His back hurt. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” He went on saying it, out loud, shivering. Twelve hours of their death had passed, and they were still walking.

“He’s in the Squads,”  Stebbins says, talking about his dad. He still sounds bored. He’s seen the end of a Long Walk. None of the rest of them have. “And he had it figured just right. I didn’t even have to move. The Walk ended practically in front of me.”

“What happened?” Henry asks. He isn’t sure he wants to know. He is sure Stebbins wants to tell them. He wonders why. When Stebbins goes on, a horrified silence falls. He tells them about the winner’s feet:  “You could see the broken blood vessels in his feet. Maybe they were able to do something with his feet later, I don’t know. Maybe they were.”

“Stop. For God’s sake, stop it.” Peter sounds dazed and sick.

“You wanted to know,” Stebbins says, a cheerful bully. “Didn’t you say that?”

But it was Henry. He had asked. Stebbins wanted to tell. They had all been walking for the Prize, and Stebbins wanted to tell them that if they got there it would be worthless, they would end up crawling and crying, not wanting anything but to go on Walking together, lost and all alone.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
All Chapters / Chapter Five

“Do you like him?” Henry asks.

Peter looks at him, his lip curling a little. He doesn’t ask Who? “Yeah. But what’s the point?”

“Because he’s not, you know…” You don’t say “gay” or “straight” in the middle of a crowd of straight people. You just don’t.

Peter shakes his head, his voice faintly contemptuous. “Because we’re going to die,” he says.

There is a moment when Henry feels even more shock than if Peter has just said “I’m gay”  out loud. For that moment, he had forgotten the blood and the brains on the road. The white boy who got a muscle cramp. The black boy who got blisters. He nods, staring at Peter. That will be all of them, one after the other.

He doesn’t want to believe that Peter used “we” to exclude Henry. Peter is going to die. He sees the blood and the brains on the white road. He shakes his head, and Peter smiles.

“Why else did we all sign up?” Peter says.

“I wanted…” Henry trails off. That kid. Queerboy. “My mom and dad were going to find out,” he says. “If I got the Prize, it wouldn’t matter.”

Peter looks sideways at him. “My dad found out last summer.”

Henry wants to ask how, but his voice has dried up. He takes another drink from the canteen. He wonders if Peter’s dad cut his face.

“No,” Peter says. “My dad never laid a hand on me.”

“How did it happen?”

A group of boys catch up with them. Peter shrugs at him. “Tell you later,” he says quietly.

A fork of lightning, so bright it looks blue, earths home not far ahead. Not even a second later, there is a crash of thunder.  “Here it comes!” Hank Olson yells, as the rain comes pouring down, a thundershower so intense it feels as if they are bathing in it. Henry wants to know about Peter, he wants to tell Peter what happened to him, but he can see it won’t happen just now: later up the road.

The rain was refreshing. It feels good. They’ve been walking for six or so hours now, and he’s conscious, as he lifts his feet to pop his knees, that his muscles don’t feel the way they did at the beginning. He doesn’t watch when he realises Peter is taking his dick out to piss: he supposes he’s been sweating out the water he’s been drinking, but he’ll need to take a piss sometime soon. And he doesn’t want to do it where anyone can see. He wonders if there’s any way to walk close enough to the half-track, he wonders if he can piss on the half-track, and he thinks again that his legs don’t feel right.

Peter’s no longer pissing: he’s walking with the boy from Maine. Hank falls into step with them, and says, trying to sound casual, “Hey. My legs feel funny.”

The boy from Maine asks, “How funny?”

Hank shrugs. “Like the muscles are all turning… baggy.”

Peter nods. He sounds sure of himself. “Relax. It happened to me a couple of hours ago. It passes off.”

Henry is surprised, but very relieved. He asks, spontaneously, “Does it?”

Peter nods again. “Yeah, sure it does.” This time he sounds as if he’s reassuring Henry, and Henry wants to be reassured. He counts his paces, trying not to do so out loud, wondering as he does so how many paces to a mile. Up ahead, the guns speak out, louder than ever. Henry looks down as he passes the dead boy, lying sprawled and headless, face down -  if he still has a face – in the dust of the road.

Three dead. Three killed. We’re going to die, Peter had said, and of a sudden Henry both wants to be included in Peter’s We, and is terrified down to his legs at the idea he could be included, both with equal desperation.

There’s a boy up ahead walking and bleeding as he walks from a fall on old railway sleepers. Henry hears two or three of the Walkers talking about him: Zuck, 100, the last Walker by surname. You can see the dark tracks of the blood splashes weaving on the road.

“Is he scared?” Henry asks out loud.

He realises a moment after he asks that this isn’t a question Hank would have asked, but the boy who replies doesn’t sound like a bully. “He says he doesn’t give a damn. But I’m scared. I’m scared for all of us.”

The clouds are clearing overhead. The rain has moved off to the east. Henry knows he and Peter can’t talk till the other boys move out of earshot. “McVries,” he says softly.

“What?”

Henry meant to ask for a cigarette – he’s seen Peter has a pack, though one of the hints recommends against smoking on a Long Walk – but what he finds himself saying instead is “It isn’t going away. That baggy  feeling I told you about. It isn’t going away.” He waits. Peter says nothing. Even “We’re all going to die” would have comforted Henry about now.

“It feels like my legs could just collapse. Like a bad foundation. That won’t happen, will it?” Henry’s voice gets shrill when he’s upset, his dad used to hit him for that until his mom stopped him. “Will it?”

No one hits him. No one answers. Hank Olsen musters himself and says what he meant to say “Could I have a cigarette?”

Peter hands him a pack of Mellows. “Yeah. You can keep them.”

Henry has been smoking three cigarettes a day since he was fourteen. One on his way to school, one at lunchtime, one on his way home. He planned to quit on the Walk, but that now seems foolish. There are ten cigarettes left in the pack. Enough to last him out. He lights one, cupping the match, and sucks down the cool smoke, feeling it numb his nerves. He thumbs his nose at one of the soldiers watching him from the halftrack. Hank says “They’ve been giving me the old hairy eyeball for the last hour or so. They’ve got a sixth sense about it.”

The soldiers don’t respond. They have smooth, expressionless faces. They’re standing on the half-track, holding their guns like cocks at half-mast, handling them like a man making up his mind to jerk off or piss. Hank raises his voice again. “You like it, don’t you, fellas? You like it, right? That goddam right, is it?”

There’s no answer. Henry tucks his pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He’ll smoke another one when it gets to be dark, after he has something to eat.

Someone says something about the Prize, and the boy from Maine, the one Peter likes, says priggishly “Rich men don’t enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Hank grins to himself. Straight, and religious. “Hallelujah,” he says out loud. “There’ll be refreshments after the meetin’.”

He doesn’t take much interest in the discussion that follows, till the boy says something that catches all their attention:  “The only difference is we’re involved in dying right now.”

That is the third time someone has included Hank in the dead: and again he looks at Peter, feeling the blood drain away from his face, feeling panic in the muscles of his legs.

He’s startled when the boy from Maine offers him an opened foil packet of cookies. He takes one, and puts it in his mouth, as if it’s a strange and secular communion wafer.  It’s too sweet. It makes him feel hungry. He’d meant to wait till it got to be dark to eat anything else from his belt, but he puts his hands to the low-riding belt, feeling for the pocket that still has a tube of meat concentrate, and fumbles at the fastening.

He cannot quite believe what his hands are telling him. He’s hungry: he wants food: and the belt somehow fell and is on the road. It is minutes before he can believe what he did, and it is too late to run back and pick it up. His hands are still trying to find the belt, still moving on his hips where he had lodged it. He says out loud “I dropped it. I wanted something to eat, and I dropped it.” He laughs, because that’s something Hank Olson would do. “I’m hungry.”

No one answers. The other boys are still walking. Some of them nearly tread on the belt, but no one picks it up.

It’s unfair. He will need food tonight. He had meant to eat and have a cigarette, and maybe eat the olives – which he doesn’t like, but would eat if he had to – in the dark, in the cold hours. All the Walkers are meant to have food belts. It is unjust that he has lost his, that no one will give him another. “I’m hungry.”

No one looks at him. Peter doesn’t look at him. The belt is gone.

The boy from Maine is holding something out to him, a yellowish tube, the cheese concentrate. Henry almost waves him off: he wants Peter to look at him, Peter to share his food. But he is hungry, too hungry to refuse.

The cheese tastes like humiliation. Henry eats it in silence. He thinks about a cigarette, because he also wants to cry, and he found since he was fourteen that he cannot both smoke and cry. He wonders if it was blasphemy to think of the cookie as a communion wafer. He is included in the dying, he understands that now, but he also understands that it is a lonely group to be part of. They are all dying, but they are not dying together, as they had walked together down the road. They are separated from each other, walking and dying alone. He hears himself saying out loud  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” No one says Amen with him: he goes back and repeats the prayer. This is the hour of death, and this hour will go on forever.

He still wants to hear what Peter has to say. Further up the road, Peter promised, but further up the road is only death.

They pass a graveyard. Peter says, to the Maine boy, “It’s on your side, you lose all your points. Remember that game?”

Henry looks at Peter. He hates him suddenly, hates him for all the things that were attractive before. “You talk too goddam much.”

“What’s wrong with graveyards, Henry, old buddy?”  Peter has a slanting smile that’s almost cruel. The old graveyard in Henry’s hometown was said to be used by queerboys, though Henry had never dared go in, just in case someone he knew saw him there. He wonders, randomly, if it was the same in Peter’s hometown, if it’s the same in towns everywhere, graveyards with queerboys having sex with each other. He wonders if the boy from Maine knows what Peter is talking about.

“A fine and private place,” Peter says, and he is definitely taunting now. “As the poet said. A nice watertight casket – ”

Henry isn’t going to cry. He says loudly “Just shut up!”

“Oh, pickles. You don’t really mind the thought of dying, do you, Olson? Like the poet also said, it ain’t the dying, it’s laying in the grave so long. Is that what’s bugging you, booby?”

Henry stares at Peter, confused. Peter makes a trumpeting noise into his curled hand.  He says, like a preacher, “Well, cheer up, charlie! There’s a brighter day com – ”

A boy cuts in. “Leave him alone.”

Henry switches off. He is staring at Peter, not hearing him, walking on scared feet, wanting to hold Peter, to feel Peter hold him. He doesn’t want Peter to talk to him like this, like a bully. He’s scared and tired and he knows now that it doesn’t matter what other people think: he could turn around and say to every Walker still alive, hey, I’m gay, I’m a queerboy, and it wouldn’t make one goddam bit of difference. If he knew he could stop walking and live, he wouldn’t care what anyone thought of him. “I don’t want to do it any more,” he says, not caring if it means he won’t be included any more. “I’m sick of it.”

“Raring to rip. Isn’t that what you said?” Peter is glaring at him. “Fuck it, then. Why don’t you just fall down and die then?”

Because I want to know how you got that scar. Because I want to touch you, and have you touch me. I want to eat, even olives, I’ll even eat olives, if I can feel food in my mouth and water in my throat, I’ll walk in the graveyard,  I’ll screw you if you want, I’ll let you screw me. I’ll take a shit sitting down and I’ll eat a meal that tastes like food. I can’t do any of that if I stumble. Or you do.

He doesn’t say anything. He keeps walking. He isn’t sure he knows how to stop any more. They walk past another town, through a warm pool of light for the news cameras, and a reporter tries to ask him questions, but Henry doesn’t have any answers, so he says nothing. The bully, the one who thought he was so important, tells the reporter that what keeps him going is planning to dance on a lot of graves.

Henry thinks about tripping him up: he could do it, except it would be against the rules, like it’s against the rules for the bully to do anything physical to the other Walker. He can’t remember if it would mean he got a warning or got a ticket.

He says to Peter “Next time he comes around I think I’ll trip him.” He remembers hating Peter, but he seems too tired to manage it now.

“Tut tut,” Peter says. He sounds friendlier, not like a bully any more. “Rule 8, no interference with your fellow Walkers.”

It would be a good thing to do, though, Henry thinks. Someone like that won’t let go till he gets someone hurt, and here on the Walk hurt is dead.  Henry smiles, briefly, happier just because Peter sounds friendly again. “You know what you can do with Rule 8.”

Peter grins. “Watch out, you’re beginning to sound pretty lively again.”

It’s dark, it’s getting cold. They’ve walked nearly forty-five miles. Yesterday he was still home with his mom and dad. He feels he’s lived a lifetime in a day.
All Chapters / Chapter Four

Hank nods. He eyes the crew-cut boy, smells his sweat: Harkness is be-spectacled and red-faced, he looks as if walking fast and writing is difficult for him. He has a notebook with spiral binding and a ballpoint pen. Harkness drops back a pace or two and asks the boy from Maine’s name and number.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m writing down everybody’s,” Harkness says, though nobody has looked interested.

“You’re with the Squads,” Hank Olson says, but no one laughs: Harkness says mildly that he plans to write a book.

“If you win you’re going to write a book,” the boy from Maine points out.

“But look at this,” Harkness says, shrugging. “A book about the Long Walk from an insider’s point of view could make me a rich man.”

That gets the laugh Hank had wanted. Peter says through his laughter, “If you win – ”  He actually has to stop talking to catch his breath, but he doesn’t stop walking, brisk and easy –  “if you win, you won’t need a book to make you a rich man, will you?”

Henry looks at Harkness, realising with a pang of discomfort that Peter and the others are laughing at the plain, red-faced boy. But he doesn’t seem to mind: he’s frowning, but he only says “I suppose. But it would make one heck of an interesting book,” and he goes on asking the other Walkers their names and numbers. He doesn’t seem to care that  they’re making fun of him.

The first town they will walk through is called Limestone. It didn’t look far on the map, but they aren’t there yet. One of Henry’s knees feels stiff: without slowing down, he lifts his heel high against his butt, and hears the joint pop with satisfaction: he does this sometimes on the way home from school, pleased as always with how he can balance on one foot as the other one comes up and keep moving. His throat felt dry: he had another long drink of water, relishing how the cool liquid felt going down his throat into his belly. He does the other knee, because you need to flex them both to keep the stiffness off.

“Percy!” The woman calling is some boy’s mother. She tries to run out into the road, but a policeman stops her. The boy she’s calling to ducks his head with an embarrassed grin, but waves back. Henry thinks of his mom far away, and is mostly relieved she isn’t here. She wouldn’t have come anyway. He didn’t want her.

He speeds up a little bit, seeing Peter just ahead, and walks beside him. They look at each other, but don’t talk yet.

“Warning! First warning, 7!”

Henry glances sideways and sees the boy: he’s walking slow, favouring one leg. Muscle cramp. He tries to speed up, and manages it for a little while: he’s staring down at his right leg, rubbing it, trying to get the cramp to loosen.

The boy from Maine catches up with him and Peter, and asks “Where is he?”

Hank jerks his thumb at number 7: the focus of all their eyes. He’s struggling, panting, working hard, but not able to keep up speed: the soldier calls a second warning. Hank doesn’t want to look, though Peter and the boy from Maine are staring in fascination: and within a few minutes he doesn’t have to, because they are pulling ahead. You can keep walking with a muscle cramp, you really can, Hank thinks, but you can’t walk fast, and four miles an hour is fast.

“Warning! Warning, 7! Third warning, 7!”

The bully is still walking with a single warning from the last time they heard “Third warning!” called: but now one more of them only has to stumble and he’ll buy his ticket.

“I’ve got a charley horse!” the voice screams, sounding as if he knows he’s going to stumble. “It ain’t no fair if you’ve got a charley horse!”

There’s silence on the road, and the sound of stumbling footsteps, slow but not stopping.

“Thank God! It’s loosening!” the most relieved voice in the world says from behind him. Hank doesn’t look back. He doesn’t want to see if there’s disappointment or relief on Peter’s face.

They pass a milk truck, waiting to finish deliveries, and the driver calls to them “Go to it, boys!”  For him this must be a once-a-year event, to see the Long Walkers pass him on his rounds. Henry wonders if he’s noticed that there are still all hundred Walkers on the road.

It’s beginning to feel like a performance. People are watching. They’re the stars. One star and a chorus, but no one watching knows yet who is the star.

“All right, everyone, take five,” Hank says loudly. Some of the boys laugh. None of the audience do.

Then there’s a scream. A loud, horrifying scream. Hank still doesn’t look back. He sucks in his breath. He hears “It isn’t fair! It just isn’t fair!”

Then Hank looks. The boy is all by himself in the middle of the sunlit road, a boy who was a Walker, who is screaming and stumbling, clutching his leg. Four soldiers on the halftrack are aiming their guns at him. There is no fourth warning.

“It isn’t – ”

All four guns fire at once, a quadruple thud, louder than Henry had ever imagined. He’s walking backwards, his eyes are full and blurry, the boy doesn’t have a head any more, there’s a mess on the road, a bloody mess, bright red and glaring white, blood and bits of skull. Henry turns around and walks on, walking hard, not easy, fast, fast, to get away from what he sees still before his eyes: a Walker bought his ticket.

They do it, they really do it, Henry thinks, and he doesn’t want to cry and he puts his hands to his eyes to jerk his tears away. They kill us. It isn’t fair. He moves his hands to clasp at his skull. He is walking fast and he can see the people beside the road, watching him. It’s a performance.

“It’s not very big, is it?”  someone says on a note of mild complaint when they’re walking through Limestone.

Henry laughs. He can’t explain why it’s funny. They are performers walking for the audience. All of them stars. All of them walking to their star moment, when they stumble out of the chorus and the applause is louder than they could ever imagine.

All Chapters / Chapter Three