Part 6 (1/2)
Chapter 9. THE MAN OF FAT.
DOC SAVAGED dived around the corner of the boxlike wing of the house and reached the open window through which he had come a few minutes before. He pitched himself quickly inside.
The pig was squealing somewhere in the bas.e.m.e.nt regions. Doc plunged through rooms, hunting the entrance to the cellar.
On the stairway which led down from the upper floors, Monk and Ham created racket. They were descending. Evidently they had left the girl behind; the sound of her feet was not mingling with theirs.
”Stay with the girl!” Doc yelled at them.
Monk and Ham came to a stop on the stairs. From behind them came a sudden awful sound. A board snapped with a tremendous noise. Planks broke, splintered. Nails pulled out of wood with shrieks like dying things.
The bedlam drowned the squealing of Habeas Corpus. Monk and Ham wheeled back up the stairs,reached the top and pitched down the hall. Aghast, they skidded to a halt.
A fantastic thing was happening to the hall floor. It was heaving upward, forced by some unearthly power from beneath. Stringers were cras.h.i.+ng apart, planks rending and tearing.
Beyond the point where the floor was upheaving they could see the steel-haired girl. Then the buckling of the floor blocked their view.
The hallway was dimly lighted. Dust was arising. These two factors joined to prevent Monk and Ham from ascertaining the cause of the fantastic destruction.
The Thing was smas.h.i.+ng up from the boxlike part of the house which Doc Savage had sought to investigate.
Doc Savage joined Monk and Ham.
”It's something alive -- a monster!” Monk gulped. ”Hear it breathin'?”
The breath sounds were like great, windy rushes. Doc produced a flashlight. It traced a beam like a whitehot thread. This spiked out at the boiling dust clouds, but could not penetrate deeply enough to show anything.
Behind them, in the lower regions, Habeas Corpus squealed monotonously.
Then the steel-haired girl cried out in an awful fear. Monk and Ham held their tiny superfiring pistols.
They did not dare use them blindly, for fear of hitting the girl. The slugs were not lethal, but one in an eye could do damage.
The clouds of dust, swirling in the glittering crystal rods of the flash beam, suddenly convulsed more violently. Wreckage, splinters and small planks flew toward them.
”Back!” Doc rapped. ”It's coming for us!”
MONK AND Ham found their arms grasped by Doc's powerful hands. They were all but carried down the stairs. They had moved none too quickly. The monster seemed to be trying to get to them.
It was evidently baffled by the dust, and by the strength of the timbers which composed the old house. It seemed to turnback.
The steel-haired girl, who had been briefly silent, began to shriek again. But her yelling suddenly decreased in loudness. It was as if she had been dropped, still screaming, into a bottle, and the bottle corked.
”The thing yanked her down into the lower story,” Doc said grimly.
Monk wiped sweat off his simian features.
”I've seen a lot of unearthly things in my time!” he gulped. ”But this takes the cake.”
In the bas.e.m.e.nt, Habeas Corpus still squealed.
”I'm gonna see what ails that pig!” Monk rapped, and plunged off.
Doc lunged toward a window. Before he reached it, a loud throbbing roar arose. This came from the boxlike room. It lifted to a great syncopation of power. ”A truck!” Ham yelled.
There was a clanking of machinery; the great door in the end of the house swung open.
A motor van lumbered out. The thing was long, the great closed box of a body rolling on a four-wheel truck at the rear. This body was of steel, and access was had by two doors at the rear. These were closed.
The van driver was the man with the dyed black hair and mustache -- he who had killed Carl MacBride.
Ham flipped up his machine pistol. It bawled, ejector spraying empty cartridges. But the bullets only turned into chemical-and-lead smears on the windows of the van driver's cab.
”Bullet-proof gla.s.s,” Ham growled disgustedly.
Doc Savage plucked the little superfirer from Ham's clutch. The bronze man's fingers worked on the weapon, flipping the magazine drum off.
In the cartridge intake chute, Doc inserted several special sh.e.l.ls which he extracted from a pocket The great van had evidently run over a buried trip device in the driveway. The gate of thick steel bars was opening.
Doc lifted the gun; his ability as a marksman was as accomplished as his other capacities. Then the gun blasted fire. On the sides of the van appeared tiny, grayish puffs, as if s...o...b..a.l.l.s had broken. Nothing else happened.
The van rolled through the great gate and was gone.
”Blast it!” yelled Ham.
HAM REMEMBERED that e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n for a long time, due to what immediately followed. For the floor seemed to sink several inches under their feet, then jump. The walls rocked. A terrific explosion all but shattered their eardrums.
Wreckage came spouting down the stairway which led to the second story. Walls cracked open like over-ripe fruit. The sides of the house split, to let out spurts of smoke and flame.
The roof over the boxlike room which had held the van spit in the middle and folded outward like a double lid.
Smoke, flame and debris, propelled by the blast, spurted up through the coa.r.s.e net of copper cables.
Doc and Ham were catapulted the length of the room in which they stood.
Their eardrums, strained by the first concussion of the explosion, registered the crash, thump and bang of wreckage falling back to earth.
Doc Savage glanced through the shattered rectangle of a window. The explosion had practically annihilated the mysterious wing of the house which had harbored the big van.
Overhead, boards and lath had fallen back upon the coa.r.s.e net of copper. Dust from the explosion whirled in a great pall.
”The girl!” Ham gulped. ”She couldn't have lived through that explosion!” The dust cloud, settling and rolling aside, partially dispersed. Flames appeared -- fire sweeping the wreckage of the house wing. Scattered tongues became scarlet bundles. They licked at the wood, flared up and spread.
”The explosion scattered an incendiary compound,” Doc rapped out.
The bronze giant and the slender lawyer flung out through the window and ran toward the fire. Waves of heat a.s.sailed them, searing as they drew closer. Extinguis.h.i.+ng such a blaze was beyond all possibility.