The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (8 page)

It only half succeeded.

The two saw, as they raced past, that the interior of the truck was like an overturned ants’ nest, with no telling how many men scrambling over each other to try to get to their feet again.

But the coupé’s snout had not plugged the rear of the truck body. The doors were still open, and there was ample room to get out over the coupé’s hood.

Which the men proceeded to do!

Smitty saw, cursing their luck, that there were at least a dozen of them, picked up somewhere en route from the gasket factory to this spot.

The men split up, half streaming toward the front of the truck to get at Smitty, the other half taking the other side to get Mac. And one remarkable thing about them was that they made no sound. There were no excited calls from one to another to do this or that thing; to get those men; to do anything at all.

They acted like deaf-mutes.

The men were firing as they ran. Smitty and Mac both jerked this way and that under the impact of slugs, but neither fell. That was because of their bulletproof undergarments of a substance invented by The Avenger and called celluglass. The stuff was transparent, fine as heavy silk, and with more bullet-stopping power than any steel. Each of Benson’s little band wore one, always.

So Mac and Smitty were kicked around considerably—but did not fall, since none of the slugs, fortunately, got them in the throat or head. And the attackers, faces black with rage, stopped shooting and used brute force.

And there they miscalculated.

Twelve men against two, but the two were Fergus MacMurdie and Algernon Heathcote Smith.

Smitty was struck by a human wave an instant before Mac was. He howled with something like berserk delight and grabbed a throat with each hand. His hands twitched, the heads atop the throats suddenly leaned in horrible off-direction, and then the two men were flung bodily at the rest.

On the other side of the closed brown truck, Mac was swinging those bone hammers he called fists. A driving right broke the jaw of the man owning it, and that man subsided into pained quiescence. A left made almost in the same breath draped another man over the doughty Scot’s fist like a limp rag over the end of a pole.

From there on, however, it was not so easy.

Mac got in four more hard blows that dazed but did not disable, and then he went down under a human steam roller of sheer numbers. Almost happily, he wrenched at legs, pounded up at faces, and jerked his sandy-thatched head around to try to avoid a rain of blows from fists and clubbed guns.

Opposite him, Smitty was teaching the four men remaining on their feet that odds of four to one didn’t necessarily mean a thing.

He smashed a man in the shoulder with a mighty left, and that man crawled off with a broken collar bone. He drove straight through the guard of another man and smashed the head behind the guard. That fellow sagged too.

The other two stopped dancing around. Their actions were those of first-class boxers as well as rough-and-tumble fighters. But what good does it do you to know the science of fighting when you’re up against a man-mountain who doesn’t bother with boxing at all but just drives steam-hammer blows through any guard you put up?

One of the two had the presence of mind to try to use a gun again. He leaped back four steps and leveled the automatic with which he’d been clubbing around a moment before.

Aimed it, this time, at Smitty’s head!

Smitty. roared like a bull elephant, picked up the other man and shoved him straight ahead. And it was this man who took the shot.

The man screamed, grasped at his chest and fell. And the one remaining out of six stared, then ran with terrified jerks of his straining mouth.

By now, police sirens were sounding from every direction. At least three squad cars were racing here from different parts of the section.

The men pounding at Mac redoubled their efforts, saw the giant coming apparently unscathed, from the other side of the truck, and they showed their heels right then and there.

So the cops got there and saw something resembling a battlefield in the late evening, with two men responsible for all the carnage. But they arrived too late to do anything but stare, and then to take the human wreckage to headquarters.

They also took the truck for the intense, microscopic examination Mac and Smitty had intended to make but were in no mood to do now. They wanted something besides monotonous routine.

Mac looked at the neighborhood, and then looked at Smitty. They both dismissed from their minds the plate-sized bruises on their torsos where bullets had been stopped from piercing but not from kicking like so many mules.

They were not so very far from the noisome alley on which was the rear-house where Old Mitch dwelt. And Smitty and Mac had been near enough when The Avenger questioned the guard to have heard him mention Old Mitch.

“Let’s go,” snapped Mac.

So they went to the rear-house.

Just what they expected to learn, neither could have put into definite words. But one of those men back there, one who had gotten away least harmed by the fracas, had been the fellow Old Mitch had sullenly admitted was his no-good son. Both Mac and Smitty were positive of that. There was a chance in a thousand that the son might have gone to the father’s hovel to hide, or that the father, angered finally beyond all parental protective instincts, might give some information about him.

But nothing like that happened.

This time Old Mitch was there when they knocked. His feeble voice called: “Come in.”

It was the first time the two had been in that room. And their pity for Old Mitch grew.

The outside of the shack was bad enough. The inside was infinitely worse. This room showed cracked plaster and lath, and paper years old was half peeled from the walls. There was a broken chair, a propped-up table, a pallet of rags, and that was all in the way of furnishings. The one bit of working equipment was the rusted, cracked, ancient stove for which the old man gathered the wood scraps.

Old Mitch lay on the pallet, now. He blinked up at the giant Smitty and the Scotchman with surly dislike in his rheumy eyes.

“Back again, eh?” he snarled. “I thought I told you I needed no help from anybody.”

“I’d say ye were somethin’ more than mistaken,” Mac retorted, staring at the shivering old body and the green-gray face—where the straggly whiskers showed a face. “Mon, ye’re sick again. Verrra sick. Ye should be in a hospital—”

“I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of my affairs,” barked the old bum. Then his tone softened a shade. “I know these attacks. They go away without doctors. So you can just forget what seems to be my illness. Why did you come here?”

“Because of your no-good son,” Smitty said bluntly. “You were in the yard of the Manhattan Gasket Company this afternoon, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” said the old man sullenly. “I get wood and other scraps there. The guards are kind.”

“Well, your son was there, too, as you know very well. And shortly after you left and he left, there was the devil to pay.”

He told of the catastrophe at the factory, of the slow deaths sure to result, some indeed having already resulted. And the old man listened with glazed horror mounting in his pain-filled eyes.

“Your son caused all that,” said Smitty quietly. “The police and Secret Service, every law officer in the land is now hunting for him. I think what he has done releases you from any parental obligation. If you know where we can find him, I think you had better tell us.”

“He wasn’t there,” panted Old Mitch.

“Look,” said Smitty patiently, “half a dozen people saw him. The guard saw you slink away from him as if you were afraid of him. We know he was there.”

“He wasn’t!” Old Mitch’s voice was hoarse, gasping, but determined. Above everything else, his tone and manner said, he was protecting the individual who happened to be his flesh and blood. “I’ll swear in court, anywhere, that I didn’t see him in or anywhere near that yard.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you. that he’s the murderer of innocent people?” flamed Smitty.

“You’re lying!” panted Old Mitch, with a stubbornness worthy of a better cause. “He wouldn’t . . . he couldn’t have! He wasn’t there!”

The old man wouldn’t talk, and neither Smitty nor Mac felt like turning him in for his pathetic loyalties.

So that was that!

The Avenger had returned to the room of the boarding house with no intention whatever of just sacrificing himself with the dying man and the frightened doctor. And he returned, incidentally, just in time to keep the doctor from jumping hysterically from the window and probably killing himself.

“Wait a minute!”

The Avenger’s voice was as calm as cold water.

Benson whipped open vest and shirt. Meanwhile, the flames below were crackling more loudly. No natural fire could spread like that. Thermite must have been used.

From his waist, The Avenger took a coil of rope. Rather, the coil looked less like rope than like thick catgut. It was made of the same stuff as the bulletproof garments, celluglass. An eighth-inch strand of the stuff would hold five hundred pounds.

Benson went to the window and looked down. Flame was shooting out the window below. No help that way. He stared upward.

The roof of the next house showed through smoke, a story above this window. There was a parapet, and on the parapet were ornamental knobs at regular intervals.

With flying fingers, he fashioned a noose. The noose rose lightly upward, seeming to have intelligence of its own. It found a knob and clung.

“When I get up there, tie the cord under the sick man’s arms,” said The Avenger.

The doctor nodded. Benson went up the rope.

Few men could have gone hand-over-hand up so small a cord, even slowly. Such was the steely strength in Dick Benson’s average-sized fingers that he went up almost as fast as if it had been a full-inch cable.

“Now!” he cried, over the roar of the fire.

The doctor carried the sick man to the window and put the cord around his body under the arms. Benson hauled him up.

Then the doctor held on himself.

He was hauled up to the adjoining roof as if he weighed no more than a baby. And he found Dick Benson not even breathing hard as he stood with him on the roof.

“Now it’s easy,” Benson said, calmly.

They went to the edge of this roof, away from the burning building, and the ground showed clear. Men and women in a growing crowd saw them and yelled; but the cries died as they saw Dick lower a limp figure, wrapped in bed-clothes. It was obvious that the situation was well in hand.

The crowd received the sick man, and then the doctor, when he was lowered. And with a final blare the red car of the fire chief arrived from one direction and a small chemical truck from the other.

Men attached the one reel of hose to the nearest hydrant, as The Avenger slid down the rope himself. Then they raced toward Benson as he was twitching to get his cord up and over the parapet knob so that it would fall into his hands.

Benson turned, but not very warily. There didn’t seem any reason to be wary.

Even off guard, he almost got sufficient warning. But not quite.

He saw that the suit of the fireman nearest him, who was running with the hose, fitted him so badly that it was almost comical; and in that instant Dick knew that these were no firemen but part of the very gang that had started the fire.

He knew that—and was caught!

With a swiftness and dexterity almost worthy of The Avenger himself, the man twitched a loop of the flattened fire hose around Dick’s leaping body.

And down the line, the man at the hydrant turned the water on.

The crushing force of ordinary water! The immense incompressible energy of it! No human being could have torn free from the inescapable grasp of that fire hose, as it filled with a rush from the fire hydrant.

Benson tore at it as one would at a great snake. But even his steely fingers could not loosen it.

He felt his chest contract, his ribs tighten inward. He fought for breath and couldn’t get it. He lashed out with his fist at the man holding the end of the hose and could not reach him.

Crowds, roaring blaze, everything faded before his blackening sight. He fell!

The crowds had gaped at the fast attack where no attack would be dreamed. They began to roar as the fire chief’s car and the small chemical truck pulled the fantastic trick of suddenly racing away from a fire, with sirens screaming and bells clanging—and with The Avenger on the floor of the red car.