“C’mon, get in!”
“What for?” Flagg asked.
“There’s going to be a lot of explaining to do to the doctors, and you’re part of it. Now, you gonna get in or do I make you get in?”
Reassuming his tough-guy role, Flagg pretended he was dusting some dirt from Paul’s shoulder. “What’s wrong, Tyler? Worried about a little insurance claim on Daddy’s car? Maybe I will come along, just to make sure you don’t lay the whole thing off on me.”
Meg stuck her head out the window. “Are you two done? Will you hurry? We’ve got an emergency here!”
Paul circled around and got in the driver’s seat. When he slammed the door, he saw that Brian had pushed Meg over and was sitting beside her, closing the door behind him.
“Hey, Flagg! Get in the back,” Paul demanded.
“What?” he said. “Hell, I ain’t sitting in the backseat with that thing on the Can Man’s hand!”
Flagg stretched out and draped his hand over the back of Meg’s seat. He smiled at Paul. “Whenever you’re ready, pal.”
Gritting his teeth, Paul turned the engine over, stuck the car in gear, and got going.
He drove fast and he drove well, as Meg guided and Brian explained how he’d just been fixing his bike when he’d bumped into the Can Man, totally out of his mind.
“He was trying to hack his hand off with this hand ax. You shoulda seen it!” he said.
Meg shuddered. “I’m really glad I didn’t.”
“Yeah, so I tried to stop him, but I when I got a gander at the stuff on his hand, well, that kind of took the wind outta my sails. So then, he just took off, with me chasin’ him. All in all I guess it turned out for the best. You guys might not have stopped if he hadn’t run right in front of you.”
“I just hope that the doctors at the clinic can help him,” said Meg, looking back at the old man in the backseat.
“Yeah! I mean, who’s gonna take care of Morgan City’s can problem if the Can Man kicks the bucket?” said Flagg.
The Aubrey Daniels Medical Clinic was a flat long brick building just outside of Morgan City on a fairly isolated stretch of road. An ambulance sat in the driveway, beside a parking lot empty except for two cars. Paul drove right up to the front of the building and, with the help of Brian Flagg, hustled the Can Man—still wrapped in the blanket, his eyes blank and glassy—into the glaring strip lighting and linoleum of the emergency room.
The place was deserted except for the night nurse, who sat at her station absorbed in some paperwork and hardly noticed the new arrivals.
Paul left the other two to keep the Can Man upright and went to the desk, trying to get the nurse’s attention.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“One moment,” she said. She wore black glasses around a pinched face and her hair was tied into a bun above the matronly bulges in a starched white uniform. She was working intently on some kind of report, scribbling onto a yellow manila folder. Paul impatiently tapped on the counter, then looked back behind him.
A strand of drool was rolling from the Can Man’s mouth onto the blanket.
“Now, how may I help you?” the nurse asked, putting the folder away and finally deigning to look at Paul.
Paul pointed back at the blanketed old man. “This guy needs a doctor right away.”
“He’s got something on his hand,” said Meg. “Some kind of acid or something.”
The nurse didn’t even look at the man. “Does he have Blue Cross?”
“I don’t think so,” Meg said, clearly flustered at the question.
“Medical insurance of any kind?”
“I don’t believe this shit,” said Flagg, muttering under his breath.
“Ma’am, this is the Can Man. He probably checks this place out once in a while, picking up discarded cans. He does a service to you guys. And he needs help!” Paul said.
For the first time the nurse looked directly at the man. She wrinkled her nose at the smell, as the Can Man trembled beneath the blanket, swaying on weak legs. She pressed a buzzer.
“The doctor on duty is busy with another patient right now,” she explained.
Almost immediately a bulky male orderly with a crew cut answered her call. She turned to him. “Willie, would you put this gentleman in number three, please?”
Willie nodded and took the Can Man from Meg and Flagg’s grasp and steered him to a rolling gurney. He picked the guy up and laid him down on the gurney, as if he were a sack of cotton. The Can Man began to whimper fearfully, his feverish eyes focusing on Brian Flagg.
“Take it easy, old dude,” said Flagg softly. “These guys are gonna fix you right up.”
Paul watched as the old man turned and looked up at Flagg, a glimmer of intelligence and hope in his eye. He quieted down. Paul looked over to Meg, who was studying Flagg, clearly as surprised as Paul at the compassion he displayed.
As the orderly wheeled the gurney away, the nurse handed Paul a clipboard holding several blank forms. “You’ll have to fill these out,” she said. Then she went back to her own business inside the station.
“You think he’ll be okay?” Meg asked, looking at the door still swinging from the recent exit.
“He could lose that hand,” Paul said. “It’s up to them now.”
Brian Flagg, though, seemed to shrug off his concern like a dirty T-shirt. “You guys can stick around if you want to. I’m outta here.” He headed for the door.
Meg shot him a look of disappointment, and Paul thought quickly. What next? They could leave now, sure, but all they’d be thinking about was that groaning old guy with the gunk on his hand. It would ruin their whole evening. This way, if they stayed—well, they wouldn’t be eating cordon bleu and sipping underage wine—but they’d be together, and they’d still be able to talk, to get to know each other.
“Do you mind if we stay for a while, to just make sure?” Paul asked.
Meg smiled sweetly, looking very beautiful. “I was about to ask you the same thing, Paul.”
“Let me see if they’ve got a Coke machine nearby.”
“Diet orange if they’ve got it, okay? I’ll be sitting over in the waiting area.”
“Right.” He stopped, then turned back to her. “You know, for a really lucky day for me, my luck swerves around, doesn’t it?”
“Lucky, Paul?”
“Yeah. I mean, you saying you’d go out with me. Wonderful luck!”
She smiled again, sexily. “Nothing to do with luck there, Paul Tyler. If you hadn’t worked up the courage to ask me out in a week or two, I would have had to ask you!”
He went off to look for the soda machine, his heart much lighter.
10
As it turned out, though, a clinic waiting room was not a spot particularly conducive to deep conversation.
Paul dutifully filled out the forms as best he could, though they looked really funny with just The Can Man penned in for a name, and The Woods Near Elkins Grove as an address. He put the forms back on the counter at the nurse’s station, but she ignored both him and them. Then he returned to continue the awkward talk with Meg.
They were both preoccupied, of course. There was no way to ignore the environs—not with those bright fluorescent lights humming into your eyes; not with that medicine and rubbing-alcohol smell reminding you where you were. A half hour dragged by as they talked and thumbed through the different magazines lying around the waiting room. Meg was paging through a big thing called Special Report: Fiction and Paul was checking out a Car and Driver.
Paul looked over at her. “I bet you’ve had better first dates, huh?”
“I don’t mind.” That smile again. Wonderful.
“Hey. You want another soda?”
“Sure. Same again, okay?”
“No problem.”
The vending machine was just inside the swinging doors. It was a Pepsi machine, not a Coke machine, but it did have diet orange, so Paul wasn’t complaining. He dutifully fed the quarters into the slot
and punched the buttons. The machine produced the beverage with a rattle and a thump. Another few quarters, this time for a Pepsi, and as he put them in, Paul happened to glance up the hospital corridor.
It was much as it had been before.
At the end of the corridor was the room where they’d put the Can Man. He was lying on the same gurney there, unattended. He seemed to be unconsious now, not moving at all. Sheesh, thought Paul. The doctor still hasn’t gotten around to him!
As Paul stared at the man lying on the gurney, something odd happened. There was a strange kind of movement under the blanket, a kind of wobbly flutter.
What the hell… ? Paul thought. Was the guy out, or was he awake, his hands going through spasms for some reason?
Leaving the sodas in their trays, Paul walked up the corridor to the open room. To one side of the hall there was activity. Soft voices came from the examination room where a doctor was putting the finishing touches on an old woman’s arm cast, while he spoke to her gently. Paul walked past, turning his attention back to the room where the Can Man lay.
Yow! The blanket was heaving up now, like a wave! What could be doing that?
As he approached, Paul noted that the Can Man’s head was turned away. But just as he entered the small cubicle, the head flopped over to face him.
Filmy eyes stared up from a white, skull-like face. A bloody froth bubbled up from within the Can Man’s gaping mouth with a rattling, gurgling sound.
“Oh, no!” said Paul, stopping dead in his tracks. He went no farther, instead turning and heading back, double quick, to the room where the doctor was working.
Bounding in, he cried, “Doctor! You gotta come right away!”
The doctor looked very annoyed at the intrusion. “Can’t you see I’m with a patient here?”
Paul pointed down the corridor desperately. “There’s a man dying! Please!”
Paul grabbed the man’s arm and dragged him into the hallway.
“Down here,” he said. “We brought him in earlier!”
They entered the cubicle. But now there was no movement beneath the blanket. The Can Man lay still and oblivious to everything, as though sleeping.
“Is this the hand injury?” the doctor asked, automatically slipping into professional mode.
“Yeah. There was this weird stuff on his hand and—”
The doctor took the edge of the blanket and peeled it off.
Paul Tyler gasped. But he couldn’t take his eyes off what lay below the blanket.
Strands of a salivalike substance clung to the underside of the blanket.
“Oh, my God!” the doctor said.
The only part of the Can Man that was intact was his head. From the neck down the body was…
It was half dissolved!
Paul and the doctor stood frozen, staring down at the quivering mass that looked like a moldy fruit-and-gelatin salad layered over a skeleton. The bare bones of the Can Man’s rib cage framed the soupy remains of internal organs and his spine ended in a lump of twisted white that had once been his pelvis. All the rest was just a mass of steaming gore that wafted up a noxious smell of acrid putrefaction.
Paul almost threw up.
He staggered back, his mind reeling, but was unable to tear his eyes away from what lay on the gurney.
“What the hell is this?” the doctor, aghast, finally said.
“The thing on his hand—!” said Paul.
The doctor broke from his paralysis. He ran to the door and hollered for help. “Nurse! Get in here!”
The thing on his hand! It wasn’t there anymore! Where the hell had it gone?
He had to find it. The thing was dangerous; Paul sensed that much. The horrible thing was a danger to everyone here in the clinic, maybe even to the whole town. He knew this fact, not so much from logic as from a queasy instinct he’d felt, ever since he’d first seen that pink blob on the Can Man’s hand.
Paul pushed past the doctor, charging into the hall, looking for that thing. It was a living thing! It had to be! It was a living thing, and it had to be found!
He hurried down the hall, whizzing past the nurse who had been summoned from her professional stupor by the doctor’s call. Paul looked first to the right, then to the left, checking the doorways.
A little way down a door was open. It was an office, and on the office desk, a phone beckoned.
They were going to need help here, no question about that, Paul reasoned. The thing had killed the Can Man. Killed him in the most horrible way imaginable. If it had killed once, it would kill again. Paul knew he had to call the police, and the sooner the police got there, the better.
He went into the office toward the phone.
It was hungry.
Hunger was the only immediate sensation it knew.
And now that it was bigger, so was the hunger-—grown into a rapacious, ravenous urge that filled every wildly growing and splitting cell in its mass.
In the hot place, it had known little, its hunger as small as it was. It had known pain as well, with the heat and the pressures of gravity, but somehow it had thrived despite the pain, thrived and survived the screaming thump that had ended its long journey.
When the cool night air had hit it, it had automatically contracted. But then the solid thing had come swimming into its ken, and it flowed around the thing, tasted it, found it organic and good. Clung. The Blob had found food.
There had been fulfillment there, there in the first drink of tissue and corpuscles, in the squirt of warmth as the Blob’s fluids had descended upon the flesh and blood of the hand, dissolving it into assimilable plasma. Yes, in feeding had come satisfaction, but the Blob was weak, and this was its first food, and it took a time to feed.
And to grow.
But then, in the darkness under the blanket, after the confusing sensations of speed and of other animate forms around it, its cells began to multiply, and it was able to manufacture more fluid. And its feasting was able to commence unabated.
But then the Blob had sensed something else.
It had sensed danger. And so the life-giving essence sucked from its prey, it had departed, aware of the movement of the other animate forms it instinctively knew were not only its food, but its enemies.
Now it hung at the top of the wall, hiding, waiting.
The flesh and blood it had consumed was of poor quality, and so its strength was not great. But now it sensed the presence of a delicious and desirable pile of animate food, fresh and young.
With a pseudopod it gently shut the door behind Paul Tyler as the teenager went to the phone.
And then the Blob began to crawl up to the ceiling, along which it flowed like an upside-down spill of vomit.
The room was sterile, featureless. The only illumination came from the single lamp which cast a pool of light onto the desk and the phone. The ceiling was covered in shadow.
Paul Tyler picked up the phone and dialed 911.
The phone rang several times before anyone answered. Then Paul heard a woman’s voice. “Sheriff’s office.”
“I have to talk to the sheriff-,” said Paul. “It’s an emergency.”
“One moment,” said the woman.
There was a pause. Paul took a deep breath and tried to control the fear he could feel crawling up his spine. He had to stay in control.
Another voice spoke on the phone. Paul recognized it as the voice of the sheriff. “Geller speaking.” Paul felt a great deal of relief hearing that voice—his dad and Herb Geller were bowling buddies. He’d known Herb Geller since he was a kid, and the officer used to give him rides in his bubble-top.
“Sheriff, this is Paul Tyler.”
“Paul? What’s the matter, son?”
“I’m at the Daniels clinic. An old man’s just been killed out here.”
Paul had taken up a pencil on the desk. He was nervously tapping the eraser against a pad of clinic stationery.
He did not notice the two globs of moisture that dropped onto the edge of
the desk, nor the small plumes of steam that rose up as the fluid ate into the wood.
“You said killed?”
“Yes, sir,” said Paul.
“Okay, you sit tight and I’ll be right out. Who else is involved?”
“I’m with Meg Penny. And Brian Flagg was here earlier.”
The sheriff’s voice rose with suspicion. “Flagg? Where is he now?”
Two more drops of fluid fell onto the desk. Two more wisps of smoke grew, and this time Paul Tyler noticed.
What… ? The ceiling was dripping or something…
“I dunno,” he said into the phone. “I—”
Paul looked up.
It was hanging there, just above the lamp. It looked like a monstrous red slug, glistening with a sheen of moisture, a soft glimmer in the light. Another spatter of moisture dropped onto Paul Tyler’s hand, and the droplet burned his skin.
He looked back up in horror, frozen… unable to do anything.
The Blob dropped down on him like a cloak of phlegm.
Paul Tyler screamed.
11
Meg Penny sat in the waiting room, flipping through the magazine and waiting for her diet orange soda.
She wondered what was keeping Paul. He should have been back by now, she reasoned. Something was wrong. The doctor had called the nurse, and the nurse had gone running. Since then there had been silence. The clinic felt spooky now to Meg, as if something was about to happen, something bad.
She was worried about Paul. Even though this date had taken a bad turn, it wasn’t Paul’s fault. He was a good guy—she knew that much now—good and conscientious. There was plenty of time for more dates, and Meg Penny knew that she wanted to go out with Paul Tyler again.
But they had to get through this nasty business first.
That old man… that horrible gunk on his hand… It made Meg sick just to remember it, the way it had eaten away his hand. It was terrible.
Being alone in this room made Meg nervous. She had to see what was going on. Besides, Paul had been gone a long time.
The Blob Page 6
