The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (6 page)

At this gate were two guards, for, as has been said, this small factory was immensely valuable. The guards motioned to the two men in the truck to get down. They did so. And the guards searched them thoroughly. They went through the truck, too.

“O.K.,” grunted one. “Nothing on ’em there shouldn’t be.”

The two got back in and drove the truck to the loading platform.

Down the building wall from this platform, a hundred yards or less, was the employees’ entrance. The young fellow started walking casually toward this.

In the yard were piles of supplies and crates. And among the crates was a ragged old figure, gleaning from the littered ground bits of things he might use or sell for a few pennies.

It was Old Mitch.

The old man had a round of such places he went to, and he was allowed to hang around by tolerant, sympathetic guards or watchmen who respected the old boy’s guts in his determined effort to keep alive without charity. They even let him salvage scrap metal occasionally, though this was forbidden.

He had come in here for bits of wood or whatever he could get, and now he looked up and saw the young fellow who had treated him so brutally the night before.

With hate in his eyes, Old Mitch glided behind a crate. The young man came on. Old Mitch picked up a rusted length of pipe and balanced it, but then let it drop. He only hid, while the young man passed the crate that sheltered him.

The young fellow opened the door of the employees’ entrance.

There was a man there in grease-grimed shopcoat. He looked furtively around, then stared aggressively at the young fellow.

“All right, all right,” the latter rasped. “Have a look. It’s all yours, later.”

He flipped open a wallet bulging with bills.

The man’s eyes glistened. “Gimme!” he said.

The young fellow reached under his coat and took out a package the size of a book. He gave it to the man, who disappeared inside with it.

The young fellow waited for about thirty seconds, then, smiling, walked inside himself. He was back in about three minutes.

Over at the loading platform, the final contents of the truck were being taken out. It was just about time to go.

The young fellow’s smile grew a little set as the seconds passed. He held his hand over the outside of his coat pocket, over a ragged, burned hole.

The employee came back.

“It’s done,” he said. “Now give it to me.”

“Sure,” said the smiling young man. “Here it is.”

He reached into his pocket with the hole and then jammed something as deeply into the man’s abdomen as he could. There was a muffled sound.

A gun shot through a thick garment and with its muzzle buried four or five inches in abdominal flesh, as in a pillow, makes much less noise than you’d think.

One of the guards turned. At the loading platform, one of the workmen looked up as he slammed the truck’s rear door.

The young fellow, smiling, was shutting the door of the employees’ entrance. He was the perfect picture of a man having had a few words with a friend who worked here and now, having said good-by, was turning with a little smile to leave.

The guards waved indifferently as the truck went back out the yard gate with the two men in it. And after that, the guards thought no more about trucks at all because all hell broke out in that factory!

There were screams and yells. There was, even audible on the outside, the sounds of machinery racing emptily or else jamming because the human hands tending them suddenly failed to keep up with them.

The guards ran to the employees’ entrance. They jerked open the door. And they saw what the young man had smilingly closed the door on.

The man who had received the bundle from him lay on the floor with his life running from a ghastly crater in his stomach.

One guard stayed with the man, and that one was lucky because he only got a touch of it. The other ran on, and about seventy hours later he was to die for that!

He burst past the time clock and into the factory room. There he stopped as if he had run into a wall—and stared with bulging eyes.

He saw a few men on the floor, limp. He saw others walking around like nightmare figures with lead tied to hands and feet, so slow, so slow, seconds to each step.

The women’s screams were coming from the general office room just beyond; and the guard started toward the door to that, reasoning that there must have been a holdup in the front office.

It would have been funny to see the guard if it had not been so dreadful.

He started on the run. He continued that way, only his running grew slower and slower till it was not as fast as an average walking pace.

He took long, running strides, but they occurred at slow-motion intervals. He swung his arms to aid his speed, but they swung very, very slowly, like pendulums frozen in motion.

He reached the office door, after a long time, but did not get through.

He was one of the men they found unconscious on the floor a little later, when police—with gas masks against the unknown peril—came in to the rescue.

One hundred and thirty-nine people stricken, this time, because here the whole place had fallen under the malevolent spell, plant and office and everything else.

One hundred and thirty-nine people; and the doctors talked vaguely of some kind of anaemia. As if anaemia could hit like a bolt of lightning, in only a few minutes!

The police sergeant, the medical examiner and the three plain-clothes men stared at Dick Benson with an awe born of the fact that they knew so much about him.

“Think we ought to keep on using these masks while we look around?” the sergeant asked The Avenger.

“I certainly do,” was Dick’s response.

“Think there’s something in the air here that did this to all these folks, huh?”

“I don’t know,” said The Avenger, his pale eyes as brilliant as agates with lights behind them.

“If it was something in the air,” persisted the sergeant, “what kind of thing would it be? Disease germs?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Benson.

And they had all stared at The Avenger in astonishment.

By now, Dick Benson was well known to every police force in the United States, and to those in large cities all over the world. He was particularly well known in New York.

The cops in New York had built legends around this man. He could do anything. He was all-powerful. He was fabulous and knew everything.

They forgot that even The Avenger was, after all, a human being and that no human, no matter how much of a genius, can know everything.

So they were amazed and a little taken aback when, now, Benson admitted that he hadn’t the faintest idea what could cause this grim carnage in a factory.

To his scientific mind, versed in mysterious illnesses and subtle crime, this thing seemed completely impossible. The more you knew of such matters, the more you would swear it was impossible.

Yet, it had happened three times to three factories in a vital industry.

“Maybe masks are necessary; maybe they’re not. Anyhow, keep them on while we look around,” he told the police quietly.

He viewed the dead body of the employee at the entrance, taking less than a minute to do it. Then he went on to the offices.

For a time, in the general chaos of the plant, a secondary crime that had been committed had gone undiscovered. Then a detective had questioned one of the girls from the office, who had been taken to the roof and lay there, now, not so much affected by this eerie slow-motion death from thin air. And the girl had said something that drew Washington and the entire Secret Service into the case at once.

She had said something about a smiling young man coming into the office with a receipt book which he said the vice president in charge of purchases was to sign. He had gone into the vice president’s office, and the girl had gone to the door because, being the vice president’s secretary, she hadn’t been sure she should admit the man.

Then the whole place had fallen apart and gone crazy with the slow-motion peril. She had been as terrified, and had screamed as loudly, as the rest. But she had still seen the young man, mask over his face, leap for the office vault.

The vice president had staggered after him, had been shot for his pains, and then the young man had run from the office toward the employees’ entrance.

The Avenger looked at the body of the vice president. The abdomen of the dead man was a gory ruin, blown half away.

“Gun jammed deep in the flesh to deaden the sound,” mused Benson, eyes with that strange, frightening brilliance. “Same as the man at the door. It is almost certain that the same man, the smiling young fellow, killed them both. And it is equally probable that he caused this disaster, by what means I still can’t even guess.”

He didn’t inquire into the nature of the thing that had been taken from the executive’s vault. He knew. Washington had known the instant the police had phoned.

The thing that had been taken was the secret formula for the rubber of which those special gaskets for warship tubing had been made. A thing as vital in wartime as the blueprints for the latest bombsight, though not nearly as spectacular.

The Avenger went out to the one guard left at the gate.

This man was not feeling so well. He had gotten one touch of the queer doom that had overtaken the rest in the building. But he was saying nothing about it, staying around to help if possible because he felt that all this was his fault.

A guard ought to keep such things from happening. And he hadn’t.

“The only thing that entered this yard and approached the building was that supplies truck?” The Avenger asked.

“That’s right,” said the guard.

“Describe it, please.”

“One-and-a-half-ton truck, closed, dark-brown, with Atlantic Tool and Die Company lettered on it. Fairly new. Two men in it.”

There was a phone at the gate, in a little house of its own like a police call box. Benson used it as such, getting in touch with headquarters. His voice was calm but vibrant, and he seemed two feet taller than his actual size.

“Have two men been found dead or hurt in the vicinity of the Manhattan Gasket Company?” he asked.

In a moment a very respectful voice replied, “No, sir. No report of anybody.”

“I think there may be such a report soon. If so, get in touch with me here.”

The Avenger hung up and turned back to the guard.

“Just what did the two men from the truck do when they got inside?”

“The driver,” said the guard, “stayed at the loading platform and helped unload the truck. The other man with him, a young fellow with kind of narrow eyes and a mouth a little thinner than most, walked to the employees’ entrance. I didn’t pay much attention; figured he had a friend working here.”

“Then?”

“I turned away. I looked back, and he was out of sight; had stepped inside, I guess. In a minute or two he was at the door again. After that, the truck was ready to go; so he climbed in and went out with it.”

“You heard nothing?”

“I heard a kind of muffled thump. That was all. And everything looked all right,” said the guard sheepishly, “so I didn’t investigate. Which I should have done.”

“That must have been when the workman in the employees’ entrance was shot,” said The Avenger. “Did you examine these men when they drove in?”

“I sure did,” said the guard. “Searched ’em from stem to stern.”

“How is it you didn’t find the young fellow’s gun?”

“I don’t know,” said the man, honestly perplexed. “He didn’t have anything on him bigger than a pocketknife. Neither did the other. And there wasn’t anything in the truck but just the stuff due here. My pal went over the truck while I went over the two guys.”

The phone rang. It was headquarters.

“You must have looked into a crystal ball, Mr. Benson,” said a police captain. “We’ve just had a report of the finding of two men near the Manhattan Gasket Company, in a boarded-up, vacant building. They were slugged, and slugged for keeps. One is dead; the other is unconscious and may never come out of it. No identification.”

“I think you will find,” said The Avenger, “that they worked for the Atlantic Tool and Die Company. Thank you for calling me.”