After what seemed an eternity jammed into a few seconds, they reached the network of piping riding up the wall to the storm drain.
“Get up, there, Kevin!” cried Meg, boosting her little brother up onto the first pipe. Kevin’s foot caught hold, and his hands started pulling him up out of the water and onto the wall.
“Okay, Eddie,” she said. “You, too, now!”
She grabbed him to boost him up as well…
But with a speed that astonished her, Eddie was suddenly ripped from her grasp. Like a half-submerged skier he shot through the water, back across the chamber, splatting up a spray of water.
“Eddie!” yelled Meg.
Eddie screamed all the way.
And then, halfway back to the other edge of the water, Eddie was sucked under.
Meg Penny, hysterical, jumped out after him, trying to drag him back.
Kevin Penny, on the pipes, horrified, saw his sister vanish beneath the surface in Eddie’s wake.
His shock broke loose in a cry. “Meg! No!”
The turbulence in the water settled. Kevin could see nothing beneath the turbid calm.
Kevin could not move. He felt as though he were frozen on the pipes. His sister… Eddie… both down there under that water… with that awful, horrible, gummy, sticky,
Meg! Oh, Meg, he thought. It got you. It got—
But then a head bobbed up through the surface, flinging off water from long hair. It was Meg! The thing hadn’t got her!
“Eddie!” Meg Penny cried. The loss of the little boy was just too much. Her mind was spinning as she gasped in air, and swung her head around, looking for him.
“It
She couldn’t believe it. They’d been so close, so very close to escaping. Meg waded back toward the pipes, still hoping that maybe it
An explosion of water directly in front of her.
Eddie!
The boy burst up from the water and for a moment hope filled Meg. But then she saw the expression on Eddie’s face—twisted in the throes of death. And she saw the stuff wrapped around his head.
Gummy liquefaction.
The creature!
Meg screamed, and Eddie was jerked back under, thrashing and struggling, eyes almost popped from their sockets.
Fear drove her legs forward. She raced for the pipes. She had to get out of here! Had to get out! Get out!
She reached the side of the chamber and grabbed the first pipe. “Up!” she cried. “Kevin, go up!”
She couldn’t help but look behind her as Kevin turned and started climbing up the pipes toward the drainpipe.
The creature was rising up from the water.
The top of it looked like the head of a cancerous jellyfish, rippling with inner gases. But then it lifted up higher, higher, an island of bloody mucus, quivering and sozzly.
By the faint light Meg could see the half-dissolved bits of human carcasses hanging in the colloidal stuff, like obscene fruit in a satanic Jell-O mold.
She climbed frantically.
Above her, Kevin slipped.
She was far enough up to catch him. She set his feet back on the pipes and pushed him up.
“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—”
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.
