The Blob

by David Bischoff

  Meg Penny watched helplessly, holding on to her mother and her baby sister Christine, as the Blob wrapped around Deputy Bill Briggs and pulled him through the bookcase.

  Screams. Crack of wood. Snap of bone and splatter of blood. And then the lawman was gone.

  The sight of the deputy being dragged—clutching a book shelf as though that would check the terrible force behind him, eyes rolling in horror and pain—was the final blast on the survivors’ nerves.

  Those nerves snapped.

  Pandemonium struck.

  People screamed and panicked. They ran toward the basement and the other rooms, leaving their posts by the barricades.

  And with an extra surge of power the Blob began breaking in.

  Windows smashed. Doors buckled, then shattered. Whole sections of wall and roof were cracking and bulging. Plaster rained down on Meg Penny and her family as they stood rooted in place with terror, watching the Blob wiggle through the new cracks.

  On the floor, in the middle of the chaos, the Reverend Meeker had recovered. Seeing the hell squeezing in on him, he began moaning and speaking deliriously.

  “And the great voice said to the seven angels, go your ways and pour the vials of wrath of God upon the Earth… and lo, there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon men which had the mark of the Beast… !”

  Meg Penny heard this scripture, but she was too terrified even to comprehend what the reverend was saying. She just clung to her family as the Blob put more and more pressure on the once sturdy Town Hall, until the rafters and the solid brick of the walls began to squeal and tremble as though in terrible agony.

  “Mommy!” cried Kevin. “Don’t let it get us!”

  But Meg Penny knew the truth. It was going to get them. The monster was going to get them, just as it had gotten the others.

  She was too frightened and horrified to even wonder what had happened to Brian Flagg.

  22

  “It can’t stand the cold!”

  Meg’s words echoed in Brian Flagg’s mind.

  But he’d already figured it out. He knew it as soon as he saw those pseudopods retreat under the spray of C02, as Meg Penny extinguished the fire on the Reverend Meeker.

  Cold! Of course! He’d been so stupid.

  When they’d been in the freezer, and the tentacles of the monster had stopped short, withdrawing back through the door cracks—that had been what had stopped the creature! Subzero temperature!

  Now, with the thing on the surface, rolling around like an unanchored mountain, there was only one way to stop it, and that was with cold.

  There was a big icehouse here in Morgan City. But no way could he convince that monster to come along and get inside it. No, the cold was going to have to be brought to the creature.

  And Brian Flagg was going to be the guy to do it!

  He ran through the night with surprising speed and energy considering how much he’d already gone through that evening. He ran down the street to Moss’s Repair Shop, praying that the door wasn’t locked.

  The door was locked.

  Shit!

  Behind him he heard the gunfire and the screams and the roar of people running from the advancing monster.

  “Shit!” he cried. The side door of the shop had a sectioned, framed window. Brian Flagg smashed his fist through the glass nearest the door. Shattered glass tinkled into the darkness.

  Brian reached in, felt for the knob, unlocked the door, and burst through.

  His hand was bleeding, but he didn’t notice.

  Cold. Cold. COLD!

  The word throbbed through his head as he ran into the shop, where the hulking shadows of machines lurked.

  He hoped that Moss had gotten around to fixing the thing!

  Brian fumbled for the light switch.

  No light. Electricity gone.

  But enough light was coming through the garage-door windows to make out where the cabs were. Brian ran to the machine and clambered into the cab. He felt around in the darkness, praying that—

  Yes! His fingers touched the key, already slotted into the ignition.

  “Okay, buddy. You gotta work!”

  He turned the key.

  The engine whined, and died.

  Shit!

  No, this was unacceptable! He tried again.

  The engine growled like a leashed mountain lion. Growled and growled, turning over but only on the power of the battery and—

  Brian stepped on the accelerator.

  The engine roared into life.

  He buckled the safety harness into place, turned the cab lights and the headlights on, and then fumbled with the emergency brake.

  Brake off, he downshifted the gear, brought up the clutch.

  The mighty machine lurched forward.

  There was no time to figure out how to unlock the front garage doors, so Brian Flagg slammed the Indian Summit snowmaker right through them.

  Glass broke and wood shattered as the door exploded outward. Stepping up the speed, Brian Flagg hurled the machine into the night. There were parked cars in front of him, but he paid them no mind. The snowmaker blasted through them, sending them careening away like tenpins struck with a bowling ball.

  The big-wheeled machine roared onward, its enormous tractor tires bouncing across the bumpy pavement. The headlights picked up the ghastly carnage wreaked by the thing—twisted autos, pieces of bodies, slime. Brian tried to ignore it as he directed the snowmaker up the street.

  Town Hall, he thought. They must have run for cover to Town Hall.

  He headed in that direction.

  He could see it from two blocks away, and it was grotesque.

  The Blob was attached to the Town Hall like a throbbing parasite, roiling and shaking as it tried to crush the building.

  Meg was in that building.

  Meg and the others.

  As he headed toward the creature, Brian looked down to the controls of the snowmaker. He’d worked on one of these things before with Moss, and the dude had shown him what lever did what, but he’d never actually used the machine before.

  But he knew how it worked.

  On top of the cab was a big funnel-like chute that dispensed the snow, while the snowmaking apparatus was housed on the flatbed back of the truck. This included big metal water tanks, and a grouping of tanks of liquid nitrogen that looked like airplane bombs. A central machine siphoned measured quantities of both through its pipes, and then blew out the resulting mixture—man-made snow—from the large blower hooked onto the front.

  Brian brought the machine right up to the Blob and stopped it, its air brakes hissing.

  The headlights shone through the red-porridge-and-saliva body of the monstrosity. Brian could smell it, and he had to control his revulsion.

  He turned on the snowmaker.

  With a great gurgling and churning sound the machine set to work immediately. After a growl and a lurch the chute above the cab began to spit out a lovely, high arc of snow that burst up through the night and landed squarely on the monster.

  Behind Brian, mist from the machine rose up into the night air. He turned the controls up to full, and a heftier dollop of new snow burst up, splattering onto the Blob.

  The creature trembled. The creature shook. Its hold on the Town Hall had seemed unbreakable, but now the Blob streamed back and away, as though in terrible pain, turning to confront this new and hurtful enemy.

  Brian could see that waves of steam rose up from the Blob wherever snow touched it. Some kind of chemical reaction was going on. It was working! He kept the snow blowing. He was going to bury this thing in snow, bury it until it was covered with this beautiful white stuff, and then he, Brian Flagg, was going to strap on skis and slalom the bastard!

  But then the Blob, with a speed that belied its heft, rippled away from the torrent of snow.

  It moved toward its attacker, rolling faster and faster.

  “Shit,” said Brian. “Okay, you want to eat me? Eat me! But you’re gonna have to eat five
tons of snow first!”

  Snow still spouting, he shifted the engine into gear and popped the clutch.

  He turned the wheel so that the vehicle was heading straight for the cannonballing monster.

  His repositioning put the snow dead center back onto the Blob, and the creature didn’t like it, not at all. With soundless, quivering fury, it struck forward at the machine, lifting it up and hurling the truck and the cab and Brian into the air, turning them over like a child’s toy.

  Brian could feel the cab disengaging from the rest of the snowmaker, ripped away from the snow chute and the tanks of water and liquid nitrogen, and skidding off onto the pavement.

  The cab spun over, and the snow stopped.

  Brian Flagg found himself upside down. Desperately he tried to unbuckle the belt. He could see the stuff of the monster rolling around him like steaming, half-solid sewage.

  He heard the metal groan as the monster squeezed.

  As the stuff of the creature rolled past the window, Brian could also hear it slipping over above him.

  As he hung there, desperately working at the latch to the seat belt, he saw half-digested bodies float by.

  Oh, jeez! There was Deputy Briggs!

  And one of the soldiers, in one of the plastic suits.

  Skeleton fingers clacked onto the glass as spiderwebs of cracks appeared… death, knock knock knocking to get in.

  The belt unlatched.

  He dropped down to the ceiling of the cab, struggling to get up and onto his feet.

  The cab squealed, as though caught in a crusher.

  But then, just as he got himself upright, a length of bare metal crunched in, cracking him across the forehead.

  Brian Flagg fell, unconscious, as the Blob squeezed on the cab of the snowmaker, pushing to get at this new bit of food.

  23

  It was hungry. So hungry.

  But now it knew other sensations.

  Much less pleasurable sensations.

  The Blob hurt

  These bits of food… Somehow they had hurt it with the terrible waves of cold they sprayed at it.

  Primordial fury swept through primitive synapses and it turned on its enemy and stopped it.

  The hurt stopped, too, and the other sensations swept in.

  It was hungry again.

  Hungry.

  First, Meg Penny heard the engine motors outside, and then the squeal of air brakes.

  Then the roof of the Town Hall shook even harder, as though the monster had suffered some kind of paroxysm.

  Then the shaking stopped.

  The streamers of the Blob withdrew.

  Meg could hear the creature slithering away.

  It left a gaping hole in the front door. Detaching herself from her family, Meg ran out through the hole and onto the steps, still slimy and gooey.

  She could see the snowmaker clearly now, spouting its load onto the cringing Blob.

  And she could see who was in the cab.

  Brian Flagg.

  “Brian!” she cried, and she ran to help him.

  “Meg!” called her mother behind her. “No!”

  But the call did no good. She had to go and help Brian. That thing had to be stopped. Determination and pure anger swelled up in Meg Penny.

  Yes, that monster had to be stopped!

  But even as she ran toward the snowmaker, she watched helplessly as the Blob hurled itself at it. She watched as the vehicle was lifted up like a bobbing boat and torn asunder. She watched as the Blob poured over the cab, trying to get at Brian.

  “No!” she cried. “No!”

  Desperately she looked around the ground by her feet.

  Wreckage everywhere.

  But just a few yards away the half-dissolved body of a soldier attracted her attention.

  The soldier still held his M16 rifle in a death grip. Attached to his back was a belt which held a package just like the one the colonel had ordered to be lobbed down into the manhole. What had he called it?

  Oh, yes. A satchel charge.

  First, Meg Penny peeled back the fingers of the dead man and pulled the rifle away. Then she detached the belt with the satchel charge and swung it over her shoulder.

  It had always been just her tiny bit of flesh and willpower against that terrible mass of rolling putrefaction.

  But now she had something to fight it with.

  She ran around to where the creature was pouring over the cab. Nearby the detached tanks of water and liquid nitrogen lay. The Blob had not poured over these. They were no longer spraying snow at it.

  Brian was in that cab. She had to distract the thing, right away.

  She had watched the soldiers work their guns, and this one was already cocked. She held it up and fired at the monster.

  A volley of bullets tore into the thing, ripping out divots of protoplasm. The weapon’s recoil pushed her back, but she recovered and gave the thing another round.

  Then she moved over behind the tanks. She had an idea.

  “Come on, you pile of shit!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Come on and try to get me!”

  She pressed the trigger and more bullets sprayed into the Blob.

  The thing shifted its bulk. A part of it collected into something that could almost be a “head.” The “head” peered down through sightless eyes.

  She let another burst rip through the roiling protoplasm, and then she scrambled up to the tanks lying on the ground by the cab.

  It was working!

  The Blob was releasing the snowmaker’s cab. It sensed easier prey—or had it indeed been maddened by the bullets and her challenge?

  “You can do better than that!” she jeered. “C’mon!”

  She emptied the chambers of the M16 and then threw the rifle itself at the advancing Blob.

  Then she pulled the satchel charge up by its belt and looked around. Right there… between those two massive tanks of liquid nitrogen. Meg Penny was a skier, and she knew exactly what these things were, what incredible cold was locked away in the metal, under extreme pressure…

  She wedged the satchel charge down between the tanks. Now, how had that soldier done it?

  She looked up, gauging how much time she had before that rippling stuff rolled over these tanks.

  “Come to Mama, fucker!” she whispered.

  She looked back down at the satchel charge, and its dangling ripcord. Hopefully you had to adjust it to make it a short fuse, which meant this one was a long fuse.

  She’d have time to get away, time to get Brian out of that cab.

  She pulled the cord.

  The satchel charge started ticking.

  The Blob crawled toward her, like the upended contents of a witch’s cauldron.

  Good enough! she thought, as she prepared to jump from the tanker to the ground.

  But her boot snagged on a piece of twisted metal sticking out from the tanker’s hull. She could feel herself tripping, body hurtling out but leg staying in place. With a breathless whoosh she found herself swinging upside down from the tanks, dangling.

  As she swayed back and forth, she could see her father and Moss running toward her from the Town Hall.

  “Stay back!” she cried. “Stay back, it’s gonna blow!”

  Above her she heard the ticking of the satchel charge.

  She couldn’t pull herself up. This was it!

  At least her death wouldn’t be meaningless, she thought. If that satchel charge blew, so would the tanks. And the tanks would—

  But she didn’t give up. She strained up, trying to yank her foot from the boot.

  Straining, straining…

  Suddenly something caught her around the shoulders.

  It twisted her, and it pulled her straight down, sliding her bloody foot out of the boot.

  The Blob! It had gotten her with one of its tendrils… !

  But as she tumbled to the ground, she quickly discovered that she wasn’t covered by slime.

  She was covered by Brian F
lagg.

  But not for long.

  “C’mon, get up!” he ordered as he got up and hoisted her to her feet.

  She heard the satchel charge ticking, ticking, ticking…

  The next thing she knew she was running.

  Running for all she was worth, back toward Daddy and Moss and Town Hall and…

  She ventured a look back.

  The Blob had covered the tanker fully now, and it was advancing after them, rolling over the machine.

  “Goddammit!” she said. “It’s supposed to blow up!”

  But nothing happened!

  And the monster was on the loose, coming after them!

  24

  Brian Flagg woke up.

  The first thing he realized was that he was in pain. Not just his aching leg, which he’d hurt in his bike spill.

  No, his head hurt, real bad. He could feel the blood seeping out, dripping down his face.

  And then Brian remembered. He remembered where he was, and what was crushing in upon him.

  He looked up, expecting the gunk to spill in on him at any moment, to engulf him, to fill his mouth and his nose and his ears with burning acid, to burn away his eyes…

  But there was nothing outside the windows. Just a residue of slime.

  He didn’t wait a moment. He propelled himself against the door, hitting the handle.

  The door opened, and Brian Flagg spilled out of the up-side-down cab.

  It took a moment to collect himself, but as soon as he had, he looked around. Immediately saw the mountainous creature, pouring across the tanker.

  And there, hanging from the tanker, her boot caught, was Meg Penny.

  From the tanker there came a loud ticking sound.

  Not sparing any time even to think, he ran to Meg and he jumped up and grabbed her, pulling her down.

  They hit the ground, and he urged her on, and they ran, and ran and ran some more.

  And then Meg stopped.

  And she said something about the tanker blowing up.

  “What’s happening?” she said. “I don’t understand. It was ticking… the satchel charge!”

  “We gotta get away from that thing, now.”

  “I’m telling you,” said Meg. “It’s—”

  And just as Brian turned to check the Blob’s advance, the rumbling started.