one thing mattered. The girl! Mark had had more than his share of girls. He, Jarvis, was the one who should have her! He'd been deprived of his manhood long enough! His frenzied brain hunted a trick to gain his ends.

Mark's superior strength began to force Jarvis to give ground. Then a final blow sent him reeling, he reached out to break his fall, his hand closed on a rock. He threw it. Mark crashed to the ground, his knee smashed, his leg useless. Then the tomb stillness of the dead city took over. The dust settled slowly. Mark came to his feet.Jarvis was gone. Dragging his useless leg, Mark forced himself to crawl forward. Jarvis had to be stopped. Ahead, a shadow moved, and for a moment the moon threw the silhouette of a man against a cavernous opening in the debris. "Jarvis!"

An electric flash shattered the darkness. The jagged teeth of the bolt spit tongues of fire. Cordite mingled with the raw, nauseant, revolting smell of scorched flesh and hair. The figure tottered and fell into the black mouth of the cave. Then, as the flame faded, it lit up small bundles of charred bones near the fallen body.

There was a whir and a click of a mechanism. Fifteen feet away, Mark watched as the arm of a phonograph rose, moved slowly back to the starting point. Then the record began once more to grind out its death-trap melody.Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.

You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

 Prev. P 4/5 next