The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (16 page)

The two plowed toward him. It was a reckless act, but there was the crazy light of fanatics in their eyes. As they came, they shot again and again for the spot where the grass had waved!

The Avenger was no longer in that spot. He was two yards to the left. A third time Mike whispered! One of the two went down. Three gone, leaving one.

There was one more bullet in Mike; the streamlined cylinder held four slugs. But Benson did not use it. He wanted this man conscious.

The remaining man suddenly lost his fanatic bravery. He turned and started to run.

Run, however, was not the word to use in that clogging marshland. He floundered more slowly than an average walk. And after him, like a tiger slipping lightly over a surface that mires an elephant, came The Avenger.

But he did not try to catch the man. Not yet.

The shore road lay a mile across the marsh in the direction the man had chosen. Why carry a heavy body when it can get to a destination under its own power?

The man ran, blindly, senselessly, till the road was almost reached. Then Ike, the keen throwing knife, flashed from Benson’s hand in a lazy arc. It did not hit the man, it went over his head and came point down in the marsh ahead of him, like a shot across a steamer’s bow.

The man stopped, panting, exhausted. Dick got to him and laid a hand on his arm, with the thumb seeking a nerve center near the armpit. The man was trembling with promise of unendurable pain if he disobeyed orders.

He went to the road with The Avenger, under the urging of that grip. Benson flagged a car, taking his prisoner with him.

One prisoner, the sole result of that perilous and beautifully faked plane crash!

Smitty felt like the girl at the dance who has gone in the expectation of being the belle of the ball and winds up as the night’s wallflower.

Instead of being in the thick of this still-unexplainable mess, he was lying around in bed like a frail baby with the colic.

Smitty had never been sick before, and he was a bit ashamed of it, now. Also he was damned tired of being in bed, even if he did feel like falling over on his face when he tried to stand up.

At the moment he was in the second-floor room with Mac, who lay weakly in another bed across from him, rubbing in the giant’s frailties.

Rosabel was not with them. Their pale-eyed chief had just come in with a prisoner, one of the gang they were fighting; and she had gone up to the top-floor headquarters room, filled with natural curiosity, to see if anything was going to be pried out of the man.

So Smitty judged it was a good time for an invalid’s rebellion.

He sat up in bed, feeling his head go round and realizing that he was moving with that weird slowness. He swung his columnar legs over the side of the bed.

“Whoosh, mon!” said Mac, words slow and labored. “What d’ye think ye’re doin’?”

“I’m getting up,” said Smitty painfully. “If anyone around here thinks I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this bed, he’s crazy.”

“What are ye gettin’ up for?”

Smitty was getting his clothes, with slow movements, and putting them on. Putting them on with difficulty. He admitted to himself, as he staggered around like a sick elephant, that he was pretty ill at that. But never would he have admitted it to anyone else.

“I’m going to have another talk with that bum, Old Mitch,” he said. “He has to be made to realize what harm he’s doing in shielding that good-for-nothing son of his from the police. I’ll bet the old guy knows right where to lay hands on him.”

“Ye can’t have a talk with anybody,” protested Mac. “Mon, ye don’t realize how sick—”

“I’m not sick at all,” lied Smitty. “I feel swell.”

“Awww, now Smitty—”

“Are you going to keep your mouth shut?” demanded the reeling giant.

“I’ll catch hell when the chief comes down and sees ye gone—and me not raisin’ an outcry to stop ye.”

“You could have been asleep when I went out, couldn’t you?” said Smitty. “Matter of fact, you ought to be asleep right now. You are, aren’t you? You don’t know a thing I’m doing, do you?”

Mac sighed. “I guess not,” he muttered. “But—”

“Sweet dreams,” said Smitty, going slowly to the door. It was hard to drag one leg after the other and make them support him.

He shut the door on Mac and went down the stairs.

He didn’t take a car, because he knew his reactions were much too slow for driving. He would have hit everything in sight, long before his slow foot could have moved sluggishly to the brake pedal.

He took a cab, with the driver staring curiously at this huge fellow who moved so ponderously and spoke so slowly that there was a two-second pause between each word.

The cab driver stared again when the big fellow told him to stop, and they got laboriously out of the car a block from the alley.

Smitty had felt very smart and rebellious in refusing to give in to his physical weakness when there was work to be done. He had tasted in advance the satisfaction of perhaps locating Old Mitch’s son—a thing so urgently necessary—all by himself while The Avenger was busy on another angle.

Now, he felt nothing but doubts as to his physical ability to accomplish any kind of job at all.

But he went on. He was hanged if he’d just go back, having come almost to his destination.

He went on toward the entrance to the dark, squalid alley wherein lay the rear-house, and Old Mitch. But it seemed that the old tramp was not in the rear-house.

As Smitty neared the alley, a shambling, stooped figure also came toward it from the other direction. The figure carried a tattered bundle under an arm. Old Mitch had been out somewhere and was coming in at just about the time Smitty had chosen for an interview.

Smitty lurched slowly toward him. Old Mitch was going to get down the alley before he could reach him. He saw that. But he went on, and he must have looked like a very drunken man, so besotted that he didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going.

Suddenly, another figure appeared, a casual pedestrian going the same way as Old Mitch and rapidly overhauling him because Old Mitch wasn’t much for lightning movements, either.

The man started to pass Old Mitch, paused, and his hand went to his pocket. He gave the old fellow a coin—Smitty saw the glint of it—and went on his way. He looked curiously at the staggering giant; and Smitty looked down at him and saw just an average-looking guy who was considerate enough to give a pauper a coin.

Smitty got to old Mitch just at the alley mouth, because of the delay. And the old man glared up at him with all his usual surliness.

“You again! Didn’t I say I didn’t need any of your help?” he snarled.

“Me again,” said Smitty, words ludicrously slow. “You take help from people sometimes, though, don’t you? That guy back there gave you money.”

Old Mitch shrugged.

“From strangers I’ll never see again, I sometimes take help, if they offer it voluntarily. Not from busybodies like you.” He stared curiously at the big man, and his voice had a different note. “What’s the matter with you, son? Had too much to drink?”

“No,” said Smitty. “I . . . I’m a little under the weather. That’s all. But I want to talk to you.”

“What about?” demanded the old man, voice snarling again.

“About that no-good son of yours,” began the big fellow.

At once the old man’s lips closed tight.

“What about him?”

“I want to know where he is,” said Smitty. “We’ve got to find him and question him.”

“What for? He hasn’t done anything wrong. I’m sure of that. He doesn’t treat me quite as I’d like to be treated, but he’s all right at heart. He’d never do anything serious.”

“You’ve heard what he has done and can judge for yourself if it’s serious,” said Smitty. “You’d better forget your scruples as a parent and remember only the duty you owe all mankind.”

Smitty was moving down the alley toward the rear-house, as he spoke; and Old Mitch, hesitating at first, started moving with him.

“I owe mankind a duty!” he snapped bitterly. “Look at me. Look at the way mankind lets me live. To hell with mankind! You don’t really think my boy had anything to do with that factory trouble?”

Smitty told him just how thoroughly he thought so, and by that time they were at Old Mitch’s door and he was fumbling for his key.

“You’re crazy,” he snarled unhappily. “My son would never mix up in anything like that. What do you think is behind it? Some foreign power that maybe wants to keep tires and things from being made for the enemy?”

“Something like that,” said Smitty, as Old Mitch at last fished a key out and shifted his tattered bundle from under his right to under his left arm.

He stared at Smitty with eyes keener than usual.

“Say! You got something like that factory trouble, ain’t you? The same kind of sickness. Where’d you get it?”

Smitty’s lips thinned.

“Right here!” he said. “See what all that means? Whatever causes that sickness is in the air here, too. I got it here, I’m sure. A friend of mine, the Scotchman, got it here. And you yourself got it awhile ago! How? It must have been from your own son, proving that he had been here several times, with the police of America all after him.”

The old man’s hand trembled as he inserted the key in the lock and opened the door. He stepped in, and Smitty followed.

“My boy would never risk exposing me, his own father, to such a thing,” he said tremulously.

“He’d risk you with more than that,” said Smitty grimly. “He—”

The light went on, then, as the old man’s finger found the switch. And Smitty didn’t say any more.

He didn’t say any more because the light revealed that they had company. Half a dozen men were standing in the room; they had been waiting in the dark!

Smitty heard Old Mitch cry out hoarsely and saw him reach for the broken chair to try to use it as a weapon. Then four of the men were on the giant.

It was like a fight between a crippled tank and a squad armed with mobile antitank guns and grenades. The tank still had slow power, but the battle was hopeless from the start.

Smitty swung with what he thought was crushing force and swiftness. And before his slow-moving right arm had leveled out, with its fist supposed to crack a man’s jaw, that man had grinningly ducked, lunged and had come up clear behind the big fellow. He got in a full swing with a sap.

It would have downed even a well man; but even ill, the giant was more than a match for an average person. He sagged a little, saw the room go around, but was not knocked out. His hands found the man’s leg and he squeezed slowly.

The fellow moaned and beat his hands against the vast paws, out of his mind with pain. And the other three started clubbing.

Smitty’s senses relaxed. He felt his hands open and saw the floor coming sluggishly up to meet him.

The last thing he heard was the bleating of Old Mitch in the grip of one of the men. The last thing he saw was a gun barrel coming down on Old Mitch’s head, too.

Then he was out of this world and in another where blackness reigned and there was no seeing or hearing anything at all.

The Avenger’s pale eyes had hypnotic powers seldom granted a human. He didn’t say anything to his captive, up in the big top-floor room. He just stared deep into the man’s mud-brown eyes till he saw them go dull and blank.

Then he commanded the man to open his mouth. The man seemed not to have heard, only looked perplexedly at him; so Dick pried open his jaws himself.

The fellow had a tongue, even if he seemed unable to use it.

The Avenger knew more languages and obscure dialects than perhaps any other linguist alive. He started with the commoner European languages, reaching through them till he hit on Hungarian. The fellow’s eyes stirred a little.

Benson began asking the question: “Do you understand me, now?” in such freakish and outlandish variations and dialects of the Hungarian language that Josh and Rosabel stared at him, wondering if he was speaking any coherent tongue at all. And, finally, he got an answer.

“Hungarian,” Dick said, “but speaking only an obscure dialect of Transylvania and knowing no other tongue.”