Yours Until Death Read Free

a shopping bag on wheels. She was very pale.She looked anxiously at me, but she had no reason to be afraid. I tried not to smile at her.
    I walked between the trees. I’ve always liked pines. They’re phallic. Plump, round, voluptuous, and they stretch toward heaven. Not like pious spruces with their drooping branches and their sad, undertaker’s expressions.
    The smell of pines has always meant summer to me. Late summer and you’re on the way up and through a mountain valley or a pass, up towards the heathery plateaus and the big open stretches and the arched pure late-summer sky with its dark blue strength, there where a long summer season has stored its vitamins against winter.
    But it wasn’t late summer now. It was February and there was no reason to think of mountain plateaus or pines, or anything at all.
    Suddenly I saw the hut, twenty metres further up the slope. It wasn’t a hut you could brag about. Somebody had dabbed green paint over pieces of lath, tar-paper and insulating scraps of sacks. High on the wall facing me was a little window covered with chicken wire. A shiny blue bicycle stood against the wail. I spotted a white face behind the chicken wire.
    I came closer and heard voices inside the hut. And then they came tumbling out through one of the side walls and down to the front of the hut. They lined up in front of the bicycle. They were like a wall.
    The Welcome Committee was in session.

4
    They looked more nervous than tough. Six average, overgrown, teenage boys with the same old pimples, the same old downy chins, the same old fatuous sneers. A tall lanky kid at one end of the line tried rolling a cigarette, but he dropped half the tobacco on the ground, and when he finally got the cigarette in his mouth he just missed jamming it in his eye.
    The kid in the middle was different. He was short and fat. Ruddy face, yellow-blond hair. The hangdog look in his eyes told me he was the gang’s court jester. All gangs have their fool, and God help anybody in another gang who tries anything with him. Consciously or not, the fool keeps the gang together. They’ve got to defend him. This must be the one Roar called Tasse.
    You could see differences in hair colour, expression and size among the other four. Even so, they were amazingly alike. They all wore jeans. Some wore leather jackets, other ski jackets.
    When the last one came out of the hut the picture changed abruptly. The others had rushed out like sheep. This one sauntered – as if he’d happened to pass by accidentally. Something deliberate and stagey about him warned me. Psycho.
    I could see how they fawned on him. What thirty seconds earlier had been confirmation candidates who’d have meekly recited the Lord’s Prayer for me suddenly became a gang. Tight lips replaced the uneasy smiles. The anxious eyes hardened into pebbles. The tall one’s cigarette settled down in the corner ofhis mouth. Tasse displayed his stomach, rested his plump little hands on his hips.
    He didn’t introduce himself. Wasn’t necessary. He seemed totally uninterested in the proceedings. There was something almost drowsy about him. But the narrow squinting eyes weren’t sleepy. They were bright and alert. A predator’s.
    His dark hair was brushed back from a high white forehead. It gave him a priestly look. His nose was unusually narrow and thin, almost like a knife, and you had the feeling he could use it as a weapon. His mouth was a little like Elvis Presley’s. The upper lip curled, but the teeth were too decayed to smile on a record jacket.
    He wore tight almost white jeans and a black leather jacket with a lot of shiny zippers. A spare taut body – not especially powerful. But I assumed he’d be very good with a knife. His type is.
    I knew how his voice would sound: as tense as a steel wire and as gentle as a used razor blade. As soon as he opened his mouth, a ray of afternoon-yellow sun strayed under the pines and shone right in his face. The paper-pale skin