“Go on,” someone said. “You’re at second base, McVries. Want to try for third?”

Garraty didn’t have to turn. It was Stebbins, of course. Stebbins the lean Buddha. His feet carried him along automatically, but he was dimly aware that they felt swollen and slippery, as if they were filling with pus.

“Death is great for the appetites,” McVries said. “How about those two girls and Gribble? They wanted to see what screwing a dead man felt like. Now for Something Completely New and Different. I don’t know if Gribble got much out of it, but they sure as shit did. It’s the same with anybody. It doesn’t matter if they’re eating or drinking or sitting on their cans. They like it better, they feel it and taste it better because they’re watching dead men.

“But even that’s not the real point of this little expedition, Garraty. The point is, they’re the smart ones. They’re not getting thrown to the lions. They’re not staggering along and hoping they won’t have to take a shit with two warnings against them. You’re dumb, Garraty. You and me and Pearson and Barkovitch and Stebbins, we’re all dumb. Scramm’s dumb because he thinks he understands and he doesn’t. Olson’s dumb because he understood too much too late. They’re an imals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”

He paused, badly out of breath.

“There,” he said. “You went and got me going. Sermonette No. 342 in a series of six thousand, et cetera, et cetera. Probably cut my lifespan by five hours or more.”

“Then why are you doing it?” Garraty asked him. “If you know that much, and if you’re that sure, why are you doing it?”

“The same reason we’re all doing it,” Stebbins said. He smiled gently, almost lovingly. His lips were a little sun-parched; otherwise, his face was still unlined and seemingly invincible. “We want to die, that’s why we’re doing it. Why else, Garraty? Why else?”

CHAPTER 8

Ray Garraty cinched the concentrate belt tightly around his waist and firmly told himself he would eat absolutely nothing until nine-thirty at least. He could tell it was going to be a hard resolution to keep. His stomach gnawed and growled. All around him Walkers were compulsively celebrating the end of the first twenty-four hours on the road.

Scramm grinned at Garraty through a mouthful of cheese spread and said something pleasant but untranslatable. Baker had his vial of olives-real olives-and was popping them into his mouth with machine-gun regularity. Pearson was jamming crackers mounded high with tuna spread into his mouth, and McVries was slowly eating chicken spread. His eyes were half-lidded, and he might have been in extreme pain or at the pinnacle of pleasure.

Two more of them had gone down between eight-thirty and nine; one of them had been the Wayne that the gas jockey had been cheering for a ways back. But they had come ninety-nine miles with just thirty-six gone. Isn’t that wonderful, Garraty thought, feeling the saliva spurt in his mouth as McVries mopped the last of the chicken concentrate out of the tube and then cast the empty aside. Great. I hope they all drop dead right now.

A teenager in pegged jeans raced a middle-aged housewife for McVries’s empty tube, which had stopped being something useful and had begun its new career as a souvenir. The housewife was closer but the kid was faster and he beat her by half a length. “Thanks!” he hollered to McVries, holding the bent and twisted tube aloft. He scampered back to his friends, still waving it. The housewife eyed him sourly.

“Aren’t you eating anything?” McVries asked.

“I’m making myself wait.”

“For what?”

“Nine-thirty.”

McVries eyed him thoughtfully. “The old self-discipline bit?”

Garraty shrugged, ready for the backlash of sarcasm, but McVries only went on looking at him.

“You know something?” McVries said finally.

“What?”

“If I had a dollar… just a dollar, mind you… I think I’d put it on you, Garraty. I think you’ve got a chance to win this thing.”

Garraty laughed self-consciously. “Putting the whammy on me?”

“The what?”

“The whammy. Like telling a pitcher he’s got a no-hitter going.”

“Maybe I am,” McVries said. He put his hands out in front of him. They were shaking very slightly. McVries frowned at them in a distracted sort of concentration. It was a half-lunatic sort of gaze. “I hope Barkovitch buys out soon,” he said.

“Pete?”

“What?”

“If you had it to do all over again… if you knew you could get this far and still be walking… would you do it?”

McVries put his hands down and stared at Garraty. “Are you kidding? You must be.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Ray, I don’t think I’d do it again if the Major put his pistol up against my nads. This is the next thing to suicide, except that a regular suicide is quicker.”

“True,” Olson said. “How true.” He smiled a hollow, concentration-camp smile that made Garraty’s belly crawl.

Ten minutes later they passed under a huge red-and-white banner that proclaimed: 100 MILES!! CONGRATULATIONS FROM THE JEFFERSON PLANTATION CHAMBER OF COMMERCE! CONGRATULATIONS TO THIS YEAR’s “CENTURY CLUB” LONG WALKERS!!

“I got a place where they can put their Century Club,” Collie Parker said. “It’s long and brown and the sun never shines there.”

Suddenly the spotty stands of second-growth pine and spruce that had bordered the road in scruffy patches were gone, hidden by the first real crowd they had seen. A tremendous cheer went up, and that was followed by another and another. It was like surf hammering on rocks. Flashbulbs popped and dazzled. State police held the deep ranks of people back, and bright orange nylon restraining ropes were strong along the soft shoulders. A policeman struggled with a screaming little boy. The boy had a dirty face and a snotty nose. He was waving a toy glider in one hand and an autograph book in the other.

“Jeez!” Baker yelled. “Jeez, look at ’em, just look at ’em all!”

Collie Parker was waving and smiling, and it was not until Garraty closed up with him a little that he could hear him calling in his flat Midwestern accent: “Glad to seeya, ya goddam bunch of fools!” A grin and a wave. “Howaya, Mother McCree, you goddam bag. Your face and my ass, what a match. Howaya, howaya?”

Garraty clapped his hands over his mouth and giggled hysterically. A man in the first rank waving a sloppily lettered sign with Scramm’s name on it had popped his fly. A row back a fat woman in a ridiculous yellow sunsuit was being ground between three college students who were drinking beer. Stone-ground fatty, Garraty thought, and laughed harder.

You’re going to have hysterics, oh my God, don’t let it get you, think about Gribble… and don’t… don’t let… don’t…

But it was happening. The laughter came roaring out of him until his stomach was knotted and cramped and he was walking bent-legged and somebody was hollering at him, screaming at him over the roar of the crowd. It was McVries. “Ray! Ray! What is it? You all right?”

“They’re funny!” He was nearly weeping with laughter now. “Pete, Pete, they’re so funny, it’s just… just… that they’re so funny!”

A hard-faced little girl in a dirty sundress sat on the ground, pouty-mouthed and frowning. She made a horrible face as they passed. Garraty nearly collapsed with laughter and drew a warning. It was strange-in spite of all the noise he could still hear the warnings clearly.

I could die, he thought. I could just die laughing, wouldn’t that be a scream?