The Blob

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 C0₂ 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 C0₂. 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 C0₂ 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 C0₂ 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 C0₂ 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.