The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (11 page)

Mac’s hand went toward the little lever. Then he looked thoughtfully at Nellie, who looked thoughtfully back. And both shook their heads.

There was no need for words as to what to do next. They started looking through the woods till they had found three young, straight trees, taller than the fence. Then Mac took an odd little contrivance from his vest pocket.

It looked like an atomizer. But in the glass receptacle instead of liquid, were several grayish pellets. And the bulb was not of rubber, but of metal.

Mac moistened the pellets, released some of the contents of the bulb—almost pure oxygen—and had a tiny acetylene flame capable of eating through inch steel.

It ate through the slim trees in a matter of seconds.

Mac trimmed the poles, bound them together at the top and had a slim tripod a foot or so higher than the fence. He climbed it, with Nellie steadying the base, leaped, and was in the clearing.

He went to the gate. And their precaution against lifting that lever was found to be justified.

There was a charge of explosive wired to the lever that would have blown Mac and Nellie sky-high if they had disturbed it.

Mac disconnected the deadly little bundle, and Nellie then opened the gate and came in.

The clearing held nothing suspicious. That could be seen, in the moonlight, at a glance. So the two went on to the laboratory building.

“You stand at the left of the door,” said Mac. “Ye pass your hand across in front of a certain spot, four times, and the door opens.”

“Photoelectric cell, of course,” nodded Nellie.

And again the two looked at each other.

“A cell could set off explosive, too,” said Mac.

They went to the first window, and Mac applied the tiny but terrifically hot torch to the steel casement and the latch inside. The contents of the torch ran out before the job was quite done; but a hard push broke the seared, fused metal, and they opened the window.

All the burglar alarm bells in the world seemed to be wired to that window and to sound off when the window was opened.

“Gracious, what a din!” said Nellie.

She flashed her small light around, found the light switch and clicked it. Only after she had done it did she stop to think that this, too, could have been a death move. But it wasn’t. So she hunted for the switch that controlled the bells, turned it off from a distance with a window pole, and sighed with relief when the racket subsided.

“Well,” she said, “if anybody’s lurking around they will certainly know now that somebody has come in! What’s next, Mac?”

“We’ll have a look at the door-openin’ mechanism,” said the Scot.

There was the little bundle of explosive, hooked up to the cell so that if they had opened the door they would have ended up in their graves.

Mac gingerly set the bundle down on the floor and opened the door, which could be opened from the inside on a regular latch.

“We’ll give the lab the once-over,” he started to say.

From the open door behind them came a deep Yankee drawl.

“Put your hands up, you two!”

Mac whirled to leap. But he didn’t. Half a dozen men, with deputy written all over them, stood beyond the doorway in the clearing. At their head was the man who had spoken, the sheriff, according to his badge.

Mac had been ready to depend on his bulletproof covering, but he saw at a glance that he couldn’t. The sheriff had a shotgun in his hands, and it was pointed at Mac’s head.

“Nice of you to leave the gate and door open.” the sheriff drawled. He was lanky and had a lantern-jawed face and a voice like a guitar. But Mac knew of no enemy more dangerous than a drawling but quickmoving country sheriff on a rampage.

So he kept his hands up. And so did Nellie.

They kept them raised a little all the way back to the Kinnisten jail, through the dark woods where normally they’d have tried for a break. They didn’t let them hang naturally to their sides till the cell door had banged on each of them.

The sheriff still had two deputies with him in the back room of the local jail, though Nellie and Mac were now carefully handcuffed. He was taking no chances with his two prisoners. And when he began to question them, the reason for his care, and the grimness of his lean face, became apparent.

“What did you two do with the body?” he began bluntly.

“Body?” said Nellie.

“Body!” said Mac.

“The body of Morel,” said the sheriff.

There was a surprised silence on the part of the two prisoners.

“Look,” said Mac, “there’s been some mistake. You don’t want to hold us. We—”

“I know,” said the sheriff, “you’re important people. We can’t do this to you.”

“I wouldn’t claim too much importance for myself,” said Mac. “But the mon we work for is important. Ye’ll have heard of him. Richard Benson. They call him The Avenger.”

The sheriff spat accurately into a can in the corner.

“You pick ’em good while you’re at it,” he said. “The Avenger, huh! And you’re connected with him! That’s a hot one.”

“We can prove—”

“You murdered Morel,” said the sheriff. “He has been gone for days from the lab. We were gettin’ uneasy about it; he’s the most distinguished citizen in these parts. And then we got the tip that he was murdered and that his murderers would come back tonight. The tip came from a guy who seems to be very close to Morel.”

“Tip,” snapped Mac, looking suddenly at Nellie, “from a guy close to Morel?”

But Nellie was staring at the sheriff, whose attention had suddenly become centered on her head. The sheriff’s hand whipped out, and when it came back it had the dark wig in it. Nellie was revealed in her natural, dark-gold blondness.

“Disguise, huh!” snapped the sheriff. “And you sneak into Morel’s lab like a couple of burglars, over the fence and through a window—”

“We did that because we suspected a trap had been set for us,” explained Nellie. “It had been, too. There was a charge of explosive wired to the gate mechanism and another to the building door—”

“Stop stalling,” said the sheriff. “You killed Morel. We know that. If you confess, things might go a little easier for you. Well?”

The absurd grilling—absurd to Nellie and Mac, at least—went on for an hour. Then they were returned to their cells, each with a pair of nickel-steel bracelets on.

The cells were adjoining—there were only four cells in the place—so they could talk if they each stood close to the cell door.

“This is it!” Nellie said suddenly.

“This is what?” snapped Mac, sore at the crazy twist that had thrown them into the local jail.

“The trap,” said Nellie.

“Huh?”

“This arrest—this jail.
This
is the trap.”

Mac still didn’t get her and said so.

“The explosive at gate and door were all very well,” Nellie said. “If we got killed by either of them, fine. Lila Morel and one of The Avenger’s aides were out of the way. That’s the way the gang figured it. But if we escaped the explosive, then this was the real trap. This arrest for the murder of Morel.”

“That doesn’t make sense. There’s nothin’ to worry about here.”

“I wonder,” said Nellie.

“But look! There isn’t a chance of proving we’re murderers. We’ll be out of here by morning, with Muster Benson’s help. The worst that can happen is a night in a cell.”

Nellie was shaking her blond head, though Mac couldn’t see that; he could only hear her.

“This is the trap, I tell you,” she repeated. “I’ve got a hunch on it.”

The sheriff and a deputy came in, then.

The four cells were on one side, and taking up the other half of the front of the building was the sheriff’s office, a desk and chair in otherwise vacant space.

“You take over for the night, Lem,” said the sheriff. “This jail ain’t as modern as some. These two are slick customers and might just think of a way out. So you’ll stand guard in here till morning. Here’re the keys.”

“O K,” said the deputy, a burly youth with a grin.

The sheriff went out; the deputy grinned at his two prisoners and sat down in the chair.

There was silence. The deputy looked sleepy and closed his eyes for a minute. It was getting on toward midnight. And then it happened!

It didn’t seem like much at first.

A rat nosed in from somewhere in the rear, and scuttled toward the deputy’s chair. The first thing Mac and Nellie noticed, looking through the bars of their doors, was that the rat was singularly fearless. It ran right up to the chair.

Then they both held their breaths as the rodent circled the chair once.

“Ouch!”
yelled the deputy, opening his eyes in a hurry. “What the hell—”

He jumped to his feet. The rat’s teeth had viciously slashed at his ankle.

The deputy roared with anger and pain and snapped out his gun. The youngster was a good shot. The revolver lanced flame, and the rat became a kind of fringe of red flesh.

But then two more rats scuttled in, and then a dozen, and then—

“Mac!”

There were, seemingly, hundreds of rats. They swarmed up the now horrified deputy’s body and seeped into the cells between the bars.

The deputy was yelling and shooting. And Mac and Nellie were kicking frantically at the crazed rodents. They’d had the presence of mind to leap to the windows, which were set high in the walls, and jump up and catch the bars.

They hung there with their feet drawn up a yard from the floor. But rats can climb a seemingly impossible steep wall; so they were kept busy kicking.

The deputy hadn’t thought to do any such thing. And now he couldn’t. He lunged blindly around the room, like a person whose clothes are in flames and hasn’t wit enough to lie down and roll.

And then the man was down, and it was frightful! Mac and Nellie shuddered as the squeaking, slashing mass waved over him.

This was something out of an inferno! An attack by rats! There were many such attacks on record, but always the rodents had been maddened by starvation into attacking humans.

And these rats weren’t starving. They were fat and healthy-looking.

Mac had finally gotten something out of an inner pocket. Fortunately for the sheriffs deputy, the sheriff hadn’t found the thing when he searched Mac.

It was a little glass gas bomb, about the size of a plum.

“Watch it, Nellie!” Mac yelled.

Then he threw the little bomb between the bars of the cell door and into the space beyond.

It plopped on the floor and a pale-greenish cloud spread instantly. And almost as instantly, the rats began dropping like flies sprayed with insecticide.

The gas was not a death-dealer. It produced deep unconsciousness. That is, it did to humans. Whether it would produce death to smaller animals, Mac didn’t know. He hoped it would.

The luckless deputy, a dreadful sight but at least still alive, lay in grateful unconsciousness. The gas had spread to the cells, now, and the rats in there were out of it, too.

Mac took another instrument from an inside pocket. It was a small clip with a kind of tiny sponge at the curve of it.

“Nellie!” said Mac, at the door, exhaling as he called so that he wouldn’t get any of the gas.

He managed to toss the clip so that it fell in front of her door. He saw her manacled hands reach out and pick it up. She’d be all right, with the clip over her nostrils. The spongelike mass was impregnated with a chemical which counteracted the gas.

Mac himself needed no clip. The lapel of his coat was impregnated with the same chemical.

Holding his head down so that he breathed through the lapel, Mac pressed close to the door. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The rats had done one thing at least.

They had sent the deputy, in his blind gyrations, so close to the cells that, when he fell, he was within reach of Mac’s cell door.

Mac, by squeezing so hard against the bars that most of the hide was scraped from his shoulders and chin, could just get his fingertips under the man’s belt. Then it was short work to drag him closer, and almost as short to get the keys the sheriff had turned over to him. Keys to handcuffs as well as doors.

Mac had thought he heard something, while he was freeing Nellie and himself. The sound was a little like that of distant surf, a queer, growing roar.

The gas was out of the room, now, with windows thrown open. Mac could dispense with the coat lapel, and Nellie removed the nose clip.

“We’ve got to get a doctor for this poor fellow, right away,” said Nellie, looking at the deputy, still unconscious from the gas.

Mac nodded. Getting help gravely increased the risk of not completing their getaway. But it had to be done, of course.

“Voices!” exclaimed Nellie suddenly, listening hard.

So then Mac understood that curious, surflike roar. It was quite close, now.

Voices, of course! Many voices! Many people, roaring in dull fury and advancing on the jail.

“A mob!” said Mac. “What in the worrrld—”

He went to the window and looked out.

The road sign gave the population of Kinnisten as twenty-four hundred. It looked as if every one of the population was outside the jail. Then the Scot saw that the mob was mostly men, though a few women raved their inexplicable fury among them.

One thing all had in common. A fury, a very insanity of hatred seemed to possess them. More than one mouth had white flecks of foam on it as the mad crowd stormed toward the jail.

Now, individual shouts could be made out.

“Bring ’em out!”

“They killed Morel! We’ll kill them!”

“String ’em to the nearest tree!”

Nellie stared at Mac. “Mac—the rats, those people! They’ve been treated with some of the hate serum Morel invented!”

“Looks like it,” said Mac. “Maybe in the town water supply. Ye were right. This jail
is
the real trap. If we were missed by the rats, we were to get hung by the crazy mob outside.”

“Mac, what are we going to
do!”

The Scot shook his head. “I ha’ no more gas pellets save a couple that produce death instead of unconsciousness. We can’t kill anyone in that crowd. They’re decent citizens, turned crazy by Morel’s drug. It’s not their fault.”