“I don’t know.” Pete was pacing the room. “Even if those guys are military, they can’t do anything with cops around, right?”
He was right. They needed cops, firemen, a whole shitshow drama. But they couldn’t call. Something hinged open in her chest—an idea, a hope. She grabbed Pete’s hand and dragged him into the bathroom.
“Seems like the wrong time for a shower,” he said. But his voice was unsteady, breaking on the joke. “Aren’t we supposed to be getting out of here?”
There was no escape this way. Nothing but a single slit of a window barely the width of a pizza box. She registered the sad shower, the sink with a nest of hair clinging like a waterlogged insect to the basin, the fire alarm. She grabbed the roll of toilet paper from next to the toilet and threw it in the sink.
Pete stood there, staring. “What are you . . . ?”
“Quick,” she said. “I need a lighter or matches or something.” She bent to search the cabinet beneath the sink. Several sheets of old newspaper lined the plywood. She balled them up and threw that in the basin, too.
Then he got it. He disappeared again into the bedroom, returning with a sheet from one of the beds and a book of matches from a place called Skins. There were only three matches left.
“Dresser drawer,” he said, tossing them to Gemma. “Someone always leaves them behind.”
She was so nervous she took off the first match head when she tried to strike it. But she got the second one lit. The newspaper flared and curled. The toilet paper began to smoke.
“Shut the door,” she said, as the smoke began to drift out toward the bedroom, sniffing for oxygen. Pete stepped inside, closing the door behind him, and together they blew softly on the fire, so flames leapt up toward the mirror from the sink. Gemma’s eyes watered. The chemicals in the paper let off an acrid smell.
The fire alarm was much louder than Gemma had expected. She plugged her fingers in her ears. The bathroom was now so full of smoke, her eyes began to water. Finally they couldn’t stand it anymore and opened the door to the bedroom, stumbling out, coughing and sucking in clean air. There must have been a sprinkler system fitted at one point, but it hadn’t been maintained. A dribble of water came from a thin pipe in the ceiling, and did nothing but wet the carpet. Already Gemma heard the wail of sirens in the distance. She hadn’t thought there’d be so much smoke. . . .
“Shit.” Pete had his shirt to his mouth. He had to cough out the word. “The walls.”
The wallpaper in the bathroom had caught fire. Gemma had never seen anything like it. She’d never been so close to a fire at home, sitting in front of the fireplace, and those were the gas kind that ran on a neat little grate tucked away behind fake logs. Click on, click off. But now through the open door of the bathroom she saw the fire climbing the walls, leaping onto the plastic shower curtain and simply devouring it. She had the strangest urge to run back and try to smother it—as if she could do anything—and then fear hooked her hard in the stomach. Out. They needed to get out. The sirens outside were louder now. A bit of the carpet caught fire and the flame made a hand, waggled its fingers at her, crawled a little farther into the bedroom.
They couldn’t get the door open. For a horrible second, she thought the men had somehow trapped them, locked Gemma and Pete inside so that their job would be easy. Then she realized that in his panic Pete had locked the bolt instead of unlocking it, and she reached up and slammed the bolt free and wrenched the door open. The fire made a sound—like a roar, like an animal, like it was alive and hungry—and smoke came out with them, clouds of it. But they were now in the sunshine, on the balcony, and she saw a cop car below them in the parking lot, newly arrived, and a fire truck just pulling in, and a dozen people slowly drifting into the street to watch. A crowd.
She saw things in images, pictures and flashes. In the parking lot: a teenage girl holding a kid—her son?—by the hand, her son trying to fit an enormous lollipop in his mouth. The desk clerk talking on his phone, an old woman pointing, athletic socks bunched around her ankles. A boy was standing next to the maroon Volvo, angling his phone toward the balcony, filming. Time was moving very quickly for Gemma, so everything else seemed almost to be frozen. The agony of the fire truck angling into the parking lot. The sludge of a cop getting out of his car.
“Don’t you try and tell me what to do. I know your type. You keep your hands off me.”
The mouth of the stairwell: fifty feet away, Harliss, stumbling and still pretending to be drunk, so the two men in suits were forced to dance around him. Gemma sliced the scene into segments, into instinct. They did not want to use violence, had been trying to get him to go quietly. He was shouting, shaking off one of the men, who had a hand on his elbow.
“I know my rights. This is America. I know all about the Constitution. . . .”
There was no way down to the parking lot but past them. And as Gemma and Pete stood there, maybe for half a second, maybe less, one of the men turned and saw them. He still hadn’t taken off his sunglasses, and that was the scariest thing, worse even than a fire that obeyed its natural impulse to burn—the unnaturalness of a man doing what he had come to do and yet not bothering to take off his sunglasses, no reason to sweat, no reason to get upset.
And in that second she knew, she truly understood, what Pete had said to her outside. Monsters weren’t made, at least not by birth or fate or circumstance. Monsters chose to be monsters. That was the only terrible birth, the kind that happened again and again, every day.