Free The Blob by David Bischoff

doctor looked very annoyed at the intrusion. “Can’t you see I’m with a patient here?”
    Paul pointed down the corridor desperately. “There’s a man dying! Please!”
    Paul grabbed the man’s arm and dragged him into the hallway.
    “Down here,” he said. “We brought him in earlier!”
    They entered the cubicle. But now there was no movement beneath the blanket. The Can Man lay still and oblivious to everything, as though sleeping.
    “Is this the hand injury?” the doctor asked, automatically slipping into professional mode.
    “Yeah. There was this weird stuff on his hand and—”
    The doctor took the edge of the blanket and peeled it off.
    Paul Tyler gasped. But he couldn’t take his eyes off what lay below the blanket.
    Strands of a salivalike substance clung to the underside of the blanket.
    “Oh, my God!” the doctor said.
    The only part of the Can Man that was intact was his head. From the neck down the body was . . .
    It was half dissolved!
    Paul and the doctor stood frozen, staring down at the quivering mass that looked like a moldy fruit-and-gelatin salad layered over a skeleton. The bare bones of the Can Man’s rib cage framed the soupy remains of internal organs and his spine ended in a lump of twisted white that had once been his pelvis. All the rest was just a mass of steaming gore that wafted up a noxious smell of acrid putrefaction.
    Paul almost threw up.
    He staggered back, his mind reeling, but was unable to tear his eyes away from what lay on the gurney.
    “What the hell is this?” the doctor, aghast, finally said.
    “The thing on his hand—!” said Paul.
    The doctor broke from his paralysis. He ran to the door and hollered for help. “Nurse! Get in here!”
    The thing on his hand! It wasn’t there anymore! Where the hell had it gone?
    He had to find it. The thing was dangerous; Paul sensed that much. The horrible thing was a danger to everyone here in the clinic, maybe even to the whole town. He knew this fact, not so much from logic as from a queasy instinct he’d felt, ever since he’d first seen that pink blob on the Can Man’s hand.
    Paul pushed past the doctor, charging into the hall, looking for that thing. It was a living thing! It had to be! It was a living thing, and it had to be found!
    He hurried down the hall, whizzing past the nurse who had been summoned from her professional stupor by the doctor’s call. Paul looked first to the right, then to the left, checking the doorways.
    A little way down a door was open. It was an office, and on the office desk, a phone beckoned.
    They were going to need help here, no question about that, Paul reasoned. The thing had killed the Can Man. Killed him in the most horrible way imaginable. If it had killed once, it would kill again. Paul knew he had to call the police, and the sooner the police got there, the better.
    He went into the office toward the phone.
    It was hungry.
    Hunger was the only immediate sensation it knew.
    And now that it was bigger, so was the hunger-—grown into a rapacious, ravenous urge that filled every wildly growing and splitting cell in its mass.
    In the hot place, it had known little, its hunger as small as it was. It had known pain as well, with the heat and the pressures of gravity, but somehow it had thrived despite the pain, thrived and survived the screaming thump that had ended its long journey.
    When the cool night air had hit it, it had automatically contracted. But then the solid thing had come swimming into its ken, and it flowed around the thing, tasted it, found it organic and good. Clung. The Blob had found food.
    There had been fulfillment there, there in the first drink of tissue and corpuscles, in the squirt of warmth as the Blob’s fluids had descended upon the flesh and blood of the hand, dissolving it into assimilable plasma. Yes, in feeding had come satisfaction, but the Blob was weak, and this was its first food, and it took a time to feed.
    And to grow.
    But then, in the