In the morning, Garraty becomes fascinated by the fact that Scramm is married and expecting a child. Scramm explains that he left school young, went to work in a bedsheet factory, married Cathy, and has been saving for their baby; he proudly insists that his child will go to college. When Garraty presses him about the risk of dying, Scramm answers with calm confidence: he entered the Walk to win, unlike Barkovitch, who seems to thrive on others’ deaths, or Garraty, who seems to be walking mostly from fear. Pearson then admits that fear of dying is almost the only thing still keeping him going.

The conversation is interrupted when an unnamed walker in a black turtleneck collapses in a convulsion and is shot after his warnings expire. Soon afterward, the boys crest a rise and look out over the green country ahead, briefly taking in the beauty of the road and the woods. Scramm talks dreamily about someday building a house there for Cathy, but the moment of calm fades as the morning breeze dies, the heat rises, and spectators begin lining the road again.

Sexual tension and exhaustion combine when two young women in shorts watch the walkers from beside an MG. Gribble suddenly breaks toward them, gropes and kisses one girl while taking repeated warnings, then stumbles back to the road in pain and frustration, sobbing that he could not finish and that he has a cramp. Gribble collapses and dies almost at once. Garraty is left shaken not only by Gribble’s death but by his own involuntary arousal and shame, and he reties his jacket around his waist to hide the evidence before forcing himself onward.

As the road slopes downhill, Olson looks increasingly close to collapse, and McVries remarks that walkers are near the end when they begin to half-wish for the bullet just to rest their feet. Rifle shots from ahead announce that Harkness has finally burnt out. Later, after more nervous joking and increasingly strained conversation, Olson begins openly pleading with the soldiers to let him rest, humiliating Garraty and horrifying the spectators. Another boy, Percy, edges onto the shoulder and tries to walk calmly into the woods, but because leaving the road forfeits all warnings, a soldier shoots him at once. Percy’s death sends McVries into a burst of hysterical, blasphemous talk until the others shut him down.

The morning grows hotter and uglier. A delayed truck driver gives the walkers the finger, prompting Garraty to explain that his own father had been a trucker before being Squaded for his politics; when Collie Parker says only fools get Squaded, Garraty remembers soldiers taking his father away eleven years earlier, and McVries forces Parker to back off. Baker then confesses that he once rode with night riders and is ashamed of it, while Olson attacks Pearson for secretly counting deaths with pennies. Garraty, sickened by the picnicking crowds, calls the spectators animals, but McVries argues that the onlookers are the smart ones because they are not the ones being sacrificed. Stebbins closes the exchange with the bleakest explanation of all: every one of the boys is walking because, in some hidden way, they want to die.