Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (29 page)

“I am to be executed,” Fiana said unhappily.

“You should be used to it by now,” grumbled Long Tom, becoming even more sour than
usual. But the bleak circumstances justified his lack of sentimentality.

“You will doubtless face the same fate,” Fiana pointed out.

“There isn’t a bullet in Ultra-Stygia with my name on it,” Long Tom said confidently.
He made an elaborate show of expectorating into the snow.

But inwardly, the electrical genius had his doubts. None of them were carrying their
supermachine pistols. They had neglected to collect them upon exiting the plane, because
they knew they would be useless without the faculty of sight. And their pockets were
likewise bereft of useful devices.

They were marched some distance to a military truck. This was painted, of all colors,
black. Somehow it seemed to fit the surroundings, if not the circumstances.

In the back of the truck lay a man they knew.

Long Tom was the first to recognize him.

“I’ll be damned! Baron Karl himself.”

The baron sprawled in the flatbed of the truck. He was spread-eagled, as if his ankles
and wrists were tied to separate cords and these stretched in four directions, anchored
to the wooden sides of the open truck. But they were not.

The baron groaned. His face was ghastly, a combination of lunar-painted pallor and
exquisite agony. His trademark monocle was missing.

Upon closer inspection, Long Tom noticed that his physical condition suggested that
his arms and legs had been pulled from their sockets and he had therefore lost all
power over them.

“Just desserts,” pronounced Long Tom.

“The good baron came to us, offering to come over to our side,” explained the general.
“But we would have none of this traitor to his own nation. We seized him instead.
He resisted our interrogation techniques.” Consadinos smiled thinly. “For a time.
But when the pain grew too great, he told us where to locate the machine which produces
darkness.”

“Figures,” said Long Tom. “The chiseler probably never turned the darkness maker over
to his leader.”

“Precisely,” confirmed General Consadinos.

They were forced at rifle point to climb into the truck bed. Ham was tossed in without
ceremony. Monk was dumped in last, like a sack of russet potatoes. Released from the
multiple grips, he bounded to his feet, bearing ferocious teeth, fists bunching up.

The clank of rifle bolts being thrown by soldiers of Egallah caused the hairy chemist
to rethink his tactics. Grimacing like a frustrated gorilla, he sullenly sat down
instead.

The truck’s engine gave a grunt and started off, fat tires struggling through squeaking
snow.

“Where are we goin’?” Monk wondered.

“Is it not obvious?” said Fiana gloomily. “To be shot as spies.”

Monk eyed the woman a long time. “I think Long Tom had the right idea about you,”
he decided.

Fiana shrugged nonchalantly. “I think this time I will accept the offer of a last
cigarette. This night has frayed my nerves.”

And that was all the cold-blooded daughter of Egallah would say.

No one noticed a pair of footprints which followed the slushy ruts made by the military
truck’s winter tires. No apparent body appeared to be making these tracks. But floating
almost six feet above these tramping, invisible feet were a pair of eyes the dappled
hues of a spring forest….

DOC SAVAGE SOON caught up with the advance guard of bat-shaped autogyros. For that
is what they were. In actuality, they were an advanced type—more along the lines of
a gyroplane. The ribbed bat-wings were stiff. They did not flap. That illusion had
been created by the rotating windmill-style vanes that whirled above the pilot’s head,
which provided aerodynamic lift, when viewed from certain perspectives by night. Motive
power was supplied by a pusher-type propeller cleverly mounted in the bat’s tail section,
out of plain view.

The noses of the aircraft were cunningly crafted to suggest a bat’s unlovely countenance.
Scarlet-lensed headlights gave the effect of the supernatural eyes. Doc found a lever
in the cockpit which, when he threw it, caused the long, rat-shaped lower jaw to drop.
This prompted a mechanism that produced convincingly loud bat-like squealing. Doc
shut this off.

Experimenting with another lever, the bronze man discovered a glass porthole on the
floor at his feet. This permitted the pilot to see the claw-like landing gear which
hung beneath the furry fuselage of the craft. Operation of the lever caused the mechanical
talons to open and close. By this means, he had been snatched up by the agile gyro.
No doubt other victims had been carried off in the identical manner, only to plunge
to their deaths from a punishing height when the mechanism released.

Nearby, a petcock connected to an arrangement of tubing. Doc left this strictly alone.
There was also a choke, pulling of which appeared to release the octopus-ink spray
designed to discourage pursuit by faster aircraft.

Other controls allowed the gyroplane to rise almost straight up in the air. This feat
was many years in advance of the present generation of autogyros. Doc himself had
been experimenting along those lines, so the operation of the weird aircraft was more
understandable to him than it would have been to an ordinary pilot.

It was obvious to the bronze man that use of these bat-ships was calculated to invoke
terror in the citizens and armies of Tazan by playing upon local legends of vampirism
and the Undead who walk by night, seeking the blood of the living. At night, seen
from below, the illusion of monstrous vampire bats was nearly perfect.

Doc fell in behind the trailing bat-planes.

They were headed toward the Tazan border, looking like vicious winged rats. A barrage
of them. A bat barrage.

Below, snow was accumulating on the rugged terrain of Ultra-Stygia, transforming it
into a bleak, leprous landscape. The coating of night frost did not improve the scenery;
instead, it painted everything ghostly and unreal in the moonlight.

The combination of endless snow and spectral lunar light made spotting movement on
the ground easier than it had been, even an hour previous.

Golden eyes roving, Doc Savage noticed footprints appearing in the wintery turf. Many
of them. What was remarkable about these tracks is that no visible agency was apparently
creating them!

When the pilots of the other planes began noticing these lines of centipede imprints,
they went into action.

Swooping low, waves of bat-planes began corkscrewing into the concentration of enemy
forces. Bat jaws dropped and, feeding from steel tanks slung under each wing, a vapor
began spewing, funneling back by the pusher props’ slipstream. These were laid down
in foggy trails over the magical footprints.

Doc Savage drew a small chemical gas mask from his vest, donned it hastily. The bronze
man watched tensely as the first waves fell upon the invisible beings—spraying them
just as a crop-dusting pilot would do.

When the ghastly gray vapor settled, the footprints grew frenzied and confused.

Unseen forms collapsed and threshed, as evidenced by great disturbances in the snow.
This activity persisted for only a minute or so. Then the stricken forms ceased all
animation.

Poison gas!

A grimness settled over Doc Savage’s cast-in-metal features. There was no telling
if the gas was lethal, or merely designed to incapacitate. Not from this height.

The flight of bat-gyros made two passes, then peeled off to the southwest, possibly
in search of other victims.

Doc Savage declined to follow them. He brought his weird craft down into the welter
of disturbed snow. The talon-shaped landing gear had good springs; they bounced only
once before settling. There were no wheels, none being needed.

Cutting the overhead windmill, the bronze man vaulted from the cockpit and extracted
a small glass bottle from his equipment vest. He waved it about, capturing fumes,
capped it again. If time permitted, he would analyze the stuff later.

Moving among the fallen, Doc Savage used his bare feet to feel around for signs of
life. He found none. The invisible creatures had all succumbed to the deadly vapor
that was redolent of brimstone and sulphur.

Returning to his craft, Doc Savage engaged the windmill arrangement of vanes, which
was powered by the same ingenious engine that drove the rear-mounted propeller. Grasping
the throttle, he sent the bizarre craft leaping into the air.

Aloft, Doc employed the dash transceiver to communicate with his amphibian. The bronze
man switched to the frequency they all used for communicating by radio.

Several minutes of this produced no results, prompting Doc to push the ungainly gyroplane
as fast as he dared.

IT took the better part of an hour to reach the designated landing spot. The bat-ship
proved nimble, but not terribly fleet.

A survey from the air told Doc a difficult landing had ensued. He saw no sign of footprints
around the craft. A flicker of alarm touched his otherwise metallic features.

Settling the bat-gyro nearby, he jumped free and pelted toward the deserted craft.

Reaching the bronze flying boat, Doc noticed for the first time the line of footprints
leading away from the amphibian.

These had not been visible from the air due to the rapidly accumulating snow. But
the faint impressions of tracks leading away told the tale.

Doc was an expert at reading sign. He recognized the furry nature of some footprints,
as well as others. Madly disturbed snow suggested a fight. Capture. Men made prisoners.
Ham’s sword cane stuck up from a drift, the tip coated with frozen gore.

In a very short time, Doc had mentally reconstructed the chain of events. Monk and
Ham had been carried off, possibly wounded. Long Tom and Fiana Drost were on foot,
prisoners for certain.

The trail led away to the south, in the direction of Tazan.

Men on foot cannot travel far, so Doc decided to follow in that fashion.

But first he entered the aircraft. Halted. The metallic scent of blood came to his
sensitive nostrils.

Habeas Corpus crawled out from under a seat. Doc knelt, gave him a brisk rubbing,
and found a green apple, which the shoat accepted happily. The bronze giant noticed
that the hog’s hackles were erected, as if in fear.

Golden eyes roved the cabin interior. In the direction of the cockpit, Doc Savage
spied a black object resembling an 8-ball hovering several inches above the floor.
He went to it.

Exploring hands told him that the corpse of one of the invisible Cyclops men blocked
the aisle. It was no longer warm.

Hefting the hairy thing, Doc carried it from the plane, then returned to the cabin,
where he began replenishing his many-pocketed vest, changing some of the contents,
discarding others. It was evident that the bronze man had a plan of action in mind.
He was going into battle well prepared for what he expected to encounter.

Discovering the bottled sample of poisonous air he had acquired after the aerial attack
by bat-gyroplanes, Doc subjected it to a chemical test, swiftly determining that the
noxious mixture consisted mainly of carbon monoxide exhaust produced by the weird
aircrafts’ engines, which was made more concentrated and therefore doubly lethal by
injection of sulphurous chemicals. No doubt these latter were contained in the pressurized
cockpit tank whose petcock the bronze man prudently declined to open.

Doc filled a packsack with supermachine pistols for his men, along with extra drums
of ammunition. He had brought along Ham Brooks’ abandoned sword cane from the snow,
but this he placed on a seat for retrieval later.

One last precaution was to don a suit of metallic alloy mesh. This covered his entire
body, like a suit of flexible armor. Once he donned matching gauntlets and a transparent
globe of a helmet made of a glassy material similar to that which composed his Fortress
of Solitude, Doc Savage was wholly impervious to bullets, not to mention protected
from poison gases. The suit was lined with rubber and carried its own oxygen supply
in the form of tablets which, when taken into the mouth, introduced oxygen into the
blood without the need for respiration.

Doc shrugged into his equipment vest last. Normally, he wore it under his clothing.
But owing to the enveloping armor, that would not be practical. There was also a belt
whose pockets were filled with extra gadgets and other useful devices.

Exiting the amphibian, Doc pushed south.

As the bronze man mushed through the snow, he saw, on the horizon where the wildly
fierce black mountains of the Marea Negra region loomed like sharp fangs, flights
of bats.

They might have been ordinary night-hunting bats, but for their size, which even at
this distance impressed one with their uncanny precision flying.

They swooped and arose again into the air, in a macabre midnight dance of death.

The eerie trilling sound of Doc Savage lifted into the night. Since he was alone,
Doc did not attempt to repress it, but rather allowed it to have free rein.

It was an unearthly sound, fully in keeping with the desolate surroundings. It might
have been the wind wailing through the dire desolation of Ultra-Stygia, making skeletal
music in the dead tree branches.

THE TRUCK CARRYING Baron Karl, Doc Savage’s men and Fiana Drost lumbered through the
night, escorted by other machines, including a modern military tank, which joined
them en route.

Spidery snow fell steadily, coating everything. There seemed no end to it.

The wet stuff pelted Ham Brooks’ exposed face, waking him. He blinked, saw white flakes
swirling over his head, then asked a natural question.

“Where are we?”

“Prisoners,” said Long Tom Roberts in a disgusted tone.

“It’s worse than that,” offered Monk.