Jessica had just finished the last stroke on the lower right corner of her onboarding form.
Before the tip of her ballpoint pen could even lift off the low-quality printer paper, the tail end of William’s sentence, “Start work now,” was still hovering in the air.
The weather-beaten rolling shutter door outside the clinic suffered an extremely brutal physical impact.
A series of ear-piercing metal grinding sounds scraped against their eardrums as the bottom slide rail was forcibly kicked out of shape by external force.
Dust from the ceiling, mixed with peeling wall paint, rustled down, fluttering up and down in the halo of the incandescent lamps.
The people outside had no patience to wait for a response from within.
Two pairs of thick arms clawed into the gap at the bottom of the rolling door, lifting it up against the deformed tracks.
The bearings let out a tragic friction sound.
Blinding morning light, accompanied by the unique sour stench of Hells Kitchen, sliced straight into the dim interior.
Two burly men covered in blood stumbled and squeezed through the door frame.
They wore leather jackets tattered by sharp objects, and their bare arms were covered in Cyrillic letters and Orthodox cross tattoos.
Those were the marks of the Russian Mafia.
Between the two of them, they supported a withered old man.
The old man’s feet dragged on the floor, leaving two long mud streaks on the dusty concrete.
His face had turned a terrifying shade of cyanotic purple, and his neck veins bulged high, the vessel walls stretched to their limit by the internal blood, ready to burst at any moment.
There were no screams, no moans.
The old man’s mouth was wide open, and a sound like a leaking bellows hissed from deep within his throat.
Every futile inhalation was accompanied by an extremely strange rise and fall of his chest—one side bulging high, while the other was completely collapsed.
The strong smell of rust mixed with the stench of incontinence filled the entire clinic without obstruction.
Jessica had spent years on the streets; she had broken thugs’ ribs and thrown punks who collected protection money into dumpsters.
Facing these two ferocious Russians, her first reaction wasn’t fear, but a muscular instinct for defense.
She took a half-step back with her right leg, lowered her center of gravity, and her fingers already gripped the heavy, rusted iron wrench at the edge of the triage desk.
If these two guys dared to pull a gun, she was confident she could shatter the jaw of the bald one on the left within half a second.
But William’s reaction was purer than hers.
He didn’t even raise his eyelids much; his gaze bypassed the two burly men and nailed itself directly onto the dying old man’s chest.
Asymmetrical rise and fall.
Pink foam overflowing from the corner of the mouth.
Trachea clearly shifted to the left.
Irregular swelling in the subcutaneous tissue.
Visual inspection complete, time elapsed: less than one second.
No stethoscope needed, no X-ray needed. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
This wasn’t a common case of pulmonary edema or an asthma attack; rather, after suffering a blunt force trauma to the chest, the broken ends of the ribs had punctured the visceral pleura, causing air to enter but not exit.
Tension Pneumothorax, complicated by severe Pleural Effusion.
High-pressure gas and continuously seeping blood were compressing the old man’s lung into a sheet of paper.
The mediastinal shift was pressing against his heart; in another hundred and twenty seconds at most, this body would become a corpse due to acute hypoxia and cardiopulmonary failure.
“Lay him flat on the operating table!
Strip off his shirt!”
William’s voice was dry and his tone flat, yet it carried a certain undeniable sense of pressure.
The two Russian thugs, who usually killed without blinking on the streets, unexpectedly couldn’t muster a single thought of rebuttal when facing this Asian Doctor in a yellowed white lab coat.
In a frantic rush, they lifted the old man onto the stainless steel multifunctional surgical bed and roughly tore open his blood-stained wool sweater.
Buttons flew off, bouncing against the tiles.
The old man’s withered chest was completely exposed under the pale halo of the shadowless lamp.
The right side of his chest wall bulged high, and traces of air bubbles moving under the skin could even be seen.
William turned and walked toward the sink in the corner.
He turned the faucet to the maximum, cold water washing over his knuckles.
He squeezed out a large glob of povidone-iodine hand sanitizer and rubbed it from his fingertips all the way to his elbows.
Surgical hand washing, donning a sterile surgical gown, putting on latex gloves.
The entire sequence of movements had no redundant pauses.
He turned his head, his gaze locking onto Jessica, who was still standing behind the triage desk in a defensive posture, holding the iron wrench.
“Go to instrument cabinet number two!”
William issued a combat command.
Jessica was stunned for half a second.
She was good at fighting, and she was well-versed in finding cats and dogs, but facing such a life-and-death emergency scene, her brain—accustomed to solving problems with fists—suffered a brief freeze.
She glanced at the old man twitching on the operating table, whose eyes were already starting to roll back, then looked at William’s black eyes, which showed no emotional fluctuation.
Five thousand dollars.
Those three words jumped into her mind.
Jessica dropped the wrench and rushed in three steps to the row of glass instrument cabinets against the wall.
Pulling open the cabinet door, a thick smell of disinfectant rushed at her face.
Inside were densely packed surgical knives of various models, hemostat, Puncture Needles, and Drainage Tubes.
The stainless steel instruments glinted coldly under the light; to a layman who had never received professional medical training, this was no different from facing a pile of bomb-defusal wires.
She reached out, her fingertips hovering over several rows of needles of varying lengths, her clothes on her back already soaked with cold sweat.
The bald Russian beside her was so anxious his eyes were bloodshot. Get faster updates on g.com.
He grabbed Jessica by the collar of her leather jacket, spraying spit all over her face: “Hurry up!
Can’t you see Boss Ivan is dying!
If he dies here, both of you will go down with him today!”
Jessica was already in a state of high tension, and this sudden pulling ignited a real fire in her.
She grabbed the bald man’s wrist with a backhand, her thumb accurately pressing on the pressure point of his radial styloid process, and tightened her fingers.
Strength far exceeding that of an ordinary person poured out without reservation.
The bald man’s originally ferocious expression twisted in pain, and a distorted scream escaped his throat.
He felt as if his wrist bones were being frantically squeezed by a hydraulic press, the crisp sound of bone friction amplifying in his ears.
“Let go,” Jessica’s voice was raspy, the fierce light in her pupils even more terrifying than the Russian’s.
“Don’t interfere with me getting the equipment.”
The bald man gasped in pain and retreated repeatedly, looking at Jessica as if he had seen a ghost.
This woman was clearly thin enough to snap, so how could her strength be greater than a Siberian brown bear’s?
“Take a deep breath, shut your mouth, and look at the labels!”
William had already walked to the operating table, his left hand pressing on the old man’s shifted trachea to fix its position.
His voice was not disturbed by the little episode just now, remaining as steady as an emotionless metronome.
“There are color markings below every tool.
I’ll say a name, and you find the corresponding colored label and give it to me.” William raised his eyelids, his gaze piercing through the beam of the shadowless lamp straight at Jessica.
“Get one thing wrong, and this old man dies in front of you.
You can also forget about getting that five-thousand-dollar salary.”
Jessica clenched her teeth and forced her gaze away from those cold metal instruments, turning toward the labels below.
Red, blue, yellow, green.
“Large-bore Puncture Needle, red label area, second row, third from the left.” William called out the first coordinate.
Jessica possessed dynamic vision far beyond that of an ordinary person.
Her gaze swept across, her fingers accurately pinching the thick needle packed in a sterile plastic bag, and she turned to slap it into William’s open palm.
“Sterile Drainage Tube with a one-way valve, blue label area, bottom layer on the right.”
“Large hemostat, yellow label area.”
“Lidocaine local anesthetic, green label area.”
Commands were issued one after another.
Jessica’s movements quickly went from awkward at the start to fluid.