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

The autopsy suite is a large, open room in the center of one of the buildings. Two autopsies were in
progress. Palm Beach medical examiners were bending over opened bodies on tables, and there was an
odor of fecal matter in the air, which is the normal smell of an autopsy. The examiners stopped work
when the CDC people entered.
"We're here to assist you," Zaki said in his quiet way.
The examiners were polite and helpful but did not make eye contact, and Zaki sensed that they
were afraid. Stevens's body contained anthrax cells, although he had not been dead long enough for the
cells to become large numbers of spores. In any case, any spores in his body were wet, and wet anthrax
spores are nowhere near as dangerous as dry spores, which can float in the air like dandelion seeds,
looking for fertile ground.
The CDC people opened a door in the morgue refrigerator and pulled out a tray. The body had
been zipped up inside a Tyvek body bag. Without opening the bag, they lifted the body up by the
shoulders and feet and placed it on a bare metal gurney. They rolled the gurney into a supply room and
closed the door behind them. They would do the autopsy on the gurney in a closed room, to prevent the
autopsy tables from being contaminated with spores.
The chief medical examiner of Palm Beach County, Dr. Lisa Flannagan, was going to do the
primary incisions, while Zaki and his people would do the organ exams. Flannagan is a slender,
self-assured woman, with a reputation as a top-notch examiner. Everybody gowned up, and they put on
N-100 biohazard masks, clear plastic face shields, hair covers, rubber boots, and three layers of gloves.
The middle glove was reinforced with Kevlar. Then they unzipped the bag.
The CDC team lifted the body up, gripping it beneath the shoulders and legs, and someone
snatched the bag out from underneath it. They lowered the body back onto the bare metal deck of the
gurney. Stevens had been a pleasant-looking man with a cheerful appearance. He was a bluish color
now, and his eyes were half open.
Heraclitus said that when a man dies, a world passes away. The terribly human look on the face
of the deceased man disturbed Sherif Zaki. It was so hard to picture this man in life and then to connect
that picture with the body on the gurney. This was the toughest thing for a prosector, and you never got
over it, really. Zaki did not want to connect the living man with the body. You had to put it aside, and
you could not think about it. His duty now was to identify the exact type of disease that Stevens had, to
learn if he had inhaled spores or perhaps had become infected some other way. This might help save
lives. Yet cutting into an unfathomed body was difficult, and after a hard post, Sherif Zaki would not feel
like himself for a week afterward. "It's not an uplifting process," Zaki said to me.
The team rolled Stevens onto his side and inspected his back under bright lights for signs of
cutaneous anthrax-skin anthrax. They didn't find any, and they laid him back down.
Dr. Flannagan took up a scalpel and pressed the tip of the blade on the upper left part of the
chest under the shoulder. She made a curving incision that went underneath the nipples, across the chest,
and up to the opposite shoulder. Then, starting at the top of the sternum, she made a straight incision
down to the solar plexus. This made a cut that looked like a Y, but with a curved top. She finished it
with a short horizontal cut across the solar plexus. The opening incision looked rather like the profile of a
wineglass.
Dr. Flannagan grasped the skin of the chest, and pulled it upward, peeling it off. She laid the
blanket of skin around the neck. She pulled the skin away from the sides of the chest, revealing the ribs
and sternum. She took up a pair of gardening shears and cut the ribs one by one, snipping them in a
wide circle around the sternum. This was to free the chest plate, the front of the rib cage. When she had
finished cutting the ribs, she pushed her fingertips underneath the chest plate and pried it upward, as if she
were raising a lid from a box.
As Flannagan lifted the chest plate, a gush of bloody fluid poured out from under the ribs and ran
down over the body and poured over the gurney and onto the floor.
The chest cavity was engorged with bloody liquid. No one in the room had ever done a post on
a person who had died of anthrax. Zaki had studied photographs of autopsies that had been done on