They both laughed then, long and hysterically, clutching each other and trying to keep walking at the same time. It was as good a way as any to put an end to the night once and for all. It went on until Garraty and McVries were both warned. They stopped laughing and talking then, and settled into the day’s business.

Thinking, Garraty thought. That’s the day’s business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them. It was enough to make you wonder what Socrates had thought about right after he had tossed off his hemlock cocktail.

At a little past five o’clock they passed their first clump of bona fide spectators, four little boys sitting cross-legged like Indians outside a pup tent in a dewy field. One was still wrapped up in his sleeping bag, as solemn as an Eskimo. Their hands went back and forth like timed metronomes. None of them smiled.

Shortly afterward, the road forked into another, larger road. This one was a smooth, wide expanse of asphalt, three lanes wide. They passed a truck-stop restaurant, and everyone whistled and waved at the three young waitresses sitting on the steps, just to show them they were still starchy. The only one who sounded halfway serious was Collie Parker.

“Friday night,” Collie yelled loudly. “Keep it in mind. You and me, Friday night.”

Garraty thought they were all acting a little immature, but he waved politely and the waitresses seemed not to mind. The Walkers spread out across the wider road as more of them came fully awake to the May 2nd morning sunshine. Garraty caught sight of Barkovitch again and wondered if Barkovitch wasn’t really one of the smart ones. With no friends you had no grief.

A few minutes later the word came back, and this time the word was a knock-knock joke. Bruce Pastor, the boy just in front of Garraty, turned around to Garraty and said, “Knock, knock, Garraty.”

“Who’s there?”

“Major.”

“Major who?”

“Major buggers his mother before breakfast,” Bruce Pastor said, and laughed uproariously. Garraty chuckled and passed it back to McVries, who passed it to Olson. When the joke came back the second time, the Major was buggering his grandmother before breakfast. The third time he was buggering Sheila, the Bedlington terrier that appeared with him in so many of his press releases.

Garraty was still laughing over that one when he noticed that McVries’s laughter had tapered off and disappeared. He was staring with an odd fixity at the wooden-faced soldiers atop the halftrack. They were staring back impassively.

“You think that’s funny?” he yelled suddenly. The sound of his shout cut cleanly through the laughter and silenced it. McVries’s face was dark with suffused blood. The scar stood out in dead white contrast, like a slashed exclamation mark, and for one fear-filled moment Garraty thought he was having a stroke.

“Major buggers himself, that’s what I think!” McVries cried hoarsely. “You guys, you probably bugger each other. Pretty funny, huh? Pretty funny, you bunch of motherfuckers, right? Pretty goddam FUNNY, am I right?”

Other Walkers stared uneasily at McVries and then eased away.

McVries suddenly ran at the halftrack. Two of the three soldiers raised their guns to high port, ready, but McVries halted, halted dead, and raised his fists at them, shaking them above his head like a mad conductor.

“Come on down here! Put down those rifles and come on down here! I’ll show you what’s funny!”

“Warning,” one of them said in a perfectly neutral voice. “Warning 61. Second warning.”

Oh my God, Garraty thought numbly. He’s going to get it and he’s so close… so close to them… he’ll fly through the air just like Freaky D'Allessio. McVries broke into a run, caught up with the halftrack, stopped, and spat on the side of it. The spittle cut a clean streak through the dust on the side of the halftrack.

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

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

“Fuck your warnings!”

Suddenly, unaware he was going to do it, Garraty turned and ran back, drawing his own warning. He only heard it with some back part of his mind. The soldiers were drawing down on McVries now. Garraty grabbed McVries’s arm. “Come on-”

“Get out of here, Ray, I’m gonna fight them!”

Garraty put out his hands and gave McVries a hard, flat shove. “You’re going to get shot, you asshole.”

Stebbins passed them by.

McVries looked at Garraty, seeming to recognize him for the first time. A second later Garraty drew his own third warning, and he knew McVries could only be seconds away from his ticket.

“Go to hell,” McVries said in a dead, washed-out voice. He began to walk again.

Garraty walked with him. “I thought you were going to buy it, that’s all,” he said.

“But I didn’t, thanks to the musketeer,” McVries said sullenly. His hand went to the scar. “Fuck, we’re all going to buy it.”

“Somebody wins. It might be one of us.”

“It’s a fake,” McVries said, his voice trembling. “There’s no winner, no Prize. They take the last guy out behind a barn somewhere and shoot him too.”

“Don’t be so fucking stupid!” Garraty yelled at him furiously. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re sa-”

“Everyone loses,” McVries said. His eyes peered out of the dark cave of his sockets like baleful animals. They were walking by themselves. The other Walkers were keeping away, at least for the time being. McVries had shown red, and so had Garraty, in a way-he had gone against his own best interest when he ran back to McVries. In all probability he had kept McVries from being number twenty-eight.

“Everyone loses,” McVries repeated. “You better believe it.”

They walked over a railroad track. They walked under a cement bridge. On the other side they passed a boarded-up Dairy Queen with a sign that read: WILL REOPEN FOR SEASON JUNE 5.

Olson drew a warning.

Garraty felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around. It was Stebbins. He looked no better or worse than he had the night before. “Your friend there is jerked at the Major,” he said.

McVries showed no sign of hearing.

“I guess so, yeah,” Garraty said. “I myself have passed the point where I’d want to invite him home for tea.”

“Look behind us.”

Garraty did. A second halftrack had rolled up, and as he looked, a third fell in behind it, coming in off a side road.

“The Major’s coming,” Stebbins said, “and everybody will cheer.” He smiled, and his smile was oddly lizardlike. “They don’t really hate him yet. Not yet. They just think they do. They think they’ve been through hell. But wait until tonight. Wait until tomorrow.”

Garraty looked at Stebbins uneasily. “What if they hiss and boo and throw canteens at him, or something?”

“Are you going to hiss and boo and throw your canteen?”

“No.”

“Neither will anyone else. You’ll see.”

“Stebbins?”

Stebbins raised his eyebrows.

“You think you’ll win, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Stebbins said calmly. “I’m quite sure of it.” And he dropped back to his usual position.

At 5:25 Yannick bought his ticket. And at 5:30 AM, just as Stebbins had predicted, the Major came.

There was a winding, growling roar as his jeep bounced over the crest of the hill behind them. Then it was roaring past them, along the shoulder. The Major was standing at full attention. As before, he was holding a stiff, eyes-right salute. A funny chill of pride went through Garraty’s chest.

Not all of them cheered. Collie Parker spat on the ground. Barkovitch thumbed his nose. And McVries only looked, his lips moving soundlessly. Olson appeared not to notice at all as the Major went by; he was back to looking at his feet.