Józef Razowski gave a sigh of relief as the soldier finally waved his truck forwards, and he swung onto the A303 and moving traffic at last.
He had been stuck in almost stationary queues for most of the day; every road that he had tried to turn down was either blocked off or choked with vehicles. With the radio seemingly dead, there had been no way of finding out what was going on, and the soldiers that he had tried to engage with had been unable to tell him anything other than there had been ‘an incident’.
He snorted. An incident. That could mean just about anything. It was the same in Poland; the authorities would never give you a straight answer.
He pressed his foot onto the accelerator, desperate to make up for the time that he had lost, and the radio that had been unhelpfully dead all day suddenly blared back into life. As he reached forward, fumbling with the controls to try and reduce the volume, something hit the windscreen of the van with a load ‘thump’.
The impact made him jump and he grasped the steering wheel with both hands once more as the van lurched across the carriageway.
The windshield was covered in thick yellow goo, legs and pieces of wing splashed everywhere. The bug must have been enormous; he could barely see out.
Cursing under his breath, he reached for the windscreen washer, and, as the wipers stared to clean the remains of the huge insect from the glass, he finally managed to find a radio channel with music, and settled into his seat for the long drive ahead.