The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (14 page)

“This doesn’t look like pitchblende country to me,” said the giant. He spoke in a low tone.

Benson said nothing. He was looking at the rising remnants of ancient buildings ahead of them. He started toward them, with the rest following.

These buildings were of dressed stone, huge blocks of it. Nothing else could have endured for so many centuries. There were lusty trees growing out of walls and through the fragments of roofs, but, in the main, the buildings were whole.

They represented a high degree of culture, and ordinarily Dick would have dropped everything to go over them with a student’s eye. But he hadn’t time for such things, now.

“The native village will be about a mile away,” he decided. “As a rule, the natives hesitate to enter such ancient structures. Spirits are supposed to dwell in them.”

Mac looked at a towering crude stone figure that leaned perilously forward on its base. All the malignant evil of the universe seemed carved in the stone countenance.

“I could believe in spirrrits myself,” he burred.

Marge spoke. Her anxiety over Stahl gave her courage.

“Where do you suppose Uncle Alden is being held?”

“In the native village, probably,” Benson said. “They have constructed it so cunningly that I saw no trace of it from the air. We’ll have to find it from the ground. But first, it’s time to deal with the green killer. Line up, please.”

The Avenger took a flat hypodermic needle case from one pocket and a small vial from the other. He filled the needle, after plunging it through the cork of the vial, and lanced the sharp point into Smitty’s corded arm.

The giant stared at the vial with his mouth open in amazement.

Benson had come from his laboratory in Bleek Street carefully carrying a vial of stuff that was
pinkish.
This was the antitoxin he had given to Heber.

But this stuff he was now using, supposedly also the antitoxin, didn’t look like that at all. It was pale, muddy-amber in color.

However, The Avenger didn’t seem to feel like explaining, so Smitty didn’t ask the questions he was burning to ask. He stepped on, and Benson inoculated Nellie, Mac, and Marge, and then stuck the needle into his own arm. There was the usual burn of an injection, and that was all.

“Now,” nodded Mac, “we’ll be safe.”

Ironically, it was at this instant that the blow fell—when talk of safety came from Mac’s lips.

The jungle, of course, made a solid canopy over them here, as it did over all the earth for uncounted miles around. And from tree branches, like hideous rotten fruit, men came dropping!

But not the men you’d expect. These were not Indians; they were white men, and their faces were all too familiar.

Grinning at them a bit in the lead was Gleason, the big fellow with the horn-rimmed glasses and the scar at the bridge of his nose. Next to him was the smaller, yellow-haired man. The fellow to the right was Heber, malevolent-looking as a demon.

All held guns; most of them were sub-machine guns. Heber had an automatic in his right hand and a grenade in his left.

“Our smart friend, Mr. Benson,” said Heber, nodding to The Avenger. “And the big boy, Smitty. Walked into a trap as nice as you please.”

And Gleason said, “Did you think we’d stay back at that lake forever? A control cable isn’t so hard to fix. And even while you were on the boat gassing us up, one of our guys got to thinking there wasn’t enough smell of gas in the air. So we drained the tank and filled it with high octane. And here we are.”

“Yeah. Surprise, surprise,” said the fellow with the yellow hair.

The Avenger said nothing. His cold, pale eyes were as calm as glacier ice in moonlight. His face was so expressionless that it made the attackers a shade uneasy.

“Do you suppose he’s got something up his sleeve?” muttered the yellow-haired man to Heber.

“Nothing but his arm,” said Heber. “You know we’re really glad to see you, Benson.”

“ ’Tis not mutual, ye skurlie,” said Mac. “If we never saw ye again, we’d not mourn.”

“Aw, now, you hurt my feelings. But like I said, we’re glad to see you, because you’re going to do us a big favor.”

The Avenger’s colorless eyes were slightly narrowed. The natural thing for this gang to do would be to kill them at once. And with the grenades and guns, they’d have had a simple task.

But they seemed to want them alive. It was perplexing—and disturbing.

“Back up,” said Heber. His voice had changed. “Just step back till we tell you to stop.”

“And if we don’t?” Nellie said.

“You can back up and live, or stand still and turn into hash.” The grenade moved threateningly.

They backed.

The ground was covered with knee-high grass, the stuff in which lurked the grotesque disease germs that changed men to apes. But in the main, the ground was even enough. Probably, it had been part of a temple courtyard, centuries ago.

What was behind Benson’s deadly mask of a face?

The rest could only guess. Perhaps he was icily angry with himself for having been so absorbed with the inoculations that his marvelous ears had failed to warn him of movements in the trees overhead. Perhaps he was planning some way of escape where none seemed possible. It couldn’t be guessed from the look of him.

“Keep on backing.”

The five had backed past the perilously leaning stone statue. Four or five stories tall, it loomed above them, with the tops of the giant trees interlacing even above that.

“Back!”

“How far?” snapped Smitty. “I’m getting tired of this. Are you planning to back us clear to Manaos?”

“No, just into a nice tight stone room,” said Heber. “Keep on backing!”

Maybe it was a sheer hunch, or maybe a breath of air just a bit more chill than the humid air of the jungle blew upward. Anyhow, both Smitty and Mac got the same inkling of something very wrong behind them at the same time.

They whirled, but not quite soon enough. And as they did so, the two girls screamed.

They were on the extreme edge of a deep hole. Rather, it was a depression walled on three sides and open on the fourth, the far, side. That was all the two men saw. Because then the loose earth and vegetation under their feet gave way, and they began sliding backward, too!

Down. Down . . .

Heber and his men began yelling like maniacs. They began shooting till it sounded like an army. Some one of them threw a grenade, in addition, and the boom of this registered on Mac’s and Smitty’s ears even as they were sliding down.

The cliff was not sheer, so they did not fall. It was covered with creepers and vines, and now and then they could catch hold of one. But they never quite stopped; the vine always pulled loose before they could arrest their fall.

They got to the bottom, perhaps a hundred feet below the brink, at last. They were shaken up and scratched but otherwise unhurt.

They looked far up. Heber’s face showed small as he peered down at them.

“Just make yourselves comfortable,” Heber yelled down. “I’ll get the Indians here to greet you in a few minutes. Then, while they’re busy with you, I’ll have time to settle my own affairs here. That’s the favor that you’re going to do me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Smitty bellowed up. “Where’s Benson?”

“We’re holding him up here.”

“Sure, you’re holding him! We heard those shots. He got away, that’s what happened.”

Heber’s face changed. He snarled wordlessly, and his head withdrew from the brink.

“So the chief did get away!” said Nellie. But there wasn’t too much hope in her lovely blue eyes. What could one man, even The Avenger, do, surrounded by fifteen or sixteen heavily armed enemies?

The four turned to see where they’d slid to.

They stood on a broad ledge of stone with vegetation growing up between the cracks. The ledge was about thirty feet wide. At one side was the steeply slanting bank they’d come down; at the other was a pool of water they instinctively knew was very, very deep.

The pool went from side to side. Its other end, three hundred yards away, was at the foot of a gently sloping hill. It would be a cinch to climb that hill, so escape from the ledge seemed simple.

All they had to do to get out of here was swim the length of the pool.

Smitty looked sideways at Mac.

“Somehow,” the giant said reflectively, “I don’t feel like diving in there.”

“Neither do I,” confessed the Scot. And the two girls, white-faced but composed, nodded their heads.

“There’s a kind of smell around here, a little like the smell in an alligator pen,” said Smitty. “I wonder if—”

Ten feet up in the rotten, loose earth of the steep bank there was a scabrous stump. Smitty wrenched it loose. It wasn’t very heavy, so he swung it far out into the pool.

What happened then was something all four would remember in nightmares as long as they lived.

A wave gathered in the glassy surface of the pool. It seemed to hump up in the middle, with the wave racing from it in an agitated circle. Then, from the center of the disturbance, an arm rose!

An arm was about all you could call it. You wouldn’t call a thing as big as a large tree trunk, of a gristle-gray, with a horn spike in the end, a feeler or a tenacle. It was a colossal arm.

It rose fifteen or eighteen feet above the water, with its other end still too far down underneath to be seen. It hovered over the stump, tightened on it, then loosened as if in disappointment.

The arm slowly sank into the depths again, and after a moment the surface of the pool was again glassy still.

Smitty drew a long, ragged breath.

“What in the name of all the squid and octopuses that ever lived was that?”

“Neither a squid nor an octopus, I’d say,” was Mac’s shaken response. “It had a whole nest of those big arms; I could just see them under the surface. And the horn tips on the ends . . . If it wasn’t crazy, I’d say that was the prehistoric ancestor of all the present-day octopuses and squids.”

“Whatever it is,” said Nellie in a small, still voice, “it can have its old pool. All of it. I don’t want even a tiny part of it.”

The broad ledge on which they stood had meaning, now.

This was a sacrificial pool. Up that steep bank, at one time, there must have been steps. Down the steps, tier on tier, must have come misshapen black priests with human victims to cast into the water.

But Dick Benson had said this civilization was pre-Inca, went back thousands of years. Had that “thing” been alive in there all that time, growing a little each century as any sea-thing tends to grow? Or had there been a succession of them?

No matter. They were stuck on this ledge more securely, with that horror ahead of them, than if the pool had been a stone wall a hundred feet high.

On the top of the cliff, Smitty and Mac had turned as they sensed peril behind them, but just late enough so that the earth beneath them had given under their weight and let them down.

The Avenger had whirled, too, but had been just a bit quicker than his aides.

To one side, at the very brink of the cliff, a liana looped downward from a great tree branch that flung its length ten feet beyond the edge of the drop. The Avenger leaped forward from the crumbling brink and darted to the left.

It was at this instant that the shots and yells sounded, as every man in Heber’s crew shot toward the lithe, fast figure.

Some of the slugs hit, but none beyond the body area protected by bullet-proof celluglass. It’s a very difficult thing to put a bullet into a fast-moving, zigzagging figure.

Five yards from the looping creeper, Benson’s body left the ground in a long, flat dive. He hit the liana like a projectile and swung with the momentum a score of feet forward and a dozen feet up to the waist-thick branch beyond the one from which the trailing vine hung.

The Avenger didn’t stop there. His hands hardly seemed to touch when he was swinging on again to still another branch. This one he reached on his feet, in a pantherlike crouch. The next he leaped to was higher, as was the next.

Slugs were cutting around him and screaming as they ricocheted. A grenade tore great gouges from a tree bole, but Benson had seen the arm that tossed it, and the bole was between him and the thrower when the grenade went off.