The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose—he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, cloudless, 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.
The Friendship drones through the clouds, following the length of the Rift Valley, and Monet slumps back in the seat, and now he seems to be dozing… Perhaps some of the passengers wonder if he is dead. No, no, he is not dead. He is moving. His red eyes are open and moving around a little bit.
It is late afternoon, and the sun is falling down into the hills to the west of the Rift Valley, throwing blades of light in all directions, as if the sun is cracking up on the equator. The Friendship makes a gentle turn and crosses the eastern scarp of the Rift. The land rises higher and changes in color from brown to green. The Ngong Hills appear under the right wing, and the plane, now descending, passes over parkland dotted with zebra and giraffes. A minute later, it lands at Jomo Kenyatta 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 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:
YOUR COOPERATION WILL BE APPRECIATED.
NOTE: THIS IS A CASUALTY DEPARTMENT.
EMERGENCY CASES WILL BE TAKEN IN PRIORITY.
YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO WAIT FOR SUCH CASES BEFORE RECEIVING ATTENTION
Monet maintains silence, waiting to receive attention. Suddenly he goes into the last phase. The human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has “crashed and bled out”. Or more politely they say that the victim has “gone down”.
He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room is turning around and around. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit while unconscious. Then come a sound like bedside being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amount of blood. Monet has crashed and is bleeding out.
The other patients in the waiting room stand up and move away from the man on the floor, calling for a doctor. Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is “trying” to find a new host.
JUMPER
1980 January 15
Nurses and aides came running, pushing a gurney along with them, and they lifted Charles Monet onto the gurney and wheeled him into the intensive care unit at Nairobi Hospital. A call for a doctor went out over the loudspeakers: a patient was bleeding in the ICU. A young doctor named Shem Musoke ran to the scene. Dr. Musoke was widely considered to be one of the best young physicians at the hospital, an energetic man with a warm sense of humor, who worked long hours and had a good feel for emergencies.
He found Monet lying on the gurney. He has no idea what was wrong with the man, except that he was obviously having some kind of massive hemorrhage. There was no time to try to figure out what has caused it. He was having difficulty breathing—and then his breathing stopped. He had inhaled blood and had a breathing arrest.
Dr. Musoke felt for a pulse. It was weak and sluggish. A nurse ran and fetched a laryngoscope, a tube that can be used to open a person’s airway. Dr. Musoke ripped open Monet’s shirt so that he could observe any rise and fall of the chest, and he stood at the head of the gurney and bent over Monet’s face until he was looking directly into his eyes, upside down.