Doma Reel didn’t waste a second admiring the reduction.
In an open compound fracture, setting the calcium into posture was only half the battle. The other half was the living sewer mud that had been driven down to the bone surface. Just then, the bone sliced through the skin. If that silt remained inside the muscle tissue, the marrow would rot into a gray, bubbling soup within forty-eight hours. She would be taking the bone-saw to the shoulder joint before the next midnight. Sepsis from heavy-duty drainage was an aggressive, fast-moving rot that blackened the veins and swelled the lymph nodes into painful knots within two days.
While Brant Sallow leaned his weight into the wrist traction. His boots were locked against the floor flags, Doma took the clay pot jug of boiling antiseptic wash.
She didn’t pour it gently.
She flooded the four-inch gaping jagged cut with the steaming, acrid solution. The wash was a crude, five-percent distillation of coal-tar phenol boiled with mountain vinegar and rock salt, formulated thirty years ago for the railway gang infirmaries. The hot antiseptic wash boiled into the wound, frothing white as it hit the exposed red muscle bellies and the dark blood bruise, scalding away the black coal grease, sewer silt, and sulfur dust that clung to the sliced open tissue. The skin-burning chemical hissed against the raw meat. That turned the margins of the torn pronator muscle a solid, grayish-pink as the superficial proteins denatured on contact.
