The Enclave (2 page)

She fought down surging panic.
Erik is dead.
And the idea that anyone at the Institute would be watching her the way he had was absurd. If she’d just turn and face whoever was there, she’ d see that.

Drawing a deep breath, she braced a hand against the tank and turned. A single frog sat on the raised threshold, sides fluttering, its golden pop-eyes gleaming in the fluorescent light.

She let out her breath and wiped sweaty palms down the front of her lab coat, feeling like an idiot. The frog hopped toward her. She stooped to grab it, then dropped it into the tank.

It’s the lack of sleep,
she told herself, returning to the hall in time to see two of her quarry disappear into the darkness of Dr. Poe’s lab.

The fans in the physical plant below her dorm room had rumbled through her dreams every night for that first week. Even after Admin let her move, she still wasn’t rested. Mandatory meetings and socials and nighttime lectures filled her evenings, after which she often had to spend several hours finishing up with the labware, before she could even start with the animals. Yet every morning breakfast was served at 7:30 a.m., regardless of how little anyone had slept.

And all that was in addition to the emotional drain of living in a new place and working among strangers she was desperate to impress. Every night she was asleep before her head hit the pillow. After almost a month of it, she knew her mounting fatigue was affecting not just her energy but her attitude.

She stopped with her hand on the knob of Poe’s door, staring into the dark lab again, a square starry night sky visible through the window at the room’s end. The light from the hall filtered in around her, limning shelved aquariums and Rubbermaid dishpans looming close on both sides.
Didn’t I just close this door?

Her nape crawled. She could almost feel someone in the darkness ahead, watching her, waiting for her. Down the hall in the prep room, Harvey’s wheel stopped.

She nearly yanked the door shut and fled, but reason steadied the ridiculous panic. She drew a deep breath, pushed the door wide, and fumbled for the wall switch. The nearest bank of fluorescent lights flickered on, illuminating a narrow alcove choked with U-configured, shoulder-high wooden shelving units. The room’s far end widened in the top stroke of a T, where a desk and a potted palm stood in the shadows. No one was there.

Squatting in the first U-shaped module, she nabbed one of her frogs between two of the dishpans and took it back to the main tank. Returning to move deeper into the room, she found another at the juncture of the third and fourth U’s, almost to the wider part of the lab. It lay on the bare vinyl of the flooring and made no attempt to escape when she bent toward it. Only as she picked it up did she realize its hind legs were gone. She found one of them on the floor in the next U. Cool, damp, and still softly firm, its moist, ragged thicker end indicated it had been torn from the frog’s body.

She stared at the limb uncomprehendingly. Even if the frog had gotten its legs caught between the pans and yanked it off in the struggle to get free, how had one of them gotten more than two feet away from the frog itself?

A cool waft of air, heavy with the scent of wet earth from the nightly watering of the grounds, washed around her. She looked up in surprise, realizing only then that the window was actually a door opened wide onto the shadow-shrouded courtyard beyond.

Even as the revelation dawned, a young man stepped from the shadows to face her. Maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, he was tall, lanky, and coarse-featured, with strong brow and jaw. He’ d shaved the sides of his head close, leaving the top in a swath of peltlike hair that pointed to the big pimple in the middle of his forehead. His pale eyes glittered like bits of glass, and a nervous tic pulsed erratically at the edge of his right eye.

He smiled at her, revealing a chipped front tooth, then plucked the frog leg from her grasp and stuffed it into his mouth. She recoiled with a cry of revulsion as he grinned and chewed, cheeks bulging, saliva glistening on his lips. She heard the crunch of bones, and refused to give way further to the distress he clearly wished to cause her.

“Who are you?” she demanded, glad her voice came out firm and crisp. “You shouldn’t be here.”

He swallowed his morsel and drew the back of a dirty, long-nailed hand across his mouth, his palm marred with a bloody gash. He continued to grin at her, and a chill crawled up her spine. He stood at least a head taller than she and was unquestionably quicker and stronger. And there was something in those eyes that seemed older than his years. Something . . . hungry.

He stepped toward her and she flinched backward, bumping into the shelves of dishpans and glass aquariums behind her and pulling a laugh from him.
If you run, they always chase you,
she thought.
Better
not to run. Better to stand and face them.

But the old fear was on her, just as it had been with Erik, though it had been four years since his death, and she knew she would take no stands, knew she was going to run.

Then out in the hallway the elevator pinged and its doors rumbled open, instantly reversing their positions. As the youth turned for the courtyard doorway, she grabbed his arm and screamed. He swung about, twisting free of her grip, then slammed her into the freestanding shelves behind her. She felt a blinding pain in her back and chest as she went down with the shelves in a crash of splintering wood and breaking glass. Water gushed around her, the room spun, and she gasped for breath.

Dimly she sensed the youth leave. Then there were others: Dr.Poe, Assistant Director Slattery, and several large security guards. The assistant director bent over her as she pointed toward the door and gasped out what had happened. She wasn’t half finished before the guards had disappeared through the door after the youth.

As Slattery and Poe helped her to her feet, pain wrenched the room askew and she fought to draw more than a teaspoonful of air into her lungs. She felt them walking her forward, feet crunching on broken glass. A bright blue salamander thrashed amid the wreckage.

They were carrying on some sort of intense conversation that she had no context to grasp. Then Slattery drew his hand away from her and held it up, covered with bright red blood. “She’s bleeding.”

Poe hissed an epithet. “Is it bad?”

“I don’t know. Her sleeve’s soaked. Let’s get her to the prep room.”

They entered the corridor, Slattery pulling the door to Poe’s lab shut behind them. Lacey’s vision kept spangling with bright light, blotting the men out. Their voices grew dim and muffled. She wanted nothing so much as to lie down, to be able to breathe again.

The voices rose as someone joined them, and Slattery gave her over to the newcomer. After only a few steps, she was picked up and carried. Her arm didn’t hurt, but she thought surely her back must be broken, or perhaps her shoulder blades. The last time she’ d hurt this badly was when Erik had hit her with the baseball bat.

Her senses were clearing as they reached the prep room, and she realized with a mild shock that it was Dr. Reinhardt who carried her. He laid her on the floor in one corner, then shrugged out of his lab coat and wadded it up as a pillow for her. She heard the door shut and the lock click, even as Reinhardt leapt up and went to rattle the knob. The sounds receded around her, his pounding on the door growing distant, his demands that Poe unlock it, faint and irrelevant.

Panicked, she struggled to draw air into her lungs, sucking it in with a great painful gasp. The pressure on her chest vanished, her hearing returned, and as she breathed more easily, the pain ebbed to a manageable level. Reinhardt gave up on getting the door unlocked and returned to her.

In his mid-thirties, he had close-cropped auburn hair and gray eyes, which were almost hidden behind smeared wire-rim glasses. He had a pleasant face, open and almost boyish, despite its unshaven grizzle and a smudge—likely printer ink—across one cheekbone. His jeans bore similar smudges, though darker and wider, as did his tennis shoes— worn, run over, and gray with use and age. The rumpled red flannel shirt was both smudged and wet, the latter likely thanks to her.

He was blinking at her as if he had just awakened, as if recent events had transpired far too rapidly for him to follow. Likely they had. She supposed he’ d come out of his lab all unawares and walked right into Poe and Slattery helping her to the prep room. Having drafted him to assist, they’d left him locked in the room without a word of explanation, and he was obviously still trying to free himself of his nucleic acids and attend to reality.

“You’re Miss McHenry, aren’t you? The frog girl.”

Frog girl. Yes, that’s all I am here, isn’t it?
She nodded.

Concern creased his brow as he knelt beside her, plucking at the bloodied sleeve of her lab coat. “This doesn’t look good. Can you sit up?”

“There was an intruder,” she said. “He knocked me into Dr. Poe’s shelving units.”

“Yes, I gathered that. Here, let me help you.” He lifted her to a sitting position, the action making her gasp at the pain it triggered. Gently he stripped off her wet lab coat, tossing it onto the wad of his own dry coat with no thought, apparently, of the consequences. His focus was on her wound now: a six-inch, straight-edged glass cut running along the inside of her left forearm, still bleeding profusely.

“It’ll need stitches,” he said, stepping to one of the cabinets. He pulled out a first-aid kit and set it on the floor beside her, then turned to the sink of soapy water Lacey had prepared earlier. “This intruder,” he said as he plunged his hands into the bubbles, “what did he look like?”

She told him all she could recall, realizing as she did that the youth had seemed somehow familiar, though she couldn’t imagine where she might have seen him before.

Hands washed and rinsed, Reinhardt was drying them off when two distant echoing booms halted the flow of her words. “What was that?” she whispered.

“Sounded like gunshots,” Dr. Reinhardt said. He stood listening for a moment, then set about cleaning and butterfly-bandaging her wound, a service he performed with a swift and practiced competence that surprised her. As he worked he pressed her to continue her story, interrupting occasionally to question her more closely about the young man. Did he speak? Had she seen him before? Did she think he was truly unbalanced, or one of Director Swain’s feared corporate spies putting on a show?

He was taping the last bandage to the slash in her arm when the door crashed open and Slattery burst in. A short, swarthy, vigorous man with a pocked complexion, he had straight black hair brushed back from a high forehead, bushy black brows, and piercing blue eyes. For a moment he paused as if surprised to find them as they were, then said to Reinhardt, “You’ve tended her, then.”

“Only temporarily. She’ll need stitches.”

“Probably has a mild concussion, too.” Slattery turned to the man who’d followed him into the room and gestured at Lacey. “Take her to the clinic.”

A second man now angled a gurney through the door as Lacey tottered to her feet. “Oh, I won’t need that, Dr. Slattery,” she said. “I’m fine, really.”

He scowled at her. “You could hardly walk a few minutes ago, miss.”

“I just had the breath knocked out of me.”

“And took a good knock to the head, too, from the look of that goose egg behind your ear. A concussion’s nothing to take lightly. And there’s the cut to stitch, as well. I won’t risk any lawsuits. Now, hop aboard like a good girl.”

Reluctantly she obeyed. “Did you find him? The man who attacked me?”

“Not yet,” Slattery said, his scowl deepening. Irritably he motioned for the men to wheel her away, and immediately they complied.

As they lifted the gurney over the raised threshold of the prep room floor, the pain of her cut finally began to override the pain of the cramps in her back. Maybe a visit to the clinic wouldn’t be so bad after all. She didn’t have to walk, and they might have some Tylenol they could give her and maybe a compress for her back. In fact, she wouldn’t even object if they wanted to take some X rays, just to make sure she’ d not broken something.

Chapter Two

As the gurney carried Ms. McHenry out of his sight, whatever had held Cam Reinhardt together was loosed. A wave of trembling overtook him and he found himself staring at the shockingly large puddle of blood pooled on the floor at his feet. The deep red surface reflected the fluorescent lights overhead and stirred up dangerous memories that made his stomach flutter and light flicker at the edges of his vision.

A rumpled, bloodstained lab coat lay in a heap beside the puddle, so close it was almost touching. Fearful at any moment it would, he stooped, picked it up, and slid it on, struggling a bit to work the damp garment over his flannel shirt. It bound across the shoulders as he stooped to pick up the other coat, which was also damp. And bloodstained. He started to put that one on, too, then stopped himself, bemused.

Out in the corridor, the elevator pinged, and its doors rumbled open. He heard the rattling of the gurney as the attendants wheeled Ms. McHenry aboard, then another rumbling as the doors closed.

Slattery stepped back into the room, his sharp blue eyes fastening at once on the coat in Cam’s hands. In three strides, he snatched it away as if Cam were a child who had picked up a valuable antique.

“How is it you happen to be here, Doctor?” the assistant director demanded.

“I was working in my lab, sir.” The trembling had not yet left his fingers, and he kept getting flashes of other wounds he’ d bandaged. Many wounds. Many times.

“Working in your lab,” Slattery repeated, glance dropping to Cam’s hands. “So you must have heard the shelving collapse. Why did you only emerge when we were helping Ms. McHenry to the prep room?”

“I . . .” Cam blinked at him. “I had my earphones on, Doctor. And I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“You didn’t think anything of a crash and a woman screaming?”

“I didn’t hear any screaming, sir. Only the crash, and then you and Dr. Poe talking in the hallway later. Even then I didn’t pay much attention. I was focused on my work.”