The motorway was unusually busy, an unending line of trundling trucks in the slow lane, cars cruising in the middle one. He awaited his chance and pulled out, got in behind a Mini Clubman estate that seemed packed with kids and luggage right up to the roof. A gimmicky notice above the rear number plate read: 'If you can read this you're too bloody close.' Silly buggers, what did they expect on the motorway? If you dropped back then somebody overtook you and cut in front so you couldn't make a gap no matter what you did. The roads were dry. All the same, Ken doubted if he could pull up in time if anything happened in front. Very few drivers could.
The sun was shining again. He glanced in his mirror, saw those black and yellow clouds way behind, thought he could make out the rain sheeting down. He'd give the storm a run for its money. He experienced momentary exhilaration.
He was watching those kids in the Clubman quarrelling and fighting when something on the seat beside him moved; something cylindrical, rolling, jerking. Oh God! The van swerved violently and he only just hauled it back into the middle lane in time. Horns blared, somebody flashed his headlights.
Now he could see the offending object lying motionless on the floor; a screwdriver, one he had used to tighten a loose screw on" the dash earlier and had left lying on the seat. Bloody hell, for a moment he had thought it was a ...
Don't think about those snakes. Like the man at the zoo said, you won't even have to unload them at the other end. You can report your arrival, go and get a cup of tea and by the time you get back you'll have an empty van to take home. As simple as that. You're just a driver, Ken Wilson, nothing else.
He would have to break the return journey overnight. That was a bit of a bummer when there was a teenage girl waiting back home, willing to do anything you wanted her to. If it wasn't for these bloody tachometers they fitted in HGVs these days he would have put his foot down and gone all out to get home in one run.
Those bloody kids in front were getting on his nerves. One had climbed over into the boot and was clinging precariously on to a pile of luggage and trying to kick hell out of the other at the same time. Why, for fuck's sake, didn't their bloody parents do something about it! Vandals and muggers in the making, that's how it all started, a lack of discipline in the home.
The sun had gone behind the clouds and it was hotter than ever. That crap cooling system must have packed up altogether. Wilson wondered if he could get his overalls undone whilst he was driving but changed his mind when a police patrol car passed him in the fast lane. The sweat was pouring off him, his trousers were stuck to the seat.
In his mirror he noticed headlights being used, and switched his own on. Those thunder clouds had moved at an unbelievable rate of knots. Now he heard the thunder again, resonant rolls like an angry monster roaring its wrath as it tried to run him down.
The sudden daytime gloom had him thinking about his reptilian passengers in the back again. Man was a daytime creature, scared of the dark no matter how he tried to tell himself he wasn't. Probably the snakes were all asleep. It was bloody cruel imprisoning them in zoos. Just done to make money. Taken out of their natural environment they slept and ate their lives away in sheer boredom. You couldn't blame them if they got nasty and turned on somebody. Man was the cruellest creature of all, there was no getting away from that. Christ, Ken thought, I'm going bloody soft.
He found himself listening again but all he heard was engine noise. If the buggers did manage to escape they couldn't go anywhere. It was the guys the other end who would find them whilst he was somewhere safe having a bite to eat. He'd keep well clear of the van until it was empty.
The rain came without warning, a few heavy spots followed by an instant downpour, the wipers struggling to cope. Ken Wilson cursed under his breath; the most depressing sound of all was that of the monotonous noise of windscreen wipers. Fuck it!
Rain was bouncing up off the tarmac, being whipped into a blinding spray by the tyres of speeding traffic, obliterating from view the vehicles up ahead. The cars and lorries did not seem to be slowing any and those idiot children in the Clubman were still slinging punches at each other. One had found a tennis racket somewhere and was attempting to brain the other, battering him viciously with it.
Ken glanced at his watch. 5.45. Night had come about four hours early; there was driving rain and a lashing gale that was bending newly planted birch saplings on the embankments almost double. Another police car passed, doing a ton for sure. One law for some, another for others.
And then it happened! Ken did not know whether the Clubman estate had failed to see the brake lights of the Ford Transit in front or whether he had simply driven into its back, distracted by those bastards of fighting kids. Suddenly the Clubman crunched, reared like a frisky filly, momentarily upright on its rear wheels. AH in an instant before he hit it; the roof buckled, split and the glass showered out of the windows spilling those children with it.
He saw them for a split second and braked hard, but knew he could not miss them. One was still clutching the racket, swinging it, the other's face a mass of scarlet pulp, a broken rag doll bouncing on the hard surface. Disappearing.
Please God! He felt the front tyre crushing the infant body, saw in his mind the squashed form like those hedgehogs you saw flattened on the roads every morning. The crunching of frail bones, instant death. The other child was still airborne when he hit it, saw it flatten on the windscreen without breaking the glass, a gnat caught by a speeding vehicle. The wipers would knock it off in a second; they were buffeting it, bouncing back off, swiping it again with mechanical determination.
Then Ken Wilson's van ploughed into the wreckage of the Clubman and the Transit, and seconds later came a shuddering jolt as he was hit from behind. He screamed aloud, gave up trying to do anything positive. The windscreen shattered and that bloody mulch disintegrated, some of it splattering the interior of the cab.
And in that same second his own van appeared to concertina, the rear of the vehicle crushing and coming forward, his seat and harness ripped from their moorings. He was catapulted; blinding pain as the steering column shattered his chest, threw him back and then bounced him down on to the floor of the cab.
Dazed, screaming, tasting his own blood, he lay there in the semi-darkness. He heard the squeal of tortured rubber, smelled its acrid stench, the screech of tearing metal, cries of anguish. Vehicles were still running into one another, he felt the van move again, pushed forward another few yards. Shouting, screams of pain and terror.
Then silence, complete and utter for a few seconds. He did not try to move, just lay there in the bloody half-darkness trying to figure out exactly what had happened. A multi pile-up, they made the television news every so often but everybody forgot and they happened again. Vehicles travelling too close together in adverse weather conditions; people never learned, including himself. It can't happen to me, it's those other silly buggers. And suddenly he was one of those silly buggers.
Don't move, just lie still and somebody will come to help soon. I'm scared to hell to look out there, I'm not badly hurt really, just cut and bruised. His senses swam, came back again. He fought down his rising panic.
It might have been seconds or hours later—he had lost all concept of time—when he sensed rather than heard a movement in the cab. A flicker of hope, raising his head up a few inches off the ground. His eyes hurt, as if somebody was pushing a sharp instrument into them; he gasped, coughed, tasted blood. I'm here, you bloody fool. Help me. He tried to call out but the words would not come, were strangulated into a low moan.