Olson sat up again. The guns were still trained on him, but the soldiers did not shoot. Their silhouettes on the halftrack seemed almost to indicate curiosity.

Slowly, reflectively, Olson gained his feet, hands crossed on his belly. He seemed to sniff the air for direction, turned slowly in the direction of the Walk, and began to stagger along.

“Put him out of it!” a shocked voice screamed hoarsely. “For Christ’s sake put him out of it!”

The blue snakes of Olson’s intestines were slowly slipping through his fingers. They dropped like link sausages against his groin, where they flapped obscenely. He stopped, bent over as if to retrieve them (retrieve them, Garraty thought in a near ecstasy of wonder and horror), and threw up a huge glut of blood and bile. He began to walk again, bent over. His face was sweetly calm.

“Oh my God,” Abraham said, and turned to Garraty with his hands cupped over his mouth. Abraham’s face was white and cheesy. His eyes were bulging. His eyes were frantic with terror. “Oh my God, Ray, what a fucking gross-out, oh Jesus!” Abraham vomited. Puke sprayed through his fingers.

Well, old Abe has tossed his cookies, Garraty thought remotely. That’s no way to observe Hint 13, Abe.

“They gut-shot him,” Stebbins said from behind Garraty. “They’ll do that. It’s deliberate. To discourage anybody else from trying the old Charge of the Light Brigade number.”

“Get away from me,” Garraty hissed. “Or I’ll knock your block off!”

Stebbins dropped back quickly.

“Warning! Warning 88!”

Stebbins’s laugh drifted softly to him.

Olson went to his knees. His head hung between his arms, which were propped on the road.

One of the rifles roared, and a bullet clipped asphalt beside Olson’s left hand and whined away. He began to climb slowly, wearily, to his feet again. They’re playing with him, Garraty thought. All of this must be terribly boring for them, so they are playing with Olson. Is Olson fun, boys? Is Olson keeping you amused?

Garraty began to cry. He ran over to Olson and fell on his knees beside him and held the tired, hectically hot face against his chest. He sobbed into the dry, badsmelling hair.

“Warning! Warning 47!”

“Warning! Warning 61!”

McVries was pulling at him. It was McVries again. “Get up, Ray, get up, you can’t help him, for God’s sake get up!”

“It’s not fair!” Garraty wept. There was a sticky smear of Olson’s blood on his cheekbone. “It’s just not fair!”

“I know. Come on. Come on.”

Garraty stood up. He and McVries began walking backward rapidly, watching Olson, who was on his knees. Olson got to his feet. He stood astride the white line. He raised both hands up into the sky. The crowd sighed softly.

“I DID IT WRONG!” Olson shouted tremblingly, and then fell flat and dead.

The soldiers on the halftrack put another two bullets in him and then dragged him busily off the road.

“Yes, that’s that.”

They walked quietly for ten minutes or so, Garraty drawing a low-key comfort just from McVries’s presence. “I’m starting to see something in it, Pete,” he said at last. “There’s a pattern. It isn’t all senseless.”

“Yeah? Don’t count on it.”

“He talked to me, Pete. He wasn’t dead until they shot him. He was alive.” Now it seemed that was the most important thing about the Olson experience. He repeated it. “Alive.”

I don’t think it makes any difference,” McVries said with a tired sigh. “He’s just a number. Part of the body count. Number fifty-three. It means we’re a little closer and that’s all it means.”

“You don’t really think that.”

“Don’t tell me what I think and what I don’t!” McVries said crossly. “Leave it alone, can’t you?”

“I put us about thirteen miles outside of Oldtown,” Garraty said.

“Well hot shit!”

“Do you know how Scramm is?”

“I’m not his doctor. Why don’t you scram yourself?”

“What the hell’s eating you?”

McVries laughed wildly. “Here we are, here we are and you want to know what’s eating me! I’m worried about next year’s income taxes, that’s what’s eating me. I’m worried about the price of grain in South Dakota, that’s what’s eating me. Olson, his guts were falling out, Garraty, at the end he was walking with his guts falling out, and that’s eating me, that’s eating me-” He broke off and Garraty watched him struggle to keep from vomiting. Abruptly McVries said, “Scramm’s poor.

“Is he?”

“Collie Parker felt his forehead and said he was burning up. He’s talking funny. About his wife, about Phoenix, Flagstaff, weird stuff about the Hopis and the Navajos and kachina dolls… it’s hard to make out.”

“How much longer can he go?”

“Who can say. He still might outlast us all. He’s built like a buffalo and he’s trying awful hard. Jesus, am I tired.”

“What about Barkovitch?”

“He’s wising up. He knows a lot of us’ll be glad to see him buy a ticket to see the farm. He’s made up his mind to outlast me, the nasty little fucker. He doesn’t like me shagging him. Tough shit, right, I know.” McVries uttered his wild laugh again. Garraty didn’t like the sound of it. “He’s scared, though. He’s easing up on the lungpower and going to leg-power.”

“We all are.”

“Yeah. Oldtown coming up. Thirteen miles?”

“That’s tight.”

“Can I say something to you, Garraty?”

“Sure. I’ll carry it with me to the grave.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

Someone near the front of the crowd set off a firecracker, and both Garraty and McVries jumped. Several women screeched. A burly man in the front row said “Goddammit!” through a mouthful of popcorn.

“The reason all of this is so horrible,” McVries said, “is because it’s just trivial. You know? We’ve sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren’t mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.”

“You’re as bad as Stebbins,” Garraty said resentfully.

“I wish Priscilla had killed me,” McVries said. “At least that wouldn’t have been-”

“Trivial,” Garraty finished.

“Yes. I think-”

“Look, I want to doze a little if I can. You mind?”

“No. I’m sorry.” McVries sounded stiff and offended.

“I’m sorry,” Garraty said. “Look, don’t take it to heart. It’s really-”

“Trivial,” McVries finished. He laughed his wild laugh for the third time and walked away. Garraty wished-not for the first time-that he had made no friends on the Long Walk. It was going to make it hard. In fact, it was already hard.

There was a sluggish stirring in his bowels. Soon they would have to be emptied. The thought made him grind his mental teeth. People would point and laugh. He would drop his shit in the street like a mongrel hound and afterward people would gather it up in paper napkins and put it in bottles for souvenirs. It seemed impossible that people would do such things, but he knew it happened.

Olson with his guts falling out.

McVries and Priscilla and the pajama factory.

Scramm, glowing fever-bright.

Abraham… what price stovepipe hat, audience?

Garraty’s head dropped. He dozed. The Walk went on.

Over hill, over dale, over stile and mountain. Over ridge and under bridge and past my lady’s fountain. Garraty giggled in the dimming recesses of his brain. His feet pounded the pavement and the loose heel flapped looser, like an old shutter on a dead house.

I think, therefore I am. First-year Latin class. Old tunes in a dead language. Ding-dong-bell-pussy’s-down-the-well. Who pushed her in? Little Jackie Flynn.

I exist, therefore I am.

Another firecracker went off. There were whoops and cheers. The halftrack ground and clattered and Garraty listened for the sound of his number in a warning and dozed deeper.