Read The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers for Free Online

beside him, a quick breath, and then heard a thundering thump to the rear. Knowledge of The Avenger’s mode of fighting told him what had occurred. A man had charged Benson, had been picked up like a feather in those slight but steel-strong hands, and then had been tossed over The Avenger’s shoulder to land a dozen feet behind. The crack had been either a broken arm or a terribly dislocated shoulder. Benson didn’t fool when he fought. He never took a life, but he apparently held it no wrong to give a crook all the punishment he asked for.
    Mac’s bony fists were flailing out now like ivory mallets. There was no more shooting. Perhaps the laughing, yelling men had orders to capture the two alive. Perhaps they felt they couldn’t shoot at close quarters without hitting each other. Or perhaps they were attacking with fists and clubbed guns for the malevolent pleasure of feeling the damage they were inflicting at close range.
    Mac had an idea it was the latter. The baleful glitter of eyeballs, in the dim light from the roofless section, was enough to foster that idea.
    Someone hit the Scot from behind like a laughing cannon ball. He went down. Mad hands felt for his throat. Maniacal laughter roared out from the owner of the hands as he found the windpipe he was after.
    Mac drove his wrists up between the wrists at his neck, and shoved them wide, tearing the murderous grip loose.
    “Ye skurlie,” he growled, like a power saw on a muted note. “Ye would, would ye?”
    He sent a left and right into the face above, felt the owner roll backward, still laughing. He got to his feet.
    Off to his left, while his eyes had been near the floor level, he thought he’d seen a queer movement in the floor itself. But he didn’t have time to look again, because the man he’d hit was on him again.
    That was the hell of this fight, he was finding out. It was a duplicate of the eerie way the man had acted in the drugstore.
    These men apparently could not be hurt. At least, they couldn’t seem to be stopped, short of actually being killed. A stooped, distorted figure was cutting across behind Mac’s opponent, and the Scot realized it was the man The Avenger had thrown. His shoulder was out of joint. So badly that it made you feel sick to look.
    But the fellow, laughing as if he had been merely tickled, was boring in just the same, with one arm hanging slack beside him but the other groping for Benson.
    Mac hit his personal assailant in the jaw so hard that it seemed to turn the man’s head clear around on his neck. And the man fell at last. Unconsciousness could be induced, it appeared, by a blow about four times as hard as was normally necessary to knock out a man.
    The Scot saw two other forms on the floor, felled by The Avenger. But there were eight or nine left on their feet, so he was too busy to see how Benson was making out.
    He was too busy to see something else, too: the sequel to the queer movement he’d seen in the floor while he was sprawled there.
    The movement was caused by the lifting of a section of the floor. A trapdoor, about three feet by seven, was thrown back. A head appeared; then the whole body came up. But the man didn’t mix in to the fight. Instead, he went toward the opening through which Mac and Benson and the girl had come.
    The girl was still out there, near the car. The figure that had emerged from the trapdoor darted out, and Edna Brown screamed.
    Mac heard the scream. It sounded, a shriek of terror, over the insane laughter of men who were trying to murder them with their bare hands. There was another scream, ominously cut short.
    Mac knocked out another man with a terrific sock, and turned to go to the girl’s aid. Two more men caught him and tried to pull him down. He didn’t see the figure from the trapdoor come back into the building, carrying the girl over his shoulder like a roll of carpet. He didn’t see Edna being taken down through the trapdoor.
    But The Avenger must have seen.
    “Mac!”