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Chapter
1
Three
armed looters stood in front of our silver RV motorhome, unafraid that the
engine was running.
“They
want our van,” my wife Belinda said.
“I’ll
talk to them.”
A soft answer turneth away wrath, my father used to say.
But
would it be enough to save my family?
“You
can’t reason with them. Just run them over. Quickly, before they come around
and stick guns in our faces.”
Belinda
did not need to be infected with courage. It was the high tensile core of her nature.
But
that didn’t make her wrong.
Courage
agreed with her and said I should do what she said.
Mow
down these looters.
But
fear… fear whispered something else.
Fear
said ‘stay alive. Seek safety.’ Fear revved the
muscles for flight, keyed up hearing, sight, smell, reasoning - and the drive
for survival.
And I was one of the very few who
still had fear. An anxiety sufferer and so-called Afghanistan war hero
suffering PTSD, I’d been hiding from the world with my family and now I was out
in the open after buying supplies in town, trying to flee with them to a safer
place where we could bury ourselves, literally... in an opal mining town in the
outback of Australia where the people lived in dwellings dug underground, a
place of sanctuary called Coober Pedy.
The looters were expressionless.
Their confrontation reminded me of a
fire-fight in Afghanistan, where a pair of insiders, Afghan soldiers, coolly turned
their weapons on my comrades, blowing away four in front of my eyes.
After a moment of paralysis, I squeezed
the trigger that killed the turncoats with barely a twitch of fear, but later,
when there was no reason to be afraid any more, a quake zone took the place
where my courage used to be and it moved incessantly setting up weakening
tremors night and day.
The
quake now brought on a tsunami of nauseating adrenalin.
The
looter on the right hand side of the windscreen lazily waved his gun barrel to
tell me to get out of the vehicle. No fear in the face. As wooden as a bored traffic
cop’s.
Petty
thieves had grown to become daredevil criminals.
I
thought: ‘what will we do if they take away our escape machine?’
The
contagion of the population began with the arrival of meteorites that flashed
through the sky around the globe, hitting the ground and spreading clouds of
dust.
They
brought something else…
The
spread of a reckless new mood.
Unalloyed
courage.
It
swept through the population in the form of a contagion that destroyed
‘caution’, the basic survival switch in the amygdala, a pair of almond sized
regions deep in the brain.
Was
it a prelude to some attack?
I’d
wondered why, if an unknown assailant lay behind the viral outbreak, they would
choose to spread courage rather than fear among the population.
But
the reason became evident.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy
they first make mad.
Madly
brave.
Fired
with courage without the caution of fear they fronted enemies they once feared,
sparked reprisals, conflict and bloodshed in the streets - and raised the
threat of reckless wars between nations. And for those that remained after the
carnage? History had shown that it was harder to kill a shadowy enemy, the
terrorist, the guerilla, the coward, those who shrank into the cracks like
spiders.
Bring
them out into the open instead.
In
this new world of courage, the brave ended up dead.
I
saw an example of this now.
The
armed men flicked their eyes skywards as they heard a cry.
A
faller from a building top.
People
were standing on the ledges of buildings watching the confrontation down below and
one had lost his footing and slipped.
They
called these human missiles Perchers - people who took to standing on the
ledges of tall buildings and sitting on balcony railings to watch fights and mayhem
down below.
The
body slammed into the street near the front of the van with the packed thud of
a cement bag.
“Yuk!”
our pre-teen daughter Tash said from the back.
“At
least he missed us,” her little brother Toby said gruesomely. His eyes were
alight behind his plastic batman mask. Toby was always playing the superhero,
ironic since he had been infected like all the family, except me.
I
seized the distraction. I slid the stubby automatic gearshift down to reverse
and jammed the accelerator pedal down, sucking us back down the street, which
brought boos and whistles from the onlookers above.
“You’re
running away!” Belinda said, appalled. “Mike, run them down!”
A
spray of bullets threw up tarmac as I swung the RV into a side street, lurching
over a kerb.
The
jolt triggered a crockery fight in our motorhome’s overhead cupboards.
I
winced, but the kids in the back seat club-lounge cheered.
“Go,
Silver Bullet!”
That’s
what they called the RV, although it possessed anything but the velocity of a
projectile; it was just a four-cylinder diesel engine, its rear-wheels driving
a 7.5 metre Mercedes Sprinter van.
The
reverse camera threw up a growing image of smashed cars jamming up the street
behind us.
No
way back.
Damn.
We’d
have to go forward again and that meant opening us up to a gauntlet of crossfire.
My
hands were shaking on the wheel.
“Do
you want them to come down after us?”
