The Blob (20 page)

The thing cringed back, and they were able to gain some yards.

“Good girl!” said Briggs. “Keep it going. Town Hall just ahead.”

The whole street seemed to bow under the Blob’s weight, cracking as it streamed along. Meg let it have another, longer blast, and then dodged back. Pseudopods waggled wildly behind her. The Blob shuddered, then flowed on, inexorably.

Even as they mounted the steps of the Town Hall, the thing flowed its hellish protoplasm up after them, a deadly tide lapping up toward their feet. The C0
₂
canister banged up the stairs, heavy and awkward to drag, but Meg couldn’t drop it. It was their only hope.

She sprayed. The Blob quivered, drew back.

The horrid stench, acid and blood, acid and death, was everywhere now, mixed with the smell of burning. But all that Meg could smell was the C0
₂
. Her hands were numb with cold.

“Hurry!” cried a voice from the top of the stairs. “Get in!” Someone was holding the door open for them.

“Thanks,” said Briggs as a man scurried out and helped drag Reverend Meeker inside. “Come on, Meg! Get in!”

Meg Penny let loose a long blast. The Blob pulled back, rearing like a fat, giant cobra.

And hurled itself, coming down at her like a blanket, cutting off the light from burning fires and the remaining streetlamps.

An arm reached out and pulled Meg through the door. The Town Hall door slammed shut, locked, and latched.

With a mighty
thunk!
the door was hit from the other side. It bowed in with the tremendous pressure. But it held. Tendrils of Blob issued through cracks.

But Meg Penny knew what to do now. She aimed the nozzle and let blast. She described a circle around the door, covering all the cracks quickly. The wriggling streamers shivered and shot back, as though shocked by electrodes.

“Doesn’t like that,” said Meg.

She turned and saw to her relief that all her family, Kevin included, were among the huddled masses in the Town Hall. She saw Moss the mechanic, Jim Adams the banker—so many people were still alive! She’d thought so many would be dead.

“Pull all the C0
₂
you can find!” cried Deputy Briggs. “We can hold it off!”

“
You
hold it off!” cried Arnold Thatcher, the baker, from the back of the hall. “We’re getting out!”

He dived toward a back window. Pulled on the latch, as the crowd rippled with agreement.

“No, wait!” cried Meg, desperately. “It’s all—”

But even as she tried to finish, tried to haul her fire extinguisher toward Thatcher at the window, the man got the latch loose.

The window angled open on its hinges.

A jet of Blob streamed through, right on top of the man, engulfing him.

Meg aimed the nozzle and fired off a blast of C0
₂
gas. But with a choked gurgle the issuing stream stopped. The canister was empty.

People started screaming.

Moss the mechanic, though, had already stepped up to the nearest fire-extinguisher placement. He pulled open the door, ripped out the canister, and started spraying the arm of gunk.

The effect was immediate. The Blob retreated back out the window, but it carried its prize with it. Meg had one last impression of Arnold Thatcher the baker being dragged out the window, already dissolving in this portable living acid bath.

Moss kept the blast going long enough for others to close the window and latch it.

“That’s not enough,” hollered Briggs. “We’re going to have to barricade every window, every door, here. And let’s get those fire extinguishers! There should be some in the hall, and lots in the basement!”

The people set to work, doing their best to barricade themselves from harm. Streamers of Blob snaked through the front door, and Meg Penny yelled for help.

Within moments Moss was there, spraying, and the streamers retreated.

Then two men ran up to Briggs, each holding a fire extinguisher.
Small
fire extinguishers.

“Is that it?” said Briggs. “There’s gotta be more. You just didn’t look in the right places!”

He was interrupted by a loud scream from a woman who was scrambling away from an air vent.

The Blob was squeezing through!

“Shit!” said one of the men with an extinguisher. He hurried over to the vent and blasted the monster’s pseudopod with a plume of gas.

The streamer of Blob wriggled back.

The man was just helping the lady back to her feet when another, larger spout of slime suddenly spurted from a nearby chimney.

It wrapped around the man, knocking the fire extinguisher from his grasp.

“Help!” he cried.

He was able to say only that one word before the pseudopod pulled him into the chimney and up into the darkness.

“Oh, my God!” cried someone. “Look! The front door!”

Meg Penny looked. Briggs looked. Everyone looked. But there was nothing to be done. The door latch, bending with the renewed bowing of the doors, snapped even as they looked.

Crack!

And the doors started to buckle.

“No!” a man cried. As one, ten people, including Briggs and Mr. Penny, ran to the front door, pushing against the barricade of desks and cabinets to keep the doors in place. But the fissures in the wood continued. And whenever there was the smallest of cracks, the Blob would squiggle though.

Moss climbed up on the barricade. He aimed the nozzle of his canister and fired at the streaming stuff coming through a particularly large crack. One good gust pushed it back for a moment—but then, with a strangled, coughing sound, the canister went dry.

Deputy Bill Briggs, straining against a bookshelf used to block the door, cried, “We need more C0
₂
up here!”

He was pushing for all he was worth . . . if they could just get some more fire extinguishers . . . They had to be here if these nitwits could just
find
them and—

Briggs heard a crack. The next thing he knew, books were scattering everywhere, onto the floor by his feet.

The creature. It had pushed through the—

Like a pincer two segments of the Blob blasted out, flowed around Deputy Bill Briggs’s waist, and closed in on him.

They burned! Oh, God, they burned . . . !

They sank through cloth and flesh.

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.

“I
t 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 C0
₂
, 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.