The bloody phone wasn’t working.
There I was, out in the countryside just outside a major town and I couldn’t get a signal. I shook the phone, waved it in the air and even banged it against the side of the fucking van but I couldn’t get rid of the ‘No Service’ message on the display. I wasn’t thinking straight. I tried dialling 999 three or four times but I couldn’t get anything. It didn’t even ring out. The phone just kept bleeping ‘unobtainable’ in my ear.
So if no-one needed to know that I’d seen the crash, I found myself thinking, no-one needed to know that I’d been the one who found it. It sickens me now when I think back and remember that the next thing I did was climb back into the van with the intention of driving home. I decided that I’d call the police or someone from there and tell them that I’d seen an abandoned car at the side of the road. I didn’t even need to tell them about the body. I guess that it must have been the effects of shock. I’m not usually such a spineless bastard.
I was in a daze, almost a trance. I climbed back into the van, started the engine and began to drive back towards town. I stared at the crashed car in the rear view mirror until it was out of sight, then I put my foot down on the accelerator.
There were a couple more bends in the road before it straightened and stretched out for a clear half mile ahead of me. I caught sight of another car in the near distance, and seeing that car made me give way to my mounting guilt and change my plans. I decided that I’d stop and tell the driver about what I’d seen. There’s safety in numbers, I thought. I’d get them to come back with me to the crash and we’d report it to the police together. Everything would be okay.
I was wrong. As I got closer to the car I realised that it had stopped. I slowed down and pulled up alongside. The driver’s seat was empty. There were three other people in the car and they were all dead – a mother in the front and her two dead children in the back. Their faces were screwed up with expressions of agony and panic. Their skin was pale grey and I could see on the body of the child nearest to me that there was a trickle of blood running from between its lips and down the side of its lifeless face. I kept the van moving slowly forward and saw that a couple of metres further down the road the body of the missing driver lay sprawled across the tarmac. I had to drive up onto the grass verge to avoid driving over him.
I was so fucking scared. I cried like a baby as I drove back towards home.
I can’t be sure, but I must have seen another forty or fifty bodies by the time I’d made it back to Northwich. The streets were littered with the dead. It was bizarre – people just seemed to have fallen where they’d been standing. Whatever they’d been doing, wherever they’d been going, they’d just dropped.
The situation was so unexpected and inexplicable that it was only at that point that I thought about the safety of my family. I put my foot down flat on the accelerator and was outside my house in seconds. I jumped out of the van and ran to the door. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t get the key in the lock. Eventually I opened it and immediately wished that I hadn’t. The house was silent.
I ran up to the bedroom and that’s where I found them both. Sarah and our beautiful little girl both dead. Gemma’s face was frozen in the middle of a silent scream and there was blood all around her mouth and on Sarah’s white night dress and the sheets. They were both still warm and I shook them and screamed at them to wake up and talk to me. Sarah looked terrified. I tried to close her frightened eyes to make believe she was just sleeping but I couldn’t. They wouldn’t stay shut.
I couldn’t stand to leave them but I couldn’t stand to stay there either. I had to get out. I put Gemma into bed with her mum, kissed them both goodbye and pulled the sheets up over their heads. I left the house, locked the door behind me and then walked.
I spent hours stepping through the bodies just shouting out for help.
2
So there I was, standing at the front of a class of thirty-three sixteen year olds, tongue-tied and terrified. The boss had volunteered me for one of those ‘Industry into Schools’ days. One of those days where instead of sitting listening to their teacher drone on for hours, children were made to listen to sacrificial lambs like me telling them how wonderful the job they really despised was. I hated it. I hated speaking in public. I hated compromising myself and not being honest. I hated knowing that if I didn’t do this and I didn’t do it well, my end of month bonus would be reduced. My boss believed that his middle-managers were the figureheads of his company. In reality we were just there for him to hide behind.
My talk didn’t last long.
I’d made some notes which I held in front of me like a shield. I felt quite calm inside, but the way that the end of my papers shook seemed to give the class the impression that I was paralysed with nerves. The sadistic sixteen year olds quickly seized on my apparent weakness. When I coughed and tripped on a word I was history.
‘The work we do at Caradine Computers is extremely varied and interesting,’ I began, lying through my teeth. ‘We’re responsible for…’
‘Sir,’ a lad said from the middle of the room. He was waving his hand in the air.
‘What?’
‘Why don’t you just give up now,’ he sighed. ‘We’re not interested.’
That stopped me dead. I’d never have dared speak out like that at school. I looked to the teacher at the back of the class for support but as soon as we’d made eye contact she turned to look out of the window.
‘As I was saying,’ I continued, ‘we look after a wide range of clients, from small one-man firms to multinational corporations. We advise them on the software to use, the systems to buy and…’
Another interruption, this time more physical. A fight was breaking out in the corner of the room. One boy had another in a headlock.
‘James Clyde,’ the teacher yelled across the classroom, ‘cut it out. Anyone would think you didn’t want to listen to Mr Collins.’
As if the behaviour of the students wasn’t bad enough, now even the teacher was being sarcastic. I didn’t know whether she’d meant her words to sound that way, but that was definitely how the rest of the class had taken them. Suddenly there was stifled laughter coming from all sides, hidden by hands over mouths and pierced by the occasional splutter from those who couldn’t keep their hilarity in check. Within seconds the whole room was out of
