A Bentley Little sampler

Jan. 21, 2001

John Hawks had started walking the night after his fever broke. At first they'd thought that the sickness had passed. When they heard the creak of his bedsprings, heard his footsteps on the hardwood floor, they assumed that he'd gotten up and out of bed because he was all right. But when he strode straight through the kitchen and outside without so much as a word, when they saw the almost complete lack of expression on his skeletal face, the glassy stare of his pale eyes, they knew something was wrong. Robert and Cabe had run out after him, trying to find out what was going on, but the old man had begun circling around the house, bumping into the cottonwood tree, stepping through the jojoba bushes, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. They had followed him around the house once, twice, three times, yelling at him, demanding his attention, but it was clear that he was not going to talk to them. They were not even sure he understood the words they screamed. The only thing they were sure of was that he was still sick. And that, for some reason, he could not stop walking.

They hadn't tried to talk to him since, and they had not tried to stop him. There was something so terrifying about the way he endlessly circled the house, something so utterly wrong and beyond their understanding, that they had thought it best to wait it out. Robert had assigned each of them watches, and for the first couple of days they stuck faithfully to the schedule, although Cabe's nighttime vigil had since been abandoned.

They hadn't expected the old man to last long. He was sick, he was old, he was frail, and he hadn't eaten since before his fever broke. But he'd continued to walk. Three days. Five days. A week. Two weeks. They'd expected him to die - had hoped, had prayed, for him to die - but he had not. His condition worsened. He grew thinner, sicklier. But he continued to walk.

Now he had died.

And he continued to walk.

- From The Walking, a horror novel by Bentley Little.

More online: To read the entire chapter from The Walking, go online to azcentral.com/rep/books. There's also a link to amazon.com, where the book is available in paperback for $6.29.