The headlights shone through the red-porridge-and-saliva body of the monstrosity. Brian could smell it, and he had to control his revulsion.
He turned on the snowmaker.
With a great gurgling and churning sound the machine set to work immediately. After a growl and a lurch the chute above the cab began to spit out a lovely, high arc of snow that burst up through the night and landed squarely on the monster.
Behind Brian, mist from the machine rose up into the night air. He turned the controls up to full, and a heftier dollop of new snow burst up, splattering onto the Blob.
The creature trembled. The creature shook. Its hold on the Town Hall had seemed unbreakable, but now the Blob streamed back and away, as though in terrible pain, turning to confront this new and hurtful enemy.
Brian could see that waves of steam rose up from the Blob wherever snow touched it. Some kind of chemical reaction was going on. It was working! He kept the snow blowing. He was going to bury this thing in snow, bury it until it was covered with this beautiful white stuff, and then he, Brian Flagg, was going to strap on skis and slalom the bastard!
But then the Blob, with a speed that belied its heft, rippled away from the torrent of snow.
It moved toward its attacker, rolling faster and faster.
“Shit,” said Brian. “Okay, you want to eat me? Eat me! But you’re gonna have to eat five tons of snow first!”
Snow still spouting, he shifted the engine into gear and popped the clutch.
He turned the wheel so that the vehicle was heading straight for the cannonballing monster.
His repositioning put the snow dead center back onto the Blob, and the creature didn’t like it, not at all. With soundless, quivering fury, it struck forward at the machine, lifting it up and hurling the truck and the cab and Brian into the air, turning them over like a child’s toy.
Brian could feel the cab disengaging from the rest of the snowmaker, ripped away from the snow chute and the tanks of water and liquid nitrogen, and skidding off onto the pavement.
The cab spun over, and the snow stopped.
Brian Flagg found himself upside down. Desperately he tried to unbuckle the belt. He could see the stuff of the monster rolling around him like steaming, half-solid sewage.
He heard the metal groan as the monster squeezed.
As the stuff of the creature rolled past the window, Brian could also hear it slipping over above him.
As he hung there, desperately working at the latch to the seat belt, he saw half-digested bodies float by.
Oh, jeez! There was Deputy Briggs!
And one of the soldiers, in one of the plastic suits.
Skeleton fingers clacked onto the glass as spiderwebs of cracks appeared… death, knock knock knocking to get in.
The belt unlatched.
He dropped down to the ceiling of the cab, struggling to get up and onto his feet.
The cab squealed, as though caught in a crusher.
But then, just as he got himself upright, a length of bare metal crunched in, cracking him across the forehead.
Brian Flagg fell, unconscious, as the Blob squeezed on the cab of the snowmaker, pushing to get at this new bit of food.
23
It was hungry. So hungry.
But now it knew other sensations.
Much less pleasurable sensations.
The Blob hurt
These bits of food… Somehow they had hurt it with the terrible waves of cold they sprayed at it.
Primordial fury swept through primitive synapses and it turned on its enemy and stopped it.
The hurt stopped, too, and the other sensations swept in.
It was hungry again.
Hungry.
First, Meg Penny heard the engine motors outside, and then the squeal of air brakes.
Then the roof of the Town Hall shook even harder, as though the monster had suffered some kind of paroxysm.
Then the shaking stopped.
The streamers of the Blob withdrew.
Meg could hear the creature slithering away.
It left a gaping hole in the front door. Detaching herself from her family, Meg ran out through the hole and onto the steps, still slimy and gooey.
She could see the snowmaker clearly now, spouting its load onto the cringing Blob.
And she could see who was in the cab.
Brian Flagg.
“Brian!” she cried, and she ran to help him.
“Meg!” called her mother behind her. “No!”
But the call did no good. She had to go and help Brian. That thing had to be stopped. Determination and pure anger swelled up in Meg Penny.
Yes, that monster had to be stopped!
But even as she ran toward the snowmaker, she watched helplessly as the Blob hurled itself at it. She watched as the vehicle was lifted up like a bobbing boat and torn asunder. She watched as the Blob poured over the cab, trying to get at Brian.
“No!” she cried. “No!”
Desperately she looked around the ground by her feet.
Wreckage everywhere.
But just a few yards away the half-dissolved body of a soldier attracted her attention.
The soldier still held his M16 rifle in a death grip. Attached to his back was a belt which held a package just like the one the colonel had ordered to be lobbed down into the manhole. What had he called it?
Oh, yes. A satchel charge.
First, Meg Penny peeled back the fingers of the dead man and pulled the rifle away. Then she detached the belt with the satchel charge and swung it over her shoulder.
It had always been just her tiny bit of flesh and willpower against that terrible mass of rolling putrefaction.
But now she had something to fight it with.
She ran around to where the creature was pouring over the cab. Nearby the detached tanks of water and liquid nitrogen lay. The Blob had not poured over these. They were no longer spraying snow at it.
Brian was in that cab. She had to distract the thing, right away.
She had watched the soldiers work their guns, and this one was already cocked. She held it up and fired at the monster.
A volley of bullets tore into the thing, ripping out divots of protoplasm. The weapon’s recoil pushed her back, but she recovered and gave the thing another round.
Then she moved over behind the tanks. She had an idea.
“Come on, you pile of shit!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Come on and try to get me!”
She pressed the trigger and more bullets sprayed into the Blob.
The thing shifted its bulk. A part of it collected into something that could almost be a “head.” The “head” peered down through sightless eyes.
She let another burst rip through the roiling protoplasm, and then she scrambled up to the tanks lying on the ground by the cab.
It was working!
The Blob was releasing the snowmaker’s cab. It sensed easier prey—or had it indeed been maddened by the bullets and her challenge?
“You can do better than that!” she jeered. “C’mon!”
She emptied the chambers of the M16 and then threw the rifle itself at the advancing Blob.
Then she pulled the satchel charge up by its belt and looked around. Right there… between those two massive tanks of liquid nitrogen. Meg Penny was a skier, and she knew exactly what these things were, what incredible cold was locked away in the metal, under extreme pressure…
She wedged the satchel charge down between the tanks. Now, how had that soldier done it?
She looked up, gauging how much time she had before that rippling stuff rolled over these tanks.