Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
Ellen takes a few steps across the tall grass, toward the cold building.
Of course, she has a plan. But that doesn’t mean she believes entirely in its effectiveness. It doesn’t mean she’s not afraid, second-guessing every decision she’s already made and the horrifying decisions that lie ahead.
Ahead, the hospital lights shine out the windows, distress signals in the dark. She wonders how much Philip knows. How much he’s worried about.
The grass brushes Ellen’s ankles as she advances, moving closer to the hospital despite her misgivings, her fear. This, too, feels wrong; the supple graze of the grass against her skin. It should hurt. It should scrape. But instead it feels no different from when she walked to the pond in the backyard of her childhood home. The same sweet innocence of nature. Threatless. Safe. When she gets to a tree she hides, flattens herself against the rough bark, then peers around it, to the same front doors she’s entered and exited too many times to number.
From here, she can see the windows lining the small front hall connecting the two longer halls beyond. Unit 1 is to the left, the same side of the building the parking lot is on. Ellen doesn’t want to go that way. Can’t risk someone, even an orderly, fetching something from their car. So she continues, advances, without the cover of the trees, heading directly for the hospital that fired her.
A figure passes the first window and Ellen pauses. She crouches, slowly, into the grass. She waits and watches.
The silhouette passes the second window, then the third; a black shroud splitting the orange light, making inverted cat’s-eyes of each window, one at a time.
Ellen rises.
The front door opens.
Ellen freezes.
A man exits. He’s dragging two large plastic receptacles on wheels.
Garbage night, Ellen knows.
She waits. The janitor, Gregory, will take the cans to the far side of the parking lot, to the dumpster squared off by wooden walls.
She looks to the windows. Sees no movement.
Because Ellen knows Gregory, and knows that he will be making four or five trips to the dumpster, she decides to get up and go to the hospital now. If someone hears the front door, they might think it’s him.
It scares her that she didn’t think of this before arriving.
She goes.
Gregory whistles a dark melody and his song travels upon the hollow Iowan night; sparse, devastating, sad. By the time Ellen reaches the front door, he’s already rattled open the wooden gate to the dumpster.
Ellen looks through the glass of the front doors.
Sees no movement.
Almost wishes she did. Wishes something would happen to force her to turn back.
Instead, she enters Macy Mercy, making the sign of the cross as she steps over the threshold.
44
The khaki pants and the black shoes, the green cotton coat with four buttons, the matching tie and hat, even the scarf that hides the chin . . . Philip knows this uniform better than he knows any uniform in the history of the armed forces.
World War II. American.
The man’s gray eyes are buried deep in the wrinkles of his face. His white mustache shines.
Of the three impossible soldiers Philip has seen in the Namib Desert, none are as ghostly as this one.
“He began as a painter, but became a musician,” the soldier says. And his voice reflects isolation. Out of practice. Unused. “He and another played songs for the miners. Two Englishmen strumming guitars for the men who dug for diamonds. They were the entertainment, if such a word could be applied to spending twelve hours a day buried beneath the sun. Even in a desert the sun is more welcome than not.”
Dust rises from the folds in his face.
“They were down here six weeks. And by the end of it, the two of them could no longer sing. There was enough dirt down their throats to age them forty years, and by the end of it they sounded more like old seamen than the fresh-faced troubadours they arrived as.”
“What do you mean . . . the end of it?”
“Once there weren’t any more diamonds, that was the end of it. But not for the two musicians. One afternoon, or night, who could tell, as they were playing their songs, the man who’s still down here heard other voices. Someone was singing along to the chords he and his associate were playing. A phantom harmony, he called it. Something off key . . . but virile.”
Philip almost hears it himself.
“So when the miners deemed the mine barren, the two with the guitars hid below. And when they had the place to themselves, they dug deeper.”
“Looking for the sound.”
“But they hadn’t hid unarmed.” His white mustache rolls like surf on the shore. “They had a box of dynamite. Only, when they tried to use it, the stuff was as impotent as their voices.”
The nuclear warhead. The guns. The discarded hand cannon.
“But they got to it,” Philip says.
The old soldier is quiet a long time.
“They got to it,” he finally says. “But they got to fighting first. And the man who is down here now”—he pauses, looks over his shoulder—“strangled the other with rage. He got to it, all right. But he got to it alone.”
Philip looks to the stairs.
“Is he down there now?”
The old soldier stares long, does not blink.
“Do you know what more than twenty years with that sound might do to a man? What his mind might look like?”
“Is he armed?”
“He has the sound.”
“I have friends—”
“They are down here.”
Philip rushes the ghost, almost grips his lapels. Sees a name stitched in white:
ROGER KINGMAN
“Where are they?! WHERE?!”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“You saw them?!”
“Yes. But . . .”
“Tell me!”
The old soldier points to the stairs.
“He has them. He—”
Philip passes the ghost of World War II, just as he limped by the ghosts of his home moments ago.
At the top of the stairs, he calls back.
“Thank you.” And his voice is determination.
But the old soldier does not respond.
The stairs creak as Philip takes them. The echo is divine.
He holds tight to the vision of an airplane, arriving on time, landing in the desert, as the door opens and fresh-faced military men descend the steps, ready to escort the Danes aboard.
But a madman breathes below.
Philip remembers a slogan from his time in basic training.
A soldier must be prepared for an enemy who is madder than he.
But he isn’t prepared. As he continues down the old creaking stairs, as memories of Mom come flooding, he feels as unprepared as the desert at dawn.
As if even the darkness has eyes, as if even the darkness says don’t.
45
Inside Macy Mercy, silence. No typing from the office. No chatter from the night nurse, Francine. No footsteps in the hall. Ellen moves fast, toward Unit 1, aware that she’s going to have to pass the office on her way.
She’s prepared for this. Prepared for a quick glance from one of the hospital employees. She hopes that, in passing, out of the corner of someone’s eye, her white dress will look like a nurse’s uniform, and not the civilian clothes of an unwelcome threat.
She tries to walk like it’s any ordinary shift, a simple action she’s carried out a thousand times, walking the hall to Unit 1, here to check on the patient. She tries to bring herself back to the days when Philip was asleep in there, comatose, the days when the nurses guessed at what could’ve done that to a man: his body hideously disfigured and horribly bruised, most of his face and chest sunken from the broken bones, unable to support the rest of him. She tries to find that resolve, that calm, a nurse carrying out her daily duties, assisting in the healing of a former soldier, a man, here, at
And yet . . . as she comes level with the door, the silence within almost reaches out to her, places a finger and thumb to her chin, turns her face in the direction of the one place she should not look, should not reveal herself to.
The office is empty.
Ellen continues. Unit 1 is only a fifteen-foot walk from here. Once inside, she will tell Philip what she knows, what Delores told her. And Philip, no doubt, will listen to her, will escape with her, will look into her eyes with the expression Ellen wishes her husband and daughter had shown her, the look of the saved beholding the one who saves them.
This time, Ellen thinks. This time she’s not letting someone she cares about go unnoticed, locked out, left to wander the kitchen alone, to discover an open window, to decide to climb out of it and onto the dangerous fire escape outside.
Unit 1 comes as quickly as the office did, and Ellen is breathing as fast as she is moving. The door is open, a crack, and she pushes it, bracing herself for a possible interaction with a staff member: Francine, Szands. Or maybe someone else, someone even higher up than the doctor, someone capable of silencing Ellen completely.
Unit 1 is empty.
Ellen steps inside.
She closes the door behind her and uses the flashlight she’s brought with her to check the corners, check under the cot, even behind the bookshelf and the piano.
He’s not here.
Ellen exits the unit.
The hall is as silent as the office. The whole hospital, it seems, is asleep.
Ellen walks. There are ten doors between herself and the Rehab Unit. So many possible places for someone to emerge from, so much open space in which to be seen, recognized by someone who’d no doubt break all this terrible silence and force the reality upon her: the reality that what she’s doing is defying the United States government, blatantly attempting to steal from it.
Ellen begins to remember her dance with Philip, but there’s no room for nostalgia inside her mind, her stomach, her heart.
She must be clearheaded. She must be quick. She must be alert.
The silence is almost physical. As if it has followed a noise, so much noise, a thing so loud, so powerful, that only its opposite could remain.
When Ellen reaches the Rehab Unit she finds the door is unlocked and open. Because of the cool air emanating, a sense of nothingness, an absence of life, Ellen knows before she enters that the room is going to be empty.
Empty office. Empty unit. Empty rehab.
But he’s here. Somewhere he’s here.
Ellen crosses the room, places her palm flat to the second door, discovers it, too, is open, and enters the second hall.
She waits. Still in the hall. To any eye she would no doubt be a woman doing something she shouldn’t be doing.
Even when she was employed by Macy Mercy this area was primarily off-limits to her. Ellen doesn’t know it like she knows the rest of the building, doesn’t know the corners, the shadows, the depths.
She begins walking, cautiously, one hand along the right wall for support, to feel connected, to feel a part of a living world she once trusted.
The first door is marked TESTING. Ellen tries the knob and finds it open. She pushes the door inward, holds her breath, sure that this is the moment the doctor spots her, the moment when gloved hands erupt from the darkness and strangle her, grab her by the neck, drag her into the room, TESTING, where they will do things to her, experiment, drug, change her. Like they’ve changed Philip.
The room is dark. But it does not feel empty.
She reaches inside, feels along the wall, turns on the lights.
At first, the colors make Ellen think of a painting. Or maybe it’s a drawing, yes, something like the very first drawing she did for Philip.
A goat. Backed by infinite red.
These colors . . .
This red . . .
Despite the fact that she shouldn’t make a sound, Ellen screams.
46
When the Danes volunteered to be in the army, they did it knowing they were going to be in the marching band. None of them were “army material” in the way that so many others were. They wanted to serve their country, contribute to the fight against Germany and Japan, but by then they’d already dreamt dreams of music, experienced visions of themselves playing in rooms so smoky the audience might not even see the faces of the band.
There wasn’t a soldier among them.
And yet . . . twelve years after . . . disoriented by memories and movement, specters and sound, Philip has discovered that material inside himself.
When he reaches the bottom of the stairs, as he spots the thin rectangle of light in the distance, the unmistakable signpost of a door closed on a lit room, as he senses someone in there, knows someone is home, Philip understands with majestic clarity that he is capable of doing everything expected of any and all soldiers of the United States Army.
And the fear is no longer overwhelming.
And the urge is as basic as breath.
He limps toward the light.
Armed or not, he is going to kill the man he finds there.
47
Before Ellen arrived at the hospital, Philip was walking the same halls without the assistance of a walker, crutches, or even a cane.
The lock on his unit door was easy to take care of. Philip is stronger than even the doctors and nurses realize. A mirror in the staff bathroom confirmed for him what the distorted reflection in the Testing Tank suggested: he doesn’t look any better than he did the day Ellen held a mirror close to his face. But, of course, it’s how he’s healed on the inside that counts.
It was simple, too, avoiding the night staff, as most of them assumed he was locked safely in his unit, and nobody was looking for a former soldier, wounded musician, to be wandering, searching, vengeful, on his own. Perhaps they fooled themselves: they’ve successfully healed a broken man, but haven’t yet rid themselves of the conventional thinking that says a man who was hurt so badly could possibly be up and moving.
But before Ellen arrived, Philip was certainly up and moving.
The orderlies Carl and Jerry arrived first. They came quickly into the room and stopped, scared, eyeing Philip as if they’d found a vampire in Unit 10.
They tried talking to him, using words intended to calm him down. But Philip hardly heard them. And the orderlies couldn’t know the strength their patient had.
Philip tried to maintain an inner peace, a determined decorum, throughout.
Using Carl as leverage (Philip’s badly bruised arm secured around the cherubic orderly’s neck), rounding up the staff was as easy as he had hoped.
Part of it, Philip understood, was that, to them, the Testing Tank had always been innocuous. But the bigger part was that none of them could see the ideas within him.
There are no X-rays for fury.
Two nurses, two doctors, men in suits, too. Scott Malones. Found in offices lining the second hall, units with titles like MEDICINE and ANALYSIS.
After locking them in the Testing Tank, Philip calmly went to the control room. Because of his knowledge of gear, recording, playback, and how to operate even the most sophisticated sound equipment yet built (some of which he learned in the Namib Desert), it wasn’t difficult playing the sound. Wasn’t difficult to find either, as Macy Mercy had labeled the reel TONKA.
He left the two-way control room microphone hot for the duration, listening not only to the growing moans of the nurses and doctors, but to the sound itself as well.
His feet on the table, sitting back in the control room chair, Philip experienced only a brief bout of illness. He thought about Ross, Larry,
Soon the small speakers emitted screams. Then the screams became pleading. And the pleading became bleeding.
Philip heard muscles snap. Bones crack. Fists upon the steel walls. Tears, vomit, and defecation.
And when the people went silent at last, Philip let the sound roll another five full minutes. It didn’t affect him at all. After a while, he discovered, it started to sound like music. A song. One man’s anthem of resistance.
After, Philip rose and left the control room. He unlocked the Testing Tank door and peered inside.
Then he returned to Unit 10, where Doctor Szands was strapped to the cot.
“The only thing I don’t know about the drugs,” Philip said, “is how much is too much. If I’m going to be taking it on my own, I need to know the signs of an overdose. Call it being thorough, doctor. And I thank you in advance.”
But Szands could only take six shots, the same number Philip was given in the doctor’s blind rage.
The results were shocking to observe. Szands’s body split at the seams.
Philip took the hall to the main office. Inside he found three boxes of files, notes, and photos, all concerning the Danes and the third platoon sent to the Namib. Most of the notes concerned Philip. Ellen had made many of them. But not all.
He shredded the documents with scissors. He carried the boxes of meaningless scraps to the dumpster, whistling a dark tune as he worked.
Then, inspired perhaps by the sound of his own song, its intention, clear to Philip, he did what all musicians do when they feel the need to play.
He went back into the hospital. Found an instrument.
And he played.
48
Microphone cords, unattached, stretched to their length, on the floor of the sloped hall. Like the mouths of baby snakes, all facing Philip, seen in the beam of his light, as if something was recently disconnected here, a machine, a series of microphones, or possibly something Philip has never heard of. The metal heads face him, but the long black cords vanish into the darkness beyond Philip’s beam, then reappear at the edges of the rectangle of light, slip under the door there.