David Bischoff - The Blob

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—”

“DO IT NOW! ”

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.

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!

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.