Just to break the everyday monotony, though, the driver thought he would do something revolutionary today: go left instead of right at the vee in the road about a quarter of a mile ahead. He would take the scenic route instead of the Goat Highway this day. Through the old sugar-cane fields.
Franklin James looked in his rearview mirror and saw straw beach hats and lobster red faces. A pretty blond bitch in a halter top was playing with her tittie straps. There were a few empty seats for a change,too.
At the vee in the road, the bus driver took a left instead of the usual Goat Highway route. As he made the wrong turn, the red-faced manager of Elizabeth's Fancy jumped up in the third seat of the bus.
'This is the wrong road, you idiot bastard. Back it up, boy. Get on the Goat road.'
Which Franklin James did with a subservient smile and not a word of protest. Admit it, mon, yo' got it easy.
Most of Dred's men were lying on their stomachs back twenty to forty yards from the dirt road. A few bare- chested boys had shimmied up into coconut trees.
Colonel Dred was paying no attention. Instead the twenty-seven-year-old man watched the burly African and the Cuban.
A man smoking a cigarette and wearing a striped woolen hat shouted to Dred from out of a tree. 'Dey comin' 'round in 'bout annudder minute.' The soldier slipped his cigarette butt down out of the tree.
Monkey Dred turned and gave a hand gesture to the rest of his guerrillas. The sound of rifles clicked off echoes on both sides of the Goat Highway.
Then Dred put the sleek M-16 to his own cheek. He sighted it very carefully.
Squeezed.
Squeezed.
The whole top half of the Cuban's head splattered. Blood splashed onto tall stalks of grass as far as thirty feet away. Kingfish Toone was thrown forward with his huge black arms stretched out wide, a big dark hole in the back of his khaki shirt. 'Bad kind a niggers,' Monkey Dred shouted to the soldier in the tree. 'Drivin' Cadillac. Warin' perfuume, yo' know.
Besides, the executions had been well paid for by Damian Rose. They'd earned Dred two more precious machine guns.
Speckles of red splashed through a latticework of jungle green. Then Colonel Dred could see the upper deck of the bus again. Sun rays ricocheted off the scaling red roof. Some banana wrens passed by. Every window in the old bus was flung open wide. Americans, Germans, English, and South Americans looked out on handsome mahogany trees, blooniing wild lilies, parakeets.
Jungle, mahn, jungle.
'Ay pretty!' Dred shouted to the treetop birds. Jacamars. Parrots. His adrenaline was flowing like the teeming streets of Trenchtown. The juices made him feel like a Rastafarian superman. Jah. A walking, fast-@ng contradiction.
The teetering double-decker bus had turned down a narrow straightaway less than a hundred yards away. It was coming straight at them, down a tunnel of coconut and fir trees.
Dred's men began to talk to one another. Enthusiastic shouts. Hypertense babble. The red bus was fuzzy and just a little unreal through shimmering waves of heat. High blond weeds fanned away from it like flying hair. Palms and fems loudly scraped the roof and windows. Dred was staring so hard, anticipating so very much, that the bus seemed to stop moving. to freeze on the straightaway.
'Ro-bert,' he screamed. 'Ro-bert!'
A tiny rifleman with sick yellow eyes and a yellow Che beret came running up beside him. The man's big M-16 rifle made him seem like a child.
'Stay by me, Robert. Now watch closely. I want you to shoot it.'
As if the red bus were a charging elephant.
Up ahead, Franklin James watched a young woman and boy step into the Goat Highway. Barefoot, dressed in sun-bleached rags, they stood in the middle of the road, both of them waving excitedly at the bus. James cursed to himself, but he touched his foot to the brakes. He shifted gears and, before the bus stopped fully, had the folding doors crashing open. 'Hey, what is it, woman?' the fat black man shouted angrily.
'Yo' can take us to main road?' the woman screamed through the open bus door. 'Bway is bahd sick, mon. ' The bus driver's face took on a pained look. 'Oh, lay-dy! I can't ride no-body not frwn dat plantation, yo 9know. t 9
'My bway is sick!' the black woman screamed. Suddenly a rifle shot crashed through the top right -,corner of the bus windshield. The entire half of the windshield fell back inside the bus.
Franklin James put his foot to the ground, and the Grasshopper bucked and jumped forward..
The hollow popping sound of M- 16 rifles erupted everywhere.
Not thirty yards away from Dred's men, the tall, gawky bus seemed to strike a giant pothole. The bus slid quietly to the center of the road. It seemed to ride on its right tires for a while. Then it swerved sharply to the left.
Franklin James was already dead, bumping back and forth over the steering wheel. People inside the bus were failing out of their seats.
Like an enormous lawn mower, the doubledecker ran over five- and six-foot-high fems, thick brush, small trees. It hit a huge royal palm straight on, and the palm tree tore back through the engine and cab. The tree trunk continued five feet down the aisle, crushing people in the front seats, and then the Grasshopper finally came to a stop.
Gaping holes began to mottle the side of the bus that faced into the firing squad.
