Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

I have no choice. I head back in. I take the stairs, moving quickly past prints and photographs, my feet squelching into the carpet as petrol comes up out of it. If I’m quick I can get in and out of here before this place goes up in flames, or maybe I can stop it from happening. I check the rooms upstairs. A study to the far left, a guest bedroom, two bathrooms, and two more bedrooms. My chest is sore from breathing hard, my legs are aching, the lack of exercise over the months clearly evident. The fumes are much thicker up here. It doesn’t add up-torching your own house doesn’t seem the way a criminology and psychiatry professor would deal with hiding a body. A guy like Cooper wouldn’t have brought a victim here, then become desperate enough to burn down his own house to hide the evidence. He also wouldn’t be foolish enough to leave her car parked outside. Cooper Riley is quickly sliding down the scale from suspect to victim. Something bad has happened to him, or about to if this place burns, and I’m thinking it’s the same bad thing that might happen to Emma Green.

I get through all the rooms. No blood. No Emma Green. No Cooper Riley. No sign of any struggle except for the broken camera outside and signs somebody used a Taser. Every second I expect to hear the rush of flames erupting from below. I head back toward the stairs. Maybe I’ll have more luck on the ground floor.

From downstairs a toilet flushes and the urgency is replaced with caution. I reach the staircase, my grip still tight on the tire iron, looking down into the foyer, when a man I don’t recognize steps into the hall. He has a box of matches in his hand and one of them is already lit. He drops it into the petrol on his way out the door without even seeing me, picking up the empty containers on the way. Before I can move or even yell out, there’s a whoomp as fire erupts over the tiles, through the French doors and onto the carpet and up the curtains. The arsonist disappears behind a haze of heat and smoke. The flames reach the staircase where it forks, heading along the ground floor and at the same time climbing the steps toward me, the flames blue at the bottom, yellow at the tips, the heart of it dark orange, the furniture in the foyer and living room already burning, the air blanketed with smoke and toxic fumes, all of it taking only seconds.

There is no path to the front door. The entire foyer is engulfed in fire. I take a few more steps down toward it. Somehow I have to get through those flames and find Emma Green.

Only I can’t. Those flames are suicide. There is no path through them. The only direction is up.

Smoke rolls like water beneath the ceiling. Petrol splashes from the carpet onto my legs. I start coughing as raw dark air is pulled into my lungs. I run the length of the upstairs hallway to the bedroom at the end where there isn’t any petrol on the floor. I slam the door closed hoping it will form a barrier to give me more time. The flames downstairs sound like a freight train. I can feel the floor heating up but I’m not sure if it’s real or just my imagination. I try the windows. They open but not far enough to climb through. Emma Green’s car is doing a U-turn. Badly. It bounces up over the opposite curb and hits a letterbox then shudders as it stalls. It stays that way for a few seconds before lurching forward again, the engine hiccupping, the letterbox crushed flat beneath the front wheels. The skeleton of the house groans as it weakens, the ground floor readying to have the top floor fold into it. The polystyrene walls are melting as the timber framing crackles and burns. It’s only a matter of seconds until the bedroom is the next victim in the inferno.

I use the tire iron on the window, smashing it, taking out some of my frustration on the glass, angry that on the ground floor Emma may be burning to death. The quicker I get outside, the sooner I can make my way back in downstairs and look for her. Most of the shards of glass rain down outside, but some are pulled back in as the tire iron hooks toward me. A couple of pieces slide into my hand and cut deep. I drop the iron and drag the mattress from the bed and twist it out over the windowsill, shark tooth-shaped fragments of glass biting at it, making it difficult. I get it far enough to let it fall and allow gravity to take over. It disappears through the smoke and I can barely see the shape of it hitting the ground. Landing on the mattress is such a cartoonish thing to attempt, but it’s all I have. The window in the bedroom below shatters and flames erupt outside and heat rushes over my face. I will have to pass through the flames, no choice there. People are appearing on the other side of the road. They’re standing there staring at me with no idea what to do, some of them with their hands over their mouths, others pointing at me, some making calls on their cell phones, others pointing their phones at me and taking pictures or shooting film, some of them probably even annoyed I’m devaluing the neighborhood by being burned alive. None of them come any closer or offer any encouraging words of survival. I drape a blanket over the edge of the window to cover the remaining glass. The bedroom door is on fire. Smoke is being sucked in under it and toward the broken window. I wrap another blanket over my body, covering as much of myself as I can, holding it over my face by putting it between my teeth. I lower myself outside as far as I can to lessen the impact. The flames hit my feet. I let go, pushing back slightly, unable to see the mattress but remembering where it landed. I watch the house race past me. I pull the blanket down further to cover my face as I pass through the flames. I tuck my knees up slightly and I hit the mattress with my feet and butt at the same time, something in my left knee popping. I roll onto my back and away from the fire, leaving the blanket behind. The cuffs of my pants are smoldering. I slap at the flames with my hands and kill them, having to stretch forward because of my already swelling knee. I crawl further from the house, and at the same time two men appear. They grab me under the arms and drag me away, asking if there is anybody else inside.

I look at the house. Fire is coming through all the windows, it’s overlapping every surface. I tell them I don’t know, but I think there might be-I think Cooper Riley might be somewhere among those flames, Emma Green too, but I can’t send these men in there.

“Let me go,” I tell them, and try to shrug them off.

“You can’t go back in there, buddy,” one of them tells me.

“I have to. There’s a girl in there.”

“Not anymore there ain’t,” the other one says, “at least not one that’s alive.”

“Let me go,” I say again, but they don’t let me go, instead they drag me further from the fire and I let them do the dragging because they’re right, I keep protesting but even if they let me go I don’t know if I would try to go back in there, not now. If Emma Green is in there then it’s already too late for her. Nobody can go in there and come back alive.

We watch as the house loses the battle, as clouds of smoke flood the air and extend out to the car and gardens and the heat pushes us back.

Adrian drives two blocks. He parks the car and locks the door and slowly works his way back to the fire. People have their eyes glued to the spectacle. A growing crowd has formed, and in that crowd he will not stand out. He should have kept driving, but there is something about the fire that called to him and made him return. When he was a kid, before he became the Urinator, he used to love lighting fires. Nothing big. Just small, contained fires, normally in rubbish bins on the side of the road, sometimes he’d drop a match into piled-up cardboard or newspapers waiting to be picked up for recycling. Less than ten fires in total, the addiction broken for him when one of the neighbors told his mother he’d seen him trying to set fire to a letterbox. Since the beating there have only been two fires. One yesterday with his mother and one today. Both big-scale fires impossible to drive away from without watching the show. Watching his mother burn was far better than trying to set fire to a wooden letterbox, and watching Cooper’s house burn is even better again. Giant orange and yellow flames climbing over the houses, smoke billowing high into the air, the raw power of a contained inferno. It’s a beautiful thing.