The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page B

grimace seem like a weak grin, the Scot ducked the flashing gun barrel and surged forward. He got the gunman in the middle with a bony shoulder, and the man went flying back as if propelled by a giant sling shot. Went flying back, and caromed against the girl.
    She cried, “Oh!” in a strangled way, as the breath was knocked out of her. And she dropped the gun.
    From then on it was a shambles, with ten men against three, and all desirous of avoiding gunfire. The ten, of course, had no doubt as to the outcome. Not at first.
    They were all over the three now! Mac went down with two men on top of him. Smitty, huge as he was, was knocked to his knees under the shock of a four-man wedge. The Avenger was the only one who remained erect, and he had a man clawing on his back and another trying to smash his white face flat with a blackjack!
    The fight seemed over before it had fairly begun. Then, somehow, things seemed to happen!
    MacMurdie could fight about as well on the floor as on his feet. His bone mallets of fists pistoned up at two savage faces. One suddenly sprouted a red mask and disappeared. The other was hidden abruptly in the crook of an arm to protect it from the Scot’s battering.
    So Mac’s bony fingers got the throat under the face in a steel-cable sort of noose, and in a moment he was up and clear of the two.
    Smitty hadn’t bothered to use his fists. On his vast knees, he was still almost head high with the men clubbing at him. He swept out his gorilla arms and gathered three of the four to him in an embrace that was an excellent counterpart of the embrace of an enraged grizzly bear.
    With the three yelling against him and trying to keep their ribs from caving, the giant simply fell straight forward.
    There was a squashing thud as one of the three broke the force of Smitty’s near-three-hundred-pound bulk as it smashed against the concrete floor. He didn’t move any more.
    Smitty ceased his embrace and got an ankle in each hand. He swung, and the two remaining men did curious cartwheels sideways, smashing against the front of a car twenty feet away.
    The fourth man was industriously clubbing for the big fellow’s head. He’d only hit glancingly, what with the fast shifting of bodies. But now he got a square sock on Smitty’s skull.
    It should have felled an ox. The gunman stood expectantly, waiting for Smitty to fall. But, somehow, Smitty did not oblige.
    Smitty shook his head, as if to clear it of fog, and blinked a couple of times. Then his face reddened.
    He had been fighting almost impersonally till now, just doing a job in the most efficient manner possible. But that last crack had evidently made him very annoyed.
    “Why you—” he bellowed.
    At the look of him, the man screamed and ran. He scuttled between garage wall and the back of a big coupé and began clawing along cleaning rags and polish cans piled there in crazy disregard of all fire laws.
    Smitty whirled to where Benson and Mac were.
    The Avenger’s fists had accounted for two men. The man with the dead face and the icily flaming, pale eyes was standing almost erect, weaving like a dancer on the balls of his feet, with his fist licking out now and then like darting white flame.
    When it went out, a man went down. Odds of ten to three, it seemed, were not enough. Not when the three were Mac and Smitty and Benson.
    But, suddenly, the complexion of the struggle changed.
    There was a sound like a riveting machine! Slugs screamed off the garage floor to plunk into the plank wall behind the three.
    The man who had run yelling from Smitty and hidden between the wall and a parked coupé had picked a submachine gun out of the piles of rags. Throwing all desire for silence to the winds, he was intent on mowing the three down!
    With clockwork precision, the three spread at the first deadly hammering sound. Benson leaped left, Mac to the right, and Smitty ahead—toward the sound.
    The Avenger’s hand flashed to the little device at his collar.