The Blob

She scrambled up the concrete ramp.

It was hungry.

It was hungry and it fed.

Feeding made it hungrier. As it had rolled through the building on the surface, sucking in so many of the animate hunks of flesh, it had known such ecstasy!

Such pleasure, sucking the blood, dissolving the bones, feeling the hot life-stuff of its victims mix with its own juices into a delightful, boiling stew, making it grow and grow, able to eat more and more and more…

Now, in the dark places, it swarmed about the plastic-suited creatures, easily dissolving this odd new skin, sucking out the life and the juices, thrilling at the sensations.

The spattering hunks of metal had been odd, but the Blob paid them no mind, forging ahead in its single-minded objectives. Find food. Eat food.

It had been pursuing food, food that was climbing up toward the light.

But then it had been distracted by the creatures wrapped in the plastic. Distracted by the bullets.

But now the Blob was no longer distracted. It set back after the food, which was no longer at the top of the pipes, but running through the water, trying to escape.

It moved toward it, like a wave toward a shore. It sensed the pulsing blood in its victim’s veins and it sensed the victim’s fear.

The Blob reached for the food, famished.

The Blob was hungry! Terribly, horribly hungry!

20

It had been a simple enough decision.

A little odd, but definitely workable.

That tunnel had been awfully dark. And Brian Flagg had only one source of light available to him: the headlight on his Indian motorbike.

And it wasn’t as if the pipes weren’t big enough! No, they were huge!

Two plus two equaled four every time.

Brian Flagg roared through the aqueduct system on his motorbike.

He didn’t know where he was going, he just went. Meg Penny was down here. Meg and her brother Kevin and his friend Eddie. That was what the voice over the radio had said.

Then, as he whipped through the dimness, his headlight striking out ahead of him, he heard the screams.

The screams and the shots.

He found the turn and roared off toward the sounds, down the incline of the pipe.

It was a girl’s scream he heard. Meg Penny’s scream.

He hurried.

Then he saw a faint light at the end of his tunnel. The pipe opened up there, into a chamber at the bottom of the pipe’s concrete spill-off. And there in that chamber, surging up from the water like a pustulant boil, was the creature.

And there, on the spillway, scrambling up the ramp like a poor half-drowned mouse, was Meg Penny.

Brian Flagg roared up to the lip of the pipe, leaned over, and reached out.

That thing was reaching out, too, with a pseudopod the size of a log. But Brian’s hand grabbed her outstretched hand, and he pulled her up.

The pseudopod hit the spillway hard, slopping off and just missing Meg’s feet as they were pulled up.

“Brian,” she said.

He pulled her onto the bike. She wrapped her arms around him. He turned the handlebars and he gunned the engine.

They roared off back up the tunnel.

“Brian, you came back!” she said, holding on for dear life as the bike zoomed away, the headlight slicing through the darkness.

Now, which way had he come? Brian Flagg wondered.

But then a blank wall reared up before them, and Brian put on the brakes and came to a skittering stop.

Dead end! He’d gone the wrong way.

He turned and saw the way he should have gone. But when they reached the intersection, there was something blocking them.

Brian stopped, startled. There hadn’t been a closure when he’d gone through this tunnel. What… ?

And then he saw what had blocked the tunnel.

A sheath of thick protoplasm, from the slotted vents above and below. Sticky stuff was still rolling through.

They were cut off. There was only one thing to do.

“Hang on,” he told Meg.

He turned the bike and he headed back toward the chamber.

Up ahead, limned by the dim light from the chamber, he could see the creature’s main bulk. It was flopping up the tunnel, straight toward them.

Brian Flagg revved the engine higher and higher. He pointed the headlight straight at the massive, globular nightmare coming for them.

“What are you doing?” cried Meg, disbelieving.

The thing was squeezing through vents, rippling through every side of them, sending out tendrils that just missed trapping them in goo.

Brian pushed the bike harder, harder, getting up speed as they approached collision with the thing.

At the last possible moment he turned the handlebars.

The bike screamed up the side of the pipe at a forty-five degree angle, and then kept on going, the centrifugal force keeping the wheels on concrete, and keeping Brian Flagg and Meg Penny in their seats. They rolled right over the monster, sweeping down in a spiral behind its mass.

“Briannnnnnnnnn!” Meg cried.

They tore toward the chamber, wind whipping through her hair, through Brian’s torn jacket. Adrenaline pumping through him madly, Brian kept his hand hard on the throttle. That thing back there was fast, and they couldn’t afford losing one bit of speed so close to it—

Now, if he could only navigate that spillway!

They burst from the tunnel, hung in the air for a moment, and then landed on the spillway…

At the wrong angle.

Both Brian and Meg were lifted from the seat and hurled over the handlebars as the motorbike slammed down onto the concrete, cracking the headlight as it tumbled and crashed downward. They flew asses over elbows, landing in the middle of the small underground lake.

Brian fought his way to the surface. “Meg!” he cried, gasping. His leg hurt like hell. He must have struck it in the tumble.

Something was bobbing beside him. He grabbed it, and it was loose and globby in his grasp. By the dim maintenance light, he could see the half-eaten body of a man—the remnants of a plastic suit…

“Over here, Brian!” Meg called.

Shuddering, Brian pushed the dead man away and the body softly sank out of sight.

Meg was just a few yards off. “Over here!” she cried, gasping for breath. “That tunnel over there! It’s free. It’s the way the soldiers came in.”

Soldiers. Yes, they must have been the ones to fire those shots… And that must have been one of them, half