No Place For Heroes

Prologue

Part 1

Prologue

When the helicopters came, we thought we were saved.  They swooped side by side above the rusted tin rooftops, a large metal crate dangling beneath them.  It was the moment we’d all been waiting for.  A sign that life still existed beyond the endless bushland surrounding this dying town.

A sign we hadn’t been forgotten.  

I hadn’t eaten a solid meal in weeks, yet I ran with the speed of the fittest person on Earth.  The helicopters were delivering the crate on the town oval, just a few hundred metres from my house.  I wasn’t the only one following them either; for the first time in weeks, the streets of Bimbimbie were littered with people.  Most were running, bare-foot and dirty from having not showered in weeks.  Others stumbled clumsily, the sudden exposure to the sun blinding them.

The grass bowed as the machines approached, propellers slicing the air.  At least a hundred people had flocked to the field, all of them squinting towards the sky.  Many were crying.  Nobody had the energy to cheer or clap.

But the helicopters never landed.

They hovered just low enough to deliver the crate and slacken its binding chains; the chains unhooked and fell to the ground like dead roots. 

Thirty seconds later, the sound of the engines had died.  We stood there, the shock paralysing, staring blankly at the metal crate, which cast a dark shadow over us.  It was plain and unmarked, large enough to house an elephant.  It was as though it had just dropped from the heavens.

But this was Bimbimbie, a town where nothing – not even a bird – dropped unannounced from the sky.  Even the sight of helicopters soaring past was a rare event.  After all, what reason would people have for flying out here?

 Gary was the first to move.  Once he took his first steps towards the crate, everybody else followed.  Soon, men were being hoisted on top of the container, others shouting at them to open the latch. 

The crate was hinged at the bottom, so the door – an entire side of the crate – swung open from the top.  People shrieked and scattered like ants out of harm’s way as the panel threatened to crush them.

It was like sand being tipped from a giant bucket.  It hit us with such force that those in the first few rows were swept clean off their feet. 

But it wasn’t sand that poured from the crate.  At first I thought a thousand white tennis balls were spilling towards us, fighting their way out of the container and rolling across the field, competing for first place. 

Except they weren’t tennis balls.  They were shiny and smooth, not perfectly round. 

Then everything stopped.  Those who had fallen got to their feet, looking around in confusion.  Nobody spoke.

One by one, people began bending down and examining the tiny objects.  Cautiously, I picked one up. 

I was sure of one thing: it wasn’t a bomb.  I determined this from the simple fact that I hadn’t already been blown to pieces.  Yet I couldn’t think of what it could be.

It looked like an apple, about the size of my fist.  But it was chalk white … a white apple.

Looking around, I observed what others were doing.  Not much, it seemed.  Most were simply staring at the apple-like objects grasped in their hands, studying them from every possible angle, whispering to their neighbours nervously.

“Nobody’s gonna do it, then?”

It was Gary who spoke.  He’d jumped down from the top of the crate, his legs now buried knee-deep in the mass of white apples.  We all knew what he’d meant by ‘do it’.  True, it was a miracle it had taken this long for somebody to do the thing we were all so clearly supposed to do.  It was like feeding time at the zoo, only we were being fed something unfamiliar, something foreign.  Naturally, we were cautious, despite our greedy hunger.

So nobody tried to stop Gary as he closed his eyes and slowly brought the apple to his trembling lips.  It was a sign of just how desperate we’d become.  So what if one of us was about to be killed?  What was one person in a town of hundreds?

His teeth sank into the apple, piercing its skin like tiny knives.  The crunch was loud enough for everyone in the town to hear.  Then he began to chew. 

And we waited. 

We waited for his breath to become rattled, for his eyes to bulge, for his skin to flush purple. 

We waited – and I watched, absolutely riveted – for Gary to die.   But then he smiled.  And I saw his teeth.

The white apple clutched in my hand fell with a light thump to the ground.