Until You Are Dead Read Online Free

standing, swaying, with his fists on his hips.
    Wilson sighed and began to rise.
    "Not like that, you yellow coward scum!" Zach shouted. "Stay on your hands an' knees where you belong!"
    Maybelle began to laugh.
    Wilson stayed very still.
    "We'll kill you if you don't," Josh said to Wilson. "Maybe we'll kill you if you do."
    Wilson was paralyzed, breathing painfully as if each lungful of air were somehow thickened almost to a liquid consistency. Fear was a thing alive within him, pulling marionette strings despite his humiliation.
    He began to crawl.
    Maybelle laughed again. They were all laughing now except Zach, who was staring with a thin knowledgeable smile at Wilson.
    Then Wilson's left hand was stung by one of the glass fragments from the shattered windshield and headlights. He paused.
    "Keep comin'!" Zach warned.
    Wilson's right hand came into contact with the lug wrench.
    "You heard!" Bandy said, not laughing now. For emphasis he slapped his right hand hard against the loose fender of the Ford, causing the metal to twang and vibrate loudly.
    Wilson didn't remember rising, but he had, still clutching the lug wrench. He surprised himself even more than the three men as he was suddenly before them, swinging the tire iron, hearing and feeling it smash the flesh and bone of Zach's skull. Arcs of bright blood glistened in the air. The injured Bandy tried to grab Wilson's arm. Wilson was too strong for that now — stronger than anyone had ever been. He brushed the clutching fingers aside, brought the wrench down behind Bandy's ear. Someone was clawing at Wilson's neck with sharp fingernails. Maybelle. He whirled, lashed out with the wrench that seemed weightless in his hand, then pursued Josh, who was trying to stagger around the rear of the Ford, and laid open his skull with one effortless swing. Then he returned to Bandy, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground before Maybelle's bloody body. Bandy started to beg with his eyes and distorted mouth. The shadow of the raised lug wrench fell upon him like a cross. The shadow grew. The wrench descended.
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    I t was Ezekiel Ferber who came across the scene and fled home to phone the law. Sheriff Haynes and Deputy Krebs arrived within half an hour in the sheriff's dusty black car with the gold insignia on the doors. The doors slammed in unison as Haynes and Krebs left the car to swagger toward where Wilson was sitting slumped on the Chevy's running board, the heavy lug wrench on the ground between his feet. The sheriff and his deputy paused.
    Somewhere in a far dark part of Wilson's mind he could feel himself spinning, falling in intermittent, sweeping plunges toward an inevitable timelessness.
    "Gawd, Gawd, Gawd," the sheriff was saying, "he killed 'em all." His face was white. "There weren't no reason whatsoever for this."
    "Thass a fact," the deputy said in a soft, awed voice.
    "Those are the facts," the prosecutor said.
    "They're the plain facts," the jury foreman said.
    "–Until you are dead," said the judge.

The Chess Players
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    T he sky beyond the old man and the boy playing chess was dark and occasionally fractured by lightning. Against that backdrop, neither of them noticed the dust of the car approaching on the dirt road from the county highway.
    Both the old man — who was younger than he first appeared, with his white hair and beard — and the boy looked up when they heard the crunch of the tires and the soft thunking of rocks bouncing off the insides of the car's fenders. They remained seated beneath the branches of an elm, in the wooden kitchen chairs they'd dragged from the tiny farmhouse to place on either side of the small cedar table. On the table was a cheap chessboard and plastic pieces that were so light that from time to time the wind building up from the southwest tipped over the taller king, queen, or bishop. If the wind got much stronger, the pieces might blow from the board, but the old man and boy knew they wouldn't go far once