The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (13 page)

“Smitty,” she said urgently into the little transmitter. “Smitty—”

“Hi, kid,” was the instant answer.

Nellie sighed with relief. “Where are you?”

“On Route 23, New Jersey, following Miller,” said the giant.

The tiny blonde caught the picture at once. She giggled at the thought of all those cars sneaking after each other up this little secondary road.

“I guess you’re only about five minutes from where I am. Watch the left side of the road. I’ll flag you.”

She crept to the roadside, hiding behind a tree. She saw a strange car sneak past, then the car she’d seen Wilson drive from Bleek Street, another strange car, then Smitty’s bus.

She stepped out and waved.

The car slowed promptly for her, dimmed lights glinting on her small, dainty figure and bright blonde hair.

“Smitty—” she began.

Then she tried to jump back from the open window. The man at the wheel of this Justice, Inc. car was not Smitty!

She didn’t make it quick enough. Something flashed up, down, and a shower of lights burst in her skull! Whoever was taking Smitty’s place in The Avenger’s car was certainly no gallant knight. He had slugged Nellie with a gun barrel as hard as he’d have hit a man.

She knew nothing after that.

Rumblings like the frantic agony of a mother elephant were the first sounds to register on Nellie’s consciousness. She opened her eyes.

Smitty was bending over her. Her head was on his vast knee. His face was twisted with a fear that no personal danger had ever brought there. But when Nellie’s eyes opened, his expression instantly changed. The giant would have let himself be cut in pieces for the tiny blonde; but he wouldn’t have admitted it to her for anything on earth.

Smitty now looked exasperated.

“Here you are,” he said disgustedly. “Getting into a jam again. Can’t you play it safe once in a while?”

“I was trying to play it safe,” said Nellie indignantly. Her head ached as if it were about to split, but she couldn’t let the big fellow’s taunt pass unanswered. “I called you didn’t I? I didn’t try to go on after Alicia Hannon alone or on foot, did I?”

It was her turn to jeer.

“Looks to me as if
you’d
gotten into a jam. Otherwise, how could somebody else have been driving the car you started out with?”

“Well—” said Smitty uncertainly.

“Well what? Let’s hear you explain yourself out of that one.”

“It could have happened to anybody,” said Smitty defensively.

“What?” Nellie demanded.

“Well, right after you contacted me, I saw a tree down across the road. Just fell. I slammed on the brakes, and a hundred guys jumped from the underbrush along the road—”

“How many?”

“Fifty guys jumped from—”

“Fifty?”

“Well, there were at least three on each running board, all of a sudden. They all had guns and they were all aimed at my head. Somebody slipped a hypodermic needle into my shoulder, and here I am.”

“It didn’t occur to you that there wasn’t enough wind to blow even rotten trees down?” Nellie said sardonically. “Or that it was pretty strange a tree should go down just in time to catch you when other cars had passed a few seconds before?”

“Suppose it had occurred to me? What was I supposed to do—ram into the tree and wreck the car? Or drive off to left or right into an eight-foot ditch?”

“You could have rolled up the windows and locked the car doors and sat there while an army tried to get at you,” Nellie reminded him. She was back on home ground now, one jump ahead of her beloved behemoth, comfortably watching his neck redden.

“Well, I didn’t,” growled Smitty. “So here we are.”

“You and I?”

“And Cole,” said Smitty.

Nellie whistled. “They got all three of us, then! But where is ‘here’?”

“Somebody’s barn,” Smitty said morosely.

“You mean to say you haven’t busted out of an ordinary barn long before now?”

“I just snapped out of it,” said Smitty. “The drug kept me asleep till just before you came to. Cole’s still under the influence. As for breaking out—look around.”

Nellie looked around.

At first, she saw nothing—just the loading floor and empty loft of an ordinary, unused barn. Then her eyes raised, and she gasped.

Beams crisscrossed the structure, both as bracing and as division points, at about the second-story level. Up here, midway between floor and roof, there seemed to be eight or ten dark birds. Very large birds, and very evil birds.

They were men, perched up there watching the prisoners. Each man had a submachine gun in the hollow of his arm or across his knees. Some were grinning bleakly at them; some were watching with a sour, bored look on their plug-ugly faces.

But all were watching warily. You couldn’t have taken three steps in any direction without being riddled.

“Funny,” said Nellie.

“What’s funny about those vultures?” Smitty snapped.

“Funny they haven’t killed us already. Why are they just holding us here? And why are they up there instead of being more comfortable down on the floor? Surely they aren’t afraid we’ll try to jump a mob as big as that, armed as they are?”

Smitty shrugged. And then Cole sighed, and his eyelids moved.

They worked on him for a few minutes.

“Oh, oh! My head!” groaned Cole. He, like Nellie, had been slugged as well as drugged, it seemed.

Nellie suddenly realized that there was no illumination of any sort in here; still, she could see around. Yet, the blackness of pre-dawn had been on the land when she was taken.

Smitty! For Heaven’s sake—what time is it?”

“Half past two in the afternoon,” said the giant. “I don’t know if it’s afternoon of the next day, or two days from when we were conked. That drug they slipped into all of us seems to be powerful stuff.”

Then they found out why they were still alive and why their guards so carefully kept to the beams, up beyond the vision of anyone normally at floor level.

Two men came into the barn; they were carrying something like a wardrobe trunk, only shinier. One side of it was a kind of screen.

“Their television transmitter!” exclaimed Smitty.

Electric cable trailed back from it to the house.

The barn, it seemed, was not wired for electricity. The two men set the cabinet up near the three members of Justice, Inc. The two men were Suva, gang leader and public enemy, and a lithe figure in black with a black hood over its head.

“The Voice!” exclaimed Nellie.

“Shut up!” came the booming tone of the head of the Black Wings cult.

Suva walked warily toward Smitty and Cole and Nellie, then skirted equally warily around them. He did an odd thing, when he got behind the three.

There was a bale of hay back there, and against it Suva propped a license plate.

It was an old plate, 1940, New Jersey, a little battered and more than a little bent. Suva put it crookedly and upside down against the bale. It looked natural enough. Farmers, somehow, don’t seem to throw old license plates away. They throw them in the barn or harness room or garage.

Suva got from between the cabinet and The Avenger’s aides. The hooded figure in black went near them.

“All right,” boomed the Voice.

The television screen glowed.

“Smitty!” gasped Nellie suddenly. “They’re using us as decoys. That’s why they didn’t kill us. They know The Avenger got their recent broadcasts, and they’re setting the wave length the same way so he can see us here! They want to get the chief here and kill him. And if he sees us in trouble, he’ll come with Josh and Mac and even Rosabel. They’ll have the whole bunch of us—”

“Shut up!” boomed the Voice again.

But Nellie didn’t need to say any more for Cole and the giant to get it all.

The battered license plate—Benson would use it as a clue to their location. He’d trace the owner of that last year’s plate and speed to this farm. And into a trap!

“Chief!” shrilled Nellie suddenly, at the screen. “If you’re watching this—don’t come here! Don’t—”

The gun of every man in the barn swung toward her. Guns that weren’t included in the televised picture.

Nellie shut up.

The hooded figure with the black wings outlined in white on its black chest, stepped nearer the three.

“You have worked against the band of the Black Wings,” the Voice boomed resonantly. “You shall pay the penalty, as soon as it has been decided what that penalty shall be—”

He went on with the threats. They were, it appeared, on the air.

And at a distance, The Avenger was supposed to be watching, and to be lured into coming here with the rest, so that all of Justice, Inc. could be annihilated at one stroke.

However, it just happened that Dick Benson wasn’t at a distance.

It had been well timed. The Voice had given Benson just about enough time to get from Wilmington back to Bleek Street before the decoying broadcast. Apparently, he had forgotten about Stanton’s betraying phone call, or had thought it could not be traced from so large a plant as Stockbridge Chemical Corp.

The Voice, or one of his hired thugs, had made another slip, too.

From the air, The Avenger suddenly saw two of his fleet of cars parked in a glade several hundred yards from a farmhouse and barn. That was all right. The Voice wanted him to find this place, anyhow. But his two cars were parked next to three strange cars. One of them was Alicia Hannon’s!

Smitty and Cole had been in those cars last night, and certainly they would never have parked them right beside the cars they’d been following.

The Avenger saw something else from the air. That was, that for miles around there was no place for him to set the plane down. Open fields were in abundance, but nothing long enough and flat enough to take his speed special that landed at over a hundred miles an hour.

He glided over the place high, with his motor cut off, and got the lay of the land. There was a big house, an even bigger barn, several other outbuildings on this farm. There was a lofty silo with a lightning rod that could be used very nicely as an aerial, with a few deft changes to the rod.

Then The Avenger went on to hunt a field capable of taking his winged bullet. He had to go for nearly twenty miles.

A kindly farmer took him back in a rattling truck.

“Yes sir,” the farmer said as they clanked past. “That’s Austin Gailord’s place. Gentleman farmer. Bet he never got a nickel profit out of the farm. Terrible how he died, ain’t it? The radio was full of it. And the other guy dyin’ the same way. You don’t suppose we’re in for some terrible kind of plague, do you?”

The Avenger left the truck a mile farther on and returned across fields to the farm.

A wood lot split across half the farm like a wedge, from the property line to within a hundred yards of the back of the house. The Avenger stole through this. An Indian couldn’t have heard him approach; certainly the New York gangster on guard at the inner edge of the woods—looking foreign and helpless and unhappy off the city pavements—had no chance.

The Avenger saw the man’s back fifty yards away, came soundlessly up on him, got him by the throat.

Forty seconds of pressure at the great neck nerve induced unconsciousness. Benson tied the man and gagged him and went on.

The cars were parked in the wood lot near the inner edge. There were four men lounging near them. The Avenger stole to the left and soundlessly ascended a tall tree. From the branches there he looked at the farmhouse.

He saw activity in one of the windows and took out a small but incredibly fine telescope. What he saw through the glass brought a glint to his pale, icy eyes.

He could see a bed, with someone on it, and, near the bed, two more people. One was a girl and the other a man.

The person on the bed was a man, too. And it was a glimpse of his face that had brought the glint to Benson’s eyes. For the first time in this deadly, foggy affair of the black death, one of Justice, Inc. was looking at the famed inventor, John Jay Hannon.

A glimpse exonerated him from all participation in the crime. His face was bruised, and he was so still that it seemed he must be unconscious. Drugged, perhaps.

The girl bending over him was his daughter, Alicia. Her face was a mask of suffering and fear for his safety. Almost equally concerned-looking was the man with her, Daniel Miller.

There was a long row of henhouses behind the farmhouse. The Avenger went from tree branch to tree branch till he got to the last tree, which was nearest the low outbuildings. A long swing and a lithe leap put him behind these. He went to the other end, fairly near the barn side of the house, and looked through a crack between boards.

There, in a little while, he saw Suva and several other men carrying a big cabinet to the barn. It was a television cabinet, but The Avenger’s colorless eyes didn’t fasten on it; they stared at one of the men with Suva—a man dressed in black from head to foot, with a black hood over his head.

Beyond the barn was a lofty silo, rearing up above the barn’s roof. The lightning rod went six feet higher. The Avenger got to the silo.

With him, he carried a small device of Macmurdie’s—an acetylene blowtorch no bigger than a perfume atomizer. With this, he burned a hole in the silo’s side. The flame was so hot that it charred through the wooden staves too fast for them really to catch fire. It just burned through.

He saw that the silo was empty, stepped inside on a carpet of decayed bits of silage and burned a small hole in the barn side.

From there, he saw the eerie broadcast, supposed to have been seen by him, fifty miles away in New York.

Before the scene was over, The Avenger took from an inner pocket a slender tube much like a boy’s bean-shooter. In this, he slid a tiny pellet no larger than a dried pea and of thin glass. He aimed the tube at the feet of the black-hooded figure and blew.

Whether it hit the man’s feet could not be seen because nothing happened. Nothing at all. But The Avenger seemed satisfied with the shot.

The broadcast was finished, and the men carried the apparatus back out of the barn. Machine guns kept Smitty and Cole and Nellie from trying to rush the open door.