Day 2,601

I work in a roadside cafe, have done since I was fourteen. It's one of those 'neon cardboard signs for three miles, shipping container in a layby' kinda places lovingly called The Grub Pit. We get a real interesting mix of people, mostly truckers and hangry families but occasionally we'll get the roadsick folk.

They come in usually around three or four in the morning which is when we open - in fact we open around this time just for them, to make sure they're safe or call the police if they aren't. We call them roadsick because that's what it is really, a sickness that draws you to the strangest and deadliest places.

I can spot them a mile away now - their cars are always filthy and they walk like they haven't moved in weeks,which they probably haven't. For some reason they've always been drawn to our spot, specifically the freshwater spring in the field behind us but if they linger long enough we get some food in them.

It's usually their last meal. Most of them will turn up in the burnt out shells of their cars in dead-end towns that don't even have a postal code, let alone a name. They're either alive or somewhat close to it, thanks to us asking the right question and calling the right numbers.

Either way around noon we'd always get a couple of officers showing us an assortment of photos and asking if we'd seen them before and I used to say that we'd always know them but last night was different. Last night they showed  us someone we'd never seen before.

They were definitely roadsick - we could see it in the vacant eyes staring back out of their photograph and the way the officers described an  all-too-familiar burnt wreckage with all the passengers still wearing their seatbelts. They always stop by for the springwater - it's a sign of the roadsickness itself - but these ones bypassed it and went straight to their deaths

 I want to rationalise it and say that everyone's different, even if they share the same affliction but a part of me is scared that this means the end of The Grub Pit's aid. If we don't see them off or send for help before they reach their destination then they might all end up dead in burnt out cars in nameless towns.

A change was in motion and not necessarily for the better.