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They shoot him in the end.
They have to, to stop him walking. Pete lies in the soft amber fog and waits to die. First warning. Second warning. Third and final warning. Boom. It echoes in his ears.
Echoes when he wakes up in a hospital bed. Crisped sheets, too-bright lights. Stares at the ceiling. The man at his bedside says the drip in his arm is for nutrients and water. He’s severely dehydrated, didn’t he know that? All the Long Walk winners come out in this state and then they ask the doctors to work miracles. He’s got three stress fractures. Amazing he hasn’t got more, the boy last year was a wreck. Did he know they had to tranq him?
Pete waits to be shot. Surely it’s coming. He killed the Major.
But across the days no soldier comes to press the barrel to his temple. He lies on his side in the bed and watches Ray and Ray looks back, a half-pitying smile on his face, lank blond hair flopping in his eyes.
“You’re dead,” he says.
Ray says, “No, I’m not,” but the mouth is all wrong and the voice sounds strange, so Pete closes his eyes. He can still feel the weight of Ray’s arm across his shoulder. He’s terrified it might go away.
The delusions can’t last forever. Pete opens his eyes to pain, which has become so routine he can barely feel his body any more, and a Garraty with limp blonde hair and lines of misery around the mouth. Raymond’s mother has agony in her eyes.
“It’s my fault,” Pete says, numb.
She shakes her head. He says again, mulishly, “Was my fault. Was meant to be me.”
She swallows. Cries a bit. Says, “I saw it. He wanted it to be you.”
He wanted it to be Ray. There was never a way out of that. Everything he said about the Long Walk - the rabbit - Olson screaming and screaming and screaming, Collie grabbing the gun, the boy legless under the tank. It all comes back. He vomits and when he’s done vomiting, she’s gone.
They discharge him after five days. There’s cheering people and a car. Pete sits in the back, elbows on his knees. Waits for the bullet.
They drive him out to a little house and they leave him there. He goes to bed. Every step from the car to the room burns like hellfire. The bed is made and the sheets are cool and new, and Pete has never slept under new sheets in his life and he can’t believe it has to start now, the fucking irony, new sheets and no arm round his shoulder. New house. Running water. Fully stocked. Harkness sobs right by his ear.
In the morning there’s an official with paper and speeches. He’s got real money now, what does he want to do with it? There’s a lot he can buy. A bigger house, for one, the officer says, looking round the little kitchen. Couldn’t keep your wife in here, could you?
Pete goes outside. He walks in circles around the house until the officer leaves, and when his ripped and aching muscles have regained that pain, the ceaseless agony and lurching ache, he leans his head against the wood of the house and breathes.
“C’mon, Pete,” Ray says. “There’s things to do, brother.”
Pete grinds his forehead against the wood and says, “It was meant to be you.”
Ginnie Garraty comes round. He’s not five minutes from her. She makes soup and they sit at the rickety table, mute from fear. He’s afraid if he starts screaming he’s never going to stop.
Like a broken record, he says, “It’s my fault.”
She shakes her head. They eat. If this is a temporary stay of execution, he realises, then he made promises. That’s what Ray was telling him earlier. And he can’t write very well, so he needs Ginnie to do it for him.
She writes two letters for him. One is to Clementine Olson, who he promised to provide for. The other is to Arthur’s grandmother, folded around the crucifix. They took it off Ray - Ray’s- He puts his head between his knees. His body moves in the rhythm. Ginnie watches. At some point she goes.
Second warning. Third and final warning. There’s not room for forty-nine ghosts in the house, but they make themselves fit. He can’t even take a shit without thinking of the boy cramping and squatting, trying to walk with it running down his leg, his guts revolting until the bullet put him down. Fuck. Fuck. He walks around the house. He does ten laps and lies in the grass, which used to feel soft but now doesn’t feel like anything at all.
He couldn’t see the Major’s eyes, but he could see his expression. Confident to the last. A spectre in a black waterproof and black sunglasses, a legless dark thing that hovers in front of him. He waits for the third warning.
He’s not dead the next morning. Or the one after that. He sits on the porch and watches the sun come up, which is colourful but not magic the way it used to be. It just the sun, rising on a world without Ray. The grasses move restlessly.
Ray, somewhere behind him just out of view, says, “Don’t give up now, brother.”
“You gave up.”
“No, I didn’t.”
If he turns around they’ll all be there: Barkovitch lounging against the wall, Olson still chewing that gum, Harkness with dangling notebook, Collie frowning down his nose, Art upright as a tree. They’re walking behind him. Ray’s just a step behind, that’s all, all he has to do is turn around.
None of the losers of the Long Walk get memorialised. The Major wouldn’t celebrate losing. But there’s forty-nine boys behind him who can’t stop following him and he owes them something.
“I’ll get you something,” he says. “Okay? If you go away, I’ll get you something.”
Silence apart from the wind. But he knows they’re still there.
With the money, it’s easy. A few guys turn up with it a week later, a massive slab of stone set down in his grassy yard. They lean over it with hammers and chisels. He walks while they do it, to and from, restless, hurting. His feet are torn to shreds still, all blisters and scabs. Makes him think of Ray’s feet, so much ground beef in filthy socks, leaving bloody prints all the way to Massachusetts.
The men take hours. They cast nervous, respectful glances at Pete and Pete doesn’t say a word to them the whole time. He can’t bear the respect. He’s only here because a better man stopped. But eventually the sun starts to set and they’re done. Pete’s feet are bleeding again. He found the rhythm.
He approaches the slab. It’s an upright grey thing, a big cross standing at the top - Arthur would like that - and on its surface are fifty numbers and forty-nine names. He reaches out to touch 47 - Raymond Garraty with shaking hand. There he is. All that remains of his brother.
The rest of them are on here from one to fifty, and at 23 - there’s no name yet, the only gap in the list. He looks at one, fifteen, forty-nine. They’re all here. The Long Walk boys come to rest in his backyard. It’s getting dark. Pete kneels and puts his forehead against the ground and stays there, body still moving like he’s walking but not crying, not crying.
Ginnie Garraty gives him a reprieve of a few weeks. When she sees the memorial she leaves and comes back with a tag that Pete recognises.
“They let us keep ‘em this year,” she says, the silver 47 sliding in her fingers. Then she hangs it round the cross and the number clinks gently against the stone. She turns to Pete. “My son didn’t die because he thought you’d lie round feeling sorry for yourself.”
He breathes, breathes. “I know.”
“Do something good with all that money.”
And when she says it, it’s like Ray speaking through her: Ray who’d gasped, “You’re right, you’re right,” to him, limping, exhausted. Told him that every moment mattered. Only thing people get guaranteed is death.
Pete puts the money to work. He used to have a plan, so he follows it and ignores the crowd of boys following him. People come to the house and he says what he needs to say, and in a month the first old barn is repurposed into the centre. He knows where the children sleep. They’re in ditches and fields, on old couches and tossed-out mattresses. The centre has a nurse and a couple of carers, mothers who lost their children. And it’s slow going at first. Real slow.
Then a newspaper does a feature. Long Walk Winner Opens Children’s Home! and boom, crack like the snap of a rifle, a carbine, there they go, up and running. Five carers, six. He signs the bills from the hospital without looking. Pneumonia, dehydration, malnourishment. One says haemorrhage and he has to go outside and limp round the house, smelling Arthur’s blood all over him.
Ginnie comes round most days now. They don’t say much, but one time Pete says, “When d’you think they’re coming to get me?”
“Who?”
“Everyone. I killed the major.”
“A doctor certified insanity. You can’t be held accountable. People saw what happened out there at the end, too. They’re…” She sighs and sets her cutlery down, leaning her chin in her palm. “You cut the head off the dragon. No one knows what happens now. They’re talking about it.”
He’s been in such a void, he didn’t know. “A doctor said I was crazy?”
Ginnie looks at him across the little table and he remembers that this was a woman whose husband was shot for dissidence, whose son had Walkers yelling, “Fuck the Long Walk!”, who raised Raymond with all his sweetness and strength. She says, “The doctor said what I paid him to.”
And Pete realises he’s forgotten something.
Ginnie won’t take the house he buys her. It’s a massive property with sprawling backyard that runs down to the river, bracketed by fields. When she tells him not to waste his money, he says, “Raymond would have bought it for you,” but she still doesn’t move in. She says, “Use it as a centre.”
The barn is getting overcrowded. Three carers and six kids move in, although he makes sure to keep a room spare for her just in case. Pete keeps walking in circles. He bought one of those fancy speed-trackers and keeps his three miles an hour. He slows by point one every ten seconds. He keeps thinking Ray’s just behind him, and if they slow down at the same time, the exact same time, they can both win.
Warning, 23, third warning.
Boom.
He’s had no visitors apart from Ginnie and the official, but one day there’s a knock on the door. When he opens it a couple stand there. The woman’s tall and blonde and the man has a look on his face, this hard, nearly-afraid look, and Pete knows what he’s clutching in his hand.
He lets Barkovitch’s parents in. They stand in front of the memorial for a long, long time while the afternoon clouds over, and eventually Barkovitch’s father hangs his tag. Number 5 clinks against 47.
He can’t bring himself to say sorry to them. Barkovitch’s mother says, “He never really had any friends.”
Pete remembers Rank with half his face scraped off on the pavement, Barkovitch’s desperate “Fuck!” when he hit himself, standing out in the middle of the road with sunlight glinting off the spoon. He says, “We were friends. Me and Ray and him.”
They both hug him and it only feels a little bit like suffocating. Barkovitch’s mother cries the same way as him, noiselessly.
They come slow after that, but they keep coming. Arthur’s grandmother sends his tag and he adds number 6. Stebbins’ mother arrives to hang 38 and she doesn’t say a word. He was meant to win. 38 was the rabbit that brought them so far out, coughing all the way. He gets post now, sometimes a letter. Usually just a tag in an envelope. He loops them over the cross. They sing in the breeze. He walks.
They need a third centre. Can they put this one in a different state? There’s kids coming from all over. Okay. Massachusetts, then. Hey, if he keeps on like this there’ll be one in every state, right, McVries? Say, do you want a bigger house?
He’s coherent enough now to tell the house was meant to be an insult. Tiny, not five minutes from the mother of the boy who died last, in that boy’s home state. The insult didn’t land. That’s all the reasons he likes it.
He still can’t see the magic, though. The trees used to be beautiful. Now they’re just so much green.
In the early hours when he’s woken up by Olson screaming, “I did it wrong! I did it all wrong!” or a gunshot sounding next to his ear, Pete puts on his boots and walks. He walks out among the fields, not needing his timer now. He puts a hand on his shoulder and feels the weight of Ray’s arm. In the third - fourth? - night, Ray had been sleepwalking, head lolling into Pete’s. Pete had smiled and gently knocked their temples together. Said, “C’mon, sleeping beauty.”
Even in the darkness, Ray’s smile was a beautiful thing. His heart clenched. They never talked about it. They talked about everything, but not about how Ray had leant in under the safety of the night and Pete had kissed his cheek, the corner of his lips.
Raymond, smiling: “You gonna call me doll?”
“Not if you tell people,” Pete whispered. And they kept walking. And the next night when there were even less boys around them and the stars were lost in the sweeping tank headlights, Ray had put his mouth on Pete’s cheek, and when he turned his head, his lips, and they’d kept going together.
That’s how he remembers Ray, in the early hours of the morning. As someone who’d loved him. Maybe the first person ever.
The sun comes up and it’s just colours in the sky. Nothing special. Pete smokes and blows the clouds of grey across it, then he goes inside.
There’s so much time to fill now. Eventually he gives in and takes a trip up to the house he bought for Ginnie. The carers meet him on the porch, two women with grey in their hair and faces careworn but still gentle, and they take him through the house. They seem to think that he’ll want to know where his money’s going, so they show him the new cooker and the cupboards filled with food, the medication in the fridge. While they’re doing the tour one of the woman calls out, “Elliot!” and a boy, maybe ten years old, comes in and sits on a kitchen stool. He rolls his shirtsleeve up to his shoulder.
“Diabetic,” explains the first woman, while the second takes a syringe out the fridge. She leans in to Pete and says, “His family couldn’t afford the insulin. His sister visits every week. He’s very lucky, none of the other children here have family.”
“I didn’t either,” he says.
“I’m sorry. You’re making a real difference here. We couldn’t do any of this without your funding.”
“Is there anything else you need?”
“Honestly, no. You know,” she says, very quietly, “if every boy in the country had this sort of care, nobody would sign up for the Long Walk.”
His stomach cramps. Pete studies her face: sees the worn-out grief around her eyes, the emptiness they share. “Who did you lose?”
“My son. Five years ago. He wanted to go, wouldn’t be talked out of it.”
“Yeah,” Pete says, “I knew someone like that.”
They walk in the backyard, the woman to his left and the ghosts to his right. There’s fruit trees they’ve planted along the border. A herb bed. She says, “This is all I ever wanted, this place. Have you ever gotten that?”
Pete feels Ray’s mouth on his. “No, but I got really close.”
And nobody comes to kill him. Ginnie says people are wondering if the Long Walk really is the answer. The war is over, has been over for a very long time. If the winner can turn a gun on the Major, what was it like? His ingratitude has sparked a wildfire.
Pete keeps walking. He thinks he’s got it down almost perfect, but every time he stops the gunshot rings out again and Ray is bleeding and crying.
“I’ll get it,” he promises, “I’ll get it eventually.”
Ray says, “I love you.” And he dies. He keeps dying. So Pete keeps walking.
Olson’s tag arrives from Clementine. He reunites the Musketeers and looks at the empty space next to 23. When he dies they’ll carve his name. He’s got it set up. His tag is in his bedside drawer. When the wind blows, the metal and the stone tinkle together and make strange high noises that remind him of Curly clutching his leg and crying.
Ginnie comes round. This time, when she sees the memorial, she breaks down sobbing and howling, and Pete sits next to her with the carved-out hole in his chest and heart hurting so bad he thinks it might just kill him. Even the Walk hurt less than this. That was just pain. This is absence, a hole in the world, a gash he can’t sew up. It’s funny, sometimes he’ll just be lying in bed or sitting on the porch or smoking and his chest will open right up and hurt so bad it’s like a heart attack. The pain will spike all the way down his arm and across to his other shoulder. He’ll lie there and whisper, “Ray, Ray.”
Ginnie wipes her eyes. “I’m glad you killed him.”
He’s not. Pete knows he killed himself with that bullet. McVries died in the evening lit all amber, facing down the Major. He walks one, two laps of the house while Ginnie watches. The rhythm’s right there, one foot in front of the other.
“Have you talked to the other winners?” she asks.
The boy last year rode an elephant home. He’s not got anything to say to the boys who celebrated their victory. He can’t begrudge them, because he knows what it takes, and he can’t resent them for using their wish to do what makes them happy. God knows there’s little enough happiness in the world. But Pete is hoping he’ll die before he ever has to look into their faces and see if they’re lacking the same thing as him. The answer might end him. He couldn’t bear it.
He surprises himself by saying, “Did you tell everyone there’s a memorial here?”
“Only the families.”
“They hate me for winning.”
Silence in early dusk. It rolls like a coin. Ginnie crosses her legs. “Everyone saw the footage. Anyway, no mother really thinks they’re going to see their son again once they drop them off.”
“Did you expect to see Raymond?”
“I hoped I would. But I also - I also hoped it would be quick. I was okay until I saw him,” and she’s crying again, quietly. “He tried to tell me sorry, he knew- knew-“
Pete just hugs her. They stand together for a while, a boy with no mother and a mother missing a son, and it occurs to him that this is it. This is the Ray Garraty memorial group. Everyone else who knew Ray, really knew him as he was, bright and lovely, has been spattered across roads. Oh God, he thinks, oh Christ, this is it.
“He really loved you,” Ginnie says into his shoulder. “He called you his brother.”
And she won’t know how he loved him. That’s okay. That’s fine. It’s too cruel to force her to revise her history. And they were brothers. They were just more, too.
“You’ll bury me next to him, won’t you?” Pete says. “Please?”
“I promise.”
There are kids running in Pete’s back yard.
There often are, these days: the carers love to take the kids out on a road trip and they love to come out to the farm. He’ll sit out on the porch with a glass of lemonade and the person in charge will lean up on the house in case they need to go running after one of the little ones, though lately they’ve been taking a seat. Pete’s place is safe enough.
“There’s a centre opening up in Wyoming,” the carer today says. He’s a man in his fifties, callused hands and a warm brown gaze. “Did you start that one?”
“No, did you?”
“Nope.”
There’s more and more these days. Ideas spread. The last one Pete approved was in Missouri: strange to think how far it’s gone beyond him. The carer calls, “Hey, Ben, watch your step!” then sighs and says, “Always up to mischief, that one.”
Pete looks. There’s a little black boy running laughing after a taller one, dirty blond, wide mouth open in a cacophonous laugh. His chest seizes up with such painful inevitability it’s stopped being a surprise.
The carer’s gaze has drifted to the memorial, green with lichen. “Hey, want me to clean that?”
“No. Let it be.” He knows the names off by heart. “How are the kids doing? Any new arrivals?”
“Just Sarah.” He points out a blonde girl who can’t be more than eleven. “She came to us, actually. You know, when this all started we would have to go and get them out from hedgerows, find ‘em in the cities, but now they come to us. Hell of a thing.”
“She all right?”
“She will be,” the carer says confidently. He’s handsome. Pete thinks that the boy he was before the Walk would have been very interested in him, but that part of him burned out.
He says, “Any news?”
“Nothing major. Just politics. They haven’t started the Long Walk again. Longer they wait, more it feels like they’re never gonna.” A sideways glance is snuck at him. “You did that, didncha?”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
People ask that nowadays. Like they want to know. Like they’re wondering if they could do it. Pete says, “I made some friends. But if any of these kids ever have to walk it I guess I’ll take that carbine off the wall and make a nuisance of myself.”
The carer can’t hold his stare. He’s got the eyes of a killer, after all.
The forty-odd tags jangle in the light breeze. Pete gets up and leans on the porch fencing, watching the kids tumble. The blond one and the little one are lying together in the grass. From here, if he squints… it’s all so familiar by now. Last week some little boy with dark curly hair had been standing with his back to him and he saw Curly for a moment, standing right there. They’re still here, the boys. Raymond’s just behind him.
“You ain’t gonna leave me, Ray?” he murmurs.
The only answer is the wind in the trees. Some day soon he’s going to step off his porch and walk, and walk, and he’s going to slow to the perfect stop and he’ll be there, Ray, and the Long Walk will have two winners. He can do it. He’s been practising. Someday soon he’ll get it.
“Not too soon,” Ray says. “Make every moment count.”
He’s made a lot of them count. He’s tired. The doctor says it’s all the walking he does, that and whatever else he’s got going in his mind that he won’t talk about. “Is it cancer?” the man had asked, raising his white eyebrows. “What’re you not telling me, Mr McVries?”
Pete had smiled. “Lot to ask of a man, to bare his heart in ten minutes.”
Lot to ask. He’s only done it once, watching a boy get dropped off on an endless road.
The kids bowl each other over. He laughs and calls, “Hey, kid,” and beckons over the blond one, who comes running up the porch. “You mind hanging something for me?”
“Sure, mister.”
He limps inside and returns with it clenched in his fist. The boy looks up at him, brown eyes and floppy hair, puppy-fat cheeks. “What’s wrong with your leg, mister?”
Pete crouches down. “I went on a really, really long walk.”
The child considers this. “Are you gonna be okay?”
“Yeah.” And he gives the boy the tag in his hand, the metal still burnished silver, his number punched straight through. “Can you put this over the cross for me?”
The boy has to come up onto his tiptoes to reach the very top of the cross. The tag settles down with the others, brushing against 47. Pete smiles. “Thanks.”
It’s earlier than he expected, but he can feel it. The carer rounds up the kids and takes them home and Pete sits quiet out on the porch chair, watching the sun shade toward the horizon in amber and gold. It shines, and for the first time in a very long time Pete just glimpses the magic. It’s so beautiful.
He pulls himself out the chair and walks down the porch, across the yard, past the memorial. His feet will carry him a little further. There’s still so far to go.
“Walk with me, Ray,” he says to the cool evening air.
A hand settles into his own. If he doesn’t look, he’s there. Plaid shirt and white tee, one hand braced on the backpack straps, keeping on. They’re just walking. This time, he knows, he’ll get it. He’ll stop right. Ray will stay.
“I love you,” he says.
They walk on.