Chapter Text
Ray Garraty opened his eyes.
He hadn’t expected this to be a part of his life, ever, but he felt okay. Whenever he moved he felt an itch of soreness, the kind that you got after working out hard, but it wasn’t unmanageable. He didn’t think he’d be getting up any time soon, but that was also because he was hooked up to all kinds of machines, and everything was fluorescent and white and clean.
Hospital.
“Oh, you’re up.”
Garraty looked up and—
“Art?”
The boy he was looking at, a kid in hospital scrubs, frowned and pointed at himself with a thumb. “Andrew,” he said. “I’m your hired help.”
“What?”
“Andrew,” he said again. “Hired help. You know, help you walk around, get acclimated to things again. I clean your bedpan, too, so we’ve got no secrets.”
Ray Garraty was pretty sure that he was looking straight at Art Baker. Easy smile, feathery blond hair, a dash of freckles. Blue eyes. Kind eyes. He didn’t know how it was possible, but this was Art Baker. This was not Andrew.
His silence prompted more words from ‘Andrew.’
“Your mom hired me,” he said. “She said she wanted you to have a friend when you woke up. I told her I’d be anyone’s friend for the amount she was paying me. You can really do whatever you want to me as long as she keeps paying me.”
“Long Walk money?” Garraty asked, sort of testing the waters, because now he wasn’t even sure if the Long Walk was real. If this was Art Baker the Walk couldn’t be real, or if it was, he definitely hadn’t been on it, because—
Because—
But Andrew was nodding. “Absolutely,” he said. “You know, I entered for that every year between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, you know, for the money, and I never once got picked.”
“You did,” Garraty said. “You died.”
Andrew had this funny look on his face, but he held up a finger and went to the other side of the room and brought back a magazine. TIME magazine, this year’s Long Walk edition. “Show me who you think I am,” Andrew said. “This has profiles on all the Walkers. More detail the farther they got, but—”
“Fourth,” Garraty said.
“Lots of detail,” Andrew said. “Oh, right. Right, yeah. Art Baker, fourth overall. It went… it went, you, Stebbins, McVries, Baker, right?”
Garraty couldn’t even nod. McVries. McVries’s name was barreling around his chest now, lighting up his nerve endings. If Baker was here now—if he could make Andrew see—then McVries—
“Okay,” Andrew said, flipping open the book. Baker was, alphabetically, pretty early on as well, and so they came to him right away.
But he looked wrong.
His hair was darker, the freckles were gone. His eyes were greener than blue.
“That’s not right,” Garraty said. He looked at Andrew, half-ready for him to deny it again, but Andrew was frowning at the picture. “That’s not what he looked like. He looked like you.”
“Yeah,” Andrew said. He scanned the article and bit down hard on his lip. “You know—you know, the night before the Walk ended, the—when he, around the same time—I get nosebleeds, sometimes. You know, dry air.”
The more he talked the more his words lengthened. The more he sounded like Baker.
“But… it…” Andrew trailed off. “Something’s weird. You mind?”
He didn’t wait for Garraty to say anything. He just bolted.