“Ain’t no way to tell just how he walked exactly,” said the storyteller to the listener, eyes squinting off into the sun, “can’t say he really walked. Only reason I use the word is ‘cause there ain’t no other way to say it, you know? Can’t think of no adjectives or sy-ner-nims for it. He strolled with the breeze, but he had the gait of a man with nothin’ but determination on his mind.” He paused, scratching the gray stubble around his chin, “The guy, the Walkin’ Man, he just… he just went.”

“Whatchu mean, he just went ?” Asked the listener, wanting to know more about the man, whose footsteps they were following.

“It’s the only way to say it really,” the storyteller sighed, and looked at a man who was a decade or so younger than he, “he just kept on keepin’ on. He walked without ever lookin’ back, and never looking ahead, he just looked around at where he was. His eyes; they were always suspicious ‘bout everythin’ he was near, but at the same time he had himself a confidence: he knew he could take whatever it was that the road decided to throw at him.”

“Almost anything,” corrected the listener.

“Yeah,” the storyteller sighed, and remembered hearing of the demise of the Walkin’ Man, “almost.”

“What’d he call himself?”

The storyteller stared off to the horizon for a moment or so, then shook his head, as if out of a trance, “Can’t quite remember. Now I’m not sure if I can’t remember ‘cause he told me and I forgot, or if ‘cause he just never did tell me.” After a few seconds of thinking on it, he decided, “probably the latter. He wasn’t much of a talker.”

“No?”

“Quiet as hell, actually. He was the only man who could scare ya to pieces without sayin’ so much as a syllable. No he wasn’t much of a talkin’ man.”

“Nope,” smirked the listener, “just The Walkin’ Man.”

“Ain’t no more. Now he’s the dead Walkin’ Man.” The storyteller watched the smirk melt off of the listener’s face. The storyteller rose to his feet and felt the joints in his knees flash with pain. The listener rose as well, looking into the sky, and determined that if his judgment of the sun’s placement was correct, there were only a few more hours of daylight left. He looked down the long black road, “How far till we reach where the Walkin’ Man made it to?”

“You see where the road splits that plateau in half?”

“Yeah, yeah I do.”

“Well right there, figure fifteen miles or so.” The storyteller looked to the guns at his waist; one on each hip, then adjusted them slightly, “That’s as far as The Walkin’ Man made it. That’s as far as he made it ‘fore it got him.”

The listener saw the story teller fix the placement of his guns, and did the same with the lone pistol at his side, then did the same with the blade on his chest. “Fifteen miles… fifteen miles to the Walkin Man’s grave,” he looked down to the road at his feet, then back up to where the road split the plateau in half; two huge pillars split evenly down the middle, as if god took a table saw to the whole thing, “fifteen miles to our grave.”

“That maybe so,” said the storyteller; if he was any scared at all of death, his voice didn’t show it.

“It got the Walkin’ Man. It’ll get us too.” The listener’s voice was shaky.

“Can’t let it get us. Not an option,” the storyteller’s voice was just the opposite; a rock compared to a fallen leaf in October, “You knew this day’d come. You knew it well.” The story teller began walking down the road, determined to move on.

“We ain’t never gonna see another sun rise!” called the listener to him, now ten feet behind the storyteller.

“If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is,” he didn’t turn around, “You knew you was gonna die someday, at least now you may have the pleasure of knowing just which day it is.”
“I won’t let it get me! I won’t fight it!” The listener’s voice was drowned in panic.

“Come on, kid,” the storyteller stopped and faced the younger man, “we ain’t got no choice. If we get there ‘fore the sun sets, we just may have a chance to see tomorrow’s dawn.” Figuring that’d get the listener to start walking, the story teller turned and headed down the long road. He took about five steps when from behind him the desert silence was snapped by the sound of a single gunshot. With unimaginable speed the storyteller turned around, his gun pointed at the source of the sound, but what he saw made him nearly drop the firearm.

The gunshot had come from the listener’s right hand, which was still holding the gun, even as the young man crumpled to the ground. The storyteller watched him fall, as he had watched so many dead men fall and approached the listener’s body. He gathered what he could carry of the dead man’s supplies then turned and took the first steps of what would come to be his final fifteen miles.