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.