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It's almost odd, seeing everyone without that stink of despair that hung over them for the past few days.
Lots of them trudge listlessly down the eternal, never ending road that leads to Boston, but without the roar of carbines and half tracks, the four miles an hour pace seems to be a lot more manageable than it used to be for most of the Walkers here. Then again, one can only guess if you all are actually walking at the right pace. Time seems to have smeared into a iridescent blur, like you are seeing Maine through glass streaked with petroleum jelly, and no one seems to be sure what an hour is anymore. The sun hangs forever at nine in the morning, bright as the first second of the Walk, when you were so sure you would win.
Despite this, even if no one else knows, you know you're all on pace. That relentless rhythm of four-miles-per-hour had been carved into your soul. After your mother had passed when you were eight, you had trained yourself to constantly walk at that pace no matter what. You had lived half your life at this pace. If you closed your eyes and listened to the sound of boots hitting the ground, of the swing of your second shoes at your hips, it would feel like the most natural thing in the world.
It would be fitting as eternal punishment for failing, to be damned to walk forever. No one seems happy about their fate for the rest of their afterlife, but no one weeps over it like they had when they were alive, when the realisation had hit them that they had already seen their loved ones for the last time. Dying has taught everyone the lesson that you had already known long before you had put your name in the lottery. The only thing that has been truly unexpected about the whole process is what is happening now.
A part of you idly wonders how Baker is handling this version of the afterlife, but he's walking in twin steps with Olson, chatting away loudly, despite the blood running down his face and the guts hanging out of Olson's belly that drag behind him on the tarmac. McVries is behind them, egging Olson on now that he ironically has some life back in him now. Olson says something, loud and brash, and Parker shoots something back, surprisingly talkative for someone who had their jaw shot off. Scramm, who still looks like death warmed over, laughs heartily before breaking off into a fit of coughs. Even Barkovitch is orbiting them cautiously, occasionally joining in on laughter when it's safe. Who knows how that happened. By the time you had caught up to everyone, everyone seemed to have spent enough time with each other that they had begun to tolerate Barkovitch, with the exception of Rank, who still seems to be a little upset. You don't blame him, mainly because you do not care enough to.
You stick to the back of the group, much like you did in life. You'll have a lot further to walk before you subject yourself to their nonsensical chattering.
Up ahead, McVries glances behind at you. You look straight ahead. Four miles an hour. He slows down anyway, and a sense of pleasure rises from your chest at the sight, before you remember that there are no more warnings, no more tickets punched. There is no more competition, only the road and the Walkers and walking.
He slows, slows, and slows, until he's beside you.
"You." McVries says, almost accusatory. Your second runner up.
"Me." You say affably, and smile a little at how he rankles.
"You haven't talked to anyone yet."
Where were these observational skills when he was ribbing Olson to death while he was about to keel over? You don't understand why he's using them on you specifically. Surely, the scant few moments together towards the end of the Walk, punctuated by Garraty's raving accusation of conspiring against him, does not warrant this level of scrutiny. He hadn't even been the one you were playing your little tricks on.
You rummage through your pack, and find a jelly sandwich, just like how you made it the morning of the Walk. You chew slowly, before downing it. The sandwich tastes like nothing, and you can't find it in yourself to be that disappointed.
You decide you'll entertain McVries. There's nothing else to do. After all, you're in a significantly better mood than however long it was ago that you got your ticket. The smile on your face stays where it is as you wipe your mouth. "Does the barking of hounds-"
"You can drop it now. This whole master manipulator act." He interrupts so incredibly rudely while glaring at you, but without the heat that he once directed towards Barkovitch during the Walk. The heat that had kept him going, and now he's here. And here you are, next to him. It appears like the last few hours together on the Walk had wizened him up to your games, at least a little bit. "Just talk to me like a normal person. I know you can."
"This is as normal as I can get." It's unfortunately true.
McVries gives you a look. He moves as if to clap your shoulder, and you dexterously dodge it while still maintaining the four miles an hour pace. "Just because your daddy is a crazy bastard, doesn't mean you have to follow his footsteps."
You continue to put one foot in front of the other. You aren't one for instinct, so you don't listen to the urge to make a jab about Priscilla. Not that it would land anymore, because why should the living disturb the dead? You cursed the part of you that had been so desperate for anything, anything at all during the Walk that you had revealed the still beating heart of the mechanical rabbit. But even that has been taken from you. No one looks at you strangely, or with any kind of appraisal in their eyes with the exception of McVries. You're no one at all now.
You can't say you can bring yourself to fully regret anything, though. There is nothing to regret, because if there is, it meant that you had made a mistake during the Walk. The only mistake you had made was underestimating your father. The thought of him causes the sandwich of nothingness to threaten to rise up. You've always hated how the acrid sting of bile burns at your throat, but now, it does not feel like anything.
"Come on, didn't we have something good during the Walk?" He tries to nudge you again. You don't particularly remember what you two had talked about. Only the feeling of his hard skull against yours, cushioned only by the hair growing from your sunburnt scalps. "You don't have to pretend anymore. Tell me something. Who made you those sandwiches you keep scarfing down, huh?"
You need the non-feeling to go away. And you also need McVries away from you as soon as possible, challenging as that might be. It occurs to you that you are stuck with this bastard for the foreseeable eternity. It's a good thing you have always had an impractical weakness for challenges. While McVries doesn't quite have Garraty's instincts for getting under your skin in particular, he does have the gift of getting under everyone's skin in general, and an infinite stretch of time to get under yours if he chose to. You can see why they were such good friends, though friends might not be the right word for what they were.
"When do you think Garraty is joining us?" You say, casual as possible.
That gets McVries off your fucking case.
His handsome face furrows, scar stretching and twisting, and you feel yourself smiling again. "What do you mean?"
"It's only a matter of time," you continue, and McVries' fist clench shut. The edges of the crimson blossom on his shirt spread a little. You make a show of checking the pedometer. Exactly four miles an hour. "He'll probably die soon. I give it a week."
"Don't you fucking say that." You watch as the snarl on McVries' face warps the scar on his face. You calmly pull out another sandwich. You're glad that there is at least a never ending supply of them in the afterlife. "He's stronger than all of us. He won."
As if that meant anything.
The strength McVries had seen in Garraty is undeniable. It's just not enough, even if it sickens you to admit it. McVries saw Garraty through his worst moments in the walk, but he hadn't been there to see the faraway look in Garraty's eyes at the very end, Alice falling down an endless rabbit hole. Then again, you had also been so lost yourself, chasing your own tail, that you aren't actually that sure that you had seen it either. Maybe what you had seen had just been your own face.
You take another bite. Force of habit.
"Statistically, most winners don't last after the Walk. Even if they do, what insurance will take them? Who knows how his organs are? It's better that he joins you faster, isn't it?" You take a bite. It still doesn't taste like anything. Up ahead, a spurt of blood gushes down Baker's nose. He wipes it mindlessly, only for it to get replaced immediately by another downpour of red.
You see McVries' mind catch on the words 'join you' and he slows down again. Second warning, 61.
"He's going to marry his girl. He has to live." Ah, Garraty's Jan. You overheard flashes of their conversation during the walk, and it almost makes you want to pull your hair out that the person who had beaten you so narrowly, as well as the person who helped him win, are apparently greater fools than you had thought. Garraty has a hundred percent rate of breaking promises. He had promised you to not help anyone anymore, and had promptly broken that promise for McVries. He had promised Baker his lead-lined coffin, and they had all promised to do something for Scramm's wife, but there is no way he would even remember any of those promises when he could barely even remember he was alive at the end. Promises left all over the sides of the accursed Maine road like the terrible ration tubes they had sucked dry and tossed. Why did McVries think that Garraty is going to stick to this particular promise?
The problem with the both of them isn't just that they are naive idiots who had walked into a death march with no real understanding of why, they are also liars. They are also the worst kind of liars - liars who didn't even understand that they were lying. At least you understand yourself.
"And you think that means he's going to be happy? Going to go back a hometown hero?" Garraty has two options - to die as soon as possible, or die in fifty years when all your souls are too far away for him to catch up. Maybe if he died that way, there is a chance that he could walk away from this, go to another afterlife where the tea and sandwiches tasted like something. An afterlife worthy of a winner.
But no matter which he chose, he would never go back home. Despite all you said to that dense boy during the Walk and all he said back to you, you had enough respect left in your heart to know which option would be better for Garraty. You remember the calm that had been written all over the other boy's face at the very end. If it doesn't last the rest of Garraty's life, he's going to wish it had. It had been the one thing you could focus on in the final few clawing seconds of drawing air. That last awful jab of truth, trapped under your skin like a splinter. There was never going to be anything else for you, and he knew that. There isn't going to be anything else for him, and you knew that.
You might even understand Garraty in a way that McVries doesn't.
McVries is quiet. He knows you're right. You put one foot in front of the other, easy as breathing. It's almost enough to distract you from something approaching in the distance. Heavy footfalls, still some time away. No one looks up or behind. You don't need to.
"He's going to live," he says, mostly to himself. He doesn't sound quite so sure anymore, and you can't even bring yourself to enjoy this conversation either. The not-nausea is back. It occurs to you that there is no point in continuing this, for both McVries and yourself.
"Even if it means you two can't jack each other off like you promised?" It was meant to finish this conversation, so you could walk the rest of your afterlife in peace. You expected McVries to push you away, to tell you to fuck off before stalking away back to his posse of people he actually enjoyed talking to. Instead a laugh, a true and deep bellied laugh, bubbles up from deep within him. He slaps your arm, and you see it coming and you let him.
"You're not that bad, Stebbins," he says, rows of teeth shining like pearls in the morning sun. His smile is almost contagious.
You shrug. "We'll see."
The both of you walk a little more in a comfortable silence. A cloud, the first you've seen in a while, passes. Whatever is in the distance is coming closer. Running towards you. Or rather, you simply happen to be near what it is running towards.You tilt your head and listen closely. McVries looks at you like you've said something strange.
It's almost here now. You can hear the bare slap of skin onto the tarmac. The most awful way to spend your afterlife, you muse, even though Olson's guts are literally on the floor, even though the kid who's legs got run over with the half track is stumbling along on bloody stumps, and you couldn't feel anything in your body anymore. Death's one blessing, besides your sandwiches, is that you got to keep your shoes.
A rust coloured blur barrels straight into McVries' back, and the action pushes all the non-existent air out of McVries' body in a single forceful shove. They both fall to the tarmac, clutching at each other. McVries yelps and twists mid-fall, giving you a great view of when the light of recognition enters his eyes. Third warning, you think with a vague feeling of warmth. It looks like you are right, as you always are. Garraty always catches up, even when you wish he wouldn't.
McVries looks overjoyed. He makes eye contact with you, and you meet it evenly before glancing to the side of the road. The edges of his mouth drops for a fraction of a second, before he squeezes his eyes shut.
This isn't the time to rub it, though. Like a breath that had been held for too long, something in the air breaks. The Walkers slow, turn, and yell, but don't stop walking. Some whoop Garraty's name, a more genuine echo of the screaming of the crowds, some heckle them, and some ask why he's here so soon. Others just make a roar of noise. Their final Walker has arrived, and its over. You all know it. You don't join in the cheering, but it does put some genuine cheer in you. It sounds like the fireworks your mother had brought you to see when you were five. Ray Garraty and Peter McVries cannot hear them. The two are too busy kneeling on the road, holding each other with their foreheads pressed together.
You don't look at them. You keep walking.
Slowly, when the two of them finally get up, the Walkers start to disperse. You see Curley go off first, and then Ewing, and then Percy and Scramm and Joe, then Parker and Barkovitch. They all look better, lighter, the further they get from the road shoulder.
It's just the Musketeers and you, now walking down the endless stretch of road. You don't know how it's possible, but you're some distance behind them again.
Olson punches McVries in the shoulder, and says something before he swans away into the forest lining the road, laughing as loudly as he did at the starting line. Baker smiles softly, before wiping the blood from his face. You had never seen his face properly. You had only ever walked behind him, and the one time you hadn't, thick blood had already obscured half of it. This time, the blood stays off, and he walks off to visit his grandma. He looks much better this way.
You look down at the ground. Four miles per hour. The easiest thing you've ever done.
You don't even realise that you've caught up to Garraty and McVries until you almost crash into them. The two of them are strolling, leisurely and slow, an awful unfamiliar pace. Garraty looks at you expectantly, and you don't say anything. You can almost feel the sweat-soaked cotton of his shirt between your fingers again.
He reaches out a hand. McVries peers at you from across Garraty. There is nothing but damnable understanding in both their gaze.
"Walk with us?" He says.
And for the second time in a long time, you slow down.