The Hot Zone Read Online Free
Author: Richard Preston
than empty and torn and on fire.
The taxi pulls out onto the Uhuru Highway and heads into Nairobi. It goes through grassland studded with honey-acacia trees, and it goes pastfactories, and then it comes to a rotary and enters the bustling street life of Nairobi. Crowds are milling on the shoulders of the road, women walking on beaten dirt pathways, men loitering, children riding bicycles, a man repairing shoes by the side of the road, a tractor pulling a wagonload of charcoal. The taxi turns left onto the Ngong Road and goes past a city park and up a hill, past lines of tall blue-gum trees, and it turns up a narrow road and goes past a guard gate and enters the grounds of Nairobi Hospital. It parks at a taxi stand beside a flower kiosk. A sign by a glass door says CASUALTY DEPT . Monet hands the driver some money and gets out of the taxi and opens the glass door and goes over to the reception window and indicates that he is very ill. He has difficulty speaking.
The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry. He sits down in the waiting room.
It is a small room lined with padded benches. The clear, strong, ancient light of East Africa pours through a row of windows and falls across a table heaped with soiled magazines, and makes rectangles on a pebbled gray floor that has a drain in the center. The room smells vaguely of woodsmoke and sweat, and it is jammed with bleary-eyed people, Africans and Europeans sitting shoulder to shoulder. There is always someone in Casualty who has a cut and is waiting for stitches. People wait patiently, holding a washcloth against the scalp, holding a bandage pressed around a finger,and you may see a spot of blood on the cloth. So Charles Monet is sitting on a bench in Casualty, and he does not look very much different from anyone else in the room, except for his bruised, expressionless face and his red eyes. A sign on the wall warns patients to watch out for purse thieves, and another sign says:
PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE.
YOUR COOPERATION WILL BE
APPRECIATED.
NOTE: THIS IS A CASUALTY
DEPARTMENT.
EMERGENCY CASES WILL BE
TAKEN IN PRIORITY.
YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO WAIT
FOR SUCH CASES
BEFORE RECEIVING ATTENTION.
Monet maintains silence, waiting to receive attention. Suddenly he goes into the last phase—the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has “crashed and bled out.” Or more politely they say that the victim has “gone down.”
He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills itonto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit blood and black matter while unconscious. Then comes a sound like a bedsheet being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. He has sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amounts of blood. Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.
The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the hot agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is “trying” to find a new host.
JUMPER
1980 JANUARY 15
Nurses and aides came running, pushing a gurney along with them, and they lifted Charles Monet onto the gurney and wheeled him into the intensive care unit at Nairobi Hospital. A call for a doctor went out over the loudspeakers: a patient was
The taxi pulls out onto the Uhuru Highway and heads into Nairobi. It goes through grassland studded with honey-acacia trees, and it goes pastfactories, and then it comes to a rotary and enters the bustling street life of Nairobi. Crowds are milling on the shoulders of the road, women walking on beaten dirt pathways, men loitering, children riding bicycles, a man repairing shoes by the side of the road, a tractor pulling a wagonload of charcoal. The taxi turns left onto the Ngong Road and goes past a city park and up a hill, past lines of tall blue-gum trees, and it turns up a narrow road and goes past a guard gate and enters the grounds of Nairobi Hospital. It parks at a taxi stand beside a flower kiosk. A sign by a glass door says CASUALTY DEPT . Monet hands the driver some money and gets out of the taxi and opens the glass door and goes over to the reception window and indicates that he is very ill. He has difficulty speaking.
The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry. He sits down in the waiting room.
It is a small room lined with padded benches. The clear, strong, ancient light of East Africa pours through a row of windows and falls across a table heaped with soiled magazines, and makes rectangles on a pebbled gray floor that has a drain in the center. The room smells vaguely of woodsmoke and sweat, and it is jammed with bleary-eyed people, Africans and Europeans sitting shoulder to shoulder. There is always someone in Casualty who has a cut and is waiting for stitches. People wait patiently, holding a washcloth against the scalp, holding a bandage pressed around a finger,and you may see a spot of blood on the cloth. So Charles Monet is sitting on a bench in Casualty, and he does not look very much different from anyone else in the room, except for his bruised, expressionless face and his red eyes. A sign on the wall warns patients to watch out for purse thieves, and another sign says:
PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE.
YOUR COOPERATION WILL BE
APPRECIATED.
NOTE: THIS IS A CASUALTY
DEPARTMENT.
EMERGENCY CASES WILL BE
TAKEN IN PRIORITY.
YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO WAIT
FOR SUCH CASES
BEFORE RECEIVING ATTENTION.
Monet maintains silence, waiting to receive attention. Suddenly he goes into the last phase—the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has “crashed and bled out.” Or more politely they say that the victim has “gone down.”
He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills itonto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit blood and black matter while unconscious. Then comes a sound like a bedsheet being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. He has sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amounts of blood. Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.
The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the hot agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is “trying” to find a new host.
JUMPER
1980 JANUARY 15
Nurses and aides came running, pushing a gurney along with them, and they lifted Charles Monet onto the gurney and wheeled him into the intensive care unit at Nairobi Hospital. A call for a doctor went out over the loudspeakers: a patient was
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