"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

together repeatedly. Her mouth was working. Her lips moved and rippled. Her tongue stuck out
and was withdrawn again. Her eyes were half open. He thought Kate was looking at him and
trying to say something to him. She moaned but no language came out.
Then her teeth sank into her lower lip, cutting through the lip, and a run of blood went
down her chin and neck. She bit her lip again, hard, with ferocity, and she made a groaning
animal sound. This time, the lip detached and hung down. She pulled her lip in, sucked it into
her mouth, and swallowed. Now she was chewing again. Eating the inside of her mouth,
chewing her lips, the insides of her cheeks. The movement of her teeth was insectile, like the
feeding movements of an insect larva chewing on its food: intense, greedy, automatic -- a
kind of repetitive yanking at the tissues of her mouth. Her tongue suddenly protruded. It was
coated with blood and bits of bloody skin. She was eating her mouth from the inside.
'She's biting herself!' he yelled. 'Help!'
He got his hands around her head and tried to hold her chin steady, but he couldn't stop
her teeth from gnawing. He could see her tongue curling and moving behind her teeth. He was
begging for help at the top of his lungs. Jennifer was next to him, weeping, crying for help,
too. The bathroom door was open, and students were standing in the hallway, looking in,
stunned with fright. Most were crying. Several of them had run to call 911.
The girl's body went into a back-and-forth thrashing movement. Then she began to writhe.
It was a type of writhing associated with damage to the base of the brain, the midbrain, a
knot of structures at the top of the spinal cord. The movements were what is known as basal
writhing.
Kate opened her mouth and a hoarse croak came out. She was lying on her back now. Her
spine began to bend backward. Her body arched into the air. Her stomach lifted up higher and
higher. Her teeth clacked together in a spasm. Her spine recurved impossibly far, lifting off the
floor, until only the back of her head and her heels were touching the floor, her stomach
raised up. Her body formed the shape of a C. Her head and heels were supporting her weight.
Her body remained poised in the air, writhing slowly, squirming, as if it were being driven by
some force trying to escape from within. Her eyes opened wide. They were pure white. There
were no pupils. The pupils had rolled up into the eye sockets. Her lips drew back from her
teeth and she smiled, and a dark, bright liquid flowed from her nose. It was a nosebleed, a
heavy epistaxis. With each heartbeat, a pulse of blood came from both nostrils. The epistaxis
stained Talides's shirt and ran across the floor, where the blood tangled with the urine on the
tiles and swirled down a drain in the center. She drew a rasping breath, inhaling blood -- the
nosebleed was pouring back down her airway now, running into her lungs. Her body was as
hard as a piece of timber. Cracking sounds came from her spine.
The nosebleed died down.
The bleeding stopped. It stopped completely.
Her spine relaxed. She sank to the floor. She coughed once, lurching up blood mixed with
sputum.
Peter Talides was on top of her, his face to her face, crying, 'Kate! Kate! Hang on!' He had
taken a C.P.R. class with the Red Cross years earlier, but he couldn't remember what to do.
Inside, deep in her mind, Kate came awake, fully aware. She heard Mr Talides's voice
begging her to hang on. There was an absolute peace, no feeling of pain, and she couldn't see
anything. It was not possible to hang on. She thought: Oh. She fell away.
 Part Two
1969



Forbidden Zone