"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

sleeping on a cot in one of the bathrooms woke up with a backache. She was a nursing student,
seventeen years old, and I will call her Barbara Birke. She was small, slender, and dark haired, with pale
skin and delicate features. She was a quiet person whom nobody knew much about, for she had been
working at the hospital for only two weeks, and had been living in the nursing school dormitory while she
received her training. The previous year, Barbara had been a kitchen helper in a Catholic hospital in
Duisburg, where she had converted to the Catholic faith (her family was Protestant), and she had set her
sights on becoming a nurse. She had spent Christmas with her family and had told her parents that she
intended to become a nun, but she wanted to finish nursing school before she made up her mind. The
Sisters of Mercy had reserved a place for her in the cloister.
Barbara Birke had never seen Los's face. She always worked on the third floor of the hospital,
and she had been tending to a sick elderly man in Room 352, near the head of the stairwell that went
down through the middle of the building. She had received both the German vaccine and the WHO
vaccine a few days earlier.
Birke told the doctors that she wasn't feeling well, and they saw that she had a slight temperature.
They immediately gave her an intravenous dose of blood serum taken from a person who was immune
to smallpox. Smallpox-immune serum is blood without red blood cells - a golden liquid-and it is full of
antibodies that fight the virus. They put Birke inside a plastic bag, and she lay in the bag while an
ambulance carried her on the winding road to Wimbern and through the fence to the isolation unit.
Barbara Birke developed a worried, anxious look, while a reddening flush began to spread
across her face, shoulders, and arms, and on her legs. Her fever went up, and her backache grew
worse. Her skin remained smooth, and no pustules appeared, although the reddening deepened in color.
When the doctors pressed their fingers on her skin, turned white under the pressure, but when they
released their fingertips the blood came rushing back in a moment, filling under the skin. The doctors
recognized this sign, and it was very bad.
I don't know how much the doctors told Birke of what they understood was coming. The red
flush across her face deepened until she looked as if she had a bad sunburn, and then it began to spread
downward toward her torso. It was a centrifugal rash that had begun on the extremities. She developed
a few smooth, scattered, red spots the size of freckles across her face and arms. More red spots began
to appear closer to her middle, following the movement of the creeping flush. She was forbidden to have
any visitors, and there were no telephones at Wimbern that the patients could use. She couldn't speak
with her family.
The red spots began to enlarge, and there were more and more of them. They began to join
together, like raindrops falling on a dry sidealk, gradually darkening the pavement: she was starting to
flood with hemorrhages beneath the skin.
Her back hurt, but the change in her skin was painless, and she prayed and tried to remain
optimistic. Her skin was growing darker and soft and a little puffy. It was slightly wrinkled, like the skin
of an told person.
The red spots merged and flooded together, until much of her skin ned deep red, and her face
turned purplish black. The skin became bbery and silky smooth to the touch, with a velvety, corrugated
look, which is referred to as crepe-rubber skin. The whites of her eyes developed red spots, and her
face swelled up as it darkened, and blood began to drip from her nose. It was smallpox blood, thick and
dark. The nursing nuns, who were wearing masks and latex gloves, dabbed gently at her nose with
paper wipes and helped her pray. Smallpox virus interacts with the victims' immune systems in different
ways, and so it triggers different forms of disease in the human body. There is a mild type of smallpox
called a varioloid rash. There is classical ordinary smallpox, which comes in two basic forms: the discrete
type and the confluent type. In discrete ordinary smallpox, the pustules stand out on the skin as separate
blisters, and the patient has a better chance of survival. In confluent-type ordinary smallpox, which Los
had, the blisters merge into sheets, and it is typically fatal. Finally, there is hemorrhagic smallpox, in
which bleeding occurs in the skin. Hemorrhagic smallpox is virtually one hundred percent fatal. The
most extreme type is flat hemorrhagic smallpox, in which the skin does not blister but remains smooth. It