Cradled in the valley of the frosty mountains, and passing under the light snowfall, the large grey bus moved though the shadows. Shadows cast by the meagre light of a night long past and a day not yet broken. Then all at once, the sun revealed itself, hidden behind the tallest of the crags; it bathed the valley in welcoming light. The cerulean blue sky was free of clouds, and the sun gathered strength, generating enough heat and light to summon activity from within the bus…
"Ahh! Oh my god, who the fuck farted!" Andrew Liu sat up in his seat and began clawing at the windows in a mock attempt to get out, to the elation of everyone around him. As if setting off a chain reaction, Andrew's announcement caused the entire back block of seated students to start screaming and yelling maniacally.
"That's so dirty!" A girl's voice, accompanied shortly after by Melissa Nuttal's head protruding over the top of her seat, nose wrinkled in disgust. The wild screaming continued anew.
"Class! You are behaving like a bunch of animals! Calm down, sit down and put your seatbelts on, now!" Stood at the front of the coach, the figure of the teacher threw a shadow onto the chaos. Mr Matheson got the silence he demanded, if only for a second.
"Oh, do fuck off," someone muttered, loudly enough to hear. Matheson turned scarlet.
"Who was that!" He bellowed down the aisle. The class chose not to respond and instead burst into peals of laughter at the sight. An adult getting angry was, after all, one of the funniest things to see. Someone threw a crudely made paper airplane that missed Matheson by inches.
"Go talk to your mate the driver," someone else yelled out, and more laughter washed over the coach. Matheson turned his back to them and slumped into his chair. Once again, the students had beaten him. Of course, normally he would remain calm and simply order the coach to turn around, but then, the coach was on a one-way trip. The thought almost put Matheson at ease.
The general good-humour among the students of the coach was to be expected. The coach was bound for an isolated resort in the French Alps, for a ten-day skiing vacation, even if many students had heavy drinking on the agenda. The sixteen-year-old students were all well below the legal age, even on the European continent, but it had never stopped them before.
"Hey, who's up for a song?" Nathan West turned round in his seat, resting his arms on the back. He grinned down at the pair behind and beneath him now, Mitchell Baker and his girlfriend Cathy Usher, who had until just a second ago been kissing passionately. Mitchell glared at Nathan.
"Ohh, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer – ow!" With a swift blow to the side of his head, Nathan retreated back to his seat and next to him his best friend Donny. "Hey, is this gonna be awesome or what?" Donny turned to him and cracked a smile.
"Hell yeah," he replied. "Gonna get drunk, do some drugs, get laid, what more could a guy ask for?"
Nathan laughed. "Got your eye on someone then?" He asked innocently.
"Yeah, Susan," Donny said. "Faye told me she fancied me."
"Good luck," Nathan snorted, "Susan wouldn't sleep with Brad Pitt. Her parents are totally strict Christians or some shit."
"I like a challenge," Donny couldn't help laughing out loud as he turned up his MP3 player and returned to his music.
Nathan cranked the lever on the side of his chair out of boredom and sent it swinging back into Mitchell's legs, evoking a furious cry of pain and two writhing fists round the chair trying desperately to strike something. Nathan just laughed hysterically.
From the back seat of the coach came a sudden quiet crack and hiss, seemingly inconspicuous, but it really might as well have been a large flashing neon sign.
"Who's got the beer?" The boy across the aisle from Nathan, Greg Crews, leaned out over his girlfriend Danielle Dias. The back half of the coach fell silent, until the source of the noise was found.
Richard Lester and Josh Colby, two of the four boys on the back seat, suddenly appeared, brandishing cans of beer and yelling loudly. The whole back half of the coach broke into loud cheers and drinks were passed round.
"Hey, what about him?" Donny aimed a thumb in Matheson's direction. Greg just grinned and cupped his hands to his mouth.
"Hey, sir, look!" He bellowed, "we all got beer!" There was no response from the teacher, who either did not hear the announcement or most likely, chose not to. Greg merely cracked open his beer with a flourish.
"Hey, Josh, give us a few beers," came the voice of Ella Fontaine calling her boyfriend and gesturing to the girls around her.
"Piss off," Josh said with a loud laugh. Ella pouted and sat down.
Along the aisle into the back section of the bus and amidst the festivities came the figure of Curtis Hutchinson with an expensive-looking video camera. "So here we are on the highway to hell," he addressed the camera.
"Highway to hell," burst out Richard with a wild grin.
"Say some shit for the camera guys," Curtis said, panning the lens around the seats. Greg and Danielle waved and smiled.
"Curtis' mum takes it hard," someone said from off-camera. There was hysterical laughter.
The girls sitting for the most part at the front end of the bus were quieter, but from some seats the clouds of cigarette smoke were clearly visible. "Hey, no smoking on the bus," the driver said indignantly, tapping the small red and white sign.
"Pay attention to the road," came a girl's voice, followed by a shriek of laughter.
"Are you gonna ask out Donny?" Faye Brooks said to her best friend Susan Ives.
"I don't know," Susan replied. "I don't think he's that interested in me. Faye faced a predicament: while she had a mad crush on Donny herself, Susan had liked him for much longer without having the courage to say anything. It was all Faye could do to get them together and resist the temptation to ask him herself. They had been having this conversation for the past thirty minutes and Faye was growing tired of it.
"Well, you should," she sat back in her seat with a sigh. From the back of the bus once more there came a chorus of voices raised in semi-drunken song.
"We're on a Highway To Hell!" Richard sang loudly. After a few chorus renditions, he almost had the whole bus joining in. "A Highway To Hell!"
Ahead, a tunnel was carved into the mountainside. As the bus snaked round a bend it came into plain view. Nathan noticed with surprise that the tunnel was so long the end was not in sight.
"Highway To Hell!" The busload of students sang. Beer cans flew and people jumped on the seats in animalistic celebration.
"Highway To Hell!"
The bus roared into the tunnel. The sound echoed all around, drowning out the now fading singing. One by one the students fell quiet and collapsed on the floor as the pale green gas seeped into the bus.
A Highway To Hell…