“Keep going!” she ordered.
There was only room enough for one at the storm-drain opening. As Kevin clambered up through it, Meg ventured another look below her.
The thing was still growing!
And even more of it was pouring in from the other drains, like never-ending flowing mucus from subterranean nasal passages.
The thing had become immense beyond imagining.
“Oh, my God!” Meg said.
She turned back to deal with Kevin. She had to concentrate on getting Kevin up that drain. Hanging on with one hand, she shoved him up the last yard.
And Kevin wriggled through, onto the street to freedom.
“I did it, Meg. Here! Grab hold!” he cried, turning back and holding down his hand. She scrabbled up, took his hand, and pushed for all she was worth up through the narrow opening.
But she stuck.
She didn’t fit! It was too narrow!
Nonetheless it was her only hope. She struggled desperately, trying to squeeze herself through, Kevin pulling on her. But her shoulders were completely wedged in.
As she struggled, she imagined the thing behind her, rising, rising, pseudopods forming and whipping, sensing its prey above it… reaching, reaching for another juicy morsel of flesh and blood…
“Run, Kevin!” she cried. “Run! I can’t make it!”
But Kevin just kept on pulling.
The soldiers in the tunnel nearby heard her shouts, and they came running into the chamber.
There they were confronted by the growing bulbous form of the creature they had been ordered to contain. It was reaching up for a pair of legs sticking from the storm drain.
“What the hell!” said the private. Automatically he raised his M16.
But the sergeant pushed the barrel from its aim. “That’s the thing, all right, but we have orders not to shoot it!”
“But, Sarge, what else are we—” the corporal was beginning.
Then a coil of something shot around the legs of the sergeant and dragged him off his feet. With a scream the sergeant was yanked through the water and into the oleaginous mass in the chamber.
“Fuck orders!” said the corporal, opening fire.
Meg Penny heard the screams and the shots. Nothing had touched her exposed legs, but she still couldn’t get through the storm drain.
She collected her wits and her nerve, and tried to speak calmly to Kevin.
“Kevin. Run to Town Hall!”
“But—”
“DO IT NOW!”
Kevin, nodding, got up and started to run off down the street.
She couldn’t get through here. There had to be another way, Meg Penny thought as she backed up, scooted down the rough concrete drain, and started climbing down the drainpipes. The creature seemed preoccupied.
The creature was devouring Sergeant Washington, who bellowed and screamed, fighting it.
The corporal had waded out into the water, and the light from his blasting rifle sputtered harshly as the bullets ripped into the creature.
But then the ground beneath him seemed to swell up.
He looked around and saw a flap of stuff lift up from the water.
“You’re standing on it!” cried the private, still at the lip of the tunnel.
“Shit!” cried the corporal, who tried to run around the flap. But then curtains of slime erupted all around him, slapping into him like a gigantic venus flytrap.
Meg Penny did not watch the flailing soldier being pulled down into the creature. She splashed along in the shallows, toward her last hope: the spill-off ramp at the far side of the chamber.
She scrambled up the concrete ramp.
It was hungry.
It was hungry and it fed.
Feeding made it hungrier. As it had rolled through the building on the surface, sucking in so many of the animate hunks of flesh, it had known such ecstasy!
Such pleasure, sucking the blood, dissolving the bones, feeling the hot life-stuff of its victims mix with its own juices into a delightful, boiling stew, making it grow and grow, able to eat more and more and more…
Now, in the dark places, it swarmed about the plastic-suited creatures, easily dissolving this odd new skin, sucking out the life and the juices, thrilling at the sensations.
The spattering hunks of metal had been odd, but the Blob paid them no mind, forging ahead in its single-minded objectives. Find food. Eat food.
It had been pursuing food, food that was climbing up toward the light.
But then it had been distracted by the creatures wrapped in the plastic. Distracted by the bullets.
But now the Blob was no longer distracted. It set back after the food, which was no longer at the top of the pipes, but running through the water, trying to escape.
It moved toward it, like a wave toward a shore. It sensed the pulsing blood in its victim’s veins and it sensed the victim’s fear.
The Blob reached for the food, famished.
The Blob was hungry! Terribly, horribly hungry!
20
It had been a simple enough decision.
A little odd, but definitely workable.
That tunnel had been awfully dark. And Brian Flagg had only one source of light available to him: the headlight on his Indian motorbike.
And it wasn’t as if the pipes weren’t big enough! No, they were huge!
Two plus two equaled four every time.
Brian Flagg roared through the aqueduct system on his motorbike.
He didn’t know where he was going, he just went. Meg Penny was down here. Meg and her brother Kevin and his friend Eddie. That was what the voice over the radio had said.
Then, as he whipped through the dimness, his headlight striking out ahead of him, he heard the screams.
The screams and the shots.
He found the turn and roared off toward the sounds, down the incline of the pipe.
It was a girl’s scream he heard. Meg Penny’s scream.
He hurried.
Then he saw a faint light at the end of his tunnel. The pipe opened up there, into a chamber at the bottom of the pipe’s concrete spill-off. And there in that chamber, surging up from the water like a pustulant boil, was the creature.
And there, on the spillway, scrambling up the ramp like a poor half-drowned mouse, was Meg Penny.
Brian Flagg roared up to the lip of the pipe, leaned over, and reached out.
That thing was reaching out, too, with a pseudopod the size of a log. But Brian’s hand grabbed her outstretched hand, and he pulled her up.
The pseudopod hit the spillway hard, slopping off and just missing Meg’s feet as they were pulled up.
“Brian,” she said.
He pulled her onto the bike. She wrapped her arms around him. He turned the handlebars and he gunned the engine.
They roared off back up the tunnel.
“Brian, you came back!” she said, holding on for dear life as the bike zoomed away, the headlight slicing through the darkness.
Now, which way had he come? Brian Flagg wondered.
But then a blank wall reared up before them, and Brian put on the brakes and came to a skittering stop.
Dead end! He’d gone the wrong way.
He turned and saw the way he should have gone. But when they reached the intersection, there was something blocking them.
Brian stopped, startled. There hadn’t been a closure when he’d gone through this tunnel. What… ?
And then he saw what had blocked the tunnel.
A sheath of thick protoplasm, from the slotted vents above and below. Sticky stuff was still rolling through.
They were cut off. There was only one thing to do.
“Hang on,” he told Meg.
He turned the bike and he headed back toward the chamber.
Up ahead, limned by the dim light from the chamber, he could see the creature’s main bulk. It was flopping up the tunnel, straight toward them.
Brian Flagg revved the engine higher and
higher. He pointed the headlight straight at the massive, globular nightmare coming for them.
“What are you doing?” cried Meg, disbelieving.
The thing was squeezing through vents, rippling through every side of them, sending out tendrils that just missed trapping them in goo.
Brian pushed the bike harder, harder, getting up speed as they approached collision with the thing.
At the last possible moment he turned the handlebars.
The bike screamed up the side of the pipe at a forty-five degree angle, and then kept on going, the centrifugal force keeping the wheels on concrete, and keeping Brian Flagg and Meg Penny in their seats. They rolled right over the monster, sweeping down in a spiral behind its mass.
“Briannnnnnnnnn!” Meg cried.
They tore toward the chamber, wind whipping through her hair, through Brian’s torn jacket. Adrenaline pumping through him madly, Brian kept his hand hard on the throttle. That thing back there was fast, and they couldn’t afford losing one bit of speed so close to it—
Now, if he could only navigate that spillway!
They burst from the tunnel, hung in the air for a moment, and then landed on the spillway…
At the wrong angle.
Both Brian and Meg were lifted from the seat and hurled over the handlebars as the motorbike slammed down onto the concrete, cracking the headlight as it tumbled and crashed downward. They flew asses over elbows, landing in the middle of the small underground lake.
Brian fought his way to the surface. “Meg!” he cried, gasping. His leg hurt like hell. He must have struck it in the tumble.
Something was bobbing beside him. He grabbed it, and it was loose and globby in his grasp. By the dim maintenance light, he could see the half-eaten body of a man—the remnants of a plastic suit…
“Over here, Brian!” Meg called.
Shuddering, Brian pushed the dead man away and the body softly sank out of sight.
Meg was just a few yards off. “Over here!” she cried, gasping for breath. “That tunnel over there! It’s free. It’s the way the soldiers came in.”
Soldiers. Yes, they must have been the ones to fire those shots… And that must have been one of them, half digested, he’d run into just now.
They splashed and flailed through the water. When they reached the tunnel, Brian limped ahead.
“You okay?” asked Meg.
“Must have hit my leg when the bike went over,” he said.
They hurried on.
A form separated from the shadows and stood in their way.
They yelped, startled.
They almost ran into him: it was a soldier, in a white suit, laden with equipment. “I’m not going to hurt you!” he said, frightened as they.
In fact, Brian could see that there was a stunned look on the man’s face. A glaze… “It got ’em,” he said. “Johnstone and the sarge!”
His faceplate was cracked. Blood streamed down his face.
“How do we get out of here?” demanded Brian.
The man didn’t seem to hear them. “They were trying to scream… inside it. They were trying to scream.”
Brian grabbed the front of the man’s plastic suit and shook him. Then he pushed him up against the wall.
“You gotta show us the way out!” he cried.
The soldier cringed away, whimpering. Brian could see now that his arm was flopping at an unnatural angle. The man’s arm was busted. He caught a glimpse of shattered bone sticking through the plastic of the suit. “Oh, Jesus,” said Brian.
“Brian!” cried Meg, gesturing desperately back toward the junction chamber.
He looked. He could see the quick movements there, the gushing glob of the monster, pouring back through the pipes, reforming… seeking them.
The soldier caught sight of the thing as well. He stepped back, turned, and started running the opposite way, through the tunnel.
“Follow him,” said Brian. “He’ll know the way out!”
They ran, and they ran, and they ran some more. The soldier ran hard, despite the equipment weighing him down. Strapped to one side of the man was a walkie-talkie. As they ran, the walkie-talkie began to speak: “Baker Team! Baker Team! What the hell’s going on down there?”
The soldier didn’t answer. He just kept on running.
A few seconds later the soldier stopped, breathing harshly. Immediately above him a vertical shaft ran up toward the surface, ridged with a metal-runged ladder and topped no doubt by a manhole.
The way out!
“This is it!” said Brian, looking up.
Not only was there a manhole up there: it was an open manhole. He could see stars glittering overhead. And a face was peering down toward him.
“We’re coming up!” cried Brian, pulling Meg over and guiding her hand to the first rung.
More plastic-suited men ringed the manhole. And two more faces peered down. Faces that Brian recognized.
Dr. Trimble and Colonel Hargis.
And they saw him. Recognized him!
Oh, shit!
“Close the manhole!” Dr. Trimble said.
“What?” said another man.
“That’s my man down there,” said Colonel Hargis.
“We have to contain that thing,” said Dr. Trimble, looking down at Brian, cold ice in his eyes. “Now, close it off. That’s an order.”
“No!” cried Meg, as the manhole cover scratched across pavement and rattled into place.
“No!” cried the wounded soldier, seeing what had happened. “Noooooooooo!”
“Hell,” said Brian. He climbed up the ladder. He was going to push that thing off! Before they could do anything about it!
Oh, hell! He could hear a truck. They were going to put a goddamn truck tire over the manhole cover.
Sure enough, by the time he reached the top and pushed, pushed hard, the thing didn’t budge. Not a half inch.
“You son of a bitch!” cried Brian.
No good being up here. He stormed down the ladder.
Below, the soldier was fiddling with his walkie-talkie. He flicked a switch and spoke into it. “Colonel! You can’t! That thing’s down here with us!”
Brian grabbed the walkie-talkie from him.
“Trimble? You hear me?” he cried into the receiver.
No answer.
“Talk to me!”
Then he noticed a chill around his feet… a pressure.
“The water’s rising,” said the soldier. “It’s coming for us.”
Brian looked down. Sure enough, the water level was inching up, lapping now at their ankles. The soldier whimpered and fell against a wall, beginning to weep with hopelessness.
God. They were trapped. This was it, thought Brian. They were going to get eaten… dissolved… digested, just like the others.
Damn!
He looked at Meg, and she was staring at him in a funny way.
“I thought you were gonna look after yourself,” she said.
“I guess I blew it, huh.” He looked around. Shrugged. Sighed. “I’m sorry, Meg. I really am.”
“Me too.”
Then she was looking at something else.
“Brian,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She pointed down at the soldier against the wall, coming apart. “On his belt, Brian. Look!”
Brian looked.
One of the pieces of equipment the soldier carried was strapped to his belt. Brian recognized it from war movies. It was a hand-held grenade launcher. There were words stenciled along the metal side: EXPLOSIVE PROJECTILE—CAUTION: BLOWBACK.
Oh, yes! Perfect!
He looked at her. And to think he had given up!
He grinned, kissed her hard on the lips, and stooped down. He grabbed the grenade launcher and pulled it off the soldier’s belt.
“This thing work?” he asked.
The soldier nodded. With his good hand he reached up and yanked back a cocking lever. “It won’t do any good. Not against that monster
…”
Brian looked up the shaft. He put the walkie-talkie to his lips, thumbed the “on” switch. “Hey, Trimble. If you won’t listen to me… then listen to this!”
He aimed the grenade launcher up the shaft.
Meg and the soldier scrambled out of the way for cover.
Brian’s finger found the trigger.
And he pulled it.
The launcher tugged like a bucking bronco on his arms, but the missile went true. In less than a blink of an eye it tore up the vertical shaft to the manhole cover at the top.
Brian stepped to one side the very instant of the explosion. Metal and broken cement rained down—along with pieces of blown-up tire. It felt as though someone had clapped Brian on his ears. They were ringing like bells.
But he was okay.
Choking with the dust from the explosion, he picked himself up and called out, “Come on, folks! We got ourselves a way out!”
As quick as they could, they climbed the ladder, Brian first.
He had something important to do.
The fresh night air struck him, revitalizing him, as he lifted himself out onto the street, gratified at the sight that met his eyes.
Chaos.
The truck that had been standing on the manhole cover was flipped on its side. And so had a lot of soldiers. Including, Brian could see, Dr. Trimble, who lay just yards away, dazed, struggling to get back to his feet.
Brian jumped up through, clearing the way for Meg and the soldier to get out. His eyes raked along the rabble on the ground.
He saw what he needed.
He scooped it up: an M16 rifle.
He swung it toward Dr. Trimble. God, how he wanted to kill that bastard!
A voice stopped him. “Flagg! Drop it!”
He spun. Peripherally he could see Meg crawling out of the hole. Then the soldier, with Meg’s help. But just past them stood Deputy Billy Briggs, leveling his service revolver.
“It’s a lie!” he cried. “All of it!”
“I said, put it down!” cried Briggs. “I’ll blow you out of your shoes, boy!”
Dr. Trimble was using the time to pick himself up. “Shoot him!” he cried to Colonel Hargis.
Colonel Hargis raised his rifle, but hesitated. Brian could read the doubt in his eyes. The man, for all his hawkishness, wasn’t as loony as the scientist. And this business was getting thoroughly crazed.
The Blob Page 14
