Published by arrangement with the Olympia Press.

Author: Marshall Macao (pseud.)

About: Plague! K'ing Against The Most Fiendish Plot Ever Invented!

K'ing's pursuit of the treacherous Kak drives him west to the highlands of the New World, where the Red Circle's plans for world dominion have taken a ghastly turn. In the mountains of Bolivia thousands of peasants are dying horrible deaths—victims of a bizarre pestilence carefully nurtured by renegade scientist's in Zedak's underworld laboratories.

Savagely battling the seen and the unseen, K'ing meets his most awful challenge!

Excerpt:

The other sentry came within clear sight of K'ing—but he saw the two unconscious bodies and heard the rock fall and he turned toward it, kneeling and unshouldering his gun in panic.

The soldiers had not expected anyone to try to break into the interdicted area. They were there to keep people from breaking out. Now the sentry opened fire after the dangerous plague-carrier he imagined had escaped. He screamed for help. K'ing, covered by the noise, wound his way swiftly through the last strand of wire and into the cover of a bush.

It was growing light by the time he reached the outskirts of Guaqui. He had not seen a single soldier since he had passed through the army lines. He had skirted isolated Indian dwellings and now, as he neared the small but modern port town, he knew that if the government had ever made an attempt to keep order in Guaqui it had given up and withdrawn its soldiers to the perimeter. He wondered about Dr. Perina and his aides and his laboratory. Where were they?

The surface of Lake Titicaca, 40 miles wide and 140 long, spread out before him. The terrain began to change. The flatness of the Altiplano gave way to terraced fields as the land sloped toward the highest navigable lake in the world—3,500 square miles of diaphanous blue water more than twelve thousand feet above sea level. Fields of barley, potatoes, wheat, and maize stretched out around farmhouses crowded with the dark green of the quinoa and the qurshuara.

In ordinary times K'ing would have seen, as daylight dawned fully, women spinning as they watched flocks of sheep and llamas, shepherd boys playing on pipes, Indians tending to their irrigation ditches and plowing their fields with ancient wooden plows. But now all was strangely silent.

He skirted the edges of the first farms and saw no signs of life. But then, as he continued downward the cluster of buildings at the tip of a wide inland-reaching arm of the lake, he heard from a farmhouse a quarter of a mile ahead a long, searing, agonized wail.

The sound hung in the air as though it would never stop. It pierced K'ing's soul as though it carried with it the essence of all the world's most horrible nightmares of pain and suffering and grief.

He made for the farmhouse.

He reached it and swung open its rickety gate of gnarled wood lashed together with reeds. He walked up the bare dirt of its front path, the sound of the wail drawing him like a magnet of terror and fascination.

He pushed the front door open.