Black Mad Wheel. Josh Malerman

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      The patient is awake. A song he wrote is fading out, as if, as he slept, it played on a loop, the soundtrack of his unbelievable slumber.

      He remembers every detail of the desert.

      The first thing he sees is a person. That person is the doctor. Wearing khaki pants and a Hawaiian shirt, he doesn’t dress like a doctor, but the bright science in his eyes gives him away.

      “You’ve been hurt very badly.” His voice is confidence. His voice is control. “It’s an unparalleled injury, Private Tonka. To live through something so …” He makes fists about chest high, as though catching a falling word. “… unfair.”

      Philip recognizes more than medicine in the man who stands a foot from the end of his cot. The strong, lean physique. The unnaturally perfect hair, the skin as unwrinkled as a desert dune.

      This doctor is military.

      “Now,” the doctor says, “let me tell you why this is such an incredibly difficult thing to do.” Philip hasn’t fully processed the room he is in. The borders of his vision are blurred. How long has he been here? Where is here? But the doctor isn’t answering unasked questions like these. “Had you broken only your wrists and your elbows, we might surmise that you fell, hit the ground in just such a way. But you’ve broken your humeri, radii, and ulnae, too; your radial tuberosities; coracoid processes, trochleas, and each of the twenty-seven bones in your hands.” He smiles. His smile says Philip ought to share in the astonishment. “I don’t expect you to know the names of every bone in the human body, Philip, but what I’m telling you is that you didn’t just break your wrists and elbows. You broke almost everything.”

      Sudden whispers from somewhere Philip can’t see. Maybe voices in a hall. Philip tries to turn his head to look.

      He can’t. He can’t move his neck at all.

      He opens his mouth to say something, to say he can’t move, but his throat is dry as summer sand.

      He closes his eyes. He sees hoofprints in that sand.

      “Now, had you broken only both hands and arms, I СКАЧАТЬ