The Blob

it.

Mitchell jumped back. What the hell?

He automatically swung the flashlight up, cutting through the shadows.

Phil Hobbs the projectionist seemed to be embedded in the ceiling! Some kind of runny glob was holding him there, like an insect stuck in tree sap. Even as Clyde Mitchell looked, he could see the light going out of the man’s eyes. Could see the skin starting to melt away, exposing cartilage and skull, as the jaw opened and closed and the body twitched and jerked.

And then Mitchell could see that Hobbs’s body was being dragged across the ceiling, that the whole ceiling was a writhing mass. It seemed alive! And more gunk was spewing up from out of the air-conditioning duct.

Stunned, the manager could only think, So that’s why he wasn’t getting any AC.

Then ropes of slime dropped from the ceiling, surrounding him. Terrified, he turned to escape…

But the whole door was covered in a sheath of gunk.

The audience in the theater screamed as the hockey-masked killer struck again.

As though on cue Clyde Mitchell screamed as well, as the ceiling dropped down on him.

Meg Penny fumed as she was jerked and jostled by the military van zooming through town.

That damned Brian Flagg! He’d just flown the coop. And here she’d thought he was showing some special qualities she’d never imagined he possessed all these years! She’d actually felt something for the jerk! You couldn’t go through what they’d been through together and not feel something. But then he’d abandoned her, just like that, to save his own rotten skin.

The van squeaked to a halt and Meg heard the sound of footsteps running up to open the back door.

The door was opened by another of those plastic-suited soldiers, who motioned her out. As she stepped onto the pavement, she realized where she was. The center of Morgan City: Town Hall.

The Town Hall was two stories of ivy-covered brick, situated to the north of the tree-lined Town Square. Usually it projected an image of dignity and austerity, but tonight all was chaos. White-suited soldiers ran hither and yon, escorting Morgan City citizens to shelters. Meg could see medical teams working with clumps of people, checking them out for infection under artificial lights. Lots of people were still in their bedclothes, having been roused from sleep.

Yes, now the Town Hall was the Town Emergency Relief Station.

From the top of a military half-track a loudspeaker blared: “Please assemble in an orderly fashion and cooperate fully with our medical personnel…”

The soldier who had opened the door for her thumped the side of the van with his fist and shouted, “Clear!”

A little dazed and discombobulated, Meg walked forward into the confused scene, looking for her parents.

She found them quickly. They were in line for medical attention, along with two people she recognized as Eddie’s parents. Mrs. Penny was holding her little baby sister, Christine.

“Mom! Dad!” she called, running to them.

Mrs. Penny welcomed her with a frantic hug. “Meg! Thank God you’re all right!”

“Where have you been?” said her father. “You had us scared out of our minds!”

She looked around, noticing an absence. Kevin. What had happened to her little brother?

“Where’s Kevin?” she asked.

“He probably snuck off to that damn movie,” said her mother. “He told us he was staying over at Eddie’s.”

Eddie’s mother, Mrs. Beckner, looked dismayed. “Eddie told us he was staying at your place.”

This was terrible! The thought of little Kevin and that horrible monster… !

A soldier was passing by, and Meg reached out and grabbed him. “Excuse me,” she said. “My little brother’s over at the movie theater on Main!”

“Miss, we’re going by sectors. We’ll get there shortly.”

“You don’t understand—”

The soldier brushed her off. “We’ll handle this, okay?”

Mr. Penny, however, clearly didn’t care for the soldier’s attitude. And Daddy was a very confrontational man.

“I don’t see you handling much of anything, bub. You on a coffee break?”

“Look, mister—” the soldier began.

“Don’t ‘look, mister’ me. I’m a taxpayer! I pay your salary!”

Everyone was listening to the argument. Which gave Meg the perfect opportunity to slip away. She had to get to the movie theater, get Kevin to a safe place and keep him there.

This was no night for a ten-year-old to be out on the town.

Kevin Penny was getting really steamed. This joker in the seat behind him was making a real nuisance of himself. Clearly he’d seen the film before, but why did he have to broadcast what was coming up?

Eddie and Anthony didn’t seem to mind. They were into the gore and the mayhem, not the suspense. But Kevin had always enjoyed suspenseful stuff, from the first time that a grown-up had played peekaboo with him when he was a baby. But there was no suspense in Garden Tool Murders, not with Big Mouth blaring behind him.

He tried to ignore the guy, and turned his attention to the screen, where two pretty coeds in nighties were talking inanely as they made salads. But Kevin couldn’t hear what they were saying. Big Mouth drowned them out.

“Oh, you’ll love this,” said the guy. “He takes the Veg-O-Matic and dices them to death.”

That was the last straw! Kevin was fed up. He was gonna give this guy a piece of his mind, just the way Dad would. In fact, he pretended he was Dad now, Dad with a mad on, as he turned to confront Big Mouth.

But as he turned, expecting to see the bespectacled man with the bad haircut, he was buffeted by a faint wind. There was a blur of motion. All he got a glimpse of was the heels of the guy’s wing tips as he was yanked up into the air.

Kevin—and the guy’s girlfriend—stared up, dumbfounded.

What they saw was infinitely worse than any killer wearing a hockey mask and waving a garden hoe.

Some kind of awful glop was spilling out of the three projection windows behind the audience. Only, it wasn’t like it was just liquid—it looked kind of like loose clay, animated. A tendril of the stuff had whipped down, lassoed Big Mouth, and pulled him up toward the greater mass.

Big Mouth was screaming.

But then the screaming stopped as he was pushed head first into the writhing mass—with no splash. His legs and arms wriggled frantically, and then blood and some other liquid started pouring down over the heads of the audience.

Screams began, louder than any movie had ever aroused.

“Look at that!” cried Kevin, pounding on Eddie and Anthony to attract their attention. Even as they looked, gobs of muck rolled down onto the aisle, grabbing a woman and pulling her off her feet.

Panic seized the crowd.

The projector jammed, freezing the movie on the image of a screaming coed. And then the hot light burned the image away—even as the creature invading the movie theater burned away the face of a man with a flick of a pseudopod.

The audience became a mob. Panicked, they ran for their lives toward the bright red exit signs.

“We gotta get outta here,” said Anthony, but as the boys ran into the aisle, they were hit by running people. Anthony was carried along with the crowd, but Eddie and Kevin were knocked down onto the sticky, popcorn- covered carpet.

The creature roiled toward them.