The Blob (19 page)

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.

“Shoot him?” said Briggs.
“Shoot him!
What is this, Russia?” The deputy swung his revolver, covering Trimble and Hargis.

There were clicking sounds as the other soldiers swung their weapons on Briggs and Brian.

“All right, hold it,” said Briggs. “Everybody just put your guns down!”

“He’s infected!” said Trimble, pointing at Brian. “Contagious! He’ll spread a plague through this town and kill you all!”

Then Brian noticed that there were townspeople gathering around. At the word
plague
they gasped and they drew back. That even got to Briggs. He swung his revolver around and put it on Brian.

“Listen to me, Briggs,” said Brian Flagg desperately. “
Think
for a minute! You suppose an army of guys in plastic suits shows up every time a meteor falls?”

“Shoot him!” cried Trimble. “That is a direct order!”

“How’d they get here so quickly? How’d they even know to come?”

“Shoot, damn it!” Trimble yelled, “Shoooot!”

“I’ll tell you how!” Brian continued. “That ‘meteor’ is man-made. It’s a satellite! It’s some kind of germ-warfare test! They fucked up!”

Maddened by Brian’s words, the scientist jumped over to Colonel Hargis and wrestled his M16 from his grasp. He swung it around, cocking it.

“Don’t try it!” said Briggs.

And the rifle went off.

Blam! Blam! The bullets sliced through the air, whizzing past Brian’s ear. He jumped and pulled Meg down, covering her as Dr. Trimble fired at them wildly. A bullet caught Deputy Briggs in the shoulder and his gun was knocked to the ground.

Silence dropped onto the battlefield as Dr. Trimble swung the rifle toward where Brian Flagg huddled with Meg Penny.

“
You’re
the infection, boy! And I’m the penicillin!” said Dr. Trimble.

Brian was suddenly looking down the bore of the Army rifle as the doctor tightened his finger, his aim better this time.

Just then something whipped out from the manhole. A pseudopod flung out, catching Dr. Trimble’s ankles.

His finger squeezed the trigger, but the shot went wide as he was tugged onto the ground.

“What!” he cried, as the tendril pulled him toward the manhole. Dr. Trimble yelled and kicked as he was dragged along, tangled in the M16’s strap.

“Help!” he cried. “Help!”

It was the creature! Brian thought, getting up. The creature, reaching up from the sewers.

Everyone just watched, stunned and unable to do anything, as Dr. Trimble was pulled down into the manhole. The rifle caught on the sides of the manhole, stopping him.

“Help me!” he cried. “Please help me!” His voice was muffled through the plastic and the faceplate.

Then the doctor started screaming, jerking violently, caught there in the manhole.

Brian watched as something oozed and swelled up within the helmet, bubbling up over the man’s head from within.

And Brian could see the awareness in the doctor’s eyes. He knew exactly what was happening.

And then those bulging eyes were engulfed in slime.

The M16 strap broke.

Dr. Trimble was sucked away from sight.

From the sewers of Morgan City there arose a squishing, squelching sound.

The monster was eating.

Eating, and
growing.

F
or Colonel Templeton Hargis it was just too much.

Hell was bubbling below his feet, and the man who had made it was frying in his own mad doctor’s stew.

He looked around at the horrified faces of his men, staring at the manhole where Dr. Trimble had just disappeared. He saw reflected in those men’s faces his own confusion, his own feelings of helplessness.

The Soviet Union was half a world away now, a very distant threat to the national security.

But the hell-spawn created by Dr. Trimble in his satellite laboratory was right beneath their butts. And the trouble was it seemed not to have the faintest inkling that it should be patriotic and loyal to its creators.

The motherfucker would eat
anything!

Hargis ripped off his helmet and threw it to the ground. He grabbed an M16 from one of his men.

“Let’s scrag that thing!” he said.

He stuck his rifle barrel down the manhole and let ’er rip. Other soldiers stepped up along with him, aimed down the hole, and began firing, making a furious din.

The kick of the gun was gratifying in his hands, but as soon as his initial wave of anger passed, Hargis realized that if that blob thing was as big as the people who’d escaped the movie theater said it was, it was going to take more than a hail of bullets to snuff the bastard.

He knew just the thing, though.

“Gimme a satchel charge!” he called, as the rifles finished emptying their ammo into the hole. “Short fuse!”

He had good men. Within seconds one of them was hauling a package the size of a phone book up to the hole.

“Let ’im have it!” ordered Colonel Hargis.

Connected to the satchel charge was a rip cord. The soldier pulled this and efficiently dropped the charge down the hole.

It took no orders to make the other men step away from the opening.

Ker
BLAM! The explosion trembled below the feet of Colonel Hargis like the devil’s own flatulence. A gout of flame ripped up from the hole, rising twenty feet in the air.

“Chew on that, slime ball!” said Colonel Hargis.

That oughtta do it!

The rumble from the explosion died.

But then another tremble started up below his feet. First a simple movement . . . but then, suddenly a violent shaking.

“What’s happening?” said Hargis, struggling to stay on his feet.

“I think,” said Brian Flagg, turning and starting to run, “I think you pissed it off.”

“Hey! Kid! Where are you—”

But Hargis never did finish his sentence.

He was cut off by the explosion of gunk, shooting up from the manhole like God squeezing a pimple.

The creature . . . it was coming up!

Streamers of the thing whipped around as it rose, grabbing Hargis by his shoulders and hauling him up with it. Hargis found himself abruptly stuck to a rising geyser of burning, churning fluid.

Rising up, up, toward the night sky.

Hargis knew that this was it. But he was too hard a man, had seen too much action, to go out without a fight.

His M16 blazing in one hand, bullets splattering into the column of pustulance, he reached with the other to the series of hand grenades strapped across his chest.

He pulled the pins.

Eat these, too, slimeball he thought even as the creature swallowed him, acids violently eating away at plastic, skin, flesh, blood, and bone.

Meg Penny watched as the column blasted up, snaring the soldiers and carrying them up, stuck in slime.

“Get outta here!” said Brian Flagg, catching her by the arm and pulling her down the street along with him.

Up and up went the creature behind them, emerging from the sewers. Finally it reached the peak of its ascent far above Morgan City, and it began to fall back down, angling out over the street. It slapped down onto the pavement, roiling and congealing into one large ball of coagulated muck.

Meg and Brian had reached higher ground before the thing fell. The noxious slime missed them.

But as they turned, they saw it snaring others—townspeople slower than they. What soldiers remained were firing into the mass.

The creature rolled over them like a wave of used Vaseline, strangling their cries instantly.

“It’s a mountain!” said Meg.

“Get back!” cried Brian, tugging her along with the escaping crowd of people.

Deputy Briggs was among them, and shouted orders. “Back! Everybody back!”

Chaos surged. Everything was in total pandemonium.

And among it all the Blob struck.

Hungry. It was still hungry.

Colonel Hargis’s grenades went off inside it, lighting a chiaroscuro of green and red within in its form, but explosives couldn’t stop the oozing thing from cruising on in search of more food, more food.

Reverend Meeker had never been much of an eschatologist. But he knew something of what the Bible had predicted about the End Times. And this looked like something biblical, all right. The judgment of God, come to Morgan City.

“My God,” he said, watching the creature roil along. “The Day is come!”

Deputy Briggs grabbed him. “Come on, Reverend. Gotta get out of here!”

“You don’t understand,” said Reverend Meeker, gazing up at the monstrosity, acceptance and resignation on his face. “This is all prophesied in Revelations!”

Deputy Briggs tugged him along anyway.

Meanwhile a pair of soldiers nearby were working with a flamethrower. One held the weapon while the other lit it. There was a muffled
thump!
as the flames poured out.

“You’re hot!” said the lighting soldier.

The soldier holding the flamethrower turned. The creature was heading straight toward him, a tidal wave of horror.

The soldier aimed and hit the trigger. The flames roared out, wrapping the monster in smoke and fire.

“We got it!” cried the soldier. “We got the thing. It’s burning up!”

But then a pseudopod shot from the Blob as though from a cannon, heading straight at the nozzle of the flamethrower. It struck with such force that the tanks on the soldier’s back exploded, engulfing him in a fireball.

Flaming fluid splattered over the street.

A splash of it fell on the Reverend Meeker, setting him alight. The Reverend screamed and fell, writhing on the street.

“Reverend!” cried Meg, seeing the man go down, his arms and back on fire.

“That fire extinquisher!” said Deputy Briggs, pointing over to a fire truck parked nearby. Meg dashed over to it along with the wounded deputy, and together they hauled the heavy, shiny cylinder off its mooring and over to where the Reverend Meeker lay burning and screaming.

The Blob rolled forward, just thirty yards away.

Meg blasted Reverend Meeker in a cloud of C0
₂
. The flames were snuffed out.

“Come on, get out of that thing’s way!” ordered Briggs, pulling the half-conscious, groaning reverend along with him.

Meg turned.

There it was, rising up above her: the creature, wriggling and quivering with rapacious evil and hunger. Even as she looked, a pseudopod detached from the mass and shot forward toward her.

Not thinking, just reacting, she turned the fire extinguisher on it. The C0
₂
hissed out, slapping against the pseudopod like the hand of a ghost.

The pseudopod stopped. It recoiled, like a snake, writhing in pain.

Meg backed away, having bought some time for herself. Thinking: The C0
₂
—it stopped it for a moment. She sprayed some of the stuff onto her hand.

The cloud wrapped her hand in an arctic chill.

“Cold!” she said. “It can’t stand the cold!”

She had to tell Brian! She whirled around to find him.

“Brian!” she cried. “It’s just like in the freezer.”

But Brian was nowhere in sight. Only the frightened, smudged face of Deputy Briggs was there.

“He ran for it, Meg,” said Briggs. “He’s gone. Now let’s get going ourselves. Town Hall. It’s got the strongest walls in the city!”

They retreated.

The creature, like a wobbling, slow-motion avalanche of dung, followed, squeezing easily through the stores and office buildings on either side of the street. As Deputy Briggs carried the moaning reverend, Meg lugged the C0
₂
canister along behind, pausing every ten seconds or so to blast errant streamers of goo. Invariably the pseudopods would wriggle back into their parent, in spasms from the cold. Once, when she accidentally released a particularly large cloud of gas, the stuff sprayed over the nearest part of the crawling Blob.