Autumn

which was shooting up from the battered car’s radiator and into the cold morning air. I felt sick to my stomach, and when the hissing eventually stopped all I could hear was the drip, drip, drip of blood. It had only been a couple of minutes since I’d eaten. I looked back at the body again and felt myself lose control of my stomach. I dropped down to my knees and threw up in the grass at the side of the road.
    Once the nausea had passed I dragged myself up onto my feet and walked back to the van. I reached inside for the phone, realising that although there was nothing I could do for the poor bastard in the car, I had to do something. In a strange way it was easier knowing that he was dead. I could just tell the police that I’d been driving along and I’d found the car crashed into the tree. No-one needed to know that I’d been around when the accident took place.
    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