The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (15 page)

Trouble was, he hadn’t looked. Waiters and taxi drivers are people you don’t tend to notice individually without reason. And there hadn’t seemed to be any reason for Smitty’s giving an inquisition to a casual cab driver.

“You again!” he said bitterly. “And I once said you were kind of pretty. You’re no more pretty than a Gila monster—”

“Get out!” said the girl.

“Huh?” gasped the giant. The last thing he’d expected was to be captured by this gummer-upper of well-laid plans and then be turned loose again.

“I said, get out!” she snapped.

Smitty started to gather up the little man.

“Oh, no. Leave him right where he is.”

Smitty said things under his breath that would have burned the dainty ears off the girl if they’d been a little louder.

“Stop mumbling,” said the girl. “Get out of this cab, at once, or I’ll shoot.”

She would, too! There was no hesitancy in those jet-black eyes.

Feeling as impotent as three hundred pounds of angry jellyfish, Smitty clambered out of the cab. It sped off with a scream of tires. There were no cabs around here in which the giant could follow.

As easily as rolling off a ridge-pole, the girl had rescued the little man Benson had ordered taken to Bleek Street.

But it seemed that rescue was the wrong word.

The taxi went along for only half a mile or so; then it stopped in front of a loft building, each of the five floors of which was taken up by a small manufacturing company.

The girl stepped back to the body of the cab. The little man was stirring now, and moaning. She held an opened vial of ammonia under his nostrils. He coughed, looked up dazedly.

“Hello, Mr. Rann,” said a man in janitor’s clothes as the little man went into the door with the figure in cab driver’s worn garb beside him.

Rann bit his lips, said hello stiffly and went on in and up the stairs. There was a gun cleverly concealed, poking against his ribs.

He stopped on the top floor and opened a door marked: Krakow Distillate Co. He went in, with the girl behind him. The girl shut and locked the door without taking gun or eyes off Rann.

It seemed there was nothing to the Krakow Co. but several chairs and a bed. There were no machinery, no light workbenches, as on other floors of the loft building. It was only a hide-out for the man called Rann.

The girl took off her man’s cap and shook out her thick, black hair. She looked like an avenging fury, in worn black whipcord and with gauntlets disguising the telltale feminine daintiness of her hands. “This is what I’ve waited for,” she said. And with the words, Death fanned the air of the big, almost empty room with sable wings!

Benson hadn’t even been carried to the factory when it became known that he was not Rann. The discovery was made through the thing that was at once one of his greatest crime-fighting aids—and his most dangerous weakness.

His face!

That dead, white countenance of his could be prodded into any shape desired. And that was a potent weapon.

But it could never express emotion; and, if pressed out of shape, it stayed that way—which was a constant menace to The Avenger when he went disguised.

It gave him away when the car he was in drew near a one-story brick building a half an acre in extent, with broken, boarded-up windows and an air of desolation. It was when the car crossed interminable tracks on a cinder cross that it happened.

“Seems to me this guy has been out a long time from just one poke,” said the man in the back seat with Benson.

“It was a good, hard poke,” said the man at the wheel.

“Yeah, but even at that—” muttered the other.

Benson hadn’t been out at any time.

The average man has a very thin sheet of muscle over his ribs, under the slab of the breast muscle. It offers no protection at all from a hard blow under the heart. But The Avenger was not an average man.

In any part of his body, Benson could make hard muscle lump and writhe at will—even in that normally unfleshed section. So that when the man’s fist had smashed there, it had crashed a sheath of iron-hard flesh ridged to meet it and hadn’t even staggered The Avenger. Benson had pretended unconsciousness to find out more of Singer’s plans.

It was about time now to open his eyes unexpectedly and overpower these two. Then he could wait here for Singer, and confront him—

His head rocked from a blow as unexpected as it was terrific. The man muttering beside him had suddenly, without a word or move of warning, crashed his fist against the side of Benson’s jaw.

It was like clubbing a man in his sleep. So unprepared was he for the cowardly, treacherous blow that even Benson found himself almost knocked out by it.

He swayed dizzily, rallying his strength—

But more damage than the impact of the blow had been done. He saw the man staring open-mouthed at his jaw. Then Benson’s brain, flash-quick even after such a blow, got the meaning of the look.

The blow had flattened and distorted the dead flesh around his mouth. And the flesh had stayed that way, like putty. A complete give-away!

His gray steel body snapped toward the man. But the unlooked-for smash in the jaw had undone him. With a yell, the man brought the barrel of a gun down over Benson’s head.

The car went on into the factory yard. Benson was carried into a gloomy den of rusting machinery and desertion. Five minutes later another car turned in, with five men in it.

Nearly an hour later, a third car came, and from it stepped Singer.

Benson wasn’t aware of any of these things. He was still out. The first thing he heard, long after that, was a voice that was strangled with fury.

“If you’ve killed him, you confounded fool—if he never comes out of this—well, you won’t be able to run fast or far enough to get away from me!”

“He ain’t dead,” came another voice, whining, placating. “I felt his ticker beat a minute ago.”

“It looks to me as if he’s going to pass from unconsciousness right into death. And
then,
where’ll I be?”

Benson lay just as he had been before returning consciousness sent the voice to his brain. He breathed shallowly, but often, getting back his strength. Power began to flow slowly back into his lax, sprawled limbs.

“I’m tellin’ you,” said the whining voice, “this guy ain’t Rann. I’ve told you a dozen times now—”

“Not Rann? Nonsense! You can see he’s Rann.”

“The way his face stayed lopsided where I hit it—”

“Rann’s face must have some peculiar quality we never suspected before, that’s all.”

“O.K.,” said the other voice, with less whine in it, “Let’s find out, right now!”

Steps neared Benson. He still lay with closed eyes.

A hand touched his head. Then a slight release of pressure told that the wig had been jerked from his thick, white hair.

“So now what?” said the man, excitedly.

“Good heavens,” came Singer’s amazed, appalled tone. “It isn’t Rann! It must be that man Benson—” His voice cracked with frustration and fury. “And I thought we had Rann and that my troubles were over. Kill that man! Kill him at once!”

Four men drew guns and shot. Four shots drilled into grease-soaked floor-planking—and nothing else!

The Avenger could move, when necessary, so fast that it made the moves of others seem like the dance of a sloth. He moved that way now.

Before the guns spoke, he had writhed a yard to one side. With their futile roar, he doubled legs and arms under him and sprang still farther aside on all fours, like a gray lynx. That move left him on his feet—to Singer’s swift discomfiture.

For the final move found Singer clamped in the vise of The Avenger’s steel-strong hands and held between the cursing men and Benson.

“You fools!” shrieked Singer. “You clumsy fools—”

Benson looked at the men through his brown-pupiled eye lenses, over Singer’s quivering shoulder. Some of the men from the Utah flat were there; some from the warehouse. A definite gang, working for Singer on tasks normally far outside a businessman’s sphere.

“Tell them to leave,” he said to Singer.

“Rush him, you fools!” screamed Singer. “He hasn’t a gun. Rush him!”

Benson’s knee was abruptly in the small of Singer’s back. Benson’s slim, steel-strong hands brought the financier’s shoulders back a little.

“Do you want a broken back?” he asked quietly.

Singer was silent, face suddenly turning the color of ashes.

“Tell them to leave,” The Avenger repeated. “Go clear away. And remember you can see a long way across this filled-in marshland; so it will be easy to see if they
do
drive clear away.”

“You heard him,” said Singer, after a long time.

“But look, boss—” said one of the men.

“Go!”
howled Singer. “If I die, the whole thing’s off!”

Reluctantly, fingering their guns, the men filed out the front entrance of the abandoned brick shell. They piled into two of the three cars and drove off. The Avenger watched them cross the flatland, Singer still helpless as a child in his slim but powerful hands.

It took a long time, but finally the cars, tiny because of distance, passed behind a clump of factory buildings.

Benson released Singer.

“There are some things I want to know from you—” he began.

He turned and stopped talking as well as moving.

A silent, deadly group had crept up behind them while they stood at the front entrance. There were seven or eight, with guns in their hands.

They were as like the thugs who had just left as eight peas are like eight other peas. But they were different individually. This was a gang—but it was not Singer’s gang!

“Kinda dumb, ain’t you?” sneered one, to Singer. “You think a bunch of monkeys like them that just left is enough protection so you don’t have to have anybody watch the back door. You let us walk up to this joint and stay at the back, just waitin’ for a chance like this.”

“Aw, cut it,” growled another. “Give it to ’em and let’s get on our way.”

The guns were held a little more tightly in eight murderous hands. With no more talking, with just this un-revealing, brief prelude, Benson and Singer were going to die—

There was a crash from the rear as if the whole back wall of the factory had collapsed. As the men found out when they whirled in alarm, in a sense it had.

A yawning hole had been battered in the rear wall. Plugging this hole was the thing that had made it—the battered nose of a truck.

Bricks were sliding down the mashed hood of the truck. In an instant something else was, too. A man who looked to be ten feet tall and six feet broad.

The gunmen by the front entrance yelled and fixed. But by the time their bullets were spanging into the hood of the battering-ram vehicle, the giant was behind a rusted machine, ten feet to the left.

The factory had originally been used for sash and door work. The machine behind which the big man was now crouched was a light milling machine. But it was “light” only in trade terms. The thing, with its solid metal slab of milling platform, probably weighed nearly half a ton.

The machine began to rock, as the men stared at it. Anyway, it seemed to rock, though of course that wasn’t possible. It was bolted down to the floor, wasn’t it? So how could it rock?

One of the gang kept his head a little.

“You damn apes!” he yelled. “Let that guy alone till you do what you came for. Take Singer and the guy with the white hair!”

The thought, while eminently practical, came a bit late. Singer and the guy with the white hair were behind another machine. And the gun in Singer’s hand spoke when two of the thugs started toward the shelter.

Again a crash interrupted a mass attack on the two. The crash was caused by the toppling on its side of the milling machine. It
had
been rocking on its bedplate, just as it had appeared to be.

The floor was of grease-soaked, old wood. But even at that, the strength that could rip out the heavy bolts and tip over the machine was phenomenal. More of it was displayed in several seconds.

The machine had barely hit on its side, when it began inching toward the gunmen.

The giant behind it was pushing its bulk over the floor, a half-foot at a time, using the ponderous metal bed of the thing as a shield.

Bullets rained on the bed of the milling machine. They were as ridiculous, against the two inches of steel, as peas against plate glass. The ponderous shield came on, like the great rawhide and timber shields pushed before an army squad by the elephants in Hannibal’s day.

A man raced to get around to the side of the incredibly moving mass of steel. Singer’s gun, now in the hand of The Avenger, spoke briefly. The man fell with a bullet in his leg.

It finished the gang. They were caught between a gun that prevented them from flanking the moving milling machine and a colossus who could shove half a ton of metal over a rough-plank floor. Besides, the sounds of so many shots must have been heard over the marshland in spite of the distance to the nearest buildings, and, soon police would come to investigate.

The gang broke and ran to the door.

Singer’s car was still there. They piled in. The howl of an expensive motor, raced in first gear far beyond its usual limits, sounded as the car fled over the cinder road.

Smitty came from behind the milling machine, and Singer and Benson met him.

The Avenger had the eye-lenses off his colorless, deadly eyes. Those eyes, like diamond drills, were on Singer’s face.

The financier bit his lips and reddened.

“All right,” he said. “I was going to have you killed. And you saved my life. Naturally I feel like the devil in such a situation. But the stakes were so vast that I’d do it again if we had it to do over.”

“The stakes?” repeated Benson, tone as enigmatic as his dead face.

“Yes. The process known to Rann. The product of the four Polish scientists.”

He mopped at his face, which was still clammy with the sweat of deathly fear.

“Wencilau and Shewski, Veck and Sodolow, managed to synthesize a life-saving drug from a coal-tar derivative. Marvelous stuff; brand new in principle. They came to America, and to me, for financial backing. I promised it. But the four were silly dreamers. They wanted to practically give the stuff away for the benefit of humanity. I’m not a philanthropist; I’m a businessman. I wanted a reasonable profit. The four ran out on me. They hid in distant places—and died! Then this Rann showed up. He claimed he knew the drug process, too. I offered him a tremendous sum for it; then he went to the Henderlin people to see if they’d give even more. Double-crossed me. I brought you here, thinking you were Rann, to get his secret in any way I could. So now you know everything.”