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.
“And the great voice said to the seven angels, go your ways and pour the vials of wrath of God upon the Earth… and lo, there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon men which had the mark of the Beast… !”
Meg Penny heard this scripture, but she was too terrified even to comprehend what the reverend was saying. She just clung to her family as the Blob put more and more pressure on the once sturdy Town Hall, until the rafters and the solid brick of the walls began to squeal and tremble as though in terrible agony.
“Mommy!” cried Kevin. “Don’t let it get us!”
But Meg Penny knew the truth. It was going to get them. The monster was going to get them, just as it had gotten the others.
She was too frightened and horrified to even wonder what had happened to Brian Flagg.
22
“It can’t stand the cold!”
Meg’s words echoed in Brian Flagg’s mind.
But he’d already figured it out. He knew it as soon as he saw those pseudopods retreat under the spray of C02, as Meg Penny extinguished the fire on the Reverend Meeker.
Cold! Of course! He’d been so stupid.
When they’d been in the freezer, and the tentacles of the monster had stopped short, withdrawing back through the door cracks—that had been what had stopped the creature! Subzero temperature!
Now, with the thing on the surface, rolling around like an unanchored mountain, there was only one way to stop it, and that was with cold.
There was a big icehouse here in Morgan City. But no way could he convince that monster to come along and get inside it. No, the cold was going to have to be brought to the creature.
And Brian Flagg was going to be the guy to do it!
He ran through the night with surprising speed and energy considering how much he’d already gone through that evening. He ran down the street to Moss’s Repair Shop, praying that the door wasn’t locked.
The door was locked.
Shit!
Behind him he heard the gunfire and the screams and the roar of people running from the advancing monster.
“Shit!” he cried. The side door of the shop had a sectioned, framed window. Brian Flagg smashed his fist through the glass nearest the door. Shattered glass tinkled into the darkness.
Brian reached in, felt for the knob, unlocked the door, and burst through.
His hand was bleeding, but he didn’t notice.
Cold. Cold. COLD!
The word throbbed through his head as he ran into the shop, where the hulking shadows of machines lurked.
He hoped that Moss had gotten around to fixing the thing!
Brian fumbled for the light switch.
No light. Electricity gone.
But enough light was coming through the garage-door windows to make out where the cabs were. Brian ran to the machine and clambered into the cab. He felt around in the darkness, praying that—
Yes! His fingers touched the key, already slotted into the ignition.
“Okay, buddy. You gotta work!”
He turned the key.
The engine whined, and died.
Shit!
No, this was unacceptable! He tried again.
The engine growled like a leashed mountain lion. Growled and growled, turning over but only on the power of the battery and—
Brian stepped on the accelerator.
The engine roared into life.
He buckled the safety harness into place, turned the cab lights and the headlights on, and then fumbled with the emergency brake.
Brake off, he downshifted the gear, brought up the clutch.
The mighty machine lurched forward.
There was no time to figure out how to unlock the front garage doors, so Brian Flagg slammed the Indian Summit snowmaker right through them.
Glass broke and wood shattered as the door exploded outward. Stepping up the speed, Brian Flagg hurled the machine into the night. There were parked cars in front of him, but he paid them no mind. The snowmaker blasted through them, sending them careening away like tenpins struck with a bowling ball.
The big-wheeled machine roared onward, its enormous tractor tires bouncing across the bumpy pavement. The headlights picked up the ghastly carnage wreaked by the thing—twisted autos, pieces of bodies, slime. Brian tried to ignore it as he directed the snowmaker up the street.
Town Hall, he thought. They must have run for cover to Town Hall.
He headed in that direction.
He could see it from two blocks away, and it was grotesque.
The Blob was attached to the Town Hall like a throbbing parasite, roiling and shaking as it tried to crush the building.
Meg was in that building.
Meg and the others.
As he headed toward the creature, Brian looked down to the controls of the snowmaker. He’d worked on one of these things before with Moss, and the dude had shown him what lever did what, but he’d never actually used the machine before.
But he knew how it worked.
On top of the cab was a big funnel-like chute that dispensed the snow, while the snowmaking apparatus was housed on the flatbed back of the truck. This included big metal water tanks, and a grouping of tanks of liquid nitrogen that looked like airplane bombs. A central machine siphoned measured quantities of both through its pipes, and then blew out the resulting mixture—man-made snow—from the large blower hooked onto the front.
Brian brought the machine right up to the Blob and stopped it, its air brakes hissing.