The Coach Trip into Hell (Extract)

For several days the Southern Uplands of Scotland had been mostly silent. Only the sound of the wind battering the heather, and the rain assaulting everything on the ground had disturbed the post pillaging serenity. Amongst the foliage the only native vertebrate for 10 miles scurried around, desperate for food. A lone brown mouse, twitching and snuffling her way down a hillside. It was amazing she had survived for as long as she had. Her acute smell picked up a scent, across the road was a packet of crisps. Her brain told her legs to make the dash for it. She could make it, sustenance, the first whiff of which she’d had in days.

Swiftly she darted down the remainder of the hillside and across the tarmac. She was halfway there when the bus crunched her into oblivion. The driver didn’t even feel a bump. Though in all fairness to the ex-mouses’ existence –and somewhat pitiful end- he wasn’t feeling much at that moment in time. He had spent the past 12 hours driving a group of heckling teenagers from Disney Land Steinkjer. The closest thing he’d had to a rest on the trip was the 4 hour ferry crossing from Norway to the Scottish coast. And then he’d been cleaning sick from the coach. All while holding back his own tidal wave of vomit.

The only mercies that had been granted to him during this trip had arrived during their return journey through Scotland. When they’d arrived at the tiny ferry port there had been no bureaucratic officers demanding he show them papers proving his and the accordion buses existence. In fact there had been no one there at all. Something which he’d been thankful for. The 15 cans of Norwegian Lager weren’t well hidden in the luggage hold. Yup, George Wilkins certainly had gone up in the world now he wasn’t working for ‘Tim Sloanes Buses’. In a bid to escape congesting traffic he had taken the bus through the hills. It gave him something pretty to look at (that wasn’t on the page of a glossy magazine). He was certain that during their two hour journey through the Scottish countryside they hadn’t seen a soul. Not even a solitary tractor hogging the road and spraying his windscreen with cow excrement. If he had been fully awake, this information could have saved his life.