by Harold Ward
One after another the lights came on as the electricians, working by the aid of flashlights, restored the power plant to some semblance of order.
Then Jimmy Holm took stock.
Half of his men were dead—stricken down by the black, vaporish shapes or the ghastly thing with the gun. Among them—and Holm suppressed a little sob as he gazed upon the figurine of the man he had learned to love and admire—was Doctor Daniel Darrow, one of the twelve greatest scientists in America and a member of the Secret Twelve—the man who had defied Death by coming to the fortress in order to help draw the fire of the sinister scientist away from his fellows who were in hiding.
There was an expression of grim horror upon the clean-cut face of the scientist as Jimmy looked upon it—a fixed stare as if death had caught him unawares. Beside him, his rotund body sapped of its vital juices, lay the uniformed form of Colonel Braig, the commander of the fortress. And upon his face, too, was a look of horror and loathing, mingled with a great sorrow.
For Colonel Braig had left, in far-away New York, a wife and two children to mourn his death.
THE radio was spitting and crackling. The operator turned to Holm, his face blanched with horror.
“It’s Lieutenant Hobbler, sir! It’s horrible! He wants you.”
Clapping the headset to his ears, Holm spoke into the short wave, two-way radio.
“Hobbler, sir!” the lieutenant said, trying hard to keep his voice from breaking. “Lieutenant Hobbler at the mainland—at La Foubelle. I’m the only officer left, sir! Only ten men and myself survive!”
His voice broke and he burst into sobs.
“It is horrible—hellish!” he exclaimed. “Folsom, Cullitt, McIntosh, Baruth—all stricken down—their bodies smashed and broken. Dead men! Dead men all around! It’s worse than it was during the war! We didn’t have a chance, sir—not a chance. Only the few of us that were stationed at the guns got away...
His voice died away in a series of sobs and Holm knew that his overstrained nerves had broken.
Again Death had triumphed. Again his diabolical hell-things had carried almost everything before them. Yet out of it all had come a great good.
Two men stationed at the magazine told their story. They had opened one of the tiny slits of windows to peer out. Standing almost in front of them was the animated dead man with his ray-gun. He had brought it to his shoulder and pulled the trigger again and again. Yet the rays had left them unharmed.
Jimmy Holm listened to their story with eyes that glittered with excitement.
“Lead” he exclaimed. “The room is lined with lead and zinc. The magazine is filled with lead—the base of the steeljacketed bullets. Lead will stand off, turn aside, the hellish rays sent out by the gun.”
He whirled on the major who now, since Braig was dead, was in command.
“Put all of your men to work!” he snapped. “Melt all of the lead out of the bullets. Let one group pull them from the cartridges while a second group makes a kiln in which to do the melting. Get kettles from the kitchen—anything in which to heat the metal.
“Meanwhile, have your radio man wireless the commissioner at New York. Tell him to start every available plane here with lead. Tell him to turn the city upside down in order to get it. Sheet lead is preferred, but any kind will do.
“The Zombi is still lurking somewhere on the island—doubtless inside the fortress by this time—ready to shoot down anyone who appears. And lead will withstand the deathrays. With enough of it to form a barricade for us as we progress, we can attack Death in his lair.
“We are going to carry the war to the island—to beard Death in his own dooryard!”
“A grim and hellish spot on which to die,” Jimmy Holm said bitterly as he looked across the barren expanse of the island at a great pile of masonry rising, four stories high, on the top of the knoll. Around him the burial parties were gathering up the dead. Ghastly, horrible caricatures of men they were, their bodies crushed and broken by the elementals. Others were like rubber dolls from which the air had slowly leaked, deflating them until they were but figurines.
And the faces of all of them were twisted in a look of horror. They had died slowly—too slowly—tortured to death by the hellish monstrosities from the air or struck down by the ray-gun.
They were heroes, all of them. Unheralded and unsung, the world knowing nothing of their bravery. Yet they were braver by far than he who charges into the cannon’s mouth, for they had sacrificed themselves that other men might live.
And somewhere inside that great stone fort, for there was no hiding place outside, lurked the menace that had already taken so grievous a toll—the animated dead man against whom flesh bullets had no effect.
BUILT a century or more before, it was rambling, the walls easily five feet thick, the masonry, even on the inside, stained with age, the ceiling vaulted, filled with casemates, with bastions projecting from the sides in out-of-the-way places and embrasures in inaccessible places.
Holm shuddered as he entered the passage which led down the center of the main room, now used as a general sitting room. Lighted though it was, so vast and gloomy was the place—so filled with passageways leading crossways and so high the vaulted ceilings that the gloomy passageway reverberated to his quick footfalls while the men, hurrying through with their ghastly freight, wrought grotesque and flickering shadows on the smooth, stone floor.
“Have you seen anything?” he demanded time after time of the pale-faced men he had stationed at frequent intervals, each behind his little parapet of lead.
And the answer was always the same.
“Nothing.”
A man stumbled past him out of a causeway, almost falling down the half dozen stone steps which led to the general level. His face was blanched, his eyes bulging with fright.
Holm seized him and jerked him to a standstill. For an instant he struggled, then, recollecting himself, gazed at the detective with gaping jaws. It was Torr, one of the older pseudo-scientists.
“Quick!” Holm snapped. “What is it?”
The older man swallowed hard, his body quivering with nervous terror.
“Down—down that way!” he finally managed to ejaculate. “I—I saw him. He was lurking in the darkness. He pointed his gun at me. I—I got away!”
With a bark of command to the guard, who was just around the corner, to follow, Holm released his hold on the half-fainting man and dashed down the passageway.
For it was in this corner of the huge fortress that the sleeping quarters had been established. Here Nina Fererra had her room. Here, too, were the pseudo “Madam Sorella” and the maids.
He heard the sentinel clattering behind him, his voice making the echoes ring with his shouts for the corporal of the guard. He turned the corner and stumbled over something, almost sprawling on all fours.
It was the guard!
He was lying, face downward, upon the smooth slab, the little lead shield with which Holm had equipped him, overturned to one side. In one outsprawled hand was his rifle, the bayonet fixed. The other was doubled under him.
The blood was still flowing from a stab wound in the back.
He was not yet dead. The other guard, coming around the corner in the wake of Holm, came to a sudden stop, his face twisted with excitement.
“The devil! It’s Rooney!” he exclaimed.
The dying man, hearing his name, twisted his head sideways with an effort.
“...from behind...” he gasped, his swarthy face twisted into a grimace of pain.
Holm dropped to his knees beside the dying soldier.
“Who was it?” he demanded. “Speak, man! You are dying! Who killed you?”
A flicker of recognition crept into the dying man’s eyes, glazing though they were. He struggled hard to speak.
“It... was...”
His voice died away in a rasping gurgle. A shudder went through his athletic body and they knew that he was dead.
THE corporal of the guard at the head
of a squad came around the corner on the “double.” Holm hastily told him what had happened.
“On top of our other troubles, we now seem to have a murderer to deal with,” the detective said bitterly. “A cowardly fiend who sneaks up from behind and stabs men in the back.”
“Maniac, probably,” the corporal ruminated. “Went nuts over what happened last night and—”
He stopped suddenly.
From farther down the corridor and around the corner came a woman’s shrill scream of terror.
Holm whirled, drawing his revolver as he ran. It was only a dozen steps or less to where a second passageway intersected the first. He turned the corner at full speed, the corporal and his squad only a few paces behind.
Outstretched upon the stone flagging was a woman. She lay in a pitiful huddle close to the wall, her face jammed against the stone, the blood welling from a horrible gash in her throat.
The corridor swam in great circles before Jimmy Holm’s eyes. He dared not trust himself to bend down and gaze into the dead face.
Was it Nina?
“Turn her over... please,” he said to the corporal.
“Heaven help us!” the non-com exploded, dropping to his knees and turning the dead body over as gently as possible.
Holm heaved a great sigh.
It was “Madam Sorella.”
From behind a door across the hallway came the sound of a struggle. Then a woman screamed again.
This time there could be no mistake. It was the voice of Nina Fererra!
Holm swung his weight against the door. It was locked. He hurled his shoulder against it a second time. But the great blinges’ wrought by workmen a century before, held. He seized the gun from the hands of the corporal and brought the butt against the heavy oak paneling. But it, like the hinges, had been made by an artisan who knew his business.
And on the other side he could hear the frantic shrieks of the woman he loved as she battled against an unknown menace.
The rifle had been splintered by Holm’s blows against the door. He seized another from one of the men and, jerking off the bayonet, placed the muzzle against the lock and pulled the trigger until the magazine was empty. Again he crashed against the door and once more it held. The soldiers, stepping back a pace, charged at it in a body. It shook beneath their combined assault, yet held.
Holm seized a rifle from one of the other men. Again he placed the muzzle against the lock and pulled the trigger. This time he accomplished his purpose. A dozen steeljacketed bullets had so shattered the clumsy lock that it gave beneath his weight. He stumbled inside, the men crashing In behind him with guns ready.
Nina Fererra was behind the bed. Her back was against the wall. In her hand was a huge vase with which she was menacing the man who, knife in hand, was striving to attack her. Here and there the creature dodged while she, manipulating the bed with one hand, the big vase in the other, managed to keep him at bay.
He whirled as Holm charged at the head of his little squad.
It was the Zombi.
One of the men fired. The bullet struck the dead man squarely between the eyes. The impact hurled him back. He staggered. Then, as another bullet struck him, he leaped across the room. High in the wall was an embrasure. He sprang into it amid a shower of bullets.
Squatting for an instant, he turned his bloodless face at them, his lips drawn back over his fangs in a wolfish snarl.
Again a volley of bullets splattered around him. He swayed beneath their terrific impact.
Then, turning, he leaped through the open embrasure out into the darkness of the night.
Chapter XII
“Chop Him Limb from Limb!”
ANIMATED by the super-intelligence of the Mephistophelian madman in the midst of the swamp, the Zombi, his death-gun emptied of charges, was resorting to cold steel in an effort to accomplish Death’s ambition to wipe all scientists off the globe.
Lurking in his underground cavern like some great beast of prey, the wily maniac himself knew that his attack was in some respects a failure.
The majority of the men whom Death believed to be the scientists he hated so cordially, had been—thanks to the foresight of Jimmy Holm—inside the fortress when the attack of the elementals was made. The result was that most of the victims were soldiers. And Death, even though he hated the law almost as much as he did the sciences, could yet claim no victory in the killing of these men.
His thought waves, beating against the vacuum-like brain of the Zombi, were telling the animated dead man what to do. How he had learned about the outpost on the rocky island was a question. Probably he had an extra range finder stored away which he had gotten out and hastily connected up and with it had sought out Holm. Finding the detective, he had seen the faces of those he supposed to be scientists on the silvered screen.
That Holm had, at least temporarily, succeeded in demolishing the giant death-ray projector was a certainty. Had he not, Death, angered as he was, would long since have brought it into commission to strike down every man and woman on the rocky island.
But, lacking this, and with his elementals thwarted by the ring of iron the brave little band on the island had erected around themselves, he was urging his animated corpse on to further deeds of violence.
All this raced through Holm’s mind as he pressed Nina Fererra to his breast. She had heard “Madam Sorello” scream, she said, in the corridor outside. Frightened though she was, she had hastily opened the door and stepped out to go to the other’s rescue.
The Zombi had been standing over his victim, his bloodstained hands still grasping her by the hair, while he hacked at her throat with the knife. She had screamed and leaped back into the room.
But she was too late. The Zombi had thrown his weight against the door, keeping her from locking it. She had leaped behind the bed, picking the vase up as she crossed the room.
There was no more to tell. The disabled death-gun lay upon the floor where it had fallen. Holm picked it up and examined it. As he surmised, the cells were all empty. He shuddered as he thought how each one of the tiny electrodes had been responsible for a human life.
He must work fast. Even though it was painful to part from the woman he loved, his duty lay before him. It took but an instant to fasten the window in the embrasure. Orders were issued that no one was to be admitted past the locked door without identifying himself.
Meanwhile the soldiers had been sent back to their duties with instructions to alarm the remainder of the garrison and to see that every window was fastened securely in spite of the humidity.
The Zombi was outside. It was up to the garrison to keep him there until morning. It lacked but a few hours until daylight. With the coming of the sun there would be no place on the rocky surface of the island for the creature to hide.
And now, as if stirred up by the anger of the demoniacal old scientist in the swamp, a storm had broken over the fortress. The rain came down in torrents. Lightning zig-zagged its way across the heavens. The waves of the bay hurled themselves against the rock, white-capped and foaming, as if ambitious to tear it from its very foundations.
INSPECTOR JOHN RICKS had recovered from the effects of his experience in the swamp sufficiently to sit up in bed, although he was still too weak to be up and about. Cloistered like a monk in his cell, hearing the noise and the tumult going on about him, yet unable to participate in it, he had fretted like a fire horse, cursing the weakness that kept him down.
No one had appeared to inform him what was going on. He had heard the wild screams—had heard the rush of feet, the sound of shots. And, for the first time in his long career as a fighting policeman, he was being kept out of a battle.
Now, propped up in bed, he reached for the faithful pipe which lay on the table beside him, and jamming the bowl full of cut plug, prepared to light it.
A slight noise attracted his attention. It seemed to come from the embrasure, the window of which had been opened to admit air and, in the tumult and excitement h
ad not been closed again.
The walls of the fortress were at least five feet in thickness. The embrasure, therefore, formed a niche in the wall almost that deep.
Ricks glanced up.
Wide, staring eyes glared down at him!
John Ricks, knowing himself to be too weak to fight, was thoroughly frightened. The Zombi was squatting in the embrasure, his legs doubled under him, the gleaming knife, its blade still red with the blood of the murdered woman, in his hand. His glassy eyes were staring straight into those of the man on the bed.
“Concentrate!”
The word rang through Ricks’ brain. He remembered the battle that he and Holm had had with the Zombi in which the concentration of the young detective had halted the oncoming horde long enough for them to make their escape. He tried to bring his own brain to bear now against the malevolent monster. His florid face streamed with the cold sweat of the enormous inward struggle.
His battle was in vain. Slowly, its laggard muscles moving like the parts of a mechanical doll, the horrible thing dropped from the embrasure and moved across the room with the precision of a robot.
STRAIGHT toward the bedridden detective it came. There was no hatred or anger in its immobile face. And Ricks, frightened though he was—trying by every means at his command to will it to stop, yet realized that there was no animosity in the thing’s advance. It was merely obeying the will of the sinister old scientist. It was the instrument by which Death was carrying out his wild scheme to intimidate the world.
Ricks shouted for help. He knew when he did so that his voice would not carry beyond the heavy oaken door of his room. Yet he was panic stricken.
The Zombi halted beside the bed and leaned forward, its glassy eyes searching Ricks’ form as if seeking a spot in which to plunge the reeking knife. Terror-stricken though he was, the scene reminded the Inspector of a butcher he had once seen sizing up his dumb victim before the fatal stroke.
The Zombi stretched forth its left hand. Ricks felt the cold, clammy fingers clamp themselves about his throat. He knew that his time had come.