"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richard Preston)

to Mount Elgon. Then, unexpectedly, she surfaced in a bar in Mombasa,
where she was working as a prostitute. A Kenyan doctor who had
investigated the Monet case happened to be drinking a beer in the bar, and
he struck up an idle conversation with her and mentioned Monet's name. He
was stunned when she said, "I know about that. I come from western Kenya.
I was the woman with Charles Monet." He didn't believe her, but she told
him the story in enough detail that he became convinced she was telling
the truth. She vanished after that meeting in the bar, lost in the
warrens of Mombasa, and by now she has probably died of AIDS.
Charles Monet returned to his job at the pump house at the sugar
factory. He walked to work each day across the burned cane fields, no
doubt admiring the view of Mount Elgon, and when the mountain was buried
in clouds, perhaps he could still feel its pull, like the gravity of an
invisible planet. Meanwhile, something was making copies of itself inside
Monet. A life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was
replicating.


THE HEADACHE BEGINS, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the
agent. On the seventh day after his New Year's visit to Kitum
Cave--January 8, 1980--Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs.
He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The
headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to
ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go
away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper,
Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a
temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really did
not know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started,
he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting
grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became
strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself
into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and
staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar
appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at
the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their
sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned
yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a
zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn't
understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He
became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away.
He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn't seem
to know exactly where he was.
When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder
about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all
right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they
went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a
hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one
of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu,
on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined
Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have