The Blob Read Free Page B

its watery, gassy beer.
    He tried to start the bike, but it didn’t even sputter.
    Yeah, he’d be outta here, all right. But not right now on this bike. He’d have to get the bike fixed and working right before he could even think about such a thing. He’d have to get the tools.
    Reluctantly Brian left his bike and began the walk to town.

3
    M organ City, USA.
    It wasn’t a name that carried a lot of magic. Not like Hollywood, or Miami, or New York. An occasional tourist at the Indian Summit resort might ask, “Named after J. Pierpont Morgan, right? The multimillionaire. Maybe he started the place, yeah?”
    The residents, upon hearing such a question, would just smile knowingly and neither nod nor shake their heads. The truth—which they seldom shared—was that Morgan was the name of the trapper who had built a shack there over a hundred years ago and had ended up ignominiously scalped and butchered by the local Indians.
    Morgan Lodge, a headquarters for hunters, had become Morgan Resort in the early twenties. The town that grew up to house the people who worked at Morgan Resort became Morgan City.
    But in truth it remained a town, marooned in the middle of the country, clinging desperately to the past with a vague hope for the future, but mostly just happy to eke out a present.
    Morgan City had all the prerequisites of a classic American town. There was a weather-beaten post office; a pseudo-Colonial town hall; an American Legion building that desperately needed a paint job; a pseudo-Gothic high school and a ticky-tacky box of an elementary school. And of course there were clusters of suburban houses strewn around, each built in whatever cheap style predominated in the decade of their creation.
    But the single, enduring symbol of an earlier innocence, of a period of hope and prosperity, as well as the cornerstone of its social life, to say nothing of its gustatory tradition, was the town diner.
    The Tick Tock Diner was built in the late forties in the classic roadside Pullman design, as though poised and ready to be hitched up to some train and make a streamlined exit at any moment. It was the fifties, however, that had left its stamp on the place, when Tandy Rumpyard had bought it and called it Tick Tock after the garish neon clock sign he’d purchased in Denver at a bankrupty sale. Even today Elvis songs still played on the jukebox and echoed against the diner’s metal walls. The whole place smelled of years’ worth of malteds and cheeseburgers. A cemetery of cracked linoleum and dulled metal, the Tick Tock might have been a monument to nostalgic memories of better days if the owner had cared to polish it up a bit, take out the patched orange booth seats, and remortar some of the tile. But why should he? Morgan City was too busy just hanging on to care much about nostalgia. It was too busy using the Tick Tock Diner as a place to eat and meet to think in terms of its history and style.
    And they all did use it, from the oldest resident to the youngest, each agreeing you could say what you wanted about the grease and the pall, but the Tick Tock still managed to brew the best coffee in town.
    Sheriff Herb Geller certainly thought so. It was his kind of coffee, all right, not like the battery-acid stuff at the local McDonald’s. This coffee was thick and rich, dark and deep, with a smooth taste and no afterbite. And they served it with real cream too—well, half-and-half. Close enough.
    The sheriff half turned on the creaky old metal stool that sat as part of a row in front of the counter. He looked out into the afternoon light, and then he looked back at his coffee in its chipped cup, and then he looked over to where Fran Hewitt sat, dreamily watching the convection heat rise from the macadam parking lot. The sheriff was dying to make some conversation with the lady, and coffee, he supposed, was about as good a subject as any.
    “Coffee’s even better than usual,” said Sheriff Geller, easing his girth a