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 hit the ground in sites around the globe, flashing to the ground, 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...
