‘Can you move your legs?’ Jill asked as she noticed that the front of the car was crushed and folded in where the woman’s legs should have been.

  ‘Yeah, but I can’t get them out!’ came the frightened reply, and Jill looked up and down the motorway for any sign of an emergency worker who would be able to free her from this car that was now not much more than a squashed bundle of aluminium.

  Jill heard a door opening and looked up to see the man who was helping her reach into the car and feel for a pulse on the silent man behind the wheel.

  ‘Is he okay?’ the woman beside him cried, desperate to know the answer but probably just as afraid to get it at the same time.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ the man replied, but Jill couldn’t tell if that was an honest answer or not. The man might have just been saying that so as not to distress the poor woman any further, but until the paramedics arrived, it was probably the wisest thing to do.

  ‘Get us out of here!’ the woman said, suddenly thrashing around and hitting her hands on the dashboard, and Jill knew she had to do whatever she could to keep her calm until her situation could be resolved. There was no saying how long it would be until help arrived, and even when it did, there were plenty of other vehicles whose passengers needed help too. Jill assumed the emergency workers would assess the scene quickly and direct their assistance to whoever they deemed to need it most urgently, and that would most likely be the people who weren’t screaming and thrashing around. That’s because if a person was making that much noise then the chances were that they were okay. It was the quiet ones who needed the help first because they might have been slipping away with every minute that ticked by.

  As Jill grabbed the hand of the woman in the car and squeezed it before telling her that everything was going to be fine, she couldn’t believe that she had been caught up in something as terrifying and unpredictable as a major crash on the motorway. She had been fortunate enough to never be involved in a car accident before today, and her exposure to these kinds of frightening events had always been limited to a few occasions when she had driven past other accidents that occurred to other unfortunate people. But now she was right in the middle of this crazy scenario, and she felt completely out of her depth. Holding somebody’s hand and telling them that things were going to be okay seemed insignificant when this was literally a matter of life and death, but it was all she could do, so she vowed to herself to keep doing it until the professionals arrived to take over.

  As she did her best to comfort the woman in the car, Jill saw her taxi driver had now pulled himself together enough to get out too and offer his assistance, and he was currently helping a young boy over to the side of the motorway where more and more dazed people were now slumping down onto the grass. Everybody in this section of the motorway who was still able to get out of their cars and walk around were amongst the lucky ones because there were plenty of people who hadn’t emerged from their vehicles yet, and they were the poor souls who hadn’t been so lucky.

  Jill had no idea what the death toll from an accident like this could be, but she was in little doubt that not everybody in these cars would have survived this. There was simply too much destruction for that to be the case, and it was only by the grace of God that Jill and her taxi driver had not been amongst them. If only they had been a little further ahead on this road then they would probably have not been so lucky, but Jill knew it would do her no good to think like that, so she pushed the thought from her mind immediately and refocused on the task at hand. But she didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of keeping the trapped woman calm because she was still screaming, and it seemed like she would never stop, or at least it did until the guy behind the wheel beside her started coughing and regained consciousness.

  The woman in the passenger seat instantly calmed down and grabbed the driver’s hand, stunned that he was now awake. That was seemingly all she needed to see to be able to get her emotions back under control, and as the pair of passengers in the car hugged, Jill stepped away and looked around for anybody else she could help.

  This was quite the unexpected turn of events for her considering that she had been on her way home after arriving back in the country after another one of her jaunts abroad. This time, she had been to Morocco and spent a wonderful week riding camels across the Sahara with a tour guide, and it had been just another in a long line of adventures she had been on after deciding earlier in the year to seize life and see the world while she had the time and money to do so. But it hadn’t all been fun and games, and Jill was still more than a little shaken after what had happened on one of her most recent trips where she had ended up in Las Vegas looking over the edge of a hotel room balcony at the dead body of the man she had mistakenly thought was romantically interested in her. It turned out that he had been a con man, but Jill had not allowed herself to be robbed without a fight, although in hindsight, she had perhaps fought back a little too hard, considering that the con man had ended up dead. Fortunately, Jill had been able to talk her way out of that little problem in the desert before boarding a plane and getting out of Sin City pronto. Since then, things had gone a lot more smoothly for her, right up until a few minutes ago when all had hell broken loose on this stretch of motorway in Southern England. Now, just like she had been back in Vegas, Jill was in crisis-management mode. She couldn’t prevent what had happened, it was far too late for that, but she could still do her best to make sure that this situation had the best possible outcome it could have.

  Rushing towards the upended minibus in the outside lane, Jill saw movement through the windows as some of the passengers inside were trying to free themselves from their seat belts and extricate themselves from the damaged vehicle. Pulling open the sliding side door, Jill reached a helping hand inside to try and pull some of the passengers out, and she immediately felt a hand gripping her own.

  Pulling as hard as she could, Jill was able to assist a middle-aged woman in climbing out of the minibus, and apart from a few cuts and scratches, the woman seemed okay. But she made it clear that there were other people inside the minibus who had not been so lucky.

  ‘Help! We need help over here?’ the woman cried to anybody within earshot on the motorway, and Jill looked back inside the minibus to see what had got this poor person so worked up.

  When she did, she saw that there were a couple of people inside who were not moving, their eyes closed and their heads hanging limply to the side, while around them some of the other less injured passengers were trying to wake them up by calling their names and shaking their arms.

  One of the women doing the shouting and shaking appeared to be in her fifties, and she was trying to get a response out of the younger woman in the seat beside her.

  ‘Francesca! Can you hear me?’ she cried, and Jill could hear the panic and pain in the poor woman’s voice as well as see the anguish all over her face.

  Jill herself was starting to panic now because as much as she wanted to help, she knew there were limits to how much of a difference she could really make here. It was time for the emergency services to take over. So where were they? And were they going to be here in time to save people like Francesca, who was still being shaken by the desperate woman beside her?

  Carol *

  17:34

  Carol Heath was in pain, and she was potentially still in danger, but her wellbeing wasn’t her priority right now. What was concerning her the most was the safety of her daughter, Francesca, who was still unconscious in the seat beside her and still failing to respond to any of her mother’s desperate pleas to wake up.

  Everything had been going so well only a few moments ago when this minibus that the two women were travelling in had been heading down the motorway on the way to a self-improvement conference in Cambridge. Carol and her daughter were very much caught up in the ‘motivation movement’ that seemed to be sweeping through certain sections of society, and they had very much been looking forward to listening to more inspiring speeches from a group of inspirational figures who had gone on to achieve greatness in their own lives. This minibus was filled with similar like-minded individuals who were all swapping a weekend of online shopping, TV watching, and wine guzzling at home to feed their minds with something more wholesome, and the journey out of London towards Cambridge had been an enjoyable one when things were going well.

  But things were certainly not going well anymore.

  Carol had been busy looking down at her phone, trying to find a particular picture of her grandson, Jack, when she had felt the vehicle that she was travelling in lurch suddenly to the side and hit the brakes. She had dropped her phone after the sudden movement, but that was the least of her worries when she had looked up and seen the chaos that was ensuing right in front of the minibus windscreen.

  There were vehicles everywhere, which was to be expected on a motorway in rush hour, but none of them were exactly where they should have been. Instead of all moving in three neat lines in the same direction, Carol had witnessed cars spinning around and trucks veering off the road, as well as a large black bus toppling over completely. She had gripped the back of the chair in front of her with one hand to protect herself whilst instinctively throwing her other arm across the front of her daughter’s body beside her because she had seen what was about to happen to them.

  They were going to crash.

  And there was nothing that any of them could have done about it.

  When the impact came, it was much more shocking and violent than Carol could have anticipated. The sound of smashing glass had punctured the air as the minibus had hit something, though Carol had no idea what, before it felt like they had gone airborne above the road. Everybody inside the minibus had screamed as they had flown through the air, and by the time they came back into contact with the tarmac again, the minibus was on its side, and there were far fewer people screaming.

  Carol had felt a sharp pain in her neck, as well as suffered bruising to both of her shoulders as she had been flung around in her seat, but thankfully, her seatbelt had done its job of keeping her in place. But not everybody else had got off so lightly, and she saw several people with severe lacerations to the face as well as some who weren’t moving at all. Carol felt sorry for every single person in this minibus because none of them deserved to be caught up in something like this, but there was one person who she was worried about more than anybody else.

  It was her daughter who was still refusing to wake up beside her.

  ‘Francesca! Can you hear me?’ Carol cried again as she tried her best to get some kind of a response from her child.

  Francesca was in her thirties now, but that didn’t mean her mother’s maternal instincts had softened in any way over the years, and Carol was just as concerned for her daughter’s wellbeing as she would have been if Francesca had still been a toddler. Having already lost one child in her lifetime, Carol would do anything not to lose another, and that was why she refused to give up hope that Francesca was going to wake up and let her mother know that she was okay after all. But each passing minute was only making things seem worse, and Carol’s anxiety wasn’t being helped by the fact that several people were already leaving the minibus now, being helped out onto the road by a kindly stranger who must have witnessed the crash and come to offer her assistance.

  That woman was standing over where the side of the minibus should have been, although it was now the top thanks to the fact that the vehicle had toppled over. The woman was holding out her hand and pulling people from inside the stricken vehicle, and now she was gesturing to Carol to take her hand and join the others out on the motorway. But there was no way that Carol was going to leave her daughter in here, whether she was dead or alive. She would stay with Francesca until the very end, whatever that might mean for the pair of them.

  ‘Where is the ambulance?’ Carol screamed at the woman in the minibus doorway, and she saw her look back out onto the road to presumably try and get a visual on any kind of help that was on its way to them. But Carol couldn’t hear any sirens, so she doubted there were any paramedics out there just yet, which was concerning because without professional medical assistance then how was Francesca supposed to survive?

  Carol felt as if the survival of her daughter depended on her because there was obviously nobody else around who could be of much help at this moment. Half the people here were injured themselves, and those who weren’t were clearly dazed and needed time to come to terms with what they had just experienced. But time was not something Francesca seemed to have as she lay still in her seat, strapped in with her seatbelt and her head hanging lifelessly to the side.

  Taking more direct measures, Carol was able to unbuckle her own seatbelt and manoeuvre herself into a position where she felt she would be better able to assess her daughter’s injuries. It hurt like hell to move thanks to the injuries to her back and shoulders, but the adrenaline from this life or death situation kept her pushing on, and now she was closer to her daughter in the overturned vehicle.

  For a woman who had spent an awfully long time worrying about her own health last year, now it was somebody else’s health that warranted her attention, and this was a far worse situation because it was the health of her beloved child. Carol would have given anything to be able to reverse the roles here and be the one who was in more danger out of the pair of them, but she couldn’t, and that broke her heart, just as it had broken her heart when her son, Ben, had been losing his battle with cancer several years ago. A parent’s duty was to protect their child, but life didn’t always work like that. It wasn’t black and white, and despite how much she loved her children, Carol knew there were some things that she was powerless to have any control over.

  An accident on the motorway was one of them.

  ‘Francesca, darling, can you hear me?’ Carol tried again as she carefully touched her daughter’s skin, trying to check for a pulse but also trying not to cause any more damage than had already been inflicted upon her body.

  It was a bad sign that Francesca still didn’t respond, but it was a good sign when Carol felt a heartbeat through her daughter’s skin. That meant there was still hope, and that was enough to keep Carol sane for the next few moments as she waited for medical assistance to arrive.

  ‘Is she okay?’ the woman in the minibus doorway asked Carol in reference to Francesca, and Carol looked up and noticed that she was now the only conscious person in the back of this minibus. Those who had been injured but able to get out of here had now gone, and only those who were unconscious remained. Carol counted three other people in here besides her and Francesca, two men and a woman, all of them in their forties and all of them looking very, very still. She prayed that they were all still breathing like her daughter was, but it was hard to say because nobody else was here to check on them. These poor people must have been travelling solo because they didn’t have a panicked family member or friend sitting beside them frantically checking for a pulse and urging them to wake up. That broke Carol’s heart because if these passengers were in the last stages of life then they deserved to have somebody with them to at least hold their hand, even if they didn’t know they were there and even if it was only a stranger. Carol wanted to help all of these people, but there was no way that she was going to leave her daughter’s side, so she stayed where she was and focused on helping the person on this minibus that she cared about the most.

  But the kindly woman in the doorway of the minibus obviously wanted to do more to help because she carefully clambered inside and moved towards the other passengers at the back of the vehicle. Once in, she started checking for heartbeats and trying to get responses while Carol continued to monitor Francesca’s situation, the pair of women working desperately alongside each other to save another human life that was just as precious as their own.

  ‘I think they’re all still breathing,’ the woman told Carol after she had finished checking on the other passengers, and that was a relief to hear, even if it didn’t really help them much in the long term as they continued to wait for professional help to arrive.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Carol said as she gripped Francesca’s hand and hoped that her daughter could feel it in whatever layer of consciousness she was in right now.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the woman asked, and Carol realised she was making conversation as a way to help her, just like she had been helping the other people in here since she arrived on the scene. Chatting wouldn’t fix this nightmarish scenario, but it would help pass the time and take Carol’s mind off thinking scary thoughts while they waited for the paramedics, so she knew she should answer it, even if all she really wanted to do was bury her head in her unconscious daughter’s chest and cry.

  ‘Carol,’ she replied, keeping her response short and sweet because saying any more might have caused her voice to crack and betrayed how terrified she was at this moment.

  ‘Hi, Carol. I’m Jill,’ the woman replied. ‘And who is that you’re with?’

  ‘This is Francesca. My daughter.’

  ‘She’s very pretty.’

  ‘Yeah, she is.’

  ‘And where was it you were going together today?’

  ‘Cambridge.’

  ‘How lovely. What a beautiful city! Was it for a holiday?’

  Carol shook her head as she kept her eyes on her daughter beside her.

  ‘We were attending a conference this weekend.’

  ‘What kind of conference?’

  ‘Self-improvement.’

  Carol’s answer made her choke up a little, probably because of how ridiculous it seemed to have been travelling to a place to try and improve her life, only for it to now be potentially in ruins.

  ‘Wow, I’m impressed. I bet that would have been very interesting.’

  ‘Yeah. My daughter loves that kind of thing. I do too.’

 

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