The Long Walk

by Stephen King, Richard Bachman

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

On the first day of May, 100 teenage boys meet for a race known as “The Long Walk.” If you break the rules, you get three warnings. If you exceed your limit, what happens is absolutely terrifying...

Release date: January 1, 2016

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 321

Sample

The Long Walk Chapter 1
“Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars.

George, who are our first contestants?

George . . . ? Are you there, George?”

—Groucho Marx

You Bet Your Life

An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run. One of the guards, an expressionless young man in a khaki uniform and a Sam Browne belt, asked to see the blue plastic ID card. The boy in the back seat handed it to his mother. His mother handed it to the guard. The guard took it to a computer terminal that looked strange and out of place in the rural stillness. The computer terminal ate the card and flashed this on its screen:

GARRATY RAYMOND DAVIS

RD 1 POWNAL MAINE

ANDROSCOGGIN COUNTY

ID NUMBER 49-801-89

OK-OK-OK

The guard punched another button and all of this disappeared, leaving the terminal screen smooth and green and blank again. He waved them forward.

“Don’t they give the card back?” Mrs. Garraty asked. “Don’t they—”

“No, Mom,” Garraty said patiently.

“Well, I don’t like it,” she said, pulling forward into an empty space. She had been saying it ever since they set out in the dark of two in the morning. She had been moaning it, actually.

“Don’t worry,” he said without hearing himself. He was occupied with looking and with his own confusion of anticipation and fear. He was out of the car almost before the engine’s last asthmatic wheeze—a tall, well-built boy wearing a faded army fatigue jacket against the eight o’clock spring chill.

His mother was also tall, but too thin. Her breasts were almost nonexistent: token nubs. Her eyes were wandering and unsure, somehow shocked. Her face was an invalid’s face. Her iron-colored hair had gone awry under the complication of clips that was supposed to hold it in place. Her dress hung badly on her body as if she had recently lost a lot of weight.

“Ray,” she said in that whispery conspirator’s voice that he had come to dread. “Ray, listen—”

He ducked his head and pretended to tuck in his shirt. One of the guards was eating C rations from a can and reading a comic book. Garraty watched the guard eating and reading and thought for the ten thousandth time: It’s all real. And now, at last, the thought began to swing some weight.

“There’s still time to change your mind—”

The fear and anticipation cranked up a notch.

“No, there’s no time for that,” he said. “The backout date was yesterday.”

Still in that low conspirator’s voice that he hated: “They’d understand, I know they would. The Major—”

“The Major would—” Garraty began, and saw his mother wince. “You know what the Major would do, Mom.”

Another car had finished the small ritual at the gate and had parked. A boy with dark hair got out. His parents followed and for a moment the three of them stood in conference like worried baseball players. He, like some of the other boys, was wearing a light packsack. Garraty wondered if he hadn’t been a little stupid not to bring one himself.

“You won’t change your mind?”

It was guilt, guilt taking the face of anxiety. Although he was only sixteen, Ray Garraty knew something about guilt. She felt that she had been too dry, too tired, or maybe just too taken up with her older sorrows to halt her son’s madness in its seedling stage—to halt it before the cumbersome machinery of the State with its guards in khaki and its computer terminals had taken over, binding himself more tightly to its insensate self with each passing day, until yesterday, when the lid had come down with a final bang.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “This is my idea, Mom. I know it wasn’t yours. I—” He glanced around. No one was paying the slightest attention to them. “I love you, but this way is best, one way or the other.”

“It’s not,” she said, now verging on tears. “Ray, it’s not, if your father was here, he’d put a stop to—”

“Well, he’s not, is he?” He was brutal, hoping to stave off her tears . . . what if they had to drag her off? He had heard that sometimes that happened. The thought made him feel cold. In a softer voice he said, “Let it go now, Mom. Okay?” He forced a grin. “Okay,” he answered for her.

Her chin was still trembling, but she nodded. Not all right, but too late. There was nothing anyone could do.

A light wind soughed through the pines. The sky was pure blue. The road was just ahead and the simple stone post that marked the border between America and Canada. Suddenly his anticipation was greater than his fear, and he wanted to get going, get the show on the road.

“I made these. You can take them, can’t you? They’re not too heavy, are they?” She thrust a foil-wrapped package of cookies at him.

“Yeah.” He took them and then clutched her awkwardly, trying to give her what she needed to have. He kissed her cheek. Her skin was like old silk. For a moment he could have cried himself. Then he thought of the smiling, mustachioed face of the Major and stepped back, stuffing the cookies into the pocket of his fatigue jacket.

“G’bye, Mom.”

“Goodbye, Ray. Be a good boy.”

She stood there for a moment and he had a sense of her being very light, as if even the light puffs of breeze blowing this morning might send her sailing away like a dandelion gone to seed. Then she got back into the car and started the engine. Garraty stood there. She raised her hand and waved. The tears were flowing now. He could see them. He waved back and then as she pulled out he just stood there with his arms at his sides, conscious of how fine and brave and alone he must look. But when the car had passed back through the gate, forlornness struck him and he was only a sixteen-year-old boy again, alone in a strange place.

He turned back toward the road. The other boy, the dark-haired one, was watching his folks pull out. He had a bad scar along one cheek. Garraty walked over to him and said hello.

The dark-haired boy gave him a glance. “Hi.”

“I’m Ray Garraty,” he said, feeling mildly like an asshole.

“I’m Peter McVries.”

“You are ready?” Garraty asked.

McVries shrugged. “I feel jumpy. That’s the worst.”

Garraty nodded.

The two of them walked toward the road and the stone marker. Behind them, other cars were pulling out. A woman began screaming abruptly. Unconsciously, Garraty and McVries drew closer together. Neither of them looked back. Ahead of them was the road, wide and black.

“That composition surface will be hot by noon,” McVries said abruptly. “I’m going to stick to the shoulder.”

Garraty nodded. McVries looked at him thoughtfully.

“What do you weigh?”

“Hundred and sixty.”

“I’m one-sixty-seven. They say the heavier guys get tired quicker, but I think I’m in pretty good shape.”

To Garraty, Peter McVries looked rather more than that—he looked awesomely fit. He wondered who they were that said the heavier guys got tired quicker, almost asked, and decided not to. The Walk was one of those things that existed on apocrypha, talismans, legend.

McVries sat down in the shade near a couple of other boys, and after a moment, Garraty sat beside him. McVries seemed to have dismissed him entirely. Garraty looked at his watch. It was five after eight. Fifty-five minutes to go. Impatience and anticipation came back, and he did his best to squash them, telling himself to enjoy sitting while he could.

All of the boys were sitting. Sitting in groups and sitting alone; one boy had climbed onto the lowest branch of a pine overlooking the road and was eating what looked like a jelly sandwich. He was skinny and blond, wearing purple pants and a blue chambray shirt under an old green zip sweater with holes in the elbows. Garraty wondered if the skinny ones would last or burn out quickly.

The boys he and McVries had sat down next to were talking.

“I’m not hurrying,” one of them said. “Why should I? If I get warned, so what? You just adjust, that’s all. Adjustment is the key word here. Remember where you heard that first.”

He looked around and discovered Garraty and McVries.

“More lambs to the slaughter. Hank Olson’s the name. Walking is my game.” He said this with no trace of a smile at all.

Garraty offered his own name. McVries spoke his own absently, still looking off toward the road.

“I’m Art Baker,” the other said quietly. He spoke with a very slight Southern accent. The four of them shook hands all around.

There was a moment’s silence, and McVries said, “Kind of scary, isn’t it?”

They all nodded except Hank Olson, who shrugged and grinned. Garraty watched the boy in the pine tree finish his sandwich, ball up the waxed paper it had been in, and toss it onto the soft shoulder. He’ll burn out early, he decided. That made him feel a little better.

“You see that spot right by the marker post?” Olson said suddenly.

They all looked. The breeze made moving shadow-patterns across the road. Garraty didn’t know if he saw anything or not.

“That’s from the Long Walk the year before last,” Olson said with grim satisfaction. “Kid was so scared he just froze up at nine o’clock.”

They considered the horror of it silently.

“Just couldn’t move. He took his three warnings and then at 9:02 AM they gave him his ticket. Right there by the starting post.”

Garraty wondered if his own legs would freeze. He didn’t think so, but it was a thing you wouldn’t know for sure until the time came, and it was a terrible thought. He wondered why Hank Olson wanted to bring up such a terrible thing.

Suddenly Art Baker sat up straight. “Here he comes.”

A dun-colored jeep drove up to the stone marker and stopped. It was followed by a strange, tread-equipped vehicle that moved much more slowly. There were toy-sized radar dishes mounted on the front and back of this halftrack. Two soldiers lounged on its upper deck, and Garraty felt a chill in his belly when he looked at them. They were carrying army-type heavy-caliber carbine rifles.

Some of the boys got up, but Garraty did not. Neither did Olson or Baker, and after his initial look, McVries seemed to have fallen back into his own thoughts. The skinny kid in the pine tree was swinging his feet idly.

The Major got out of the jeep. He was a tall, straight man with a deep desert tan that went well with his simple khakis. A pistol was strapped to his Sam Browne belt, and he was wearing reflector sunglasses. It was rumored that the Major’s eyes were extremely light-sensitive, and he was never seen in public without his sunglasses.

“Sit down, boys,” he said. “Keep Hint Thirteen in mind.” Hint Thirteen was “Conserve energy whenever possible.”

Those who had stood sat down. Garraty looked at his watch again. It said 8:16, and he decided it was a minute fast. The Major always showed up on time. He thought momentarily of setting it back a minute and then forgot it.

“I’m not going to make a speech,” the Major said, sweeping them with the blank lenses that covered his eyes. “I give my congratulations to the winner among your number, and my acknowledgments of valor to the losers.”

He turned to the back of the jeep. There was a living silence. Garraty breathed deep of the spring air. It would be warm. A good day to walk.

The Major turned back to them. He was holding a clipboard. “When I call your name, please step forward and take your number. Then go back to your place until it is time to begin. Do this smartly, please.”

“You’re in the army now,” Olson whispered with a grin, but Garraty ignored it. You couldn’t help admiring the Major. Garraty’s father, before the Squads took him away, had been fond of calling the Major the rarest and most dangerous monster any nation can produce, a society-supported sociopath. But he had never seen the Major in person.

“Aaronson.”

A short, chunky farmboy with a sunburned neck gangled forward, obviously awed by the Major’s presence, and took his large plastic 1. He fixed it to his shirt by the pressure strip and the Major clapped him on the back.

“Abraham.”

A tall boy with reddish hair in jeans and a T-shirt. His jacket was tied about his waist schoolboy style and flapped wildly around his knees. Olson sniggered.

“Baker, Arthur.”

“That’s me,” Baker said, and got to his feet. He moved with deceptive leisure, and he made Garraty nervous. Baker was going to be tough. Baker was going to last a long time.

Baker came back. He had pressed his number 3 onto the right breast of his shirt.

“Did he say anything to you?” Garraty asked.

“He asked me if it was commencing to come off hot down home,” Baker said shyly. “Yeah, he . . . the Major talked to me.”

“Not as hot as it’s gonna commence getting up here,” Olson cracked.

“Baker, James,” the Major said.

It went on until 8:40, and it came out right. No one had ducked out. Back in the parking lot, engines started and a number of cars began pulling out—boys from the backup list who would now go home and watch the Long Walk coverage on TV. It’s on, Garraty thought, it’s really on.

When his turn came, the Major gave him number 47 and told him “Good luck.” Up close he smelled very masculine and somehow overpowering. Garraty had an almost insatiable urge to touch the man’s leg and make sure he was real.

Peter McVries was 61. Hank Olson was 70. He was with the Major longer than the rest. The Major laughed at something Olson said and clapped him on the back. “I told him to keep a lot of money on short call,” Olson said when he came back. “And he told me to give ’em hell. Said he liked to see someone who was raring to rip. Give ’em hell, boy, he said.”

“Pretty good,” McVries said, and then winked at Garraty. Garraty wondered what McVries had meant, winking like that. Was he making fun of Olson?

The skinny boy in the tree was named Stebbins. He got his number with his head down, not speaking to the Major at all, and then sat back at the base of his tree. Garraty was somehow fascinated with the boy.

Number 100 was a red-headed fellow with a volcanic complexion. His name was Zuck. He got his number and then they all sat and waited for what would come next.

Then three soldiers from the halftrack passed out wide belts with snap pockets. The pockets were filled with tubes of high-energy concentrate pastes. More soldiers came around with canteens. They buckled on the belts and slung the canteens. Olson slung his belt low on his hips like a gunslinger, found a Waifa chocolate bar, and began to eat it. “Not bad,” he said, grinning. He swigged from his canteen, washing down the chocolate, and Garraty wondered if Olson was just fronting, or if he knew something Garraty did not.

The Major looked them over soberly. Garraty’s wristwatch said 8:56—how had it gotten so late? His stomach lurched painfully.

“All right, fellows, line up by tens, please. No particular order. Stay with your friends, if you like.”

Garraty got up. He felt numb and unreal. It was as if his body now belonged to someone else.

“Well here we go,” McVries said at his elbow. “Good luck, everyone.”

“Good luck to you,” Garraty said, surprised.

McVries said: “I need my fucking head examined.” He looked suddenly pale and sweaty, not so awesomely fit as he had earlier. He was trying to smile and not making it. The scar stood out on his cheek like a wild punctuation mark.

Stebbins got up and ambled to the rear of the ten wide, ten deep queue. Olson, Baker, McVries, and Garraty were in the third row. Garraty’s mouth was dry. He wondered if he should drink some water. He decided against it. He had never in his life been so aware of his feet. He wondered if he might freeze and get his ticket on the starting line. He wondered if Stebbins would fold early—Stebbins with his jelly sandwich and his purple pants. He wondered if he would fold up first. He wondered what it would feel like if—

His wristwatch said 8:59.

The Major was studying a stainless steel pocket chronometer. He raised his fingers slowly, and everything hung suspended with his hand. The hundred boys watched it carefully, and the silence was awful and immense. The silence was everything.

Garraty’s watch said 9:00, but the poised hand did not fall.

Do it! Why doesn’t he do it?

He felt like screaming it out.

Then he remembered that his watch was a minute fast—you could set your watch by the Major, only he hadn’t, he had forgotten.

The Major’s fingers dropped. “Luck to all,” he said. His face was expressionless and the reflector sunglasses hid his eyes. They began to walk smoothly, with no jostling.

Garraty walked with them. He hadn’t frozen. Nobody froze. His feet passed beyond the stone marker, in parade-step with McVries on his left and Olson on his right. The sound of feet was very loud.

This is it, this is it, this is it.

A sudden insane urge to stop came to him. Just to see if they really meant business. He rejected the thought indignantly and a little fearfully.

They came out of the shade and into the sun, the warm spring sun. It felt good. Garraty relaxed, put his hands in his pockets, and kept step with McVries. The group began to spread out, each person finding his own stride and speed. The halftrack clanked along the soft shoulder, throwing thin dust. The tiny radar dishes turned busily, monitoring each Walker’s speed with a sophisticated on-board computer. Low speed cutoff was exactly four miles an hour.

“Warning! Warning 88!”

Garraty started and looked around. It was Stebbins. Stebbins was 88. Suddenly he was sure Stebbins was going to get his ticket right here, still in sight of the starting post.

“Smart.” It was Olson.

“What?” Garraty asked. He had to make a conscious effort to move his tongue.

“The guy takes a warning while he’s still fresh and gets an idea of where the limit is. And he can sluff it easy enough—you walk an hour without getting a fresh warning, you lose one of the old ones. You know that.”

“Sure I know it,” Garraty said. It was in the rule book. They gave you three warnings. The fourth time you fell below four miles an hour you were . . . well, you were out of the Walk. But if you had three warnings and could manage to walk for three hours, you were back in the sun again.

“So now he knows,” Olson said. “And at 10:02, he’s in the clear again.”

Garraty walked on at a good clip. He was feeling fine. The starting post dropped from sight as they breasted a hill and began descending into a long, pine-studded valley. Here and there were rectangular fields with the earth just freshly turned.

“Potatoes, they tell me,” McVries said.

“Best in the world,” Garraty answered automatically.

“You from Maine?” Baker asked.

“Yeah, downstate.” He looked up ahead. Several boys had drawn away from the main group, making perhaps six miles an hour. Two of them were wearing identical leather jackets, with what looked like eagles on the back. It was a temptation to speed up, but Garraty refused to be hurried. “Conserve energy whenever possible”—Hint 13.

“Does the road go anywhere near your hometown?” McVries asked.

“About seven miles to one side. I guess my mother and my girlfriend will come to see me.” He paused and added carefully: “If I’m still walking, of course.”

“Hell, there won’t be twenty-five gone when we get downstate,” Olson said.

A silence fell among them at that. Garraty knew it wasn’t so, and he thought Olson did, too.

Two other boys received warnings, and in spite of what Olson had said, Garraty’s heart lurched each time. He checked back on Stebbins. He was still at the rear, and eating another jelly sandwich. There was a third sandwich jutting from the pocket of his ragged green sweater. Garraty wondered if his mother had made them, and he thought of the cookies his own mother had given him—pressed on him, as if warding off evil spirits.

“Why don’t they let people watch the start of a Long Walk?” Garraty asked.

“Spoils the Walkers’ concentration,” a sharp voice said.

Garraty turned his head. It was a small dark, intense-looking boy with the number 5 pressed to the collar of his jacket. Garraty couldn’t remember his name. “Concentration?” he said.

“Yes.” The boy moved up beside Garraty. “The Major has said it is very important to concentrate on calmness at the beginning of a Long Walk.” He pressed his thumb reflectively against the end of his rather sharp nose. There was a bright red pimple there. “I agree. Excitement, crowds, TV later. Right now all we need to do is focus.” He stared at Garraty with his hooded dark brown eyes and said it again. “Focus.”

“All I’m focusing on is pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down,” Olson said.

5 looked insulted. “You have to pace yourself. You have to focus on yourself. You have to have a Plan. I’m Gary Barkovitch, by the way. My home is Washington, D.C.”

“I’m John Carter,” Olson said. “My home is Barsoom, Mars.”

Barkovitch curled his lip in contempt and dropped back.

“There’s one cuckoo in every clock, I guess,” Olson said.

But Garraty thought Barkovitch was thinking pretty clearly—at least until one of the guards called out “Warning! Warning 5!” about five minutes later.

“I’ve got a stone in my shoe!” Barkovitch said waspishly.

The soldier didn’t reply. He dropped off the halftrack and stood on the shoulder of the road opposite Barkovitch. In his hand he held a stainless steel chronometer just like the Major’s. Barkovitch stopped completely and took off his shoe. He shook a tiny pebble out of it. Dark, intense, his olive-sallow face shiny with sweat, he paid no attention when the soldier called out, “Second warning, 5.” Instead, he smoothed his sock carefully over the arch of his foot.

“Oh-oh,” Olson said. They had all turned around and were walking backward.

Stebbins, still at the tag end, walked past Barkovitch without looking at him. Now Barkovitch was all alone, slightly to the right of the white line, retying his shoe.

“Third warning, 5. Final warning.”

There was something in Garraty’s belly that felt like a sticky ball of mucus. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t look away. He wasn’t conserving energy whenever possible by walking backward, but he couldn’t help that, either. He could almost feel Barkovitch’s seconds shriveling away to nothing.

“Oh, boy,” Olson said. “That dumb shit, he’s gonna get his ticket.”

But then Barkovitch was up. He paused to brush some road dirt from the knees of his pants. Then he broke into a trot, caught up with the group, and settled back into his walking pace. He passed Stebbins, who still didn’t look at him, and caught up with Olson.

He grinned, brown eyes glittering. “See? I just got myself a rest. It’s all in my Plan.”

“Maybe you think so,” Olson said, his voice higher than usual. “All I see that you got is three warnings. For your lousy minute and a half you got to walk three . . . fucking . . . hours. And why in hell did you need a rest? We just started, for Chrissake!”

Barkovitch looked insulted. His eyes burned at Olson. “We’ll see who gets his ticket first, you or me,” he said. “It’s all in my Plan.”

“Your Plan and the stuff that comes out of my asshole bear a suspicious resemblance to each other,” Olson said, and Baker chuckled.

With a snort, Barkovitch strode past them.

Olson couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Just don’t stumble, buddy. They don’t warn you again. They just . . .”

Barkovitch didn’t even look back and Olson gave up, disgusted.

At thirteen past nine by Garraty’s watch (he had taken the trouble to set it back the one minute), the Major’s jeep breasted the hill they had just started down. He came past them on the shoulder opposite the pacing halftrack and raised a battery-powered loudhailer to his lips.

“I’m pleased to announce that you have finished the first mile of your journey, boys. I’d also like to remind you that the longest distance a full complement of Walkers has ever covered is seven and three-quarters miles. I’m hoping you’ll better that.”

The jeep spurted ahead. Olson appeared to be considering this news with startled, even fearful, wonder. Not even eight miles, Garraty thought. It wasn’t nearly as far as he would have guessed. He hadn’t expected anyone—not even Stebbins—to get a ticket until late afternoon at least. He thought of Barkovitch. All he had to do was fall below speed once in the next hour.

“Ray?” It was Art Baker. He had taken off his coat and slung it over one arm. “Any particular reason you came on the Long Walk?”

Garraty unclipped his canteen and had a quick swallow of water. It was cool and good. It left beads of moisture on his upper lip and he licked them off. It was good, good to feel things like that.

“I don’t really know,” he said truthfully.

“Me either.” Baker thought for a moment. “Did you go out for track or anything? In school?”

“No.”

“Me either. But I guess it don’t matter, does it? Not now.”

“No, not now,” Garraty asked.

Conversation lulled. They passed through a small village with a country store and a gas station. Two old men sat on folding lawn-chairs outside the gas station, watching them with hooded and reptilian old men’s eyes. On the steps of the country store, a young woman held up her tiny son so he could see them. And a couple of older kids, around twelve, Garraty judged, watched them out of sight wistfully.

Some of the boys began to speculate about how much ground they had covered. The word came back that a second pacer halftrack had been dispatched to cover the half a dozen boys in the vanguard . . . they were now completely out of sight. Someone said they were doing seven miles an hour. Someone else said it was ten. Someone told them authoritatively that a guy up ahead was flagging and had been warned twice. Garraty wondered why they weren’t catching up to him if that was true.

Olson finished the Waifa chocolate bar he had started back at the border and drank some water. Some of the others were also eating, but Garraty decided to wait until he was really hungry. He had heard the concentrates were quite good. The astronauts got them when they went into space.

A little after ten o’clock, they passed a sign that said LIMESTONE 10 MI. Garraty thought about the only Long Walk his father had ever let him go to. They went to Freeport and watched them walk through. His mother had been with them. The Walkers were tired and hollow-eyed and barely conscious of the cheering and the waving signs and the constant hoorah as people cheered on their favorites and those on whom they had wagered. His father told him later that day that people lined the roads from Bangor on. Up-country it wasn’t so interesting, and the road was strictly cordoned of