Preston Hot Zone :: essays research papers

     Prestons Hot ZoneImagine walking into a exact village in Africa, suffering and dying from some unknown virus. As you approach the huts you hear the wails of pure agony from the afflicted tribe members. advance closer, you smell the stench of vomit mixed with the bitter smell of unassailable riptide. People inside dumbfound dying in pools of their own decisive fluids, coughing and vomiting up their own liquefied internal variety pith their faces emotionless masks loosely hanging from their skulls, the connective tissue and collagen in their bodies move to mush. Their fur bubbled up into a sea of tiny white blisters and intuitive rips occurring at the slightest touch, pouring birth that refuses to coagulate. Hemmorging and massive clotting underneath the skin causing black and blue bruises all over the body. Their mouths bleeding or so their teeth from hemorrhaging saliva glands and the sloughing off of their own tongues, throat lining, and twist pipe, crying tears of pure blood from hemorrhaging tear ducts and the disintegration of the eye lining and bleeding from every opening on the body. You see the blood spattered room and pools of black vomit, expelled during the epileptic convulsions that accompany the last stages of death. Their black Maria have bled into themselves, heart muscles softened and hemorrhaging , the brain clogged with dead blood cells (sludging of the brain), the liver bulging and yellow with deep cracks and the spleen a individual hard blood clot. Babies with bloody noses born with red eyes lay dead from spontaneous abortions of affected mothers. It is the human slate-wiper, the invisible ultimate death, the filovirus named Ebola.     The al-Qaida of Richard Prestons Hot Zone seems deal with mans one predator, the invisible one, the one matter that man cannot seek out and conquer, the one that lurks unseen and undetected in the shadows waiting for a warm body to make its cuttin g life ground in, with total disregard for person, social class, or status. We are "meat", as the biologists at the USAMRIID Institute stated, no names, no faces, no " individualization", the virus rips through our bodies with no thought, mechanical reproducers who sabotage our cells and used them as incubators until their "offspring" replicate to the point the cell wall bursts, releasing hundreds of new virus particles. Literally thousands of these "killers", as humans see them can be held on the point of an ink pen.