Free The Cobra Event by Richard Preston Page A

else you guys catch,” Dudley said to him.
    “Hey, I’ve worked in the morgue for seven years,” Kly replied, “and my immune system is like a rock by now. Nothing can get past it. Except every October I get my cadaver cold, as regular as an alarm clock.”
    Austen wanted to inspect the girl’s mouth and tongue. She opened the mouth and grasped the tongue firmly with a forceps, and pulled the tongue partway out of the mouth.
    Her mouth was stained with partly coagulated blood. Austen moved the tongue sideways. “She bit her tongue and lips,” she said. “There are molar cuts toward the back of the tongue.” She had shredded her lips with her front teeth, it seemed, and a portion of lip was missing. But that was not all. The inside of the mouth had the wrong texture and color, but the blood obscured it. Austen bent over and looked very closely, and now she saw something. The inside of the mouth was shining with blisters. They were very dark. They were blood blisters, it seemed.
    Next came the examination of the eyes. Gripping the eyelids delicately with a small forceps, Austen rolled them back one at a time.
    The inside of the eyelid was peppered with small red dots.
    “She’s got inflammation of the conjunctiva,” Austen said.
    Now she looked at the eye. The iris was blue-gray, but with a hint of golden yellow. Austen bent down until her face was inches from Kate’s, and she stared into the pupils, left and right. In the cornea was reflected the blue glare of the overhead fluorescent lights and her own face, with the mask over her mouth and nose, and the safety glasses over her eyes. Pathology, above all, is the act of seeing. Seeing with understanding leads to diagnosis. Austen continued to stare into Kate’s eyes, trying to understand what she was seeing, trying to recognize a pattern. Her eyes had an abnormal color, she thought. There seemed to be a ring of yellowish shiny pigment inside each iris—a pupillary ring, with flamelike offshoots. It had formed a kind of iridescent circle fringing the black dot of the pupil. The ring had a metallic sheen, like the wing of a tropical butterfly, with a predominantly yellowish cast, and it made the pupil look as if it had caught fire.
    “These eyes seem unusual, Dr. Dudley. What do you think of the color in the iris?”
    “Huh.” Dudley bent over to look. “It’s natural color. The conjunctiva’s inflamed.”
    “But she has pupillary rings in the iris. Like some kind of crystalline or metallic deposit. I wonder if this is copper. She could have copper poisoning. These rings in the iris could be Kayser-Fleischer rings. That’s a copper deposit in the eyes. It’s a sign of Wilson’s disease—”
    “I
know
what that is,” he said, looking at her. “Nope—no way. Rings from copper poisoning, Dr. Austen, would appear on the
outside rim
of the iris. This golden coloration is on the
inside
of the iris, near the pupil. It’s normal eye color.”
    The girl had had a bloody nose. Austen decided that she wanted to look inside the nose. “Do you have an exam light?”
    Kly found a standard examination light and handed it to Austen. She pointed the light into Kate’s nostril and looked.
    The nasopharynx is like a cave inside the head. This cave was clogged with congealed blood. Then Austen saw it: blood blisters in the cavity. They gleamed in the light.
    “Wow,” Austen said. “There’s a blistering process.” She thought: the bloody nose could be a broken blister.
    “Let me look,” Dudley said. He took the light. “Yeah. What the hell is that?”
    “She has similar blisters in her mouth. This looks like an infectious-disease process, I think.”
    “Yeah. Or hemorrhages. This could be a toxin, a poison of some kind. Go ahead and open her,” Dudley said to Austen.
    Ben Kly prepared a fresh scalpel, snapping a clean blade onto the handle, and he handed it to Austen. She inserted the scalpel into Kate Moran’s right shoulder. With a quick, careful, deft