Chapter Text
“No, Ray. It’s time to sit down.”
McVries opened his eyes and smiled again. The next instant, he was gone.
The bullet froze Pete’s face in an eternal smile as it went through his temple and out the other side, sending a vicious spray across the road, and Garraty wanted to scream. But his vocal cords had gone hoarse when he yelled for the soldiers to take him instead, dear God, let it be him. Garraty had tried, oh he’d tried, but they wouldn’t listen, the fucking bastards in their khaki uniforms and their rifles trained on the easiest marks they’d ever be handed in their miserable lives.
It hadn’t been a conscious wish, or at least something he’d completely been aware of, that he was ready to die for McVries. But the things that tethered his mind to reality had already started to come undone like a loose thread on a shirt, and he had slowly been tugging at them for miles. Waiting to see where that thread would end and leave a gaping hole in the fabric where his rationality used to live. And when Pete sat down, cross-legged and world-weary and so very, very tired, Garraty knew he had reached such an end for himself. Pete was asleep, but he could wake from his slumber, Garraty was convinced.
But nobody listened, and Pete was dead.
Stebbins passed behind where he stood over McVries, gliding along at his steady pace, chuckling softly, “Oh, Garraty. You didn’t have to make it so easy for me.”
The agitation that sparked in his chest sent Garraty careening back to reality. He was losing time the longer he remained frozen in place.
“Who the fuck says I was?” he snapped, but Stebbins was too far ahead of him now, nothing but a flash of purple and green. In his grasp, Garraty could almost imagine another jelly sandwich. It dripped onto the asphalt like the blood that had been Pete’s.
I won’t let you win, you fucking bastard. I’ll walk you all the way down the coast if I have to. Garraty used his palms to push himself to his feet. Shuffled forward, a skeleton performing the waltz of death, bones creaking in pitiful protest.
The very next moment, his knees snapped and his legs buckled.
He crashed to the pavement, and all he could see was Pete splattered all over the road. All he could hear was the shot that had ripped clean through him.
“Warning! First warning number 47!”
It’s over, he realized with terrible clarity.
They hadn't managed to get the corpse that was Peter McVries in a bag yet, not yet, the soldiers too preoccupied with the fresh death that threatened to unfold. Maine’s Own sacrificial lamb. But like he was pulled by some invisible puppeteer, Garraty managed to prop himself up and crawl on torn hands and knees to Pete’s still body.
All around him, the Crowd writhed and swelled and crested and broke against the shore that was the barricade. The camera bulbs flashed and popped and sparked.
“Warning! Second warning number 47!”
Somehow, with his waning strength, Garraty managed to pull McVries’s sagged form into his lap and settle his limp head on his thighs.
“Shh,” he found himself whispering. Singing, “Alive-o, alive-o…”
He carded his fingers through Pete’s matted hair, sticky with blood, while he silently wept. Eyes that had once been filled with secretive mirth as he made some joke or sarcastic quip were now slack and dazed. They’d slipped into that endless darkness, that stilled library.
Garraty wondered if it might hurt, when the bullet came to claim him too. It was a thought that had occurred to him time and time again since the first sacrifice was made to the Walk, Curley, all those years ago, but now he would find out for sure.
Something dark and shadowy swam in his field of vision, just up ahead, sandwiched between the faceless bodies of Crowd. It observed him, eerily calm.
Have you been expecting me? Garraty thought, and he swore he heard a voice tell him, Yes, I have.
“Warning! Final warning number 47!”
His eyes closed before he felt that final gunshot.
Of all Garraty’s thoughts on what hell might look like, he never imagined it would be a parking lot in upstate Maine.
He was back in the cracked leather seat of that old blue Ford, his worried mother behind the wheel. Her bony hands were grasped tight around it, her knuckles white in their endless worry, and in the rearview mirror, Garraty could see the pinch of her brow, the anxious set of her gaze.
Garraty rubbed a disbelieving hand over a knee that didn’t pop and wondered if he was dreaming. Didn’t people sometimes claim that you saw your life flash before your eyes before you died for good? But all he felt when he pinched his arm was a sharp bit of pain. There was no great tunnel to the afterlife waiting outside the car windows, just the same sunny, crisp, spring morning that had greeted him the first time.
The soldier at the gate asked to see his ID, and he handed it, dumbly, over to his mom. The terminal swallowed the card whole and spat out the same information it had five days ago.
Even stranger, his legs didn’t scream in protest as he opened the door and stepped out. His shoulders didn’t feel like they had sandbags on top of them when he shut the door.
“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath. He wished he could slap himself back to sanity without drawing unwanted attention from the boys, who milled around under the trees and chattered quietly with one another and nervously sized up the competition.
The boys he’d become friends with were all there too, unbroken and whole. Baker sat in the shade of a tree, his face and nose bloodless. Olson engaged in animated conversation with another Walker. Scramm flashed his toothless smile, and Abraham flipped a dime on his thumb, metal glinting whenever it caught the sunlight.
“Jesus,” Garraty repeated, louder this time, and caught a strange sideways look from a boy nearby. Someone whose face he only vaguely recognized.
Keep it together. Don’t crack up, he told himself. It’s only a dream, after all. Isn’t it?
McVries stood, as he had before, not far from where Garraty was saying another goodbye to his mother. After she left, Garraty watched the crook of Pete’s neck as he bent to listen to his parents, but there was a distractedness about it. Even from farther away, Garraty could tell McVries’s eyes weren’t quite focused, that they kept subtly darting to the side, as if scanning the area for something. Then he was alone, watching his folks pull out of the lot with that resolute crunch of gravel.
As it turned out, Garraty wasn’t completely healed. There was a phantom ache to his limbs as he forced his once trodden feet towards McVries, a sort of rust that had accumulated in the grooves of his muscles and joints. And there was, of course, the way he nearly jumped out of his skin when the sound of an engine backfire felt a little too familiar.
At his approach, Pete looked up from where was inspecting a bit of grass next to the toe of his boot. Over his shoulder hovered a shadow that made Garraty shiver and break out into goosebumps. A dark figure that seemed, for a moment, to catch Garraty’s eye and beckon him. Then it was gone, leaving only Pete, wrapped in a sudden whisper of fog that invaded the beautiful morning.
Maybe it’s a nightmare.
As his stare locked onto McVries’s, Garraty found the answer to a question that had been needling at him since he woke up in the parking lot again: Pete remembered. He was here, with him, wherever they had ended up.
He spoke in a hushed tone as soon as Garraty was within earshot.
“It was supposed to be over. The pain, I… I sat down—” Pete extended his arm as if to grab Ray’s shoulder, then stopped and seemed to snap out of whatever daze he was in, shaking his head violently and halting his movement. “Nevermind. Looks like the universe hasn't had its fill of fucking us in the ass just yet, so…”
Pete stuck his hand out.
“What are you doing?”
“Acting like we've never met,” he scoffed. “What, you want to be the one to tell the good gentlemen here that we've already walked and watched them die and get yourself locked up in the loony bin before we even have a fighting chance?”
Garraty was about to protest, but when he remembered the queer look that other boy had thrown him earlier, decided against it. He snapped his mouth shut and nodded. Pete’s hand was as rough and callused as it had been during their initial meeting, but the touch hadn’t carried the same weight then. He could somehow sense that McVries felt the same and watched the column of his throat work as he swallowed.
McVries dropped his hand after a few moments and just studied him. Ray ducked his head, unable to handle the unexpected scrutiny.
“What do we do?” Garraty asked, helpless. He wished to God he didn’t sound so small. So defeated. “What the hell do we do?”
When he glanced back up, Pete appeared to be contemplating something, squinting out at the horizon towards the marker where they were to take their places in just a couple of hours.
“Nothing, I suppose,” he said, and he sounded like a man who had aged a hundred years. “Except get back on the road.”