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

brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern Rift Valley. The passengers
looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born.
They saw specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle
trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the Friendship
passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy Rift clouds, and began to
bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.
The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes,
and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin
is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in
the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the
man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is
something wrong with him, but you can't tell exactly what is happening.
He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep
cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up.
Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with
something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been
chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is
an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before
had started out as starlike speckles, expanded and merged into huge,
spontaneous purple shadows; his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The
muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is
dissolving, and his face appears to hang from underlying bone, as if the
face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps
into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and
he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been
empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as
vomit negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it
is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry
granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it
smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It
is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that smell of the vomit negro
fills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming with black
vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag bulging and
softening, threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant.
When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with
virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then
say that the virus has undergone "extreme amplification". This is not
something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification
peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim's blood may contain a hundred
million particles of virus. During this process, the body is partly
transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed
by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The
transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is
a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological


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accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it