Free The Avenger 17 - Nevlo by Kenneth Robeson

Heaven!”
    The radio went dead, as if the giant’s explosive, horrified exclamation had blasted the tiny transmitter.

    In the refuse-littered yard, Smitty crouched in the shadow of the packing case and glared through the slit in the blanket into the basement. His tiny radio had been forgotten in the sight that met his eyes.
    “Another person coming into the basement,” he had said. Now this other person was in full view.
    Smitty saw a big-shouldered, bulky figure, dressed in cheap but fairly good clothing. The man swayed from side to side as he walked, with arms hanging low. He had the arm length and the walk of a gorilla.
    The man turned so that the giant could see his face.
    It was the face of a brute rather than a man. The eyebrows, ridged and heavy, made little pits of the black, dull eyes. The nose was flattened and smeared half to one side. The ears were masses of gristle with no resemblance whatsoever to human ears.
    The man even wore his clothes as if unaccustomed to such things, as a trained bear or a great ape might wear clothes. A gorilla of a creature! He made even the hoodlums in the cellar uneasy, Smitty could see. Two of them promptly stepped back, with their arms raised a bit, when he lunged a step toward them.
    But the brutish figure’s destination was not the men. He started toward the girl, heavy arms crooked out in a gesture so much like a wrestler’s that it would have been comical if it had not been so grim.
    “Is it a gorilla?” Smitty whispered to himself. But he knew the answer.
    It was a man, all right, inhuman as it appeared. It waddled with its wrestler’s posture toward the girl who lay bound and gagged . . .
    There was a ghost of sound behind Smitty. The giant turned swiftly and looked up.
    A man stood behind him with a crowbar in upraised hands, just ready to flail down on Smitty’s skull.
    Smitty, enormous as he was, looked like the type of person who would be so muscle-bound that he’d get in his own way if he tried to sit down. But he was not that way at all.
    For all his near seven feet of height and his almost three hundred pounds of brawn, he was nearly as lithe as Dick Benson himself. And he could move nearly as fast.
    Now, in the split second before that murderous bar could flail down, his huge right hand shot up, and his big body eeled to one side.
    The bar came down with dissipated force on his shoulder, instead of full strength on his hand. Under his colossal pads of muscles, he felt dull pain. And he didn’t like it.
    Meanwhile, his right hand had found its mark, which was the man’s throat.
    The man didn’t raise the bar again, nor did he make any noise, though doubtless he would have made a lot of strange and anguished noises if Smitty’s hand hadn’t been pressing his neck into a thing that could have been fitted by a size 10 collar.
    The bar dropped, and the man would have followed, save that Smitty had risen from his crouch and held him upright.
    A minute would have been enough. But Smitty, still angered by the stinging in his shoulder, held him for two. And when the man dropped, he fell in such a way that you knew he would never again rise under his own power. The Avenger never took a human life. But his aides did, now and then, when the provocation was sufficiently great.
    Smitty loped to the back door. It was open a crack. He bent over, so that his great height shouldn’t betray him, and became simply an anonymous shadow in the night.
    “Okay out there?” came a whisper from somebody peering out the slightly opened door. “Anybody say something? Or was it a cat?”
    So his exclamation at the sight of the warped figure entering the basement had given him away, Smitty gathered. It had been heard and a man sent to investigate. Well, he would be investigating the sulphur situation in hell at about this moment.
    “Okay out there, now,” he whispered back, truthfully enough.
    He opened the door, not too swiftly or urgently.
    It opened onto a pitch-black hall