“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.
Come.
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 here, but I didn’t know who they were talking about and I heard fighting in the kitchen.” The more Jen talked, the more tears streamed down her face. Her voice streamed out of her in much the same way. “The ones with the tattoos started fighting each other. There were a few with guns and some more ran outside. There was screaming and…and ripping sounds. It was worse than what I heard in here. It was…” Her words devolved into an indecipherable series of gasps and sobs.
Rather than ask her to go on, Paige patted Jen on the shoulder and asked, “Can you stand up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try for me, okay?”
With Paige’s help, she was able to get up.
“Don’t look around, Jen,” Paige said. “We’re going to get you outside. There’s a fire in the kitchen, so you need to get moving. Just look at the front door and nothing else.”
Although Jen was weak, she got moving once the F-word had been used. Fires had a good track record of motivating any animal, whether they were hurt or not, and Jen was no exception.
Cole watched through the window as Paige led her outside. Jen was about Paige’s height, but outweighed her by at least thirty pounds. Even so, Paige carried her with ease and gently lowered her to one of the cement blocks marking the nearest parking space. When Paige walked back inside, Cole asked, “How is she?”
“She’ll be all right. Are there any more breathing?”
Cole shook his head. “I can only see a few bodies that look human. The rest…” What he didn’t need to say was that the rest were either leaking oily black liquid instead of blood or clawing at the ground with stiffening hands. Now that the diner was quiet, he could hear the sounds of dry snapping. The Nymar bodies had already become dry enough to crack and send flakes of skin into the air. Taking in the sight of it all, he wondered if it was good or bad that he could remain in that spot without puking his guts out.
“I’ve got some good news,” Paige said after taking a quick survey of the bodies. “All these Nymar are real dead and Jen’s still real human. She was bitten, but there would have been some of that black stuff in the wound already if a spore had been passed into her. I gave her a bit of the antidote anyway, but it’s not like Nymar can just reproduce accidentally.”
“That puts them one up on humans, then,” Cole grunted.
Paige chuckled and took a closer look at the Nymar whose spine had been ripped out. “Come over here. You should see this.”