W2F-007 Walking Corpses-0.txt
Prologue

Children with dirty faces smiled back at him. Their eyes gleamed in the light of the flames. A beautiful girl with thick dark clusters of curls hanging down to her shoulders was singing in Irish, unaccompanied. She just stood by the bonfire, there in the middle of the street, in the middle of a Catholic slum that for the last three nights had been under siege from gangs of Protestants, her voice rising above the crackling fire, and sang. And there was silence. The gangs of men and youths who had spilled from the corner pub to the pavement outside fell silent. The youths who had been laughing and joking at the makeshift barricade a little further up the street, they too fell silent, laying aside their sticks and clubs. It seemed as if the whole war-torn city was listening in the hope that her words would assuage its ugly wounds.

Four days before, Mickey Burns was standing on the pavement of Manhattan carrying a suitcase, waiting for a cab to take him to Kennedy Airport for the bonfire, enraptured, though he didn't understand a word of what she sang. Neither did his cousin, Tofer Curry, who sat next to him, sipping from a beer can. But somehow Mickey understood what the song meant more clearly than he had understood anything in his life before, or perhaps since.

Both cousins were weary. Three nights in a row they 'd been up without sleep. There 'd been riots, mobs rampaging in the streets, a nine year old boy murdered in his bedroom, others cut down on the road. The barricades were everywhere, blocking off the entrances to the warren of narrow side streets that made up the heart of the Falls Road Catholic ghetto.

Mickey had come for a holiday, to stay with his cousin Christopher "Tofer" Curry. Instead, he 'd never worked so hard in his life - not even in Vietnam. He helped erect barricades, patched up injuries; had even given an on-the-spot arms lesson to someone said to be in the IRA who 'd shown up with a Second World War carbine left over from some long forgotten campaign. And everyone knew him as "The Yank". The women made him cups of tea and sandwiches and asked him what he thought of this place, and wouldn't he rather have stayed in New York? And the children with dirty faces and bright eyes followed him around asking him if he knew where Clint Eastwood lived, and if when he returned could he hide them away in his suitcase?

Since the barricades had been put up, the streets had come alive. There were bonfires, and the pubs never shut; impromptu dances were held at the corners and around the fires. All of the ghetto's life spilled onto its pavements; the dourness, the sullen boredom of ghetto existence was swept away, people seemed to have shaken off the years of resentful obedience to hated authority. The very atmosphere was heady and electric with crackling rebellion.

She sang, and he fell in love. He did not know her name. He had never seen her before. He did not know from where she had emerged, nor to where she had gone. When she had finished and stepped out of the light of the fire and into the surrounding shadows, she vanished. But for the duration of that song, sad yet defiant, she was the embodiment of an experience that Mickey Burns would treasure for the rest of his life. An experience that had bound him to his cousin who was at his side for those unforgettable days, and through that profound blood-link he was joined forever to the city from whence his own people had come and whose suffering he had witnessed for himself.

She sang, and the whole city listened. But with the coming of morning, it resumed its murderous ways.

And Mickey would return to New York again, not knowing how it would end.

1

Dawn came with the promise of a good bright summer's day. It was so quiet that the sound of the traffic signals could be heard clicking from the far side of the road. Green, orange red, green, orange, red to the empty road, idiotically busy, like chorus girls dancing in an abandoned theatre. Not one car had passed in hours.

Christopher Curry had not slept all night but felt wide awake. He had seen other dawns like this, crouched behind a rock overlooking a lonely road, waiting as now. Or years before, before the burnings, the barricades, the bombings; walking along a deserted road somewhere in England hoping only for the first car of the morning to come to thumb a lift. Such summer dawns always gave him a sensation of almost infinite optimism. The first car he thumbed would be certain to stop and take him to where he wanted to go.

He looked at his watch, and then at Tohill, whose face as usual was expressionless. Next to him, McCann was slumped in a corner near the window.

"A great day for the shore", McCann said with a sigh.

"Can you swim?" Christopher Curry asked Tohill, who shook his head.

"Aye - like a brick," he said.

The queer smell of burning rubber and petrol that hung in the air over West Belfast had filtered into the room. It mingled with the stale smell of cigarette smoke.

"I can swim," said Curry, "but I wouldn't go near the beaches around here."

"Tofer's a man for the Costa del Sol," McCann said, smiling.

"He wishes," said Tohill.

A little later a car came along and stopped at the junction. They listened to its engine ticking over. Then a milk cart rattled down the road on its morning delivery. The lights flashed red. It halted.

"I'm surprised," Christopher Curry said, "after last night's riots that they let it come into the area."

"They know it won't be touched," said Tohill. "The families need the milk."

"What if it stops here?" Curry asked, his eyes darting suddenly from the milk lorry to Tohill.

"It won't. I checked with the ould ones last night when we took over. They shop down the road. They don't take deliveries now. Relax."

After that a bread van came trundling towards the lights, full of freshly baked loaves, scones, baps and various cakes in long wooden trays. Christopher wondered if it would make the light But it was the third in a row that had to stop. He glanced at his watch again. They were due soon. Would they make it four?

McCann roused himself and checked everything. Tohill told Curry to make sure that McAreevy, who was guarding the old couple, had everything under control. He found them still safely out of the way in the locked back room.

"They 're sleeping like logs," he told Tohill on his return. "McAreevy says they 've been no problem."

A baby's cry drew the three men's attention back to the road. They tensed. A young woman was pushing a big baby carriage down the sidewalk, heading in the direction of the traffic lights. It was a Cadillac of a pram - the kind young mothers buy to show off their first baby.

She stopped and stuck her head into the pram. The baby was howling. It must have lost its dummy tit or something. What the hell was she doing out at this hour anyway, Curry asked himself. Tohill was pale, and kept checking the time. They were usually so punctual.

Both McCann and Curry looked at Tohill. He kept staring down the road. It was too late to back out now.

The baby stopped crying. The mother pushed the pram along more quickly. They heaved a sigh of relief. But when she reached the lights she halted. She began to push the pram off the curb, but as its back wheels hit the road she hesitated.

The sound of a vehicle made them all look left. They were coming. Tohill took a deep breath and squatted down, McCann beside him, ready to feed the belt of bullets into the M-60 general purpose machine gun. Christopher shoved up the front window. A breeze blew in, wafting up the curtains, intensifying the stink of melted rubber and burnt petrol.

A British army landrover came racing towards the light. Christopher raised his rifle to his shoulder. The lights turned orange.

"The bastard's tryin' to make the light," he whispered. The signal flashed red. The vehicle braked hard. Four in a row, Curry smiled to himself.

"What's the fuckin' rush, Sarge? Goin' to see your lady friend?" one of the squaddies in the back shouted in a thick Birmingham accent.

The driver had just waved the woman across the street when the first burst of Tohill's M-60 punctured the landrover's side, tearing out gaping metal craters. A soldier fell backwards onto the road, his side a mess of blood. Two others tumbled after him as Tohill raked the vehicle once more, splitting the driver's head like a coconut halved by the blow of a machete. Curry fired again and again into the confused, panic-stricken group. One soldier was sent spinning onto the pavement as easily as a broken doll.

The young mother's screams could be heard above the groans of the wounded and dying man. The baby was howling again. From somewhere above it all came the noise of a helicopter.

They dismantled the M-60 rapidly and made for the stairs. As Curry left his post, he glimpsed the woman and her pram. Her hands were in front of her face. The pram was splashed with the driver's blood and brains.

At the back of the house the car and the delivery truck were waiting, their engines throbbing. Two men dressed in blue overalls opened the truck's back doors as Tohill and McCann threw in the machine gun. Then, putting on overalls themselves, the M-60 operators climbed in. The truck was soon reversing down the alley.

Curry opened the car's back door and concealed the dismantled armalite in the hidden compartment built into the floor.

The young woman who was at the wheel waited for him to jump in beside her. He hardly recognised her as the Deirdre Duggan he knew. Her hair was cropped short and she was dressed like a mousy office girl. The short hair made her eyes look larger and brighter.

They drove towards the far end of the alley and then turned a wide and leafy street. She was calm, unhurried.

"I heard a woman scream," she said.

He nodded. "No problem. She wasn't hit."

"Thank fuckin' Jasus for that," Deirdre said under her breath.

Christopher glanced out the window. A British army helicopter was hovering above the street.

"The fuckers have spotted us," he exploded.

Deirdre accelerated. Immediately there was a boom and the back windscreen disintegrated, showering them with fragments of glass. An army and police patrol was closing behind their car, a sharpshooter standing up, his rifle trained on them for a second shot.

"Right at the junction." Christopher told her. She swung the car on the main road. The helicopter was now slightly ahead of them and banking in their direction. A short distance up ahead was an old abandoned factory. Its entrance was a rusting ramshackle gate. "There" he said pointing to it.

She gave him a perplexed glance.

"There's a way out the back onto the next road." he explained. In the side mirror he saw the patrol vehicle turn onto the main road and come after them. "We 'll dump the car inside."

"But the gear?"

"Fuck the gear!"

Deirdre swerved right off the road. The car bumped up the little cobblestoned entrance way and collided with the gate. There was a crunching thud as the car smashed through.

They were in a narrow yard. On either side were warehouses, storerooms and high-ceilinged winding rooms; all were empty. There were large puddles of water where the rain had poured down through gaping holes in the roofs.

"Get out," he ordered.

"But...."

"Go straight ahead, then make a sharp left at the foot of the yard. There's an old office workers'entrance at the back. It opens out on Mill Lane."

"But you...." she insisted.

"I 'll keep them busy. Now hurry, for fuck's sake!" He reached over and opened her door. She heard a police siren.

Deirdre jumped out. Christopher followed her, but went to the back of the car. As she disappeared down the yard towards the rear entrance, he took the rifle from the compartment and ran into the winding room.

The damp heavy smell of flax still lingered in the air. His mother had worked in this factory years ago when he was a boy. Then it had bustled with mill girls. They always fussed over him because of his mop of curly black hair. His mother was dead and the mill girls were long gone, their winding looms turned to junk. Now the floors were covered in pigeon shit. It was a dead, dank place, like his past and the world he knew.

So this would be the spot - the place of his very own Alamo, where he would enter the realms of Republican martyrology.

Outside, the Brits braked sharply, and the roar of the descending helicopter shook the factory and made in rattle like a pile of old bones.
