more gnarled and contorted than ever. His left fist sailed toward Paige, but she was able to hop away. Henry’s knuckles sent a chair flying, but his next attack was quicker.
Even though Paige was able to raise one of her weapons as a shield, there was more than enough force to send her skidding across the slippery floor. She grabbed onto a table and pulled it down with her so it could shield her from Henry’s next swing. A meaty fist cracked the thick plastic tabletop. Paige waited for the next blow, but it didn’t arrive. Instead, Henry loped over to the Nymar on the floor.
Cole circled around Henry and reached for Paige’s arm to help her up, but almost got one of her weapons jammed down his throat. “Easy,” he hissed. “That thing’s distracted.”
Paige blinked furiously and gathered herself up so she was crouched behind the table and ready to spring. “What’s distracting it?” she asked.
“Looks like our friends with the fangs are good for something after all.”
Taking a quick glance over the table, Paige watched as Henry stood in front of the Nymar and lowered his head. He then wrapped both arms around himself as if hugging his own stomach. The Nymar tried to scoot away, but Henry flew at him before he could get far. Shouting incoherently, Henry swatted at the floor and sent tiles through the air. With the same reckless abandon, he swiped at the Nymar’s chest and ripped away several layers of flesh and bone. “You!” Henry grunted. “Justliketheothers! Justliketheothers!”
The Nymar grabbed onto Henry’s wrist and had just enough strength to keep the gnarled fingers from reaching into his exposed rib cage. Once Henry’s hand came free, the Nymar flipped over and got to his hands and knees. Dropping his face to the floor, he lapped up some of the blood that had pooled there and then sent his leg straight back to pound against Henry’s midsection.
Henry skidded backward and crashed against the counter. His head lolled crazily as he stood up and swelled to something even bigger than when Paige had been on his back. He howled something that could have been words but were wrapped up in too much snarling to make any sense. Gripping the back of the Nymar’s head, Henry slammed the guy’s face against the floor, his other hand sinking wrist-deep into the middle of the Nymar’s back. He pressed down even harder against the Nymar’s head and pulled his other hand up to send several chunks of vertebrae through the air amid a spray of oily, blackened blood.
“You seen anything like that before?” Cole gasped.
For once Paige was speechless. She shook her head as Henry stuffed his face into the breach he’d created and started gnawing.
The word rolled through the air, causing Cole and Henry to snap their heads up and look toward the kitchen. Henry’s mouth was covered in Nymar blood, and rubbery chunks of the spore dangled from his teeth. Without a moment’s hesitation Henry stood up and leapt for the order window. His second jump took him out of sight completely.
“Come on!” Paige shouted as she hurdled the overturned table.
Cole was moving before she’d given the order.
The kitchen was a smaller area than the dining room, but was in an equally messy state. Pots and pans were scattered everywhere. Blackened hockey pucks that had once been burger patties sizzled on the grill, and a man in a white apron and T-shirt lay on the floor with his neck torn open. Cole led the way through a hole in the wall that might have been a doorway before Henry had shoved through it.
The back of the diner was a gravel-covered lot with several cars parked in a row. There were a few more parked off to one side, but they weren’t arranged as neatly as the first bunch. Pushing past Cole to emerge from the diner, Paige held her arms up with her weapons flipped over her forearms to protect her face. But there was no attack coming and nobody was there to ambush them. Cole’s attention was drawn to a dark, late model four-door speeding away from the diner. Henry bounded alongside that car like an obedient dog, then got in front of it with his next leap. The car left the diner behind amid a spray of loose gravel that wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out Paige’s fierce swearing.
“We can still catch it!” Cole said. “Let’s go!”
“This place is right off the interstate. They’ll be in the fast lane before we get the car started.”
Cole wanted to argue and drag Paige to the car, but after running around the side of the building, he saw she was right. The highway was less than a hundred yards away, and Misonyk’s car was already pulling onto it. “So we just let them go?” he asked.
Paige let out the breath she’d been holding and nodded. “There’s a survivor inside. I saw her at one of the tables.”
“And what if the survivor isn’t human?” he asked.
Holding up the weapon in her right hand to show Cole that it was the straight, sharpened stake, she replied, “One more body in there won’t make much difference.”
Chapter 15
The survivor was a woman with rounded features and wire-framed glasses. Her reddened face was streaked with tears, and her black, curly hair hung like a curtain over her eyes. Her arms were tightly folded on top of the table and her head lay sideways upon them as if she was either playing dead or being punished for talking during story time.
“There’s a medical kit under the passenger’s seat in my car,” Paige said as she crouched down beside the woman’s table. “Go get it.”
As Cole headed for the front door, he watched Paige gently examine the woman’s neck and wrists. He ran for the car, waiting for police to skid to a stop in front of the place or news helicopters to gather overhead. But there was none of that. It seemed everyone was perfectly content to drive by and listen to their radios. Finding what he was after, he rushed back while trying to decide if he was grateful for or disgusted by the absence of his fellow man.
Paige’s medical kit was something that might have confused an army field medic. Opening like a tackle box, the kit contained everything from mundane bandages to syringes filled with stuff that he didn’t even want to think about. After cleaning off the short-haired woman’s minor scrapes, Paige bandaged them up.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
The woman had yet to speak after she’d sat up and allowed herself to be cleaned off. In fact, it seemed that she had yet to blink. After hearing Paige’s question, she twitched and replied, “Jennifer.”
“What happened, Jennifer? Or should I call you Jen?”
Without meeting Paige’s eyes, Jen nodded and said, “There was only four or five of us in here. We were eating lunch when they came.”
“Who came?”
“The ones with the…the ones with the black…” Unable to finish her sentence, Jen reached up to brush her fingertips along her neck.
“With the markings on their skin?”
She nodded again. “I guess they were tattoos. They came in and they spread out and started looking us over. That’s when I thought they were going to hurt us.”
As Jen spoke, Paige removed one of the syringes containing the Nymar antidote from her kit and discreetly cleaned the needle with an alcohol wipe. “Then what did they do?”
“They had…they all had…they had long teeth. Fangs.” Letting her head fall forward, Jen gave in to a sobbing fit that shook her shoulders and drained the color from her face. Fortunately, Paige had already stuck her with the needle and removed it.
“Some tried to fight them,” Jen went on. “I think they even fought each other. One of them bit my arm,” she added as she held out the arm that Paige had already cleaned and bandaged. “He was…I think he drank…”
“All right,” Paige said. “What about the big one?”
Suddenly, Jen’s eyes widened and she turned to look directly at Paige for the first time. “He came after most of us were dead! The ones with the tattoos were all talking after they were through with us. One of them said he was
