Richard Preston by The Hot Zone

Author:The Hot Zone [Zone, The Hot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-09T06:00:00+00:00

The people who had died in Germany, he knew, had been handling raw, blood monkey meat. The meat was full of virus, and they got it on their hands, or they rubbed it on their eyelids. He and other people at the company had been cutting into sick monkeys since October-and yet no one had become sick. Everyone had worn rubber gloves. He wasn't afraid for himself-he felt fine-but he began to worry about the others. He thought, Even if the virus is Marburg, the situation is still no different from before. We're still stuck in a pot. The question is how to get ourselves out of this pot. He called Bill Volt and ordered him not to cut into any more monkeys. Then he sat in his office, getting more and more annoyed as the day darkened and Peter Jahrling did not call him back. He wondered if any of the men had cut themselves with a scalpel while performing a dissection of diseased monkey. Chances were they wouldn't file an accident report.

He knew for sure that he had not cut himself. But he had performed a mass sacrifice of approximately fifty animals. He had been in contact with fifty animals. How long had it been since then? He should be showing some symptoms by now. Bloody nose, fever, something like that.

At five-thirty, he called Jahrling's office and got a soldier on the phone, who answered by saying, "How can I help you, sir or ma'am? ...

I'm sorry, sir, Dr. Jahrling is not in his office ... No sir, I don't know where he is, sir ... No, he has not left work. May I take a message, sir?" Dalgard left a message for Jahrling to call him at home. He was felling steadily more annoyed.

1500 HOURS

JAHRLING WAS IN his space suit. He worked steadily all afternoon in his own lab, hot zone AA-4, at the center of the building, where he fiddled with the flasks of virus culture from the monkey house. It was a slow, irritating job. His tests involved making samples glow under ultraviolet light. If he could make the samples glow, then he knew he had the virus.

In order to do this, he needed to use blood serum from human victims. The blood serum would react to viruses. He went to the freezers, and got out vials of frozen blood serum from three people. Two of the people had died; and one had survived. They were:

1. Musoke - A test for Marburg. Serum from the blood of Dr.

Shem Musoke, a survivor. (Presumably reactive against the Kitum Cave strain, which had started with Charles Monet and jumped into Dr. Musoke's eyes in the black vomit.)

2. Boniface - A test for Ebola Sudan. From a man named Boniface who died in Sudan.

3. Mayinga - A test for Ebola Zaire. Nurse Mayinga's blood serum.

The test was delicate, and took hours to complete. It was not made easier by the fact that he was shuffling around in his space suit the whole time.

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