Chemistry
There was a lot of traffic. The rain began to get heavier, and got very heavy. I slowed down a lot. Most others didn’t.
I kept a good braking distance from the vehicle in front. People overtaking me, probably scared witless by the idiots two car lengths behind them, kept pulling into the space I’d left, as they do. I kept dropping back, trying to preserve my braking space, as I do. The result was that I was going even more slowly than I would otherwise have felt the need to, but so be it.
The inevitable happened, of course. I was able to stop before hitting the mess, and got myself onto the hard shoulder in the hope that I might escape the impact of following traffic. Not being very confident of that, I got out of the passenger side of the car, and legged it up the embankment.
For a short while I watched the mayhem from the top of the bank. I watched as the pile-up grew. My car seemed to lead a charmed life there on the hard shoulder – the whole road was full of carnage, and it spilled onto the hard shoulder both in front of and behind my car, but my car was untouched.
Then I watched with horror as two big trucks, side by side, attempted to stop before hitting the pile. They slid sideways into it, and a third slammed straight on into the side of them. The first was a fuel tanker, followed by a liquid oxygen tanker. And something burst into flame.
I didn’t wait to watch any longer. I wondered how far I could get before the first of the two tanks burst in the heat, and worse than that, the second as well. I ran, looking all the while for anywhere that would give me some shelter from the blast I knew was likely any time. A dip in the ground, anything.
They found me two hundred yards from the road. How much of that I’d run, and how much I’d been blown, no-one will ever know. I was lucky they found me – I could have died of hypothermia so easily, lying battered and unconscious in a field in the rain like that. I was the only survivor of the accident, and they still don’t know exactly how many people died in it.