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.
Something moved. His vision blurred, cleared, but only partially. An arm was reaching in through the smashed cab window, feeling inside. Jesus, don't tell me you can't see me! Ken tried to shout, mustered his vocal cords for one supreme effort and managed a wheezing gurgle, experienced a sensation as if he were drowning and tasted blood again.
A fist, clenched. Erect. Some guy's got one helluva long arm, he thought. If they can't get to me why the fuck don't they start cutting into the cab?
That fist was starting to open out. The driver stared, forced his agonised eyes to work with sheer willpower. It did not look right, the arm was elongated like one of those cartoons they fed the kids every afternoon on TV; no fingers, either a malformed hand or else the berk was wearing mittens. Bloody crazy, I'll go mad in a second.
And then everything turned crazy. That hand, if it was a hand, had two tiny eyes, orbs that glinted and flickered, came forward in a sinister supple movement, a kind of mottled greenish-grey. A mouth, opening, and in those eyes Ken Wilson read hate and malevolence. And death.
The worst moment was when realisation dawned, the jig-saw pieces slotted together through a haze of pain and fear, formed a picture which left no doubt in his terror-crazed mind.
Jesus God Almighty, no! A cobra, the most fearsome and deadly of all snakes.
Its face was only a foot away from his own. He tried to press himself back against the crumpled wreckage of the cab but there was nowhere to go. The creature was gloating, prolonging the fatal strike, savouring the mental anguish of Man, its captor for so long and now at its mercy.
No, please, I don't want to hurt you. I'm only the driver.
A trick of the half-light, or did it smile, an evil elongation of that awful mouth, another movement of the hooded head. He wanted to close his eyes and shut it out but his lids appeared to have stuck. Forced to look into those flashing pinpoints, reading death there and praying that it would be quick. I'm dying anyhow, you don't have to bother to kill me. Just leave me alone and I'll be dead before long.
Background noises; engines running, people screaming for help outside in the Stygian blackness. A stench that was overpowering, the smell of burning rubber and heated metal, the smell of death.
Wilson's mind had gone numb, an instinctive anaesthetic that spared him pain at the very last, transcending the limits of human endurance. He saw the cobra, knew that it was going to kill him but suddenly it did not seem so terrible after all. He would have died anyway, maybe lingered for days, perhaps ended up on a life-support machine, clinically dead but the vital organs kept alive. A pointless exercise demonstrating Man's cruelty to Man, the law forbidding euthanasia. They wouldn't let a wounded animal suffer, they'd put it down, yet it was all right for a fellow-human to undergo indescribable agonies. A twisted philosophy. He wanted to laugh because he had beaten the System, cheated them.
The reptile struck, a sharp pain somewhere in the region of his neck, like the prick of an injection; he couldn't make up his mind whether it had bitten him or spat venom because the head was several inches away from his face. Possibly a movement too quick for the eye to follow. It didn't matter because it was all over now.
He felt the movement of its body as it crawled across him like a thick rough hosepipe being dragged over him, and then he wondered where it had gone because he could neither see it nor hear it any longer. Probably out of the opposite window.
A sensation as if he were burning up, as if somebody had injected him with acid and his veins were corroding away, and then the numbness took over again and cut out the pain, left him with a light-headedness as though he were floating weightlessly through the atmosphere. Euphoric because it was all over and it didn't hurt.
Outside the van the cobra dropped silently on to the wet tarmac and slithered away beneath the crumpled wreckage, its victim forgotten. The killing was over and now its instincts turned to survival in an alien world of hard man-made surfaces where the air was filled with pungent smoke and noises beyond its primitive comprehension.
It made it to the hard shoulder, found the long grass of the adjacent embankment and began the ascent, a powerful wary creature that underwent a new experience after a lifetime of boredom in captivity.
It tasted fear for the first time; fear that merged into anger and gave it the killing urge again.
THE YOUNG police constable in the motorway patrol car felt his stomach churn as the message came over the radio. A weakness engulfed his limbs and he remembered how he used to be carsick as a child every time his parents took him out in the dark blue Maxi which they kept polished in the garage in readiness for a Sunday afternoon spin; an urge to open the door, lean out, leave a trail of vomit in their wake. He wanted to be back at HQ, a desk job, checking traffic reports, anywhere except out here.
He did not speak, turned his head to one side in case Sergeant Bufton saw how white he'd gone. The sergeant had a reputation as a right bastard, both in the station and out on the cars. Just plain nasty and sarcastic, he didn't know any other way, and a young PC was fair game.
'Ever seen a dead body, constable? I don't mean a stiff all neatly laid out in a mortuary, I mean one in a dozen different pieces that you've got to retrieve from the highway, gather 'em up in a sack and try and find out what fits where? Like a kind of jig-saw puzzle and some of them can be real teasers, but when you've been to a dozen or so such accidents you instinctively know what fits where. You'll find out before long.'
That was how Bufton had briefed young Mark Bazeley on the first morning he reported for motorway patrol duty. A week last Monday. Things had been quiet, just two or three smashes, one death but the victim had died in hospital three days later from internal injuries. Now the horror was about to start. The real horror.
'Sounds like a bad 'un, Sarge,' Bazeley tried to keep his voice even, attempted to sound almost casual. Better get in first before the bastard gives me a run-down of what to expect.
'You heard what the radio said,' Bufton shouted to make himself heard above the whine of the siren. 'A multiple pile-up. That could mean a dozen vehicles. Or fifty. We won't know until we get there and as it's only at junction twenty-two we'll be first on the scene. Another minute and a half by my reckoning. I'll count the vehicles, you count the corpses.' A laugh that was devoid of humour,
Bazeley wished there was somewhere he could vomit in private, just a quick throw-up to clear his guts and then he'd face it. His companion wasn't just being sadistic for the sake of it, it was a kind of mental barrier, a shield he was throwing up to protect the two of them. Don't think of them as people, think of them as units, units of work, and when the job's done you can put it all out of your mind. If you don't, you'll end up in the head farm. But Bufton wouldn't put it into words, you had to read him like a complicated book to see what he was driving at. Just don't let him see you're scared.
'Here we are.' The sergeant eased his foot off the throttle, the speedo needle dropping from 80 to 70. To 60. Braking.
It was difficult to discern details through the deluge, the wet road reflecting the deep red of rear lights interspersed with the flashing blue from the police car. A tail-back of traffic, people out of their vehicles and walking down the lanes oblivious of the thunderstorm or-slowing cars and lorries.
'Idiots!' Bufton slowed, eased off the motorway and on to the hard shoulder, kept his speed down to 30 mph. 'Ghouls. AH they're interested in is gawping at mangled bodies. You get 'em at the scene of every accident. Now, it seems to start here . . .'
The police car came to a halt, warning lights and flashers left on as the two officers got out. Two or three prangs, nothing more; the bad ones would be further along where the first vehicles had collided at speed.
Bazeley's mouth was dry as they put some orange cones out. This was the easy part; take your time and follow the sergeant. He's a bastard but you need him now more than you've ever needed anybody.
The constable glanced back behind them. He could hear wailing sirens. Ambulances, fire engines and more motorway patrols were on the way. Jesus, hurry up.
The rain storm was at its peak. The thunder and lightning had passed on, left the cloudburst to follow, a deluge of water that hit the officers' orange plastic jackets with force.
Then they heard the screams of pain and terror, the hysterical cries for help. Vehicles were crunched up now, these were the ones that had taken the full force of the accident at speeds of up to 70 mph.
A van, it was impossible to recognise the make, was flattened beneath the trailer of an articulated lorry. A sheet of pressed metal; the chassis would have to be prised apart if they were going to find out who was inside. Human silhouettes. Bazeley noticed a pool of scarlet fluid being diluted by the rain and tasted bile at the back of his throat. But at least he didn't have to do anything about it.
The artic had ploughed into a big carrier, which in turn had crunched a small car; it could have been a Clubman estate but the details would be sorted out later. The young officer felt something else besides fear, sheer helplessness. I can't do anything, I can't help anybody. I'm just a bystander like these ghouls the sarge was on about, except that I don't want to be here.
A car was blazing somewhere, the thick black smoke kept low by the thunderstorm, creating a dense black fog that made everything a thousand times more terrifying; shapes that moved and screamed, came at you out of the blackness and you only saw the injuries and the blood when they got close; had you stepping carefully in case you fell headlong over a corpse. There appeared to be bodies everywhere.
Bazeley kicked something, recognised it as a severed arm as it rolled away. That was when he threw up, vomited everything out of his guts in one spouting spew and hoped that the sergeant did not see him in the smoky darkness.
And then he saw the girl. Her piercing screams had his blood running cold and when she came staggering out of the darkness he almost turned and ran. Oh God, she had to be hurt bad, he didn't want to see, didn't want to have her clinging to him and bleeding all over him.
Miraculously she wasn't bleeding, in fact she did not appear to be injured at all. He stared at her with smarting eyes and wondered for a second if his brain was playing tricks on him, if he wasn't up to all this and something inside him had snapped.