The Enclave Read Online Free

so strong now he glanced over his shoulder at the empty corridor as he stepped to the door of his own lab. He swiped his ID card through the lock slot, the bolt retracted, and he pushed the door inward, stepping over the five-inch-high raised threshold as he snapped on the lights.
    The square lab was a third the size of Poe’s, with a row of narrow clerestory windows running high up along the opposite wall. Counters cluttered with lab equipment, working pans, and several ten-gallon aquariums ran along three walls atop Formica-faced cabinets. Those to his right butted up against a full-length wooden closet. Dead center, his desk and computer station stood as an island, piled with books, papers, disks, and various lab paraphernalia, looking almost as if someone had searched through it all. When did I get to be such a slob?
    He stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him, his neck crawling with the awareness that his every move was being recorded. Only when his jaw began to ache did he realize he was clenching his teeth. With a sigh, he relaxed his jaw and started around the small lab, sorting through beakers and flasks, opening cabinets and drawers, reading notes, making a show of inspecting his things, even as he wondered where exactly the camera was.
    The heap of the frog bodies lying in the tray where he’ d left them after removing their livers looked undisturbed. All still had their legs, so it didn’t appear the intruder had breached his lab. They were beginning to stink, however. . . .
    He continued around the counter, returning finally to the island computer station, where he slid out of his wet lab coat and tossed it carelessly over the back of the chair. Immediately it slid almost to the floor, and when he picked it up again and held it up to fold it properly over the chair back, his eyes caught upon the blood that stained its left sleeve and the red palm print on its shoulder. . . .
    Suddenly the distant wop-wop of a helicopter’s rotors grew loud and close. His chest constricted, and he clenched his teeth again— hard—as the bloody palm print flashed like a Vegas marquee. His hands shook and he gasped for breath as the image of another puddle of blood, much larger than what he’d seen on the prep room floor, overlaid the coat.
    Suddenly he was on his knees in another ruined lab, this one on the other side of the world. Ranks of wooden cabinets had been splintered and wrenched from their moorings, huge examining tables lay on their sides, and jagged shards of glass glittered on the floor. Blood pooled around him and coated his arms to his elbows as he strove to hold closed the severed artery in the Afghan biologist’s thigh until Rudy could get back with a med kit.
    Automatic-weapon fire rattled in the cavernous chamber beyond the lab’s shattered doorway, the sulfurous smoke of burned gunpowder acrid in his nose. He heard a chorus of screams; then all was drowned out by a lionlike roar. His trembling grew so violent he could hardly keep himself upright, his hand unable to hold the artery firmly, the Afghan’s hot blood welling up against his palm. The roar sounded again, closer now, and panic seized him.
    Abruptly he was back in his quiet southern Arizona lab, messy but not demolished. The floor was clean and clear, the walls solid, cabinets intact. Silence replaced the gunfire, though he could still hear the choppers, somewhere off in the distance—Institute security forces searching the desert for Slattery’s nonexistent intruder.
    Suddenly the coat in Cam’s hands terrified him. He flung it away as if it were a flesh-and-blood attacker, surprised when it only crumpled to the floor about five feet away from him. He watched it warily, nonetheless, telling himself he was being utterly irrational as he breathed deeply and sought to regain control of himself.
    Slowly it dawned on him that he’ d had a flashback. His first in almost ten years.
    He sagged back against the desk, horrified.