The red menace 3, p.13
The Red Menace #3, page 13
14
The Red Menace stole across the broad, manicured lawns that stretched out for ten acres around the slumbering home of Petit Perfumes, Incorporated.
The grass was damp from recent watering and there were floodlights positioned in beds of flowers throughout the grounds. The lights were there both to accent the landscaping and to keep any ne’er-do-wells from approaching the building unseen.
The floodlights would have been effective against an ordinary intruder, but the Red Menace was far from ordinary. There were dark areas in those spots between beams where the light did not fully fall, and even darker zones directly behind each bulb. It was to these areas that the Red Menace gravitated, slipping along from shadow to shadow until he at last reached the gleaming glass building.
The plants near the building had been watered too, and residue mist from the many sprinklers still glistened on the first-floor windows.
The light posts in the front parking area brightly illuminated the blacktop, which was still warm from the day’s scorching sun. Steam rose from the asphalt. The main entrance was too open and well-lit for him to gain access there. No matter. He would not have announced his presence by marching up and knocking on the front door.
The Menace moved swiftly around the building, his cloak deflecting all light back to any eye that might be watching, rendering him invisible to normal human sight.
There were no cars in the front lot, no sounds from the darkened building. No eyes to watch the Menace as he slipped up the rear fire escape.
At the top, he hopped onto the metal railing, grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled himself up and over. A locked trap door was no more an effective barrier than all the locks of San Jacinto State Prison, and a minute later he was slipping through air-conditioned corridors on the building’s second floor.
On many walls were pictures of Cassandra Vox smiling next to yellow bottles of Petit Perfumes. There were full body shots of the actress sprawled on sofas and on zebra print rugs, as well as extreme close-ups that had airbrushed away ten years. He wondered if Cassandra was home right now staring at one of the images and wishing there was some magical, Dorian Gray way she could switch places with her photographic self.
His research had turned up a splashy magazine spread on the perfume company, which had included several glossy pictures of the building. Leslie Petit had been featured in some of the photos, with some shots taken in the perfumer’s office. The Menace oriented himself inside the building by keeping a careful eye on the landscape outside the big windows, which had been visible as well in the background of some of the photographs of Leslie Petit. The pictures he’d studied gave the path to Petit’s office.
The Menace had hoped to find information that would lead him to Hallifax and which might tell him what exactly the substance was that the madman was releasing on the public. Instead, he found sitting in the dim light of a lone desk lamp a thin man in a pair of white slacks and a powder blue shirt open to the navel.
Leslie Petit drummed the flawlessly manicured nails of one hand on the gleaming glass desktop while he spoke into his pink Princess desk phone.
“…I don’t even really care at this point, sweetie, provided it’s someplace deliciously decadent. No, a cruise, definitely a cruise. Oh, no, darling, I’ve simply had a lifetime of aggravation these past two months. Must, simply must get away. Well, you set that up too. You know the kind I like. Young. Yes, I knew you’d appreciate it, dearie. You still have my credit card info? Right then, tah-tah.”
Petit slipped the phone into its cradle and let loose a hissing sigh.
“Ugh, what a simply ghastly little man,” he said to what he thought was an empty office. He snapped up straight in his chair when the shadows answered.
“Try looking in a mirror sometime.”
The largest, darkest shadow seemed somehow to move, and then it had taken on the amorphous appearance of a faintly glowing red ghost, and then it quickly resolved itself into the brilliant red shape of a man in a cape and mask standing directly before the glass and chrome desk of Leslie Petit. In addition to the executioner’s hood pulled down over his eyes, the man in the cloak wore a clear plastic mask over his mouth and nose.
“I’m not usually big on schoolyard taunts,” the Red Menace said, “but, we’re all alone and, hey, they can’t all be home runs. So, Charles Nelson Reilly, you want to tell me where I can find R. Gunn Hallifax? And don’t tell me he’s visiting his winter place in the Horsehead Nebula, or I’m using your bad nose job as a glass cutter.”
The Menace tapped one gloved finger on the glass surface of Petit’s desk.
Petit’s initial shock that an intruder had somehow gotten into his office was overcome by the even greater horror that some maniac off the street had detected the delicate pruning Dr. Murray Shwartzbaum had given his perfect proboscis.
“You’re a beast,” Petit wailed, a delicate hand fluttering to his nose.
The Red Menace reached across the desk, and Petit recoiled.
“All right, all right!” the perfumer cried. “I don’t know where he is. Wait here long enough and he’ll show up, that’s all I do know. He’s taken over my business, taken over my life. All I wanted to do is sell perfume, and now I’ve got dead bodies piling up to my pretty little hips, and men in masks sneaking up on me in the dead of night.”
“If you can’t give me Hallifax, you’re going to tell me everything you know about that poison he’s dumping all over the country.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” Petit said.
The Menace was in no mood for games. Mouth curling to cold fury behind his plastic oxygen mask, he began to march around the desk.
Petit recoiled, drawing himself to a near fetal position in his chair. And when his sparkling ruby loafers fled the floor, the Red Menace saw through the glass desk the small red button that had recently been installed through the shag carpet.
And even as the Menace wondered how long ago Leslie Petit pressed the emergency alarm that had been hidden under the toe of his left shoe, the door to the office was bursting open behind him and the glaring lights overhead were flashing on full.
“Hands! Show me hands now!”
The Red Menace whirled to find that he was facing four armed members of the Realtopian cult. One was the young man Cassandra Vox had kicked in the groin at the downtown L.A. recruitment center.
The man seemed unaware that he was standing next to a life-size cardboard standee of Cassandra holding yet another yellow bottle of perfume. His attention as well as that of his four companions was focused on the glowing red figure that was now fully visible in the bright, unforgiving office light next to Leslie Petit’s desk.
The men leveled automatics on the Red Menace, who offered his hands outside his red cloak, but only at chest level with palms out.
“What’s the problem now, Petit?” a voice from outside the office snarled. “The High Star Admiral installed that button for his own use, not for you to—”
Junior Grade Ensign Stan Morrix of the Realtopian Church of America stopped dead before he’d even reached the four armed guards.
Morrix traced the contours of the Red Menace’s iridescent form with eyes wide and jaw slack. He took a reflexive step back into the safety of the hallway. He gawped, he stammered, after seconds of struggling he finally found his tongue.
“Are you from the Rectium Swarm?” Morrix breathed.
“No,” the Red Menace replied, “but I’m pretty sure the chorus girl in Dorothy’s ruby slippers is their leader.” He stabbed a thumb at Petit.
The perfumer had pulled a pearl handled revolver from a cabinet behind his desk. Petit gripped the weapon two-fisted, and was trying to aim it at the Menace, but his hands were shaking so much it sounded as if the gun would rattle apart.
“But you must be,” Morrix insisted, nodding to himself. “That’s what this has been about all along. He knew. Of course the High Star Admiral knew all along.”
“Who is he?” one of the armed cult members asked.
The Menace could see this one man had received weapons training outside the cult. The four men stood just inside the office, and while the man spoke to Morrix, who was still standing cautiously in the hall, his gun remained level and his eyes never strayed from his target. He had short blond hair, a stocky build in a yellow short-sleeved jersey, and everything about the way he carried himself screamed “cop.”
“It’s … it’s an advanced level, you haven’t reached it yet,” Morrix said, with an excited wave of his hand. “In the end times, the highest-level priests of the Rectium Swarm on Earth will infect a single host. An enemy, a beast who will unite the armies of evil against the High Star Admiral.”
“Like the devil?” one of the other cultists asked.
“Don’t be silly, Jenkix,” Morrix snapped.
“Hello! Over here!” Petit called from across the room. “Can we just please get Mister Lone Ranger out of here? Thank you!” His hands continued to shake like mad.
“I’m all for that,” the Red Menace said agreeably. “Why don’t I just hop on my magic space scooter and fly back to Planet Sanity?”
He moved scarcely an inch, but the cop cult member coolly trained his barrel on the Menace’s chest, directly at his heart. The man did not flinch.
“You’re not leaving,” Morrix said. “We’re delivering you to the High Star Admiral. He’ll want you to bring a message to Washington.”
“Do I look like Western Union, Froot Loops?” the Red Menace asked. “Get on your unicycle and peddle it there yourself.”
The Menace had already appraised the situation, and it was only going to end one of two ways. Their leader had just told his insane foot soldiers that the intruder in the mask was the repository of all evil on Earth. The Menace had faced down enough killers with guns to know the look in the cop cultist’s watery blue eyes. There was no way that man was going to let the Red Menace walk out of the office alive.
That was only the first way the standoff might end. The Red Menace decided to go with what was behind door number two.
“These space monkeys don’t think much of you, Tinkerbell,” the Menace said to Leslie Petit, “if they only gave you a cigarette lighter for protection.”
Petit was still only a few feet away from the Menace and thus closer to danger than all the Realtopians. He could not believe they had left him standing inches away from the maniac burglar with no real protection. The rattling gun twisted sharply in his hand as he looked down in abject horror at the object he thought had been a weapon, and he promptly did precisely what the Red Menace expected him to do. He tested it.
The perfume manufacturer squeezed the trigger on what turned out to be an actual gun, the explosion from the weapon thundered through the big office, and across the room one of the armed men who had been unfortunate enough to be in the line of fire spun around from the meaty slap of a bullet striking his shoulder. Blood splattered the rest of the men and splashed across the smiling cardboard face of Cassandra Vox. The men jumped back as their luckless companion slammed into the wall and slid to the floor.
The cop was the first to recover, but by then the Menace had already grabbed Petit by the forearm and aimed the pearl-handled revolver. Two quick shots caught the cop cult member in the chest and the man tumbled back into the hallway, nearly wiping out Stan Morrix who jumped back from the falling body.
The remaining two gunmen panicked and began firing wildly. Bullets chewed the walls and one pinged off the surface of Petit’s desk, cracking the glass and sending a spider web of fissures off in a dozen directions.
But by this time the Red Menace’s own weapon was in hand.
The Menace did not panic, did not waste a dozen shots. The gunmen stood their ground, while the Menace crouched, rolled, avoided their volley and squeezed off two easy rounds. The bullets found their marks and the last men standing tumbled over one another on the way to the floor. One slammed back into the cardboard standee of Cassandra Vox and the movie starlet’s life-size picture crumpled beneath him. The two men landed in a jumble of twisted arms and legs.
The Menace heard a sucking gurgle to his left and when he glanced over he saw that Petit had not been as lucky as he.
A wild shot from the Realtopian gunmen had caught the perfumer in the soft tissue two inches above his sternum. Half of Leslie Petit’s throat was gone, and blood pumped from raw flesh, staining his powder blue shirt. Petit’s hands clutched his neck in a vain attempt to stem the flow of the river of crimson that poured from the wound.
Leslie Petit’s eyes grew wide, there was a final desperate sucking from the open hole in his throat, and he pitched forward onto his desk. The web of cracks from the ricochet that had killed him split open wide and Petit fell straight through to the carpet. He landed unmoving in a hail of a million shards of shattering glass.
The Red Menace left the dead and dying to bleed out onto the shag carpet and raced out into the hallway.
Stan Morrix was gone, but the Menace could hear the sound of fleeing footsteps racing desperately down the corridor to the right. He took off at a sprint after Morrix.
“Emergency! Emergency! Red Level One Emergency!” he could hear the Realtopian screaming.
There came the sound of shattering glass up ahead, followed by the flash of newly installed emergency lights on the walls high up near the ceiling. A whining “whoop-whoop” siren blared throughout the Petit Perfumes building, similar to the klaxon on a submarine. Lights throughout the complex came on full, and the Red Menace knew that he’d lost all hope of stealing in and out of the place undetected.
Around a corner, he caught a glimpse of Morrix ducking down another corridor. The Menace felt the crunch of thin glass underfoot as he ran and noted the jagged glass still remaining over a recessed emergency switch in the wall. There were fresh pencil marks over the older paint on the wall, and as he raced up to the adjoining corridor he wondered what else the Realtopians had recently installed in the building.
The Red Menace turned the corner and saw the looming shapes of many men an instant before the volley of gunfire screamed down the hallway.
During the split-second between the time he saw the Realtopian guards and the instant they pulled their triggers, he redirected his forward momentum.
It was clumsy, it wasn’t pretty, and he slammed his shoulder hard when it struck the floor, but at the last possible instant he avoided running up the corridor. The two halls met as a capitol T, with the Realtopians down the stem. The Menace remained at the top of the cross, landing on his side and sliding to safety as automatic gunfire rained hell from out the open mouth of the corridor.
He scurried to his rear end, planted his back safely against the wall and let the shooters exhaust their ammunition. Once the gunfire died to a trickle, he took out his own gun, flipped the dial on the butt and fired a single oxygen compressed round down the adjoining corridor.
There were shouts, then confusion, then an explosion that belched dust and flame from the mouth of the hallway.
The Menace rolled back to his feet and darted down the hall.
He had only taken out the nearest men. The bloodied bodies of five Realtopians lay twisted in the wreckage of the hallway. The five who remained alive staggered back in a panic, choking on dust. Two dropped their weapons as they clutched their throats and gasped for breath. At the rear of the pack was Morrix, whose eyes went wide when he saw the masked man stepping unharmed through the carnage.
“The mask! Get his oxygen mask!” Morrix screamed, just before he turned tail and raced like a frightened rabbit through the nearest door.
The four remaining men wheeled on the Red Menace.
One who was still armed raised his weapon. The Menace grabbed his hand and slammed it into the forehead of the next Realtopian in line. Gun met temple with a violent crack, and the man went down in a heap. The Realtopian whose gun had just clubbed to unconsciousness one of his own compatriots didn’t have time to realize what had happened before a sharp elbow shot back into his nose. With a spurt of crimson and a horrid crunch of bone, he joined his friend on the floor.
Before the Menace could deal with the remaining two, he felt a strong hand grab at his face and tear at the plastic oxygen mask. The small tank clipped beneath his cape came after it, drawn by the connecting plastic tube and nylon tendrils.
“Hah!” the Realtopian shouted, holding the clear plastic mask above his head and waving it like a bloody shirt.
His short-lived triumph ended with four knuckles to the throat and a hard fist in the solar plexus. The man doubled over, his wide-open face met a sharply rising knee, and he went down for the count. The mask and small tank fell out of his hand.
The Menace did not have time to retrieve the oxygen mask before it rolled beneath the charging heel of the last standing Realtopian. The Menace heard the sound of cracking plastic.
The last man was still armed, but clearly terrified. Everything had happened so fast. The sudden screech of the invasion siren, Junior Grade Ensign Morrix running and shouting, the masked man appearing at the end of the hallway, the gunfire, the explosion; suddenly the man in the mask in the midst of the Realtopian guards. But it was all down to him now. He would be the hero who stopped the Rectium Swarm on Earth. The final soldier threw aside his fear, raised his gun and let out a howl of vicious triumph.
The Red Menace shot the last man dead and ran through the door through which Morrix had fled.
There was a second door just inside the first. Inside the hall was the scent of freshly cut lumber, and the Menace wondered if the whole building smelled of it. He had been wearing his oxygen mask until then and had been unaware of it before now. The emergency switches and lights in the hallways and the silent alarm in Petit’s office suggested that much work had been done around the building lately.
The second door was very much like those on a submarine, and the Menace had to duck to pass through it. He found himself in a glass-lined corridor above the Petit Perfumes test labs.
