The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

infection fades, and the vaccination begins to wear off after about five years. Today, almost everyone who was vaccinated against smallpox in childhood has lost much or all of their immunity to it.
    The traditional smallpox vaccine is thought to offer protective power up to four days after a person has inhaled the virus. It is like the rabies vaccine: if you are bitten by a mad dog, you can get the rabies vaccine, and you’ll probably be okay. Similarly, if someone near you gets smallpox and you can get the vaccine right away, you’ll have a better chance of escaping infection, or if you do catch smallpox, you’ll have a better chance of survival. But the vaccine is useless if given more than four to five days after exposure to the virus, because by then the virus will have amplified itself in the body past the point at which the immune system can kick in fast enough to stop it. The doctors had started vaccinating people at St. Walberga Hospital five and six days after Peter Los had been admitted. They were closing the barn door just after the horse had gone.
    The incubation period of smallpox virus is eleven to fourteen days, and it hardly varies much from person to person. Variola operates on a strict timetable as it amplifies itself inside a human being.
    The Student Nurse
    JANUARY 22, 1970
    ELEVEN DAYS AFTER Peter Los arrived at St. Walberga Hospital, a young woman who had been sleeping on a cot in one of the bathrooms woke up with a backache. She was a nursing student, seventeen years old, and I will call her Barbara Birke. She was small, slender, and dark haired, with pale skin and delicate features. She was a quiet person whom nobody knew much about, for she had been working at the hospital for only two weeks, and had been living in the nursing school dormitory while she received her training. The previous year, Barbara had been a kitchen helper in a Catholic hospital in Duisburg, where she had converted to the Catholic faith (her family was Protestant), and she had set her sights on becoming a nurse. She had spent Christmas with her family and had told her parents that she intended to become a nun, but she wanted to finish nursing school before she made up her mind. The Sisters of Mercy had reserved a place for her in the cloister.
    Barbara Birke had never seen Los’s face. She always worked on the third floor of the hospital, and she had been tending to a sick elderly man in Room 352, near the head of the stairwell that went down through the middle of the building. She had received both the German vaccine and the WHO vaccine a few days earlier.
    Birke told the doctors that she wasn’t feeling well, and they saw that she had a slight temperature. They immediately gave her an intravenous dose of blood serum taken from a person who was immune to smallpox. Smallpox-immune serum is blood without red blood cells—a golden liquid—and it is full of antibodies that fight the virus. They put Birke inside a plastic bag, and she lay in the bag while an ambulance carried her on the winding road to Wimbern and through the fence to the isolation unit.
    Barbara Birke developed a worried, anxious look, while a reddening flush began to spread across her face, shoulders, and arms, and on her legs. Her fever went up, and her backache grew worse. Her skin remained smooth, and no pustules appeared, although the reddening deepened in color. When the doctors pressed their fingers on her skin, it turned white under the pressure, but when they released their fingertips the blood came rushing back in a moment, filling under the skin. The doctors recognized this sign, and it was very bad.
    I DON’T KNOW how much the doctors told Birke of what they understood was coming. The red flush across her face deepened until she looked as if she had a bad sunburn, and then it began to spread downward toward her torso. It was a centrifugal rash that had begun on the extremities. She developed a few smooth, scattered, red spots the size of freckles