The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (14 page)

The Avenger had seen, before the broadcast was over, that the guns covering his aides were in the hands of men high up off the floor, so as not to be in the range of the television screen. He climbed higher himself, to the top of the tall silo.

He did this by unwinding from his waist a length of fine silk cord with a weight on the end. He threw it up over the top bracing beam, then climbed hand over hand up its doubled strand.

He wasn’t quite to the top when he heard the sound of car motors.

Quickly, he made a hole in the top of the silo in the direction from which the sounds came. He looked through his small telescope toward the wood lot where the cars had been parked.

Men were all around these, now. The Avenger saw the television apparatus loaded into one, and Alicia and John Hannon being shoved into the rear of another.

The inventor was being carried, indicating that he was still unconscious. The girl was fighting like a tigress. If she had ever been in with this gang, it didn’t seem as if she were particularly friendly with them now. The Avenger nodded as this apparently confirmed some thought of his own.

He started to slide down the rope again and hurry to the cars.

It looked very much as if the Voice, having set his trap for Benson and the others of his aides whom they did not already have as prisoners, was going to leave here at once, to make sure no slip-up might involve
him.
And rather than have the brains responsible for the Black Wings cult get away a second time, The Avenger was going to see what he could do to prevent it single-handed.

But before Benson had started down the rope again, something happened to change his plans.

There was a yell from the direction of the woods. Most men would have heard just that—only an indistinguishable yell. But The Avenger’s marvelous hearing caught the words.

“Hey! Nick’s lyin’ here bound and gagged! Somebody slugged him—”

With any kind of luck, no one would have found the guard in the woods whom The Avenger had put out of the way. But the luck had been bad; the man had been discovered.

There was a crossbeam halfway down the silo. Benson slid to that and opened a hole on the barn side again. He took from his coat a tiny spring gun, then took from another pouch half a dozen of Mac’s anaesthetic pills.

The Avenger had come to the top in the first place to gas those guards in the barn who covered his aides. He’d had to go high because the gas tended to sink; if it were released on the barn floor, it might not get up to the perching guards.

So Benson had planned to smash them at roof level and let the fumes sift down efficiently.

Now, by halting midway, at about the level of the beams in the barn which provided perches for the men, he planned to make it quicker and even more effective.

He shot the little pellets through the hole so swiftly that they seemed to come in a solid little stream. They smashed against a beam in the center of the barn.

The Avenger slid down the rope again till he came to the ground level. He started to retrieve his rope. But he never completed this move because, then, another shout came to his keen ears.

It seemed to be in the deep tone of the Voice itself.

“He must be here! Something must have gone wrong! Destroy that barn! The rest of you—get out of here at once.”

The Avenger also heard several thudding sounds within the barn as men with machine guns fell from beams, then a lot of yells as the others discovered that something was the matter and tried to find out what. The gas was working fine.

Benson leaped to the square of wood he had burned from the silo wall and propped back in place while he was inside. He jumped out into open air, and took half a dozen swift steps to get around the barn and to the woods where the motors were racing.

Then he stopped abruptly.

“Destroy that barn!”
the Voice had said.

Of course! There was a deadly trap conceived about that barn. Otherwise, the Voice would not have striven so hard to get him and all the rest of Justice, Inc. into it. This trap, warned by his bound guard, the Voice intended to spring at once, prematurely.

And Smitty and Nellie and Cole were in the barn, probably as unconscious from the gas fumes as the dozen gangsters who had been guarding them.

Destroy the barn!

But how? What was the trap?

Four shots roared out in the rapid drumfire of a machine gun. The Avenger was knocked a dozen feet back as four slugs hit him. They didn’t penetrate, but they had the kicking power of mule hoofs as they were stopped by the bulletproof celluglass undergarment—and the body behind it.

The Avenger fell to one knee, twisted sideways as another stream of slugs felt for him, then began running in great zigzag leaps toward the source of the fire.

He saw what the trap consisted of, before he’d gone a dozen yards.

On the side of the barn opposite the wood lot, another man had been posted. An old corn crib leaned here. Through the open-slatted side, Benson could see the man and catch glints of his gun barrel. Also, he got a glimpse of something else that added speed even to his terrific pace.

He got a glimpse of the precise nature of the trap.

This man was something more than a guard. Beside him, on the floor of the crib, was a thing only too familiar to Benson. It looked like a one-gallon can set on end—a can such as oil is shipped in. Out of the upper end of this, however, was a rod and a handle. It looked like the handle of a bicycle pump.

It was the detonator of a dynamite charge somewhere around. Somewhere? Easy to guess where. The charge, probably a terriffic one, was under the barn, like a war-time land mine. If the man pressed that plunger down, the barn and everything in it would go up in dust!

The machine gun was spitting flame and lead like a dragon! Two more slugs hit The Avenger, as he zigzagged toward the gunner, who was frantically trying to center his aim on the shifting, lightninglike figure bounding toward him.

The slugs hit with terrific impact, this close, but Dick Benson at the moment had even more than his normal terrible strength. He was fighting for the lives of his aides. The bullets spun him, but did not stop him.

The slats on the side of the corn crib didn’t stop him, either. He saw as he ran that they were fairly light, so he hit the side of the corn crib at full speed, spraying gas pellets inside as he did so.

The man had stopped firing and reached for the deadly detonator. His hand was on the handle when the gas rose up around him.

He tried to cry out, coughed instead, and sagged to one side. But the open air was filtering into the crib and was dissipating the effect of the gas.

The man got resolutely up on one elbow and forced his sluggish arm up. His fingers again found the handle from which they had slipped. He pressed down a little!

The Avenger’s steel fingers were tearing at the cracked slats of the corn crib. Another thing he had noted while running was that the door was solid and that a beam had been propped against it from the inside so that it couldn’t be opened. The only way in was the one Benson was racing to effect, now.

The slats fell aside. He forced his wiry body through. The man had the handle down a little, pushing as hard as he could. He was almost out, but not quite. Not enough!

No time to get to him. Even a leap would be too late. The Avenger threw the jagged end of the last slat he had ripped off.

It caught the wrist behind the resolutely straining hand so hard that the slat broke. Probably the wrist broke, too. Anyhow, the man gave a thin scream of agony, and dropped to the floor. There, the gas, a little heavier than above, finally got to him in spite of the air coming into the crib through the slats.

Very carefully, The Avenger cut the wires leading from the detonator in the general direction of the barn. Then he went to the house and phoned the state police.

The police gathered up the gunmen in the barn, and The Avenger gathered up Nellie and Cole and Smitty, unconscious, too. But nobody gathered up the Voice and Suva, Alicia and Hannon, Miller and Marcy. Dick Benson assumed that Marcy had been here also, a prisoner. They’d gotten away, warned by the unlucky discovery of the bound guard and led by the swift cleverness of the Voice. Whoever he might be.

The papers had made it front-page news, though not too big, when a second man had died of the strange black death. Now, with time enough elapsed for the details on the death of still another victim of the black doom to be in all the newsrooms, the papers really went to town.

The headlines were hysterically big. The war news was crowded clear off the page. There was mention of Austin Gailord’s terrible death and of Maller’s. And then the screaming account of the similar death of Frank Stanton, engineer at Stockbridge Chemical Corp.

One paper read:

Eminent scientist says new Black Plague upon us. Every war breeds at least one world-wide epidemic, he says. This, a new form of an ancient disease, is the spawn of the present war.

There were speculations as to whether the epidemic would grow to such terrible dimensions as to stop the war altogether. There were panic-stricken groups of people moving from city to country, and from country into the city, anywhere, just to be somewhere else, as if one can outrun a germ.

“One thing is clear, anyway,” Cole Wilson said. “And that is that there’ll be hell to pay all over the country if we don’t stop this Black Wings devil.”

“There’s another angle,” said Smitty gloomily. “With mass panic born, the Voice can assume mass control. I mean, instead of making one or two individuals do what he commands, in fear of death, he could make a lot of people obey, under the same mass fear. Why, he might get to be dictator of the United States, or something, given time.”

“So we can’t give the mon the time,” nodded MacMurdie.

They were all in the Bleek Street headquarters. Every member of The Avenger’s band. Before them were spread the still-moist editions of the latest papers.

“We’ll have to catch up with the skurlie before he can do any more damage,” added MacMurdie, bleak blue eyes like pin points of flame in his bony eyesockets.

To the Scot, it was as simple as that. But Nellie shook her blonde head doubtfully.

“For forty-eight hours, we’ve tried every known trick to locate the Voice. And we haven’t succeeded. He hasn’t broadcast any more. At least, we haven’t picked up any more stuff on the wave length he first used. Smitty’s had no chance to use his directional finder. So how are we going to catch up with him?”

“Maybe one of that gang the chief trapped in the barn will talk,” said the giant hopefully.

But they all knew better than that. In the first place, it was almost a certainty that all of the cheap thugs hired for the coarser dirty work would not know the Voice by sight and would not know where he would be liable to hide out. In the second place, if any of them did know, it was a cinch he’d never talk with the horrible black death hanging over his head.

No, the captured men were out as a source of information.

They all looked at The Avenger, sitting at his big desk with sphinxlike lack of expression on his face. Benson was making a long-distance call, and had been waiting several minutes for it to be completed.

“Hello,” he said evenly into the phone, as the connection was made. “Stockbridge? . . . This is Richard Benson. I called about the matter on which I saw you several days ago. You remember. I want to ask you a question about that, now. The question is—have you recently written any large checks in connection with that affair? . . . You have? . . . Thank you very much . . . Yes, the matter will be kept with the utmost secrecy, of course.”

He hung up, and the glacial, colorless eyes had a chromium brilliance. But he said nothing in explanation of his phone call. Instead, he looked at the little black box on his desk and pressed the button opening the street door.

“A messenger boy is coming up with a bundle,” he said, voice as calm as deep water. “I think the bundle contains flowers.”

Flowers! A box of flowers for Justice, Inc.!