All Our Yesterdays Read Free

the barracks rifle and pistol fire began. Flames flaunted up through the broken roof now, no longer yellow, but red as they began to feed on the wooden interior of the building. Conn dropped one of the grenades and hunched back as its explosion sent flames and smoke up toward him. He threw the other one and missed the opening. The grenade rolled down the roof and lodged in the gutter. Conn lay flat and the grenade went off too close. The concussion deafened him for a moment and it was minutes before the ringing in his ears subsided. He scrambled back toward the chimney. The remaining slate was hot to the touch. He reached the chimney and climbed up on it, and to himself grinned in the flaming darkness.
Praise-be-to-God the peelers don’t fire up the flue
. The wind turned the smoke and flames now toward him, now away. His hands were burnt. His face felt singed. He pulled out the parabellum and emptied the clip through the roof into the burning barracks. Then he emptied the Webley and sat with his legs dangling over the inferno while he reloaded. It occurred to him as he did so that his clothing was soaked in oil.
One spark and I go down in history as a fiery leader
. He grinned at his own joke, and fired again into the flames below. From the shed that angled off from the main barracks, police were firing up at him through openings in the roof. He returned fire from the chimney. From inside the barracks a Very light went up through the shattered roof, then another, visible for miles against the black sky.
    Below him he could hear his men shouting at thepolice, taunting them.
Goddamn them
. He screamed down at them.
    “Shut up, you fucking gossips.”
    But the gunfire was too insistent and the roar of the fire too loud for anyone to hear him. A bullet wanged off the edge of the chimney, sending a fragment of brick to slash across his cheek. Conn laughed out loud. A second bullet hit him. He swayed briefly with the bruise of it as it tore into his shoulder.
    “Shit,” he said.
    Then he felt numbness. He could see the blood soaking through his coat around the entry hole. There was a medical kit in his coat pocket. He got a gauze out, folded it, and held it against the wound with his chin. He tied a bandage around it using one hand and his teeth. The bleeding slowed. He loaded, fired, loaded, fired. Then he began to work his way across the ridgepole. His hair was afire; he put it out by running his hands through it. Little leaves of flame leapt up from his oily coat and he beat them out with his hands. The flames exploded up through the roof, blocking his way, preventing him from the ladder. Soaked with oil and gasoline, he would burst into flame if he tried to go through it. He would die here on the roof if he didn’t. It was thick fire. The gusting wind made it dance. He thought of that line, was it from Virgil, he used to know it in Latin. Something about it being fitting and beautiful for a man to die for his country.
    “Good-bye, James,” he shouted.
    “
Slan leat
,” O’Gorman shouted back.
    The wind gusted in a different direction. The flames leaned away, and Conn scuttled past them to the ladder.
I’ll have to look up that line
.
    O’Gorman went down the ladder first while the men on the ground fired at the windows and gunports to keep the police down. They gathered behind the stone wall. Across the hills, near the pass, the sky was pale gray. It was almost morning. Out of the near darkness behind the wall Feeney appeared on his bicycle.
    “Cavalry,” he said, “from Dundrum.”
    “How soon?” Conn said.
    “Ten, fifteen minutes behind. They’re having slow going picking through the barriers, Cap’n.”
    “Pull back and disperse,” Conn said softly. “We didn’t capture the bugger, but we surely caved it in some.”
    Dead silent now, the men faded into the thinning darkness, away from the blazing barracks, into the cool, fine rain that fell steadily on the slow dawning countryside.

Conn
    C onn lay