The Blob

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 C0₂. 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 C0₂ 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 C0₂—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 C0₂ 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.

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