Stab Everybody

A journalist's quest for truth, the desire to shine a light on the murky conspiracies and machinations that go on in the bristling underbelly of Scottish society, sometimes take him to places where he wouldn't normally be seen dead.  You know the type of place: so rough that the only way you'll get home is if you live downriver and your body just happens to float there.  That's where I fetched up one night recently as I searched for some information on the latest shenanigans going on inside Ibrox where there seems to have been an outbreak of galloping clown syndrome as Rangers pratfall from one calamity to another.  It came to a head when even wily old Walter Smith resigned his chairmanship and left the stadium with his Ally McCoist robot army to lick his wounds in Silence, his secret underwater headquarters.

But I digress.  I was sitting, hunched in a corner of some crazy pub in the Gallowgate which had a lovely horseshoe shaped bar and I wasn't too happy to be there considering at the head of the horseshoe bar, right by the doors, was a gang of hoodlums all listening intently to the loud boasts of their leader, a small man with a bald head.  They didn't care who heard their wild brags of drug deals and beatings and acted like they owned the place and since this was the Gallowgate, who knows, maybe they did?

I was looking around for my contact when I noticed that the fire exit beside me was blocked by a juke box and even if it wasn't, the damn thing was chained shut anyway.  I was just pondering what I'd do if a fire broke out when the doors at the other side of the bar swung open and in came what was obviously a rival gang.  I knew they were rivals from the way one of them brought a meat cleaver down on the bald head of the man at the bar.  Baldy collapsed in an explosion of blood as his attacker shouted "Stab everybody!" and the pub erupted in screams and a mad scramble for the exits.  Unfortunately for me, my exit had a bloody great juke box in front of it but one likely lad beside me had picked up a table and holding it in front of him, was charging for the main door as all around us people were being stabbed in the legs and arse.  You don't have to ask me twice and I was close in beside my table carrying friend and shrieking like a woman as we tumbled through the melee and collapsed through the doors and into the daylight.

"Come with me if you want to live," said my saviour, dusting himself down and reaching out a hand to help me up.  I blushed and let him pull me to my feet, feeling a slight frisson of excitement at the scent of stale beer and cheap soap.  "But who are you?" I asked, quivering.

"How quickly you forget, Spiers" snorted my rescuer.  "It's me, Keith Jackson.  Come on, Rangers are vulnerable again and we have mischief to make."