Free The Troubles by Unknown Page B

during those three devastatingly morose days as countless other civilians had been injured. The victims of propaganda are now the faces of a disheartened and hopeless broken world. 
         Quinn was at a crucial precipice now where perhaps his naivety and enthusiasm for the cause had put his young life in peril. As his short legs would not carry him swiftly away to safety, there would be no going back. Could he throw his condemnable weapon and quickly hide in the ruin of the alleyway?  Did they carry tear gas with them in their rucksacks? A barrage of questions flooded him with anxiety and to all he was without answers. 
         As he spied on the soldiers he was shoved from behind with such force that his brutally connected with the hard surface he was facing. Metallic hot liquid seeped from his nostrils as his eyes wept cold salty tears in a reflexive physical response to the stinging pain.
         “Do it!” Alroy’s breath, a mixture of rotting lamb stew and tobacco, burned hot and foul behind his ear. Quinn gagged upon a reflex of bile and swallowed the release of pungent coffee down quickly. He would not give Alroy the satisfaction he obviously desired by bullying of Quinn in this way.
        “Aye.” He breathed in a deep breath of dust, moist rain soaked air and the putrid remnants of Alroy’s stench, left in the boy’s wake. With trembling muscles not yet made strong from puberty formed testosterone, he thrust the brick high above his head and with all of his mighty fury he threw. “Arghhh!”
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 13: An the mach bhfuil laidir, ni folair do bheith glib (He who is not strong must be clever)
     
         Alastar Taggart…. My temples are throbbing and with neither a relief rom the tobacco smoke and other pub related pollutants or a form of man-made medicine, I fear my headache will only worsen. The urgency of Lanary’s trip and mine has been lost upon the drunken purveyor of our only form of transportation to Dublin. He has managed to relegate to us about the exploits he and his fellow loyalists had patriotically perpetuated during the now infamous People’s Democracy march between Derry and Belfast. He gleefully, now seeming to enjoy our obvious discomfort, had boasted about the ambush in Burntollet in which 200 loyalists and off-duty police (RUC) officers armed themselves to the hilt with iron bars, bricks and bottles. The volley of men whom had accosted the marchers remained jubilant from their campaign of violence and propaganda. Jamie Egerton had consumed the propaganda as he would have eaten gluttonously every morsel of food in sight and now was the village voice spewing hatred.
         “There’s no more damn fenian’s to walk after the bating I gave ‘em.’’ His slurred thickly accented snarl is losing volume and his neck snaps forward in the customary inebriated lull.
          “Are ya cod, do ya know who I am?’’ The syllables have escaped my lips without my mind’s diplomatic permission. Jamie is so drunk he doesn’t acknowledge my incendiary admission and Lanary looks relieved at this slight. He is a strategic man whom has evolved as he has aged but it is apparent right underneath his stoic exterior there is a seething, pulsing volcano capable of unimaginable aggression. My stray stead, Coraline, has fallen fast asleep into a perfect curled bundle of fur. I’m not surprised at her ability to distance herself from the noise and clamor around her. She is but a feline wonder and their abilities to recognize safe passage and kind human stewardship always amaze me.
         Blankets of rain has washed the streets clean of everything from the customary patrons and workers who meander at a much less heightened pace than the citizens of the much more bustling impersonal Belfast to the remnant’s of red silt. Beholden to us are polite greetings that are the fabric to the town’s integral community. The residues of a day’s work, from discarded bottles,