Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
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Mac's leg hurt like a son of a bitch.
It had hurt him before, but whatever the strange man with the red hair and prominent birthmark poured in his wounds burned like acid, so bad that Mac saw stars and nearly passed out from the pain. He sniffed the air as the acrid scent of alcohol filled his nostrils. Moonshine, he realized. The man was pouring perfectly good moonshine into his festering wounds.
"Why you got to waste booze like that, Doc?" Mac grunted, unsure of what the man's name was. Charles seemed to know him, and that was something. Charles did not trust many people. Charles also did not have a twin, and yet Mac had seen two of them. Both carried him to bed, and he'd been drunk enough times to know it wasn't a hallucination. Something odd was going on, and he intended to get to the bottom of it.
"It's a disinfectant," the man with the red hair said. "It'll kill the bacteria that's infecting your wounds, and it'll kill the maggots as well. Then I can bandage and stitch you up as best I can. With some penicillin injections, you should make a full recovery with the exception of some nasty scars."
"The hell's penicillin?" Mac hissed painfully, fighting the fog in his brain caused by the white-hot pain in his side, leg, and shoulder.
The door to the cabin banged open, and Mac heard Charles say, "I found you some honey. There was a beehive fairly close by, and I was able to get a lot out of it by burning some green pine boughs beneath it."
"Good," the redhead replied. "Mince a couple heads of garlic and mix it in with the honey, and then add some of that wild oregano and thyme you gathered earlier. Once I dig this bullet out of his shoulder, I want to soak some clean cloth in it and use it as a wound pack to help kill the infection before he goes septic. Honey is a natural antibiotic, and it's so good that even modern doctors still use it. The herbs will be less effective than the honey, but they'll help a bit. The penicillin will take care of the rest."
Mac was so weak and in so much pain it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. Chills coursed through him, and he shivered violently even though it was warm in the cabin and the man dressing his wounds was sweating. "What's an antibiotic?" he grunted nevertheless.
"It'll keep you from dying," Charles murmured quietly from further in the house. "It stops fevers in their tracks if you're lucky."
"I think he will be," the doctor said. "At this point in history, pharmaceutical antibiotics haven't been invented yet, meaning the bacteria infecting him have no chance of being a resistant strain. Penicillin normally wouldn't be strong enough, but on bacteria with no resistance? It'll be like dropping a nuke."
Too tired to ask questions, Mac sighed and closed his eyes. Keeping them open didn't help much anyway. The room swam like the waves of the ocean, and the longer he looked around, the more the nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach grew. He would have vomited by now if there had been anything in his stomach to vomit. As it was, he hadn't eaten in days.
