Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

Rock crunched and Doc loomed toward them from out of the murk.

"Foray was eminently successful?" Johnny suggested.

Doc nodded. "They are on the run."

"We better be, too!" Renny grumbled. "The whole top of that mountain's about due to blow off, if you ask me."

"It is becoming more threatening every minute," Doc admitted gravely. "Come on, we'll join the others."

But Doc's flanking party did not join the others. The others joined them. That is, part of the others did.

"Doc!" Monk and Ham roared together, as they came plunging out of the gloom.

"Here!" Doc called, sharply.

"The Count is gone!" Ham squalled.

"With Pat!" Monk bellowed.

"He cut his hands free on this glassy rock, I guess," Ham gasped. "And then he grabbed Pat!"

Monk howled in rage, "We couldn't shoot on account he held her in front of him."

"And in this dust and murk, he was out of sight in about 6 steps," Ham finished. "We tried to find him. But no luck."

"Go on to the pits," Doc directed. "Let me hunt Pat."

With a parting wave of his hand, the bronze man moved quickly away. He was out-of-sight in a few long strides.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

While Doc's aides raced for the honeycomb pits, the underground thunder sounded again. The rosy light glowing above the volcano crater expanded violently, flinging fiery streaks through the ashy gloom and disgorging a torrent of lavawhich cascaded in redstreams down the blunt mountainside.

"I said she was ready to blow," Renny grunted.

The geologist Johnny reassured them. "It would be excessively rare for the initial eruption to be of sufficient volume to inundate the plateau where the honeycomb pits are."

Long Tom gasped, "Look!"

"Blazes!" Monk blurted . "Run!"

The warning was hardly necessary. Oozing down a defile upon them came a mass of red, liquid lava . It was a moving serpent of liquid, superheated rock which — disgorged from the gutted Earth — had cascaded down the outside of the squat volcanic cone and was now seething forward. Heat in gaseous billows fanned out ahead of the molten avalanche. Doc's men felt the withering blast as they climbed in a frenzy toward higher ground.

"Holy cow!" Renny gulped. "That was close!"

"And how are we gonna get back across that strip of melted Hells?" Monk wanted to know.

"We're only cut off on one side," Long Tom pointed out. Nearing the pits, Doc's aides fired warning shots. The overseers — having no firearms — did not contest their advance. Already filled with dread at sight of the volcanic activity, the overseers shouted in panic and surrendered. Scattering over the entire front, Doc's aides forced the lizard-collared men into the pits to unlock the diggers.

So furiously the rescue work proceeded — so intent were Doc's companions in effecting the release of every last one of the miserable fellows chained in the pits — that they were unaware for a time of a frightful trap closing in on them.

It was Monk who first became aware of their predicament.

"Blazes!" he roared. "There's lavaon both sides of us!"

It was true. The seething lavaflood had swelled and curled out in a broad path on each side of the plateau, straddling it. The only escape from the plateau of the honeycomb pits was by the sea.

Renny cracked his huge fists together helplessly.

"The sharks!" he gulped. "Brothers, we're really jammed!"

Even as he spoke, the lava rivulets seemed to grow like a doughnut swelling in a cauldron of boiling fat. Fed by a continuous fiery flow from the spewing volcano mouth, the red ropesswelled and swelled, pressing inward, threatening to engulf the entire honeycombed plateau.

When Doc Savage took the trail of the count and Pat, his gold -flecked eyes ferreted out minute clues: a bit of shoe-crunched volcanic glass … a bruised leaf … and missing barbs from a form of jumping cactus which grew rankly in the lava crevices.

Mounting upward toward the smoke-belching crater, Doc came shortly across in the crushed volcano glass indisputable evidence that the Count Ramadanoff had met brother Boris's party and joinedforces with them.

Trails of the brothers Ramadanoff led up-and-up the squat cone of the smoking volcano, headed directly for the fiery crater.

The trail grew fresher. Doc was high on the stubby cone of the mountain when the lava burst from the crater in an especially violent eruption. Flowing down in a mountain-high waterfall of fire in broad channels to the left of Doc's position, the liquid rock — like the spawn of many glass furnaces dumped together — sprayed heat and light through the sooty air.

Then above him, Doc glimpsed those he trailed. A yellowish pall of smoke smudged them from view. But the glimpse had been enough. The bronze man left the trail and lunged upward on a shortcut which would allow him to intercept his enemies.

It was hard going over old, lava-flow formation. The stuff was deceptive. Twice the ground gave way beneath Doc's plunging feet and precipitated him into head-high ruts. Needle-pointed lava showered down upon him.

The ground under his feet became hotter as he proceeded. Oozing from fumaroles, noxious gases made breathing a hazard. Nearing his quarry and to avoid being detected, Doc half-slid, half-climbed into one of the fuming cinder caves and groped his way across the bottom between smoking boles gleaming a raw red colorand noisily horrible with the suck and gurgle of fluid rock below the cinder crust.

With lids slitted to prevent his eyeballs from being scorched, he waded through that withering heat and climbed the opposite slope of the clinker pit, maneuvering for a position which would bring him out above his enemies.

Doc gained the position … and then lost everything in the moment which should have been his greatest triumph.

The air in the deep fumarole that he had just traversed was impregnated with an insidious gas — carbon monoxide, colorless & odorless — making its presence felt only by its sudden sapping of a man's strength. Doc had been aware of the possibility of this gas in the smoky atmosphere. Making his painful way across the scoria or metallic rock froth, he had breathed no more than was imperative.

But even this little was too much. He felt a "giddiness" settle upon him. His legs grew leaden. Taxing his reserve strength to the utmost, he reeled to the top of the pit and then plunged down with an avalanche of needle-pointed clinkers sliding in a brittle wash behind him.

With his eyes momentarily sealed shut from the stinging reek of volcanic gases, his reeling steps had carried him onto a bubble-glass surface which had crashed under his weight, plunging him down a tortuous slope almost on the heads of his enemies. He was half-buried in the downsurge of the metallic rock.

Before he could extricate himself, Boris Ramadanoff's revolver muzzle was a burning coldness against the back of his neck.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

The Count stood in front of Doc with his bearded head thrown back and ghoulish mirth issuing in loud gobblings from his mouth.

"Everything … it is perfect!"Ramadanoff roared. "Better even than we could have planned it. Is it not so, brother Boris?"

Boris Ramadanoff nodded emphatically.

Pat Savage — imprisoned between two of the lizard-collared slaves — stared speechlessly, her face taut.