"Be f**ked 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 f**ked-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
"Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah."
-The Count Sesame Street
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!"