We'd made it to the barricades like

  fish in a fishbowl.  

  Breathe.  Breathe.  You're the last person I need dead right this minute, whack translated into a thud way down under a vest.  A cracking sound in the earpiece.  Dead, dead reverberated with the echoes of machine gun fire.

  Then total silence.  Everybody slightly on the move stiffened into a nest of coral.  The amplified soundscape blared a cigarette being crushed out by a foot atop pulverized building materials.  We wait.

  Like a magazine centerfold the seperatists had turned the whole scene inside out.