The Ebola virus kills
nine out of 10 of its victims so quickly and gruesomely that even biohazard
experts are terrified. It is airborne, it is extremely contagious and, in the
winter of 1989, it seemed about to burn through the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
At Fort Detrick’s
Army research facility outside the nation’s capital, a SWAT team of soldiers
and scientists wearing biohazard suits was organized to stop the outbreak of
the exotic “hot” virus. The grim operation went on in secret for 18 days and
has been covered up ever since.
THE
HOT ZONE: The terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus tells this dramatic story in depth,
giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and
their threat to the human race. From a remote African cave hot with Ebola
virus, to an airplane over Africa that is carrying a sick passenger who
dissolves into a virus bomb, to the confines of a military lab where scientists
risk their lives studying substances that could kill them horribly, THE HOT
ZONE describes situations that a few years ago would have been taken for
science fiction.
As
the rain forests of the world are destroyed, unknown viruses that have lived
there for eons are entering human populations. The implications for the future
of the human species are terrifying, yet science might not be able to save us
next time.
Horror
writer and amateur historian Stephen King said, “The first chapter of THE
HOT ZONE is one of the most horrifying things I’ve read in my life—and then
it gets worse. That’s what I keep marveling over: it keeps getting worse. What
a remarkable piece of work.”
Softcover,
320 pages
Excerpt
The headache begins, typically, on the
seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New
Year’s visit to Kitum cave-January 8, 1980-Monet felt a throbbing pain behind
his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow.
The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to
ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away
with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was
still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper.
She tried to take care of him, but she really didn’t know what to do. Then, on
the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever,
and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the
same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life
and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic,
and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar
appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at the
same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and
they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with a brilliant
starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened
the temporary housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man.
His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory
seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions,
although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.
When Monet failed to show up for work, his
colleagues began to wonder about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow
to see if he was all right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and
watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed
to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a
car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu,
on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and
could not come up with any explanation for what had happened to his eyes or his
face or his mind. Thinking that he might have some kind of bacterial infection,
they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on
his illness.
The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi
Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone
system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors
to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he seemed able to travel
by himself. He had money; he understood he had to get to Nairobi. They put him
in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.A hot virus
from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every
city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline
routes. The web is a network.
Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot
anywhere in a day: Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly.
Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.
The plane was a Fokker Friendship with
propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its
engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with the
dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing
over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights
that drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was
probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts
and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in
shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to 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 say 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 nd 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 star-like speckles, have 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 the 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 know as the vomito 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 would scare the daylights
out of a military biohazard specialist. The smell of the vomito 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 is 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. 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 accident.
Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it is the black
vomit.
He appears to be holding himself rigid, as
if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting up
and his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere.
His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood
clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are
accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his
intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are
starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer
because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His
personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization,
in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming
an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of
consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem
(the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It
could be said that the who of Charles Monet has already died while the what of
Charles Monet continues to live.
The vomiting attack appears to have broken
some blood vessels in his nose and he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from
both nostrils, a shining, clotless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth
and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used
up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up
his nose, but the blood still won’t coagulate, and the towels soak through.
When a man is ill in an airline seat next
to you, you may not want to embarrass him by calling attention to the problem.
You say to yourself that this man will be all right. Maybe he doesn’t travel
well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and people do get nosebleeds in
airplanes, the air is so dry and thin. . . and you ask him, weakly, if there is
anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles words you can’t
understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on forever. Perhaps
the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot virus
have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an
offer of help. They become hostile, and don’t want to be touched. They don’t
want to speak.. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can’t
seem to find words. They can tell you their name, but they can’t tell you the day
of the week or explain what has happened to them.