The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Read Free Book Online Page A

having hands that were “too quick” to handle delicate work in dangerous situations. Nancy had begun martial-arts training partly because she hoped to make her gestures cool and smooth and powerful, and also because she had felt the frustrations of a woman officer trying to advance her career in the Army. She was five feet four inches tall. She liked to spar with six-foot male soldiers, big guys. She enjoyed knocking them around a little bit; it gave her a certain satisfaction to be able to kick higher than the guy’s head. She used her feet more than her hands when she sparred with an opponent, because, her hands were delicate. She could break four boards with a spinning back kick. She had reached the point where she could kill a man with her bare feet, an idea that did not in itself give her much satisfaction. On occasion, she had come home from her class with a broken toe, a bloody nose, or a black eye. Jerry would just shake his head: Nancy with another shiner.
    Major Nancy Jaax did all the housework. She could not stand housework. Scrubbing grape jelly out of rugs didn’t give her a feeling of reward, and in any case she did not have time for it. Occasionally she would go into a paroxysm of cleaning, and she would race around the house for an hour,throwing things into closets. She also did all the cooking for her family. Jerry was useless in the kitchen. Another point of contention was his tendency to buy things impulsively—a motorcycle, a sailboat. Jerry had bought a sailboat when they were stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. And then there was that god-awful diesel Cadillac with a red leather interior. She and Jerry had commuted to work together in it, but the car had started to lay smoke all over the road even before the payments were finished. One day, she had finally said to Jerry, “You can sit in the driveway in those red leather seats all you want, but I’m not getting in there with you.” So they sold the Cadillac and bought a Honda Accord.
    The Jaaxes’ house was the largest Victorian house in town, a pile of turreted brick with a slate roof and tall windows and a cupola and wooden paneling made of golden American chestnut. It stood on a street corner near the ambulance station. The sirens woke them up at night. They had bought the house cheap. It had sat on the market a long time, and a story had been going around town that the previous owner had hanged himself in the basement. After the Jaaxes bought it, the dead man’s widow showed up at the door one day. She was a wizened old lady, come to have a look around her old place, and she fixed a blue eye on Nancy and said, “Little girl, you are going to hate this house. I did.”
    There were other animals in the house besides the parrot. In a wire cage in the living room liveda python named Sampson. He would occasionally escape from his cage, wander around the house, and eventually climb up inside the hollow center post of the dining-room table and go to sleep. There he would stay for a few days. It gave Nancy a creepy feeling to think that there was a python asleep inside the dining table. You wondered whether the snake was going to wake up while you were eating dinner. Nancy had a study in the cupola at the top of the house. The snake had once escaped from his cage and disappeared for a few days. They pounded and knocked on the dining-room table to try to flush him out, but he wasn’t there. Late one night when Nancy was in her study, the snake oozed out of the rafters and hung in front of her face, staring at her with lidless eyes, and she screamed. The family also had an Irish setter and an Airedale terrier. Whenever the Jaaxes were assigned to a different Army post, the animals moved with them in boxes and cages, a portable ecosystem of the Jaax family.
    Nancy loved Jerry. He was tall and fine looking, a handsome man with prematurely gray hair. She thought of his hair as silver, to go along with his silver tongue, which he used trying to talk her