The Frosted Death

CHAPTER X Hope — And Defeat

The curse of the frosted death was spreading, slowly but inexorably.

It spread slowly because every health and law department in the city was concentrating on checking it and quarantining those even suspected of having been in contact with it.

It spread inexorably because such a deadly thing couldn’t be quite corked up.

Here a woman, servant to August Taylor who had touched her master when he called in the early morning for help, died with helpless doctors in attendance. There a man, boarding at the home of the detective who’d touched Braun, and who had been with his friend in death, saw hands and arms turn to snow limbs. In another home, over a big delicatessen store with a foreign-sounding name on it, half a dozen men suffered and died of the frosted death without daring to call doctors at all.

These latter were those of the crowd that had jumped Smitty and Benson in the laboratory. They hadn’t been told the full nature of their task and had ignorantly touched the dead pig.

An epidemic slowly, ominously getting started that would be worse than the Black Plague of the Middle Ages if it were not stopped. It was like a black storm cloud — no, a white, smothering one — that was slowly spreading a pall over the city and obscuring the clear and healthy sun.

While all this was going on, a man sat at the soda fountain in MacMurdie’s drugstore, and methodically and endlessly consumed maplenut sundaes.

The man was a tall, gangling Negro, and so sleepy-looking that he was instantly nicknamed Sleepy.

“Ah’ll take ’nuther one,” Sleepy said. The boy behind the fountain looked at him in awe. He had had four maple-nut sundaes already. And his long, skinny, Negroid body was so thin you’d have thought they would show.

“They’s sho’ good,” the colored man added.

He didn’t have to talk like that. Joshua Elijah Newton was an honor graduate from a famous college. He could talk as excellent English as any professor, and he did when among friends. But when with strangers or in public places, Josh talked and acted as people expect Negroes to talk and act. It was good protective coloration.

“It’s only when a houn’ dawg barks that folks pay attention to him,” he often said. “When he sleeps in the sun, they let him alone.” For Josh was a dusky philosopher with a deep store of wisdom.

Furthermore, Joshua Elijah Newton, no matter what he looked like, was one of The Avenger’s aides — and an invaluable one. Josh and his pretty wife, Rosabel, had helped in many a desperate fight with criminals too brilliant for the regular police to handle.

It was Josh’s habit, when waiting for orders, to hang around in Mac’s drugstore. And while he was there, he saw no reason for not indulging in his consuming passion — maplenut sundaes. He downed them till, as Mac sometimes said: “Mon, ’tis a wonder ye don’t look like a string of beads with all those sundaes in ye, one on top of the other.”

Mac appeared at the door of the rear room now.

“Josh,” he called softly.

There were no customers in the store. If there had been, Mac would not have openly called and Josh would not have openly entered the laboratory. As it was, Sleepy eyed the last third of the maplenut sundae sadly, and left it to go to Mac. Mac shut the big lab door behind them. The dour Scot was red-eyed from continuous work.

“I’ve got it!” he said.

Josh instantly shed his sleepy look. His eyes shone with clear intelligence — and with an admiration too great to be put into words.

“You have? You’re sure?”

“I’m sure!” said Mac.

“If that is true, you should have statues put up in your honor all over New York! You’re a great man, Mac.”

“There’ll be no statues, because no one’ll ever know,” Mac said Wearily. “As for bein’ great — I’d call it just stubborn, that’s all.”

Josh looked at a dozen cuts of meat on Mac’s lab workbench. Each was covered with the powdered sugar that spelled death — except the last one. That one was fresh and clear, without the white mold.

“You’ve found the exact nature of the stuff?” he said.

“Yes,” nodded Mac.

A fine brain had been snuffed out when that first doctor, the one who attended John Braun, died. He had guessed immediately the type of thing that had smothered Braun. He had deduced the species of fungus, if not the exact type.

“It’s a new thing, Josh,” Mac said. “But very, very close to a well-known one. Selectively cultivated from it, I should say. In all but appearance and action, the mold is identical with saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast ferment.”

“So the most harmless things,” observed Josh, “can be turned into the deadliest weapons — if the minds of men desire it.”

“Yes! Here’s an instance of it.”

Josh stared at the one piece of meat not covered by the mold.

“And you’ve actually found the antidote for it? Something to stop it?”

Mac nodded, too tired for superfluous words.

“Then we must start phoning at once — give the formula to every doctor and laboratory in town—”

“That’s the catch,” said Mac. “There’s no formula to give. This antidote isn’t a chemical to be mixed up, Josh. It’s a living organism, itself. A kind of parasite that attacks the white mold and devours it. Having devoured it, the parasite withers and dies. It can be cultivated swiftly — as swiftly as the mold. But only from its own kind.”

He pointed to two small jars, full of blue-green stuff.

“That’s the stuff that will do the trick. Applied to a victim of the frosted death, it will eat out the mold in half an hour. There’s enough in those two jars to give a bit to every laboratory in the state. From that bit, each can cultivate his own supply.”

“Two jars?” said Josh, eyes narrowing.

“Yes. You know why. One for each of us to carry to Bleek Street, to the chief, for distribution. Are the men still near the store?”

Josh nodded.

He had been sitting sleepily at the soda fountain devouring maplenut sundaes, not alone to be on hand if needed — but, also, to watch from the window.

He had been in the store for three hours. And all of that time there had been several foreign-looking men idly propping up building walls, nearby.

Somebody knew, somehow, that experiments with the white stuff were being conducted in the back of the store. And somebody had sent a guard to surround the place.

“A jar for each of us to carry,” Mac repeated to the tall, gangling Negro. “One of us must get through! No matter how many try to stop us.”

Josh nodded, eyes clear and alert. Then they clouded.

“You have worked a lot with this deadly stuff,” he said. “Are you sure you’re all right? Uncontaminated?”

“I’m all right,” Mac said. “The stuff’s funny. The spores will get to any meat within ten yards. But the developed mold won’t leave that meat, even for other meat, unless actually carried off by touch. And ye can be sure I’ve not touched the frosted death! I’ve even worn medicated felt pads up my nostrils so I won’t take a chance on inhaling any. No, I’m all right. And so will the city be — if one of us gets through with the antidote.”

“This is something well worth dying for,” Josh said.

“We can’t afford to die! We’ve got to get through, I tell ye!”

“I’ll go out the front way—”

“That’s the most dangerous,” Mac argued. “I’ll take that way.”

“It’s least dangerous,” said Josh, who could be as twisty as a Philadelphia lawyer when he wanted to gain a point. And he wanted badly to gain this — to take the most risk. Mac was more valuable than he was, he thought. “In broad daylight, on a crowded street — who would try anything?”

Mac wasn’t quite taken in, but there was no time for arguments.

“All right,” he said. “You go out the front way, and I’ll take the rear. But—get through!”

Josh picked up his small jar as if it had contained gems. But even that was a poor simile. The contents of that jar were many times more priceless than a pint of diamonds.

He went out the laboratory door into the store. With the moment of his exit, he became sleepy-looking again. He shuffled, looking as if he were too lazy to lift his huge feet clear of-the floor. He ambled to the street door as if he had nothing on his rather empty mind but his black, kinky hair. He stepped out onto the sidewalk—

Josh Newton could fight like a black panther, and was as fearless and fast as one. But he was undone by his natural conviction that no group of men would try anything fantastic at the store entrance, right on crowded Sixth Avenue, in clear daylight. They’d follow him, of course, he reasoned, and try for him in a less conspicuous spot. And that was all right. If they followed him, Mac would have a better chance.

He hadn’t realized the caliber and fanaticism of the men they were up against. And so he didn’t have a chance at all!

The moment he stepped from the store, a man who had been standing flat against the wall clubbed him down with a gun barrel. Josh hadn’t even had time to see him out of the corners of his eyes.

There were dozens of people within a few yards. Most of them saw the act. Most of them yelled or screamed. The man didn’t seem to mind it a bit. As if he were alone on a desert island, he calmly gathered Josh up and carried him toward a sedan that swirled with machinelike precision to the curb.

Three other men, who had been the loungers noticed by Josh at the fountain, came at once to the car. They didn’t pay any attention to the crowd, either, till two men more daring than most in such emergencies, tried to hold them while yelling at a cop down the block. Then the men with the phlegmatic, foreign-featured faces coolly clubbed them down, then went on to the car.

The door slammed with a thump, and the sedan drove off. The patrolman, taking in the situation at a glance, knelt and sent shot after shot at the car. It didn’t even hasten its pace. It was as bulletproofed as a tank. It went around the corner and was gone — with Josh and one of the two jars that meant salvation for a great city.

Mac, mercifully, didn’t know of the swift tragedy in the front of the store. He was going through a tunnel from the rear.

The tunnel, a corridor in the basement of the building behind the store, opened onto Waverly Place, around the corner from Sixth Avenue. It was customarily used by The Avenger when he came to see Mac; so few knew of it.

The men loitering near its street door didn’t actually know of it. They were just part of a corps that was acting with all the military precision of an army in battle.

Yes, there were men near the door of the corridor. But there were also men clear around on Fifth Avenue, and more men were stationed on the street north of Waverly Place.

The entire block had been surrounded, coldly, methodically, to guard against just such an exit as Mac was trying to make from some unknown, secret areaway.

However, because the men nearest the exit didn’t know of its precise meaning, Mac got a little farther than Josh had. He stepped from the tunnel and got twenty feet toward a cab when the men saw him. Then, without a sound, they rushed him.

Mac had seen a lot of criminal activities. But he had never seen anything like this. For it exceeded the merely criminal. It entered the realm of war, of the military. These men weren’t just a gang, they were parts of a machine, with no thought for themselves at all if only their objective could be gained.

Two of the three reached him at the same time. Mac knocked one down with his bony fist that was like a mallet swung at the end of his long arm. He tripped the second — and staggered back to his knees under the impact of the third.

He was up again as if on springs. He managed to elude clutching, clawing hands, and raced toward the other side of the street, and down toward Fifth Avenue. He changed his course in the middle of the street and doubled back again.

One of the square-shouldered men with close-cropped hair was waiting for him on the opposite sidewalk. As Mac turned, the man whipped out a gun, and braced it on his left forearm, evidently deciding that bullets, would be the best remedy in the situation.

At this moment a plain-clothes man, who had seen the lawless attack with mouth open in incredulity at its utter boldness, hit the man in a flying tackle. The gunman went down with his gun flying from him.

Mac didn’t even see that. He was too busy trying to thread a way past two more men between him and Fifth Avenue, while behind him the original three closed in.

“ ’Tis an arrrmy,” he groaned to himself.

In the distance, clear at the corner of Fifth, a cop appeared and began running to help. A man down there stepped out, and with no expression on his face, clubbed the cop down.

Mac began to feel utter hopelessness. In the face of this kind of organization, he began to feel that a dozen cops, wading in shooting, couldn’t save him. And he was pretty close to right!

However, he couldn’t be downed, now. Not with the precious jar of antidote in his possession. He hit the two men ahead of him, running at full speed. One whirled to the curb and sprawled at full length. The other was knocked out of the way.

Still another man stepped from a building entrance; one Mac never did see. With the grim coolness of a military machine instead of a human being, he clubbed the Scotchman. Mac fell! Before he had hit, two of the robotlike men had him by ankles and shoulders and were carrying him toward a sedan. A car that sagged on its tires like an army tank.

The second jar of antidote was gone!