At two in the afternoon, Baker and Abraham are jokingly gambling with dimes while Garraty walks beside them. In the middle of their banter, Garraty is hit by a monstrous cramp in his left leg and collapses to the pavement. Because Garraty cannot stand and keep pace, he rapidly draws his first, second, and third warnings while soldiers and walkers move past him, and Garraty becomes certain he is about to be shot.

Garraty desperately massages the locked muscle while a blond soldier calmly prepares to execute him. At the last possible moment, the cramp breaks, Garraty jerks to his feet, and he lunges into a run fast enough to satisfy the speed monitor. Garraty survives, but the effect is grim: for the next hour, he must walk with three warnings on him, meaning any small lapse will kill him immediately, and the experience leaves him shaken, resentful, and newly conscious that death is always only seconds away.

McVries joins Garraty and helps him move to the front so Garraty can safely exceed the minimum speed. To keep Garraty from panicking over the clock, McVries draws him into talking about how Garraty entered the Long Walk. Garraty explains that after receiving his confirmation letter he felt proud and trapped by public attention; a town dinner celebrated him, Jan begged him to take the final backout, Dr. Patterson argued logically that the odds were terrible, and Garraty's mother half-hoped the Prize or the Major might somehow save him. Garraty admits that, despite all of that pressure, he could not make himself withdraw. During this conversation, Joe is shot, proving again how quickly a walker can vanish.

The conversation then turns to McVries. McVries reveals that he was not originally a Prime Walker but a backup who was called in only hours before the event, and he says his father wanted to physically stop him from going until soldiers arrived to take him. As Garraty's danger hour slowly passes, the chapter widens back out to the road: more walkers are killed, the crowd responds with a mix of excitement and horror, a loose dog is shot when it runs into the course, and a wandering child is shoved back into the crowd by a soldier. By late afternoon Garraty is physically steadier, but the approach to Augusta makes him brood over whether Jan and his mother will be waiting and what he would do if he saw them.

Once Garraty has recovered enough, McVries suggests dropping back so they can rejoin Baker and Abraham and enter Augusta together. They do so gradually, learning that Gallant has just died. As the road marker announces Augusta is ten miles away, Abraham explains how he got into the Walk: he took the test on a whim, wrote a deliberately grotesque and self-mocking essay, then got swept along because everyone around him treated the whole thing as a joke and expected him to keep mocking the system. Abraham's story ends the chapter on a bitter note, showing that beneath the laughter the Walk keeps turning boys' bravado, vanity, and helplessness into death.