“No,” Garraty said. Baker was making him uneasy. The thunder had begun to roll its wagons across the sky again. “Your Aunt Hattie, is she dead now?”

“No.” Baker looked up at the sky. “She’s down home. Probably out on the front porch in her rockin’ chair. She can’t walk much anymore. Just sittin’ and rockin’ and listenin’ to the bulletins on the radio. And smilin’ each time she hears the new figures.” Baker rubbed his elbows with his palms. “You ever see a cat eat its own kittens, Garraty?”

Garraty didn’t reply. There was an electric tension in the air now, something about the storm poised above them, and something more. Garraty could not fathom it. When he blinked his eyes he seemed to see the out-of-kilter eyes of Freaky D'Allessio looking back at him from the darkness.

Finally he said to Baker: “Does everybody in your family study up on dying?”

Baker smiled pallidly. “Well, I was turnin’ over the idea of going to mortician’s school in a few years. Good job. Morticians go on eating even in a depression.”

“I always thought I’d get into urinal manufacture,” Garraty said. “Get contracts with cinemas and bowling alleys and things. Sure-fire. How many urinal factories can there be in the country?”

“I don’t think I’d still want to be a mortician,” Baker said. “Not that it matters.”

A huge flash of lightning tore across the sky. A gargantuan clap of thunder followed. The wind picked up in jerky gusts. Clouds raced across the sky like crazed privateers across an ebony nightmare sea.

“It’s coming,” Garraty said. “It’s coming, Art.”

“Some people say they don’t care,” Baker said suddenly. “Something simple, that’s all I want when I go, Don.” That’s what they’d tell him. My uncle. But most of ’em care plenty. That’s what he always told me. They say, “Just a pine box will do me fine.” But they end up having a big one… with a lead sleeve if they can afford it. Lots of them even write the model number in their wills.”

“Why?” Garraty asked.

“Down home, most of them want to be buried in mausoleums. Aboveground. They don’t want to be underground’cause the water table’s so high where I come from. Things not quick in the damp. But if you’re buried aboveground, you got the rats to worry about. Big Louisiana bayou rats. Graveyard rats. They’d gnaw through one of them pine boxes in zip flat.”

The wind pulled at them with invisible hands. Garraty wished the storm would come on and come. It was like an insane merry-go-round. No matter who you talked to, you came around to this damned subject again.

“Be fucked if I’d do it,” Garraty said. “Lay out fifteen hundred dollars or something just to keep the rats away after I was dead.”

“I dunno,” Baker said. His eyes were half-lidded, sleepy. “They go for the soft parts, that’s what troubles my mind. I could see ’em worryin’ a hole in my own coffin, then makin’ it bigger, finally wrigglin’ through. And goin’ right for my eyes like they was jujubes. They’d eat my eyes and then I’d be part of that rat. Ain’t that right?”

“I don’t know,” Garraty said sickly.

“No thanks. I’ll take that coffin with the lead sleeve. Every time.”

“Although you’d only actually need it the once,” Garraty said with a horrified little giggle.

“That is true,” Baker agreed solemnly.

Lightning forked again, an almost pink streak that left the air smelling of ozone. A moment later the storm smote them again. But it wasn’t rain this time. It was hail.

In a space of five seconds they were being pelted by hailstones the size of small pebbles. Several of the boys cried out, and Garraty shielded his eyes with one hand. The wind rose to a shriek. Hailstones bounced and smashed against the road, against faces and bodies.

Jensen ran in a huge, rambling circle, eyes covered, feet stumbling and rebounding against each other, in a total panic. He finally blundered off the shoulder, and the soldiers on the halftrack pumped half a dozen rounds into the undulating curtain of hail before they could be sure. Goodbye, Jensen, Garraty thought. Sorry, man.

Then rain began to fall through the hail, sluicing down the hill they were climbing, melting the hail scattered around their feet. Another wave of stones hit them, more rain, another splatter of hail, and then the rain was falling in steady sheets, punctuated by loud claps of thunder.

“Goddam!” Parker yelled, striding up to Garraty. His face was covered with red blotches, and he looked like a drowned water rat. “Garraty, this is without a doubt-”

“-yeah, the most fucked-up state in the fifty-one,” Garraty finished. “Go soak your head.' Parker threw his head back, opened his mouth, and let the cold rain patter in.

“I am, goddammit, I am!”

Garraty bent himself into the wind and caught up with McVries. “How does this grab you?” he asked.

McVries clutched himself and shivered. “You can’t win. Now I wish the sun was out.”

“It won’t last long,” Garraty said, but he was wrong. As they walked into four o’clock, it was still raining.

CHAPTER 10

There was no sunset as they walked into their second night on the road. The rainstorm gave way to a light, chilling drizzle around four-thirty. The drizzle continued on until almost eight o’clock. Then the clouds began to break up and show bright, coldly flickering stars.

Garraty pulled himself closer together inside his damp clothes and did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. Fickle spring had pulled the balmy warmth that had come with them this far from beneath them like an old rug.

Maybe the crowds provided some warmth. Radiant heat, or something. More and more of them lined the road. They were huddled together for warmth but were undemonstrative. They watched the Walkers go past and then went home or hurried on to the next vantage point. If it was blood the crowds were looking for, they hadn’t gotten much of it. They had lost only two since Jensen, both of them younger boys who had simply fainted dead away. That put them exactly halfway. No… really more than half. Fifty down, forty-nine to go.

Garraty was walking by himself. He was too cold to be sleepy. His lips were pressed together to keep the tremble out of them. Olson was still back there; halfhearted bets had gone round to the effect that Olson would be the fiftieth to buy a ticket, the halfway boy. But he hadn’t. That signal honor had gone to 13, Roger Fenum. Unlucky old 13. Garraty was beginning to think that Olson would go on indefinitely. Maybe until he starved to death. He had locked himself safely away in a place beyond pain. In a way he supposed it would be poetic justice if Olson won. He could see the headlines: LONG WALK WON BY DEAD MAN!

Garraty’s toes were numb. He wiggled them against the shredded inner linings of his shoes and could feel nothing. The heal pain was not in his toes now. It was in his arches. A sharp, blatting pain that knifed up into his calves each time he took a step. It made him think of a story his mother had read him when he was small. It was about a mermaid who wanted to be a woman. Only she had a tail and a good fairy or someone said she could have legs if she wanted them badly enough. Every step she took on dry land would be like walking on knives, but she could have them if she wanted them, and she said yeah, okay, and that was the Long Walk. In a nutshell-”

“Warning! Warning 47!”

“I hear you,” Garraty snapped crossly, and picked up his feet.

The woods were thinner. The real northern part of the state was behind them. They had gone through two quietly residential towns, the road cutting them lengthwise and the sidewalks packed with people that were little more than shadows beneath the drizzle-diffused streetlamps. No one cheered much. It was too cold, he supposed. Too cold and too dark and Jesus Christ now he had another warning to walk off and if that wasn’t a royal pisser, nothing was.