Stranded in a ditch

Roland Drew stands outside the coach, the rain pouring down on him, and soaking through even his high quality outdoorswear. Off to his left, Richard Pimms is performing first aid on Manny in the skewed light from the bus's headlamps.

Roland crouches and examines the undercarriage. In the dim light, he can make out, among other things, a snapped and twisted axle. The bus is wrecked beyond any possibility of repair, leaving the passengers stranded, in the middle of the night, in the middle of howling thunderstorm, in the middle of nowhere.

Manny says to Richard, with an empty smile:

"There is always blood these days. Thank you for your kindness. My name is Emmanuel."

Manny considers the top of the ditch. He thinks back to childhood. They said he was no acrobat, too heavy set, Manny had never accepted that. It was more that the acrobats were a closed community in the circus and they would only train their own. So young Emmanuel had become a lion tamer instead, one man against the awesome force of the wild. Unless of course, there were greater things than even that... Manny shivers

"We should not stay here"

Richard, fingers fumbling in the cold rain to screw the lid back on the bottle of iodine, smiles to Emmanuel.

"A pleasure to meet you, Emmanuel, my name is Richard. Your head took a bit of a knock, but it's nothing too serious. Just let me know if you start feeling dizzy."

Having packed away the contents of the small first aid kit, Richard then looks up at the slope of the ditch and sighs.

"No, I doubt anybody would see us down here, best get back to the road."

From the door of the crashed coach, Kurt says to no-one in particular,

"The driver's had it. Anyone see what made him swerve like that?"

Richard points to the exposed undercarriage of the bus and says:

"I didn't see anything at the time but that spiked chain around the rear axle is the likely culprit."

There is a heavy spiked chain tangled around the broken axle of the bus, and two burst out tyres on the left hand side. It's hard to make out, but it looks like the chain may have been dragged down from the road with the bus, rather than something that was in the ditch with the rest of the rubbish and rubble. It would have been enough to cause the crash if it had been.