"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

International Airport. Monet stirs himself. He is still able to walk.
He stands up, dripping. He stumbles down the gangway onto the tarmac.
His shirt is a red mess. He carries no luggage. His only luggage is
internal, and it is a load of amplified virus. Monet has ben transformed
into a human virus bomb. He walks slowly into the airport terminal and
through the building and out to a curving road where taxis are always
parked. The taxi drivers surround him--"Taxi?" "Taxi?"
"Nairobi ... Hospital," he mumbles.
One of them helps him into a car. Nairobi taxi drivers like to chat



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with their fares, and this one probably asks if he is sick. The answer
should be obvious. Monet's stomach feels a little better now. It is
heavy, dull, and bloated, as if he has eaten a meal, rather than empty and
torn and on fire.
The taxi pulls onto the Uhuru Highway and heads into Nairobi. It
goes through grassland studded with honey-acacia trees, and it goes past
factories, 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 tax 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 window 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 someone 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: