The Wheel Turns

"The Wheel Turns" by Chuck Augello

Issue 2.21 | Fiction

Cover Art: L. Erickson

“Tell me what it looks like, Daddy.” 

Kimmy’s hand fits inside my own like a photo in a locket, as if both were made for the sole purpose of being intertwined. We’re five hundred feet above ground, the evening air warm and thick, our eyes level with the setting sun as our carriage on the Ferris wheel rises toward its apex, the climb before the inevitable descent.

“The treetops are like broccoli crowns,” I say, and Kimmy shrivels her nose and sticks out her tongue. She’s never seen a tree nor a piece of broccoli, but her fingers know the feel of the soft buds cramped atop the firm stalks, and it’s the best I can do to convey how the trees look from this eye-in-the-sky perspective. Blind since birth, Kimmy’s world is an eternal darkness, the sunset, the color blue, her parents’ smiles, even the look of her own face in the mirror forever denied her.

“The clouds are cotton candy…”  

“Can we get some? Please!”

“Of course, sweetie.”

But it’s a lie. Minutes ago the cotton candy booth collapsed. I watched from above as the mob pulled down its roof, wrecked the machines, and shoved cotton candy into the teenage vendor’s mouth until her legs stopped twitching and her arms relinquished the fight.

“You can have all the cotton candy you want, Kimmy.”

A father should never lie to his daughter, but why tell her we might never eat again?

—

April knew it was a bad idea.

“Look at the news,” she said. “Did you see what happened in Oakdale?”

“Oakdale is two hundred miles away, and the news makes everything seem worse. If something was wrong, I would have seen it on the ride home.” I checked my phone. “We’d be getting text alerts from the police.”  

“What about this?”

She showed me an Instagram post from her cousin Lauren in the neighboring town. Broken windows, a burning car, a family of three hiding in a dumpster.

“It looks fake, and Lauren overreacts to everything. She thinks Black Friday at Target is Dawn of the Dead.”  

“Dean, please don’t go. Please.”  

It was Friday night, the end of a long, draining week at the office, and spending the evening on the couch streaming some dumb show with my family was exactly what I needed, but Kimmy had been excited about the County Fair for weeks, and I’d promised to take her. The forecast promised heavy rains for Saturday, leaving us only one night if we didn’t want to miss it.

“Do you want to tell her she can’t go?”  

“We can both tell her,” April said.

“You’re worrying about nothing. We’ll grab some cotton candy and funnel cakes, ride the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel a few times and be home by nine o’clock.” 

The lines around her mouth softened as she touched my shoulder. “If you see anything suspicious, promise you’ll turn around. Anything.”

I kissed the tiny dimple on her forehead. “April, honey, there’s nothing to worry about.” 

—

Our carriage reaches its peak, and for a moment it seems possible we might stay here forever, gravity eluded, my daughter and I safe at the top of the Ferris wheel while the world below us burns. From our vantage point the people resemble well-crafted miniatures, figurines one might find in a model train village or a Victorian Christmas display, only some of the villagers are bashing in the skulls of the others with metal pipes and baseball bats and wooden slats ripped from a fence. Others have been set on fire and roll in the dirt to extinguish the flames, but it’s too late, it’s always too late, and I watch as more of them stream through the entrance gate, hordes of zombies looking for someone, anyone, they can kick and stomp and bludgeon.

“I hear screams, Daddy,” Kimmy says, grabbing my hand. “Why are people screaming?”

“The Tilt-a-Whirl moves really, really fast. People scream because they’re having fun.”  

Fast, yes, but not fast enough to save the riders from being pulled from the teacup chairs, dragged off the ride, and beaten to a pulp. I see a mother and her son on hands and knees scurrying toward the crawlspace beneath the ride’s platform, desperate for shelter, but the zombies are too quick, there are too many of them, and they grab the mother by the feet and pull her back into the crowd; the son, a smaller, more difficult target, escapes halfway under the platform before the zombies grab his leg and start biting.

“I wish Mommy was here,” Kimmy says.

Knowing our likely fate, thank God she isn’t, but who knows what April might be facing alone? Her phone goes straight to voicemail, my texts unanswered.

We should have left the moment I saw the man lying face down in the gravel parking lot, but I dismissed him as a passed-out drunk, kept walking, the inclination to ignore unwanted information a tough habit to shake.

Kimmy’s expression tells me she knows something’s wrong, her face scrunched as if waiting for her measles shot. Police sirens howl below us, and the unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire is everywhere.

“It’s just the shooting range,” I say. “If you hit the target you win a stuffed toy. Monkeys, bears, horses…” 

Kimmy loves horses.

There’s a moment of hope as a squad of state troopers swarms onto the fairgrounds. Order will be restored. Kimmy and I will get into our Outback and drive safely home.

But the troopers fire at random, at anyone who moves, even firing at each other as they embrace the carnage.

“I want to go home,” Kimmy says, the sulfurous, metallic stink of gunfire perverting the night air. She might not see what is happening, but she can sense that it’s bad.

“Soon, sweetie, we’ll go home soon.” 

“Now.”  

If only we could stay aloft forever, protected by the sky. When Kimmy was two I would balance her in my arms and dance around the living room and pretend she was flying, her arms extended like Supergirl, her devilish giggles interspersed with ecstatic cries of “more” and “I’m a bird, Daddy. A bird!” If only we could unhook our seatbelts, leap from the carriage, and fly home, truly be birds soaring over this wounded Earth. I contemplate the impossible: climbing from the carriage and scaling down the Wheel’s iron skeleton until I reach the motor and shut it, halting the Wheel, Kimmy safe above it all until help arrives, a brave and friendly fireman in a cherry picker scooping her into his arms and bringing her home. But wouldn’t the zombies just turn the motor back on and be waiting when she reached the ground alone? Wouldn’t I fall the moment I stepped from the carriage, Kimmy’s last memory of her father a helpless, plummeting scream?

There’s no stopping fate, grandfather told me the night before he died, and our carriage drops another level as the Ferris Wheel continues to turn.

—

They weren’t real zombies.

They were still alive. Their hearts still beat, blood surged through their arteries and veins, their lungs inhaled and exhaled, they processed language and spoke in sentences, but the media had to call them something, and “zombies” allowed condescending smiles and quips about the “walking dead” until it wasn’t a joke anymore. Classification was impossible: they were all races, all genders, all ethnicities, and all ages. Origin theories proved worthless. The only thing certain was how violent and deadly it soon became.

I never told April, but at a department meeting at the office three weeks earlier, Jody from Accounts turned on Scott from IT and bit him on the neck, her teeth tearing his skin and pulling it like an onion peel, blood spurting over the bagels on the conference table as we all watched stunned as Scott fell from his chair, and Jody—the same Jody from Accounts who brought balloons for every co-worker’s birthday—dashed out of the room shouting obscenities, her mouth ringed with blood, ribbons of Scott’s flesh hanging from her lips.   

Within twenty minutes HR sent a memo. We were told not to worry. It was under control.

Anyone not at the meeting received a different memo: ignore the rumor; it had never happened.

When Kimmy’s pre-school closed as a precaution, “only temporary” read the letter home. April told her that some kids had the flu, that soon she’d be back with her friends, five other blind kids and the blind woman teaching them strategies for navigating the world.

But there was no strategy to navigate madness.

—

“Hey buddy, help us up, please!”

The couple in the carriage below, a balding guy in a flannel shirt and his middle-aged wife, reach up to us desperately, as if it were possible for me to pull his 200-plus pounds from one carriage to the next, as if we both wouldn’t fall. The Wheel keeps turning—we’re halfway to ground level now—and I contemplate the chances of fighting off zombies long enough for us to rise once more above their reach and steal another five minutes of life, another five minutes to pray for a miracle until the Wheel turns again, sending us down to face the vicious mob. How long could we do it? How many times could we climb to the carriage above us before our strength gave out and we fell from more than 200 feet?

The bald guy’s eyes are panicked and desperate as he looks for me to save them. We’re close enough now to see the faces of the hordes waiting at the base of the Wheel, men and women banging steel pipes and crowbars against the dirt as they lick the gore from the shiny blades of their butcher knives. A carriage reaches the ground and they yank two crying teenagers from their seats and go to work, stomping and beating.

“Please, they’ll tear us limb by—” the bald guy pleads, but his wife grabs his arm and points to Kimmy, his fear melting to shame as he turns and hugs his wife, accepting their bloody fate.

“Don’t lie to me, Daddy, what’s happening?” Kimmy asks.

How does a father admit that there’s nothing he can do to protect his child, this lovely girl who I rocked in my arms from the moment she took her first beautiful breaths?

“Some people are angry, sweetie, and getting in fights. But we’ll be okay.” 

“Is it the zombies Mommy talks about?”

Sometimes April and I forget how smart Kimmy is, how her blindness makes her more attuned to the world than other kids her age.

“We’ll be home soon, sweetie.” 

My voice breaks as I pull her to my chest and wrap my arms around her, the turning Wheel sending us closer to the ground, the couple below us dragged from their carriage and devoured by the Beast.

—

We knew life had its rough patches, its cruelty and violence and exploitation, and we swore never to bring a child into this mess. But accidents happen, and from the moment we learned a baby was growing inside April, we prayed our daughter would never see the world stripped of its mask.

—

The Wheel turns, and the zombies attack.

We’re at ground level, and the first blow is a baseball bat against my left shoulder. The pain surges across my back, pulses at the root of my skull, but I’m ready for them, and while they are crazed and feral, hands grabbing from all points, their strength is no greater than my own, and when I punch a snarling, mad-eyed woman straight in the face, she falls back, hurt, and perhaps I have a chance.

“Daddy, daddy,” Kimmy cries, but for now she is safe, curled in a ball on the carriage floor, head tucked toward her knees, arms over her head. Survival pose. A man grabs my bicep as another tries to climb over the safety bar into our carriage. I elbow the first one in the throat and jab my car key into the other one’s eye. He falls away, the Wheel still turning as our carriage begins its rise. A razor blade slashes my cheek, warm blood spreading over my skin, and I must be lucky because two other zombies see what I’ve done and decide I’m not worth the fight. They rush off toward the easier prey at the merry-go-round, whooping and spitting. Kimmy holds tight to my leg as a final zombie lunges, but as our carriage rises, his feet lift from the ground, his fingers clinging to the metal rim as he dangles from the Wheel.

“Daddy, what’s happening?” 

I look into his mad zombie eyes. He’s near my age, a once normal looking guy with a dirty beard and blood-stained teeth wearing a blue Brooks Brothers dress shirt like the one in my closet. Why him and not me? Perhaps there’ll be an answer some day, but now I jam the key into the dimple between the knuckles of his middle and index fingers, his grip breaking as he screams and falls. We’re close enough to hear the crack of his bones against the earth, but the turning Wheel has lifted us from reach. I pull Kimmy from the floor and kiss her trembling hands as we sink back into the chair, the carriage swaying in the breeze as once more we rise, alive, toward the darkened sky.

We reach the top, and for a moment it’s beautiful. The setting sun paints a red-orange band of light across the horizon, and I see the streetlights of our town beyond the tree line. As long as I don’t look down, the world is as it should be.

“It’s like the taste of a cherry Lifesaver spread across every inch of your mouth,” I say, trying to convey to Kimmy the pleasures of a sunset.

“Like chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven,” Kimmy says, playing along as I hold her tightly, her rapid heartbeat pressed against my chest.

We’re both crying, but I refuse to let the tears break my voice.

There are more of them now, a ring of crazed people circling the base of the Wheel. Like the villagers chasing the monster in Frankenstein, they carry torches, pieces of wood ripped from benches, and tent poles broken in pieces and set on fire. They wait for us, knowing the Wheel only turns one way.

“Remember all those times when you laid in my arms and pretended to fly?”

“That was so fun, Daddy. Can we do it again?”

Such a smart little girl: she knows what it means. She can’t see them, but she knows what’s waiting for us. They shout, and scream, enslaved by some feral hunger demanding sacrifice. By the Tilt-A-Whirl I see them building crosses, watch them push a man against the wooden slats, nails digging into his flesh.

“Let’s do it now, Kimmy. Let’s fly. . . .” 

The Wheel turns, dropping another level closer to the ground, yet we’re still high enough that there’s no chance of surviving the fall.

“Will you hold me in your arms, Daddy?”

The mob, almost as one, raises their heads to watch us, their feet stomping, torches waving, baseball bats pounding the earth. I cradle my daughter and lift my right leg over the rim of the carriage.

I take a final look at the evil below us, then focus on the sky, the sunset blind to who we are and what we’ve become.

“The taste of cherry Lifesavers across every inch of your mouth.” 

I kiss Kimmy’s forehead, then leap.

“Daddy, I’m a bird.”

—

Chuck Augello is the author of the novels A Better Heart and The Revolving Heart, a Best Books selection by Kirkus Reviews. His most recent is Talking Vonnegut: Centennial Interviews and Essays (McFarland), an exploration of the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut. His work has appeared in One Story, Necessary Fiction, Ghost Parachute, 100-Word Story, Smokelong Quarterly, and other fine journals. Visit him at www.chuckaugello.com.