The long walk

They plowed through ankle-deep drifts of confetti. They lost each other and found each other in a sheeting blizzard of magazine streamers. Garraty snatched a paper out of the dark and crazy air at random and found himself looking at a Charles Atlas body-building ad. He grabbed another one and was brought face-to-face with John Travolta.

And at the height of the excitement, at the top of the first hill on 202, overlooking the mobbed turnpike behind and the gorged and glutted town at their feet, two huge purple-white spotlights split the air ahead of them and the Major was there, drawing away from them in his jeep like an hallucination, holding his salute ramrod stiff, incredibly, fantastically oblivious of the crowd in the gigantic throes of its labor all around him.

And the Walkers - the strings were not broken on their emotions, only badly out-of-tune. They had cheered wildly with hoarse and totally unheard voices, the thirty-seven of them that were left. The crowd could not know they were cheering but somehow they did, somehow they understood that the circle between death-worship and death-wish had been completed for another year and the crowd went completely loopy, convulsing itself in greater and greater paroxysms. Garraty felt a stabbing, needling pain in the left side of his chest and was still unable to stop cheering, even though he understood he was driving at the very brink of disaster.

A shifty-eyed Walker named Milligan saved them all by falling to his knees, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands pressed to his temples, as if he were trying to hold his brains in. He slid forward on the end of his nose, abrading the tip of it on the road like soft chalk on a rough blackboard - how amazing, Garraty thought, that kid's wearing his nose away on the road - and then Milligan was mercifully blasted. After that the Walkers stopped cheering. Garraty was badly scared by the pain in his chest that was subsiding only partially. He promised that was the end of the craziness.

“We getting close to your girl?” Parker asked. He had not weakened, but he had mellowed. Garraty liked him okay now.

“About fifty miles. Maybe sixty. Give or take.”

“You're one lucky sonofabitch, Garraty,” Parker said wistfully.

“I am?” He was surprised. He turned to see if Parker was laughing at him. Parker wasn't.

“You're gonna see your girl and your mother. Who the hell am I going to see between now and the end? No one but these pigs.” He gestured with his middle finger at the crowd, which seemed to take the gesture as a salute and cheered him deliriously. “I'm homesick,” he said. “And scared.” Suddenly he screamed at the crowd: “Pigs! You pigs!” They cheered him more loudly than ever.

“I'm scared, too. And homesick... I mean we...” He groped. “We're all too far away from home. The road keeps us away. I may see them, but I won't be able to touch them.”

“The rules say—”

“I know what the rules say. Bodily contact with anyone I wish, as long as I don't leave the road. But it's not the same. There's a wall.”

“Fuckin' easy for you to talk. You're going to see them, just the same.”

“Maybe that'll only make it worse,” McVries said. He had come quietly up behind them. They had just passed under a blinking yellow warning flasher at the Winthrop intersection. Garraty could see it waxing and waning on the pavement after they had passed it, a fearful yellow eye, opening and closing.

“You're all crazy,” Parker said amiably. “I'm getting out of here.” He put on a little speed and had soon nearly disappeared into the blinking shadows.

“He thinks we're queer for each other,” McVries said, amused.

“He what?” Garraty's head snapped up.

“He's not such a bad guy,” McVries said thoughtfully. He cocked a humorous eye at Garraty. “Maybe he's even half-right. Maybe that's why I saved your ass. Maybe I'm queer for you.”

“With a face like mine? I thought you perverts liked the willowy type.” Still, he was suddenly uneasy.

Suddenly, shockingly, McVries said: “Would you let me jerk you off?”

Garraty hissed in breath. “What the hell—”

“Oh, shut up,” McVries said crossly. “Where do you get off with all this self-righteous shit? I'm not even going to make it any easier by letting you know if I'm joking. What say?”

Garraty felt a sticky dryness in his throat. The thing was, he wanted to be touched. Queer, not queer, that didn't seem to matter now that they were all busy dying. All that mattered was McVries. He didn't want McVries to touch him, not that way.

“Well, I suppose you did save my life—” Garraty let it hang.

McVries laughed. “I'm supposed to feel like a heel because you owe me something and I'm taking advantage? Is that it?”

“Do what you want,” Garraty said shortly. “But quit playing games.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“Whatever you want!” Garraty yelled. Pearson, who had been staring, nearly hypnotized, at his feet, looked up, startled. “Whatever you goddam want!” Garraty yelled.

McVries laughed again. “You're all right, Ray. Never doubt it.” He clapped Garraty's shoulder and dropped back.