The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (3 page)

Whatever he was going to say was quickly muted.

Like the rest, he began to move more and more slowly, with his eyes glazed and dull and his motion weak. He went on with what he was starting to say, cussing out the man nearest him. And even his words were slow. It certainly didn’t help what was supposed to have been crisp profanity to have a long silence between each syllable.

The thing would have been droll if it had not been so dreadful. In a moment it grew even more dreadful.

All the slow-moving, seemingly drugged men began to tremble.

Almost rhythmically, shudders swept through them as if they were very cold. To increase the illusion, even their teeth chattered with their violent shuddering. And a few of them fell down.

In the opened door of the power room, a figure was furtively standing. The figure had a sort of shield over its face, possibly to keep it from being identified. Like a minor demon in a little hell, this figure watched the stricken humans in the crude-rubber department.

Off to one side, one of the stricken men watched this figure. The man was dressed as the other workmen were dressed, but was not quite as they were. He was one of the company police, mingling with the run of the men, performing a multitude of duties outside the regular one of tending the machines.

This man was as affected as the rest; but with a tremendous call on his will power, he began to go toward the partly opened steel door with the masked face showing in the crack.

He moved as if he were a bear, awakened during hibernation time and hardly able to keep awake. It took him four or five minutes to traverse the thirty feet to the door.

Nearing the door, he started to draw the gun he carried under his coveralls.

Again, the effect would have been ludicrous if you hadn’t sensed such life-and-death urgency in it.

The man’s hand slowly went to his pocket, slowly came out with a flat .32 automatic, slowly began to level it. Of course the act was suicidal. It was like a fighter, in the ring, taking a full five seconds to draw back his arm and drive it forward again in a slow-motion left hook. What would the other man, not slowed, be doing all this time?

Exactly. And the man in the power-room doorway was acting just as that unslowed fighter would have acted.

He watched the gun come slowly out and slowly begin to level, almost as if he were amused. Then he drew his own gun.

He fired twice into the chest of the factory cop! And the cop fell. He even started to fall slowly, but then crashed to the floor in a fast heap.

The man in the doorway put up his gun, looked once more at the stricken department, then turned and walked out of sight.

Behind him, machines jammed and screamed, empty. More men began falling over in limp heaps! And presently the whole vast plant would stop humming because its supply was not coming out of this one vital department.

Death in slow motion seemed to have struck and, having struck, to linger still instead of moving on.

The man who had unconcernedly left the doorway after murdering the factory cop moved just as unconcernedly toward the big street exit of the place. In doing so, he stepped over the body of the assistant engineer, who had tried to put up an argument when the man first came in.

The assistant engineer lay with a neat blue hole in the right side of his head, and a gaping red crater on the left side of the skull where the bullet had torn out again!

It was now three minutes to twelve. The assistant’s relief came in off the street, whistling, unaware of what had happened here.

He saw the man with the shield over his face.

Without a sound, like a well-trained watchdog that instantly sizes up a situation and acts accordingly, the man jumped.

It was so swiftly done that the man with the shield over his face hadn’t time to get his gun out again. Snarling a little behind the shield, he battered a right and left into the engineer’s face instead, swayed back with a return blow, then closed!

The masked man was very powerful. Disregarding a rain of blows, his hands went out and grabbed the engineer’s throat. They tightened, like the coils of a snake.

The blows got weaker and fewer, then stopped. The engineer’s face turned red, chalk-pale, purplish! Came a moment when his movements were convulsive and terrific, and then a following moment when they ceased entirely.

Calmly, coldly, the man with the masked face dropped the stark body and went on to the exit. Three had died under his hand, now.

At the curb were lines and lines of cars, belonging to employees. They were parked diagonally, with their noses to the curb; but a few with the radiators pointing outward because they had been backed in.

In one of these parked cars, all of which were dim and without lights, two men sat in the front seat, slouched down so that it took a sharp eye to realize that this sedan wasn’t empty, too. And this was one of the cars that had been backed in so that it could be instantly driven away into the night.

The man who had killed three of his fellows almost in as many moments went to this car, taking the shield off his face as he did so. His features were revealed, and a natural wonder sprang up as to why he didn’t wear something over them all the time.

The jaw was heavy and brutish. The eyes were little, hard pinpoints of black under heavy black eyebrows. There were scars on cheeks and throat. The mouth was a mere gash under a smashed nose. Very often, murderers don’t look like murderers at all. This man did.

One of the men in the car opened a rear door for him. This man stared his question. The fellow who had come from the power plant nodded an affirmative answer.

There had been no words spoken. And still with no exchange of words, the car sped off into the blackness. It was as if the men were all deaf-mutes, able to convey meanings only with looks and signs.

Ten blocks away, a police car screamed past them, on its way to the Wardwear plant. The sedan moved sedately on at a law-abiding speed. Another cop car, and another, followed.

They had no way of knowing that this innocent-looking sedan had anything to do with the now-distant factory. All they knew was that a call had come from a frantic manager about murder and a queer slow motion of the workers in the crude-rubber department—and of a whole vast plant brought to a standstill by some mysterious blow.

The glittering town car held a precious human cargo indeed. The four men in the capacious back were worth about a hundred million dollars.

They were rubber-factory owners, barons of Akron, and held executive positions with the American Rubber Institute, that association of manufacturers which molds prices, opinions and foreign policies in addition to molding rubber.

They were Thomas Wardwear, Anthony Hillyard, Abel Quill and Michael Moribunce. Wardwear was the richest and most important, but the others didn’t have to look up very far to his eminence, at that.

In front with the chauffeur was a fifth man of this party, but he was a small cinder heap compared to a mighty mountain. He was cheaply dressed and had gnarled, work-torn hands. He sat there shivering like a chilled dog and moving in a curiously slow fashion when he wanted to shift position. Several times, his shoulder bumped the window upright because he couldn’t get his arm up in time to brace himself when a curve was rounded.

This man was in the rubber business, too. But at the bottom. He worked for Wardwear, in the crude-rubber department.

As the big machine passed a corner newsstand, the boy was calling forth the evening papers. “Extra! Read all about it! Another Akron factory—”

Another one. That was the second.

Wardwear’s main plant had been paralyzed by the defection of the crude department. But Abel Quill’s whole factory had suffered the same mysterious slow-motion, shivering, enfeebling malady seven hours later, just before the day shift went on.

So the four men had chartered a plane for New York, bringing the sample workman from Wardwear’s plant with them.

Now, in the big car, they were bound for Bleek Street, and, they hoped and prayed, deliverance from a thing that seemed more dangerous and mysterious every time they thought of it.

A hundred million dollars or more, humbly on its way to Bleek Street. But from looking at that street, you’d never guess it could be a mecca for such men.

It was a short block in lower Manhattan. The north side of Bleek Street was taken up entirely by the windowless back of a great, concrete storage building. In the center of the south side were three narrow, red brick, three-story buildings, looking old and dingy and shabby.

And all of the south side was either owned by or under long lease to one man. So that this one man, in effect, owned the block.

This man, whose headquarters were the three red brick buildings which had been thrown into one, was Richard Henry Benson—The Avenger.

It was to see The Avenger that these important men in the rubber industry were going.

The town car reached the corner of Bleek Street and turned west toward its dead end. It stopped in front of the center entrance of the red brick buildings.

Over this entrance was a small unobtrusive sign. It had dull gilt letters on it, and the letters said:

JUSTICE, INC.

“This is it,” said Wardwear, a square-bodied man with rimless glasses.

“Come along” said Moribunce to the factory workman beside the chauffeur.

The man got out. He was very ill. That could be seen at a glance. His pallor was chalky, and he was shivering, as if he were very cold, though the day was warm.

He moved with curious, eerie slowness. His foot descended and touched the pavement like a scene in a slow-motion picture. His body followed with equal slowness; it took him a full minute to cross the sidewalk, even with two of the rubber magnates helping him impatiently.

Wardwear pushed the buzzer in the vestibule.

There was a moment of silence and inaction. During that moment, though they did not know it, the five men were under scrutiny.

Upstairs there was a small television set, designed by Smitty, that was constantly on. This revealed whoever was in the vestibule.

A soft hum sounded and the vestibule door opened. The five men went slowly—for the benefit of the slow-moving workman—up two flights of stairs which were very richly carpeted and whose walls were draped with tapestries worth a fortune.

Quill was in the lead. He started to tap at the door at the top of the stairs, but there was another soft hum and the door opened by itself.

The five strode in.

They saw a tremendous room, taking up the top floor of the three buildings in one.

They saw a Scotchman with outstanding ears, dim freckles under a coarse skin, sandy ropes of eyebrows over bleak blue eyes, and sandy-reddish hair in a rough thatch.

They saw a man who was a veritable giant, with a torso so muscled that his arms would not hang straight.

They saw a demure, slim, small blond girl who looked as delicate as porcelain and twice as fragile. Of course, they did not know that this was Nellie Gray, blond little bombshell who could handle most strong men with her ability at boxing, wrestling and jujitsu.

One important member of The Avenger’s crime-fighting crew who was not present was Cole Wilson, the young mechanical-engineering genius who was in Washington, aiding the government on an important defense project.

Then they saw the personage they guessed at once to be the leader here.