As the walkers push on in cold rain after Freeport, Tubbins goes mad and rants incoherently until he is shot. Garraty, now ashamed and desperate after seeing Jan and his mother, realizes he truly wants to win for the first time, but also feels that his body is failing. Abraham approaches Garraty with a pact the remaining boys are making: no one will help anyone else from now on. Garraty agrees, even though he knows this means betraying the bond he feels with McVries and abandoning the last traces of solidarity.

The walkers grow quieter and more isolated as evening comes on. Everyone accepts Abraham’s rule, including McVries, Baker, and Stebbins, and the little groups dissolve. Garraty reflects on Jan, his mother, his father, and McVries’s earlier rescues, recognizing how deep into the Walk they all are. Then Collie Parker suddenly seizes a soldier’s rifle, kills the soldier, and tries to rally the walkers into some kind of uprising or escape. The others are too stunned and exhausted to respond, and Parker is shot in the back and dies cursing them as they pass.

That night the cold worsens, and Abraham begins to suffer without the shirt he discarded earlier. Garraty feels sickened by the new cruelty among them, but no one breaks the pact to help. Baker drifts toward madness, counting change and talking dreamily about buying a lead-lined coffin, which horrifies Garraty. After another walker, Marty Wyman, simply lies down and is shot, the survivors continue through darkness, past a drive-in theater saluting them, while rain starts again and Abraham develops the same wet cough that preceded Scramm’s death.

In the early hours, Bobby Sledge tries to slip into the crowd but is quickly killed. Soon after, Baker falls and cracks his head, and Garraty instinctively moves to help, but McVries stops him and reminds him that the old loyalty is over. Baker survives long enough to rise again and keep walking. Near two in the morning they cross into New Hampshire amid enormous fireworks, bands, and patriotic spectacle, a grotesque celebration that blurs into Garraty’s hallucinations and exhaustion.

As the night grinds toward dawn, more boys are shot in the rain while the core survivors visibly deteriorate. Stebbins remains unnervingly strong, Baker struggles on grimly, and Garraty notices with alarm that even McVries is beginning to collapse. Several walkers have become almost mindless, already seeming half dead. Just before dawn, three go down in quick succession, and Abraham is among them: coughing, feverish, and reduced to crawling on his knees before he finally falls facedown and dies. The chapter ends with dawn rising over a much smaller field as the final day of the Walk begins.