Chapter Text
"In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators. ... Kill him! Flog him! Burn him alive! … Why does he meet the sword so timidly?"
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius (translated by Richard Mott Gummere)
MILE 334
Wide were the eyes of the reporters ogling into the operating theatre, their faces almost pressed against the thick glass window — the only thing keeping them from all but climbing right onto the operating table. That gallery, which in any other circumstance was reserved for family, was now adorned with NO FLASH stickers and yellow-taped borders. They had filled the room quietly at first, respectful to the extent that mosquitos can be. It was a selected pool of top journalists and their film crews, come from all across the country to see this man die. Soon enough, the room was packed with voyeurs and their big, bulky cameras and they could not help themselves but to rumour: such is the nature of a journalist, after all.
"God. Look at his feet. I heard they might be amputated, wouldn't that be something."
"Never mind that. Look at his legs. Like a plucked chicken. I heard it smells like one, too."
"Christ... Ten bucks he doesn't make the week?"
On the table before them, their ritual sacrifice, doctors worked militantly to keep the Long Walk's nineteenth Winner alive just long enough to give the television some interesting cud to chew on. A clear tube ran down his throat, exposing even the inside of his throat to the world, and it was all that kept him breathing while they tried to flush the poisons from his blood. The anesthetist monitored the ventilator's pressure — shallow, uneven, too much fluid built up in his lungs — and adjusted something out of sight of the cameras (much to their chagrin).
The surgeons, in their green camo scrubs, were inserting a line into his neck. A thick, blue-white tube that might just carry him through the next few days as his kidneys gave out. It would sit neatly on the pre-existing scar there, just along the collarbone, giving everyone a good look.
It was silent work, except for the soft buzzing of suction and the distant, mechanical pump of the ventilator.
A nurse, a civilian ward nurse belonging to the hospital and who was quite pleased with all this hubbub, leaned in to re-dress the bandages of his legs. It had been years, see, since this hospital had gotten to treat the Winner — oh, the honour of it all, the sheer fucking patriotism. The bandages peeled away wetly, by now soaked through with blood and pus and a thin seepage of rotting meat, taking with them more layers of skin which had, for the past day, been sloughing off him like a lizard's stuck shed. She'd inserted herself into his care from day one. It was an old hospital, see, and a proud one, and she'd be damned if she weren't getting her piece of the pie. She cleaned his legs with sterile saline.
The smell, iron and anti-septic and decay, carried faintly to the gallery. Once she was done, the nurse lifted the spoiled bandages up for the press, who cheered.
Cameras shuttered incessantly. Even through the glass, they could see the faint fog of his breath condensing on the inside of the tube. One reporter pressed closer, his own breath fogging against the screen, scrawling shorthand through the petty reflection of the sterile white lights. He took a deep sniff, feeding on the carrion.
"He kept trying to stand," explained the nurse, gesturing to the restraints; padded plastic wraps around both ankles, both wrists. "It was the humane option, of course." She spoke louder, so that they could hear her through the window as she adjusted the IV flow. "The sedatives don't always hold." It was not intended to sound cruel.
The doctors went on working, and the journalists went on watching.
They took no notice that his legs twitched against the restraints, or that his eyes flickered beneath the lids.
Outside, it was raining.
⩖
The boy Peter McVries came conscious on a rainy Sunday morning to bright, white light, and thought he was dead.
He squinted, and blinked harshly. The smell of bleach filled his nose, with something meat-sweet underneath it. The ceiling above him, once his eyes adjusted, was an off-white speckled grey — it was the only thing in this room he could see that was not white.
No, he was not dead. Worse.
He woke up walking.
In the same way that a baby dropped in water will start to swim, his calves jerked forward against something soft but unyielding — a strap, padded plastic, like a cheap children's soft play area. Met with this resistance, his muscles spasmed, he breathed hard, cords of movement fired blind and desperate. His body wanted forward, needed motion, needed to keep itself alive in that basal, animal-instinct way that a bear might chew off its own foot to escape a trap.
Just one foot in front of the other. Nothing more to it, except that there was more to it, he couldn't move his legs.
His tongue felt all at once too big for his mouth — except that was not his tongue either, was it? Something solid and spongey in his mouth, inside him, all the way down his throat. His jaw flexed; he bit down hard. When that did help things, he whined. He tried to lift his head and the motion caught where breath comes from, digging in. He gagged, gasped, tasted plastic. The ghost of hands closed around his throat, drifted along his jaw, the phantom taste of salt coating his tongue. He moved to sit up but found that he couldn't — his arms were tethered down at the wrists, too.
A shrill, electric note screamed into the air, piercing. The sound of a monitor, of many monitors, or...
FIRST WARNING, 23.
Breath struggled to come, his chest seized. The tube in his throat hissed, cracked as each wheeze dragged itself through. He could feel it all the way down to his lungs, this foreign invader, and coughed around it. It was cold.
He pulled and thrashed, flopping up and down like a beached fish, the motions barely his own yet, just momentum carried in his body. He had fallen asleep. He'd fallen asleep on the Walk and he had to get up. He could feel the road underneath him, taste salt and stone and blood. His calves burned with agony at the pulling; something on his shin came loose — a sock? His own skin?
The room swirled. The grey ceiling came crashing in on him. Tubes ran across him like veins, like intestines, holding him, pinning him down. His chest heaved.
Footsteps, faint. Somewhere down the hall, echoing around inside his skull.
Get up, get up, get up.
Silhouettes moved at the edges of his vision, moving past him, too fast, leaving him behind. The boy Art Baker's face became visible, looking down at him, pity and blood on his face, then he was gone again. McVries' fingers flexed to reach for him and his legs strained to catch him up.
Get up. One foot after the other. There's someone waiting for him just up ahead, a shadow at the end of his bed, back turned and walking away. He just needs to get up and keep walking. Keep fucking walking.
Hands on his shoulders, real hands, squeezing and pressing him back down into the bed. Firm hands, familiar hands. He was weak, and went easily but not without struggle. A woman's voice he didn't recognise said something tired and rehearsed, like she was talking to an animal.
"There's a machine breathing for you — don't fight it."
And still Pete tried to rise, to move, to chase the shadows down the hall. He was pushed down again.
The ceiling blurred and spun and spun, but did not come down on him again. Shapes came into and out of focus. A nurse's face, all masked up, green camo scrubs. Behind her, someone in a military coat. The scratch of scribbling on a clipboard. He was reminded of the boy Harkness.
Beeping. The constant click and whirring of machines.
"You won, Peter," somebody said to him. It couldn't be true, because nobody called him Peter — he was Pete. He decided he was dreaming. Maybe the same nurse, maybe somebody else said: "You don't have to walk anymore."
His legs jerked against the restraints, as if reminded of their single purpose, and pain ripped through them, bright and electric. His throat convulsed around the plastic in it. He was starting to become keen to the weight of all the things inside of him, digging in like worms, like maggots in a corpse, pulling and taking and filling him up. There was the tube down his throat, another sitting in his collarbone, a needle in his arm, something up his nose, a dull ache between his legs. Wires across his chest, sleeves around his arms. He wanted to tear everything out. Everything in him burned to stand up and keep walking.
A gunshot.
WARNING, 23. SECOND WARNING, 23.
It was not a gunshot — a pop, a shutter, a burst of light.
He moaned into the ventilator.
His legs yanked again, raw skin reopening and reopening. A nurse swore under her breath. Not quiet enough, Pete heard her anyway. Somewhere nearby, a camera shuttered again. The window in the door had a strip of yellow tape over it, NO ENTRY, AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, and he could see silhouettes behind it, the shapes of people leaning in, faces pressed all-too-close to the glass. One raised something, and he thought for a second he saw the smoking barrel of the carbine.
Flash of light.
He thrashed once, twice, and the restraints held. Hands pinned him down again. Someone huffed, annoyed, and said: "Just sedate him."
The drip of the IV continued the same. The machines sang their songs. His breath came too fast through the ventilator tube. He could hear the monitor that tracked his heart speed up, and up.
The boy Rank appeared to him then, clear as day. Standing, staggering, at the end of the bed. He was hunched over, both hands pressed to his open knees, his fingers bloody.
Pete shut his eyes, hard. Opened them again.
A nurse was talking to him, and had been for the past few minutes, speaking slow and telling him to calm down. It could've been seconds or hours later, all the difference it made. Her words took the vague outline of sympathy but in a hollow, meaningless tone. They all knew he would not remember this later. Someone adjusted a dial, and coldness shot up his arm, and his eyelids grew heavy.
A voice called his name. For one terrible moment, it was awfully familiar — and then it wasn't. He wanted to ask if they were still walking.
When he turned his head left, all he saw was the curtain drawn halfway around his bed, the faint outline of another bed beyond it.
His eyes were so, so heavy.
WARNING. WARNING, 23. THIRD WARNING, 23.
He felt for the road beneath his feet and found nothing but linen. His throat made a noise like drowning. For the umpteenth time since he'd won the Long Walk, Pete realised he wasn't Walking anymore.
⩖
"Breathe through your nose," came a clinical voice somewhere on his side.
It was followed by a pull, a deep tug in his chest, and Pete gagged as the breathing tube slid out of his throat with an awful, slick shhlk, trailing a string of spit with it. It was obscene. He thought, for a moment, crazily, that it had taken a piece of his lungs with it. It didn't. He coughed until something bitter came up, which a gloved hand wiped away, and then he could breathe solidly again.
"Don't talk."
Pete obeyed because he didn't know how not to. He might've thought it would feel good to breathe on his own again, but it was exhausting. The air burned on the way in, raw and chemical. The tube was replaced with a mask, which breathed cool air into his mouth for him. It was uncomfortable and stuck to his skin, which he couldn't adjust on account of his hands, but it was better than the tube.
The man standing over him wore a military uniform. He made a note on Pete's chart and pressed a button on one of the machines, which came to life with a sleepy tune.
"Where... what..." McVries' voice came hoarse and wavering. His brain might not remember the times he woke up screaming, but his body did.
"Don't talk."
The nurse had a number badge, like all the other staff, and this nurse's number was 0470. Pete couldn't work out why that was significant, but seeing it did something painful to his chest. For a second, he forgot how to breathe.
He swallowed hard, and the motion scraped all the way down his oesophagus. He became once again aware of every line and tube still in him, and resisted the compulsion to tear them all out.
In the corner of the room, a boy he only faintly recognised was pacing slow, relentless circles. Pete knew him. Oh, what was his name? Cleat? Casey? Curly. Yes: his name was Curly, and he's just warming up.
On the wall opposite him, beyond the foot of his bed, a flag hung limply: red white and blue. It said "WINNER" across it in a gaudy white-backed font.
"Four days."
Pete flinched. The nurse again. He didn't remember asking. He couldn't fathom it, anyhow — his mind couldn't work in measurements of time anymore; only miles, only how far he's Walked. "You're at St. Clement's Hospital. You won." He went about his words in a bored kind of way, like he'd said them many times.
The name — Clement — struck him kind of funny, needling at his brain. He felt like he was forgetting something. He felt like he was forgetting a lot of things.
The lights flickered, humming like insects, and the train of thought was lost.
His legs flinched under the blanket, restless automaton. Little tremors, just muscle memory. He couldn't stop it, didn't try to; they didn't know how to do anything else, he knew that. The nurse noticed but said nothing. Pete stared at him and also said nothing.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
The nurse adjusted the IV, and stinging coldness crept up his arm.
"Try to rest," the nurse said, and Pete suspected he had no choice in the matter.
Footsteps receding. The door clicked shut.
For a long time he lay still, staring at the ceiling and blinking slowly. The sound of the machines filled every gap in the air like rain. His heart pulsed in his eyes. Still beating, still alive.
A warmth pressed against his side, brief as a hand, then went again. When he turned his head, the curtain moved faintly in the current of an air vent, the space beyond empty.
His leg twitched.
A hollow ache began to make itself known to him, an absence in the pit of his stomach. He blinked. The boy in the corner of the room was gone — who? Oh, yes. Curly. He was warming up — he's gone now. Where'd he go? They left him behind? He needs to catch up. Someone's waiting for him.
Pete squeezed his eyes shut. In his dreams, he walked.
⩖
Days passed like this. Or weeks. Or months. Or hours.
Waking only sometimes, half-aware and scared, a stranger to his own body, back-seat driver.
The doctors had hooked him up to the good stuff, the best they had, and it still wasn't enough to block out all the pain. So much of it remained, bone-deep, something he might never shake no matter how far he ran. This constant whine in his feet, his legs, behind his eyes. When he tried to move, which often he did (though rarely of his own accord), he'd be met by those rubber restraints. Each quivering breath carried the sickly twang of antiseptic, and the low ache of lungs not yet convinced they were his again.
They came and went around him — doctors, nurses, orderlies. They weren't wearing military gear anymore. These doctors and nurses and orderlies were just people, doing their jobs, getting their piece of the pie. The Long Walk brigade had moved on, sufficiently sure that he was stable enough to be left in their hands. Behind the masks, gloves, long blue scrubs, their faces were interchangeable. He had long since stopped trying to tell them apart — and anyway, he got the creeping sense that they were never the same. Felt like everyone, even the janitors, wanted to get a look at him, to come see the Winner, to have something to tell the grandkids.
They told him his skin was necrotic in places ("that means rotting away"). They told him he'd gotten an infection in the blood. They told him his kidneys had nearly thrown in the towel. That his lungs had filled with fluid. That his GI tract stopped working for a moment there, but it's alright now. That he's dehydrated. That he's healing.
He'll heal.
None of it seemed real or true, and often he had forgotten what they told him by the time he woke back up.
He'd picked up a habit of sleepwalking, too. He never used to sleepwalk. It might go away, they told him, and he knew it wouldn't.
More stickers on the door window now, black and yellow: NO PHOTOS, and yet often he felt the lens of a camera on him, the flash of white light. A sacrificial lamb gone to the wolves — dead either way, what did it matter, the wolf or the butcher's block.
He'd heard of people pretending they were family members to get in — it tickled him, because he wasn't aware he had any of those left. Anything for a headline. He fancied the image like peasants in days gone past lining up to watch nobles at banquet, and was struck again by that hollow ache, that empty grief. Someone, someone would've gotten a kick out of that, if only he could remember their name.
The wall to his right had been decorated with the faces of every previous Winner, the words they Walked so you could Walk scrawled underneath. In another time, he might've laughed. It looked like a row of presidents, of CEOs or a memorial, except they were all young men. Young men with vacant eyes. He could not imagine his face amongst them, but he was sure he wore the same empty expression.
The nurses came and went, speaking as if to a mannequin, a practice dummy from their medical training. They weren't unkind, they just didn't see him. It was the way people speak to the elderly, or folks who've lost their mind — some days, he thought he might very well be in the latter, so he didn't begrudge them. They changed his bandages when needed, pumped him full of painkillers, emptied out the bags of urine and wiped his ass when he shit. They were nice enough, entirely professional, and that was almost the worst part of it.
He wasn't ungrateful, but he wasn't awfully grateful either. He wasn't much of anything at all. Just a boy, a nine-year-old boy, hiding under the bed from all his monsters. That's all he ever was.
Often he'd wake to a boy leaning over him, sometimes breathing heavy and sometimes making no noise at all. Hank Olson, with his intestines dangling over the bed, dripping with blood and whatever else. Stebbins, snot and mucus running down from his nose, a hole blown through his head. Always that sense of loss, that notion of something missing. When he blinked, he'd find the boy had become the shadow of the IV pole against the curtain, or a nurse checking his pulse, or something else just as plausible.
The grafts had begun — miscoloured, translucent sheets of skin fixed over muscle rubbed clean, stapled down in tidy lines.
They gave him the appearance of a well-loved stuffed bear, the ones that are more haphazardly-sewn-on patches than they are bear, except that he couldn't recall a time in his life that he'd ever been well-loved. Somehow, though, he knew that he had been. It came with such surety, and punched him right through with grief. He cried for the first time in as long as he could remember, mourning something that he couldn't remember losing, something he couldn't even remember having in the first place.
He kept wanting to ask how much longer to the next town, what about the next big city. Sometimes he did.
And then he'd close his eyes and he'd walk.
