Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/68

over them, was gliding still smoothly on with their dark bodies visible in its clear gray masses.

Never afterward could Worley remember clearly the things that befell him in the next moments. He knew that with that sight a final mad frenzy of utter horror and despair had settled upon him, that with those other fleeing figures he was stumbling through the narrow streets toward the northward and the one chance of escape from the death-trap that the island had become, but his impressions of those mad moments were always hazy, dim. Striking, trampling, pushing, he and the panic-driven mobs about him fought their way through the choked streets, through the darkness of that dread night, while ever behind them, from south and east and west, there glided upon their track the mighty wave of protoplasm, calm, smooth, effortless, effortless, sweeping out over the island's tip and up through its narrow streets, absorbing into itself steadily the exhausted fugitives who fled before it, advancing northward and inward from the city's sides with its vast, glistening masses still steadily increased by the floods of protoplasm pouring up from the encircling waters.

To Worley, then, it was as though he was pushing his way onward through the fear-choked nightmares of some terrifying dream. The hoarse shouts of the fleeing thousands who were pouring forth from all the city's buildings to flee northward about him; the frantic clanging of bells and screeching of whistles; the thunder of bombs and crack of rifles as the city's defenders sought in vain to halt those gliding, irresistible masses; the agonized shrieks of those who fell before the great wave of death, of those trapped by it in buildings or in blind streets; the faint, far roar of panic that came from the other cities west and eastward; these merged in his mind into one mighty, unceasing bellow of utter terror.

For how many hours Worley had fought his way northward through the horror-driven millions that surged through the night of the city's streets before he reached at last the island's northern heights, he could not guess. There, pausing and swaying in a doorway while the roaring crowds surged ever by him toward the Harlem River bridges that were the sole gates of escape from the island of death, he peered southward through the darkness. The great city, a far-flung mass of blinking lights, stretched before him, its streets alive here and there with other moving lights, with the mobs that surged wildly northward to escape from it, and from whom arose a dull, far roar of fear. Farther southward, though, in the midtown and lower sections, no lights moved, and there arose no cries, for there, surging up about and across the island like a great tide of utter silence and death, there rolled the mighty protoplasmic masses, sweeping all before them as they poured still up from the bordering seas, gliding onward in a single gigantic, glistening wave. As Worley turned and fought northward again with the crazed mobs that filled the streets, it came to him dully to wonder whether on all earth was any place of refuge from those mighty, mindless masses that had rolled out so suddenly and strangely from the sea.

Had Worley but known it, as he struggled northward through the last hours of that dread night, it was not at New York alone but on all the shores and in all the seaside cities of earth that humanity was fleeing at that moment before the protoplasmic tides of death. Up from all earth's seas at the same hour, the same moment almost, had rolled the same mighty glistening waves, flowing upward and sweeping out over mighty cities, and through tiny villages, and