His feet continued to move forward (although the motion would be more properly termed shuffling than walking now) because there was nothing else for them to do -- to stop, to sit down, or to be still would be to give up. Giving up would mean that he had put Seth through all of this for nothing. He didn’t want it to be for nothing.
That may have been a strange thought to dwell in the mind of a man who not so very long ago had been certain that he was doing nothing more than making a futile gesture born of a desperate attempt to placate a conscience that did not want to cope with the new knowledge placed upon it. He had been running away from what he knew. He had been running away from what he had done. He had taken the little boy with him as a token (a piece of the futile gesture, an excuse); his last thought was to have been a noble one about trying (an absolution of sorts for all of the questions he had never bothered to ask).
They were not supposed to make it very far. It was all supposed to be over before he had time to do much in the way of thinking. It hadn’t worked out that way. Nothing had gone the way he expected in his half frenzied escape from the hospital. They had made it far. It hadn’t been over quickly. He had had time (so much time) for thinking, wondering, and hoping. That was the problem. Something had shifted in the time that he hadn’t intended to have. It might have been the strange feeling (almost giddy in nature) that had overtaken him when he had realized that he was truly out in the open beyond the borders of the city that had confined him all his life.
He hadn’t even realized that he had been confined until the openness of it all had forced itself upon his notice -- beyond the expectations of spotlights, orders to halt, and the growing concerns of what it was that he was supposed to do with a baby or even with himself now that the structured life he had always lived had been left behind him. The giddiness hadn’t lasted long in the face of his uselessness.
He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know how to feed them. He didn’t even know whether he was poisoning them on the occasions that he had stumbled across water that he had both of them drink anyway because he didn’t know what else to do. He only knew how to keep walking, so that was what he did. He didn’t think that his final thought would end up being a noble one now. He thought that his final thought was going to be something far more depressing. It was going to be something about how he wished that they had just stayed put. That way he wouldn’t have had to watch Seth die.
He didn’t know for sure what they did to put down tagged children, but he guessed that it was at least carried out quickly. His last thoughts were going to end up being about how he wasn’t any different than the others. They were going to end up being about how he caused deaths just like they did.
It wasn’t time for that yet. He wasn’t ready to give in to those thoughts. He wasn’t ready to sink to the ground beneath one of the trees and wait for it all to be over. His feet kept moving. He shifted the child from one hip to the other in a rather futile attempt to spread out the wear on his body. Seth merely let his head sink onto the new shoulder. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t let out any sort of protest. Ian would have really appreciated it if the child had registered some sort of a sound. That was a shift in his thinking as well.
He had been petrified that the child was going to make noise and draw attention to them as they were making their way out of the city. He had hushed him repeatedly and done everything that he could think of to keep him quiet. Later, he had wanted nothing more than for the little boy to stop when he had been squalling because he was hungry (and there was nothing that Ian could do to fix that). He had hated that noise then. He had hated the headache it had given him and the way it hurt his ears. He had hated how easy it would have made it for anyone to find them (if anyone had been trying).
Mostly, he had hated how guilty it had made him feel to know that the child’s distress had been all his doing. The squalling had died away to fussing. The fussing had died away to exhausted snuffling. The exhausted snuffling had continued for a very long time. Seth had stopped even that now. He just rested his head against Ian’s shoulder and didn’t make any sounds. Ian missed the noises. He missed the reminders that Seth was still as okay as it was possible for him to be under the circumstances. He wasn’t okay. He was lethargic. He had only roused just slightly the last time that Ian had given him some water. Ian’s head was fuzzy enough that he couldn’t recall exactly when that had been.
He kept walking. He kept his hold on the little boy in his arms. Those two things were about all he could handle. He had stopped paying attention to where it was that he was going. He might be traveling in circles. He might have being going the wrong way the entire time. He didn’t know. He just knew that Seth was fading, and he had to keep going. He had to keep going because that was the only chance that Seth had, and he couldn’t give up while Seth still had any chance at all.