Sprinkling of luck

Found an abandoned car on the road this afternoon. Writing in it now. Had to break a side window to get in, so I guess anything else, anybody else, could get in, but it gives me a much needed place to rest that is under cover. The really good news was finding a pack of old digestive biscuits in the glove compartment. It was only a single serving travel pack with four of them inside, but biscuits never tasted so good. The half pack of mint Polos I am saving for a pick-me-up when I restart my journey.

The bad news? Couldn't find a key, so I couldn't test the car to see if it might start. Might have been any number of reasons to leave it here, but none of that matters without the key.

The really bad news. I found an old newspaper. It begins to fill in some gaps that I wonder if I was better off not knowing. The paper was mostly about the Manchester Crisis, but there was a load about the flu outbreak and all kinds of advice on how to avoid catching it, and what to do if you thought you had it. Talk about how stretched the services were and how people could help by preserving water, and so on. Making it sound like there is a war on.

Still Manchester was the headline story and pictures from the street filled more than half the pages. Some of the close-ups of crowd scenes made me think back to the scene outside the police station. Hidden away in the middle pages were smaller reports of violent outbreaks in other parts of the country. Not yet linked to anything, but newsworthy all the same. And after that, the sports pages, thinned out by a total lack of football thanks to nationwide travel restrictions and probably a lot of flu.

The editorial and comments columns were full of advice and wisdom that amounted to stay at home and batten down the hatches. Obey the authorities, watch television and listen to radio for important announcements, and whatever you do, remain in your homes unless absolutely necessary. That clearly helped a lot of people in Manchester.

Four days after this paper was printed, Manchester was destroyed. The government had to know how serious this was back then. I'm still assuming a link between the flu, infection, and the Manchester Crisis. It's hard to find anything else to pin the blame on. So, nuking Manchester had to be about containment. So why stop with the nukes? Why aren't all the stragglers being taken care of? The military seem to have abandoned this area. Busy elsewhere? Maybe they all have this flu too. That's a thought and a half.

If the flu is what turns people into psychos, and if it has spread like any normal flu outbreak, then the whole country will be in a mess. Government will be working on a cure of course. Maybe they already have one. But I got better, so why not other people? Maybe I had is something else. Maybe I am lucky, or maybe all the poor bastards who would have recovered from this got turned into ash in the greatest over reaction ever.

There are too many what-ifs. I need to get to the next town and find somebody to ask. Suddenly struck by the idea that Manchester may not have been the only place to have been bombed. Maybe things have fallen apart everywhere else? I have no way of knowing. Can't think like that. Not yet. Leeds first. Then decide what to do. I just hope my sister is still there.