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He’d heard it before he felt it.
In the midst of the gunfire and the bodies falling and the screaming, a snap can be heard through the night. It reminds Richard of a twig, almost. That’s what he thinks it is at first. He doesn’t look down to check. He doesn’t have time. He just keeps walking. If it’s a little stilted, he doesn’t notice.
He doesn’t notice until a little over an hour out from the hill. The adrenaline had finally worn off, and the pain hit him like a truck. He’s walking next to Olson, and the sound he makes startles the boy out of his trance. He liked Olson. He was a crass little guy, but he was nice enough to walk with. Hadn’t poked too much fun at the book, and talking to him wasn’t all that different from the boys back home. He worried about Olson though; he’d gone quiet around 6 p.m. yesterday and hadn’t talked much since. He’s especially worried about Olson now though, the way he looks down at Richard’s leg, pales, and begins to walk faster.
Richard’s scared to look. If he looks, he’ll have to accept that it's real. That the pain he’s feeling isn’t a cramp or a rock in his shoe. He does anyway. The sight that greets him is his ankle, red and inflamed, with a steady trail of blood flowing from a puncture in its side. He thinks he sees something sharp poking out. Something sharp and jagged and pearly white and- his stomach heaves and he tears his eyes away. It’s almost worse. His mind begins to fill in the blanks for him. Curse of a writer, he thinks somewhat bitterly.
He pulls his notebook from the front pocket of his bag; Pearson had suggested he place it there when they’d first seen the incline warning. Suggested he just add in that part later to avoid the risk of dropping it. He’d been a little bitter about doing so originally, memory always distorts events, and his goal is for the book to be as accurate as possible. He’s glad Pearson had done it now. He suddenly looks around for Pearson, to walk with him, maybe hear more about his strange little brother, but can’t seem to find him in the crowd. He looks for him longer than he should before writing a small eulogy for the boy he’d spent the last few hours with before everything had gone to shit.
He also writes a small paragraph on his current condition. Shorter than he’d like, but his vision is going slightly hazy at the edges, and his headlamp is suddenly too bright. His glasses are smudged with grease and sweat, and all attempts to clean them seem to spread it even more. His ankle hurts. He puts his notebook back into his bag and half walks, half stumbles into a spot next to Parker and Baker. Parker lets out a mumbled swear and tells him to “turn that damn light off,” and he obliges without argument.
Richard tries to doze for a few hours and is even successful a few times, but can never quite seem to fall into the type of fitful rest that any of the others are getting. Every time he gets close, a jolt of pain goes through his leg like a physical blow. The first few times he’d awoken, he’d been noticeably irritated. Baker had attempted to talk to him, and he’d shrugged him off. He’d apologized half heartedly a little while after. Baker was nice, he told himself. He was trying to help. To distract him. But he’s tired and his leg hurts. He badly wants to sleep.
Eventually, sometime after sunrise, he rationalizes with himself that falling asleep wouldn’t be good for the book. The book. The book about The Long Walk. The book that would make him rich. The reason why he is here. Something ugly creeps in with that last thought. Something that sounds like Mcvries telling him that he wouldn’t need the book to be rich if he won, and Barkovitch saying that he was dying tonight. He shakes his head, drinks a little from his canteen, and continues to walk. Dimly, he realizes he is limping. Richard pulls out his notebook and begins to write.
A few hours pass, and Richard trips. Hard. The unexpected roar of a carbine scares him so badly that he loses his footing. And with it, his left shoe. He’d been up quickly, hadn’t even stopped long enough for a warning. Sometime in the last few hours, his circumstances had really set in for him. He was breathing laboriously, on the verge of hyperventilating. Teeth clenched so hard he could taste copper. He chanced a look down on his now shoeless foot, and immediately regrets it.
It's a horrid sight. The sock is drenched through with blood, his blood; the joint is almost fully turned sideways. There’s a bone sticking out. No longer white, crusted with dry blood, broken almost in two. The foot itself is turning purple.
In his terror, he stops walking for just a moment and picks up a warning. Before the panic rising through his body can fully take hold, Stebbins haphazardly brushes past him and shocks him into stumbling forward. It’s agony, but it’s better than the alternative.
Richard walks for an impossibly long time after that. Uncoordinated, jerky steps, barely reaching pace but reaching pace nonetheless. His mind wanders. Back to the day before, back to Thomas Curley, back to Pearson, back to anything and everything that would keep his mind off the scorching pain in his left leg.
He’d been so excited to do this. He’d win and he’d publish his book and make his mark on the world. That excitement had been stopped dead in its tracks when Curley had gotten his ticket. He was just a boy who’d clearly lied about his age. He’d been fourteen at the oldest. It was the first time Richard had seen a dead body.
Death was an ugly thing, nothing like it was described in the books he’d read growing up. There was no shining light or deus ex machina to save the boy before the bullets had ripped through his skull. He was just there, and then he was gone. All that was left of him was the carcass left on the side of the road to bleed before the clean-up crew swept through the trail to pick up the broken boys left behind on the pavement.
He thinks back to Pearson, the boy with the glasses almost as thick as his, who had lived with his mother and little brother, who had been sad that his little brother hadn’t cried for him. He wondered if Pearson was still on that hill or if they’d come through to get him yet. Pearson was nothing but a dead body now. Soon, that’s all Richard would be.
He wasn’t diluted enough to believe anything else, not really. He was living on borrowed time. His ankle was fucked. It wasn’t going to get better. Richard was no longer walking for his book, or for himself, or whatever bullshit he’d told himself to keep him from backing out on the 31st. Richard was walking because he was scared of dying. He wanted to go home, back to his sisters and his parents. He wanted to be back in his older sister’s room listening to her read to him.
She’d been the one to get him into books, into writing, and he had been going to dedicate his book to her. He wouldn’t have the chance now. And if he couldn’t have that, he wanted to go back to the start of the walk. When Olson was cracking jokes with him, and he and Pearson had been trading stories, and when Thomas Curley had been alive.
He’s startled back to reality by his first warning. His feet were failing him. He lets out a dry sob as he feels the earth get strangely closer to him all at once. He hadn’t realized he was falling until his hands reach out to brace himself from the ground. There is a gun to his head. He hears Baker yelling something. He hears his second warning. He half stumbles, half drags himself back to his feet and trudges forward. He’s not reaching pace. His ankle’s all twisted up. He wants to go home. All at once, he feels everything and then nothing. It is utterly indescribable. He wants to tell his sister about it. And then he is gone.
Richard Harkness burns out at noon on the second day of the walk, nine hours after twisting his ankle. His memoir is never published.