"Come on, big boy," he told himself in Arnold's accent. "If it bleeds, we can kill it. No—get to the—stair." Stupid. Not a jungle. Not a monster you could knife. But the voice steadied his feet, and the numbers came back like prayer. "Twenty‑four flats above nineteen. Six doors a landing. Don't break unless—" He stopped thinking in sentences and started listening with his bones.
On twenty‑two the landing door breathed like an animal. He went low, swept a hand across the carpet until his fingers found cold brass. Two tiny knuckles tapped from the other side—weak, uneven. He put his mouth to the crack.
"Hey," he said, low and slow. "It's me—your friendly American tourist. Bruce. Big guy in black. Open the chain."
The door would not open.
Bruce pressed his ear to the seam and heard it again: a small cough, then a thin voice, muffled by wood. No chain slid. The smoke shoved at his towel like a hand.
He set his shoulder to the lock rail and kicked hard. The frame spat splinters and the door flung inward. Heat punched him; smoke folded him to one knee. His chest lit like a matchbox. Not yet, he told his body, the words slow in his head. Not yet. Don't fail me till they're out.
He crawled.
"W‑Where are you?" he called, voice a rasp. The smoke alarm drilled the room; the flat breathed hot and wrong.
"Here!" a small voice answered, somewhere ahead and left.
Bathroom. He found tile with his palm, found the open door by the cool bite against his fingers. Inside, two little figures in dark clothes—long dresses, headscarves—sat in the fog of steam and smoke. One lay on the tile, limp as rope; the other knelt, coughing, shaking her shoulder.
For a heartbeat his starved brain misfired and made them something he could understand: little ninjas, twin warrior girls on a mission. He blinked hard until they were just two frightened children again.
"Whoa," he said softly, the old movie‑flatness tucked under the towel. "What are you doing here, little ninjas? Is she hurt?"
"My sister was coughing and then she fell," the kneeling girl said, words breaking. "I called Mama but she didn't answer. I don't know where she is."
"That's okay," Bruce said. "I'll carry you. If you can't walk, I carry you."
He scooped the limp child under his left arm and tucked the other to his right side, big forearm a shelf across her back. Pain put white lines at the edges of his sight. He stood anyway. The world tilted; he stamped it flat by force of will.
"Come with me if you want to live," he managed, because the line steadied him.
The corridor was a black throat. He ran bent, heads tucked against his chest, shouldering the stair door with a hip. Down.
He took risers in greedy handfuls—two, three at a time—half jumping the last steps of each flight to buy seconds he didn't own. Once he missed the landing edge and lurched; his knee hit concrete; he kept the girls high and took the blow with his shoulder. "Get down," he told the night, and then he did, lower, lower, pushing air that wasn't air into his lungs.
The older girl's whimper turned to a breathless hitch. The smaller one went quieter in his arm, her weight different in a way he didn't like. He prayed in the flat way he did everything. A little more time. Please. Just a little more time.
Light flickered through stair slits. Fire made holy windows in his head. He saw, for one sick moment, his father at the foot of the stairs—massive, rough, impossible—and his mother beside him, both dead these many years, hands out, beckoning. Come on then, son. He pushed past them, jaw set. Not yet. Not now.
He was on level fourteen—or something near it. Numbers slipped past his mind. He was down to the counting children do: one step, two step, three step, don't stop. His vision tunneled. His chest was all wire and flame. He tried to breathe; nothing came.
A few more stairs. His legs shook. He went to one knee, then both.
Shapes slid out of the smoke—two firefighters on hands and knees, masks blank, lamp beams thin and white.
Bruce thrust the girls toward them. "Take them," he coughed. "Quick—hurry down." The little bodies were unresponsive; the firefighters didn't argue.
"Got 'em," one said, voice tinny under the mask. "With us, mate. Down now."
Bruce pushed to follow and his body decided no. He folded to the landing like a dropped coat. He braced to get up and nothing in his body cared to listen.
Is this it? he asked no one. Is this all I get? Frank's going to be pissed. The kids. Sarah. Amber— He almost laughed, one dry bark. Amber won't cry, but at least I paid the damn premium on life insurance—good job, Bruce, finally responsible for once—
He would have let it go there. He was ready to let it go there and just close his eyes.
But then something metal scraped the inside of the smoke to his right. He rolled his head, slow as a tide. A wheelchair lay on its side, one wheel lazy‑spinning. Beside it, a heavyset man lay on the landing like a dropped coat, eyes closed, mouth open, chest stuttering a shallow, failing rhythm.
Hallucination, Bruce told himself. Not that clever, remember?
He crawled.
Two fingers found a pulse against a damp neck—weak, there, going. Bruce got his feet under himself, then got his legs under the man's arms and locked his hands together in the man's armpits. The first pull took everything; the second took the rest. He leaned back and let his legs be the engine. The stair accepted the weight one riser at a time, each edge of concrete biting the man's heels. Down, down. He stopped thinking of floors. He was a machine that produced one more step, then another.
Somewhere later—ten landings, ten years, ten breaths—more lights swam up. More helmets. Hands took weight. Voices pinned him to the now.
"We've got him—good job—hey, big man, stay with us."
They took the old man. The line flowed around Bruce and down the stairwell.
Bruce shuffled after them on hands and knees and found the lobby not so much as a place but as a temperature change, and then the doors, and then night air beyond them. Blue lights wrote on wet tarmac. The tower spoke in flame. The crowd beyond the cordon was a single animal with a thousand eyes.
Frank was there at the tape, jaw locked, a police sergeant with both palms flat to his chest in a gentle, unmoving wall. Frank saw him and took one half step that was still a mile. Bruce grinned—he couldn't help it; it wasn't much, just teeth in a soot‑black face—and lifted his hand four inches before gravity remembered him.
He found the ground with the side of his face and the whole world shrank to a bright pinhole at the end of a long, dark hall. Someone rolled him. Somebody else pressed a mask to his mouth. Words swam above him and popped like bubbles. He didn't catch a one.
He thought, without meaning to: At least I did one thing right.
No one thanked him. No one knew his name. He smiled anyway, because it didn't matter. Somewhere to his left a siren whooped and turned.
The pinhole winked out. His chest went to take the next breath and couldn't find it.
Black folded in. The noises went thin, then away. His heart fired once more, once less, and then stopped.
Everything went quiet for Bruce. He could feel himself slipping further and further away, systems shutting down, and his mind did its trick: back to when he was seven years old. Outside snow fell down around the mountain-valley town of Stowe in Vermont. The two-story house clung to the mountainside under trees; to him it was heaven, so close to nature, nothing like the big city.
He was up the stairs, under a wool blanket, the hallway smelling of pine cleaner. Heavy footsteps came. He hid his face. With a bang his father's huge figure filled the doorway, just as it did whenever he had too much to drink.
Cold winter air; whiskey breath. The mattress tilted under a weight that had once, long ago, been tender and had now forgotten how.
"I know you're awake, boy." His father's voice was a low growl. "Now as your father I want you to listen. You already know this story, but you're slow, so I'll remind you again. You don't forget it ever."
Bruce wanted to block his ears but didn't dare. The story always started like a prayer.
"Long ago, when I was but three, they called me Nikolai. Me and Roman, your uncle, were put through hell. Taken to the village where our ancestors' blood ran strong. We trained until our hands bled. Men moulded into warriors, women into agents for our nation. We were made, not born. And when we graduated after sixteen years of suffering we were free to choose. We went west because we wanted to be masters of our own fates. No flags over our heads. No one telling us what to do."
He reeled off the legend of his own life: the train, the ship, the freezing docks of New York, the statue of liberty through mist. Petty theft in the metro. Midnight raids on shops. The car-shop job. The Italian cop with the soft voice and the offer to wipe their record if they would kill. "We did the work," his father said, voice warming with pride. "We killed the evil that needed killing. We got papers. We had money. Cars. An apartment with rooms you could count on one hand and still need the thumb. We were close, Bruce. We were almost great."
Then the hinge.
"I met your mother," he said, the warmth draining away. "Six men in an alley. I went in. I broke them, bent them, sent them limping and bleeding. She was light. She fit in my arms. We became a couple. She became pregnant. I dreamed of a strong son. A small version of me. But what I got…"
He leaned down until whiskey and winter filled the boy's lungs.
"From the moment I saw you I knew something went wrong. Your mother bled. Your head not right. Your voice sounded off. Your mother cried. Roman, tough as he was, looked away. I should have killed you then. Tossed you in the trash. Made sure the stain didn't taint my life any more. But your mother, weak as females are, begged. And God forbid, I spared you. And what a mistake that was."
His big hand landed on the blanket, heavy as a shovel. "Now, with you having papers, with the government knowing, I cannot get rid of you. I have to look at your disgusting, ugly face and listen to your lisping, stuttering voice. You. Fucking. Failure. Because of you we had to move here. Because of you our life turned to shit. You are the devil's spawn."
He unscrewed the beer bottle and tipped it, cold liquid running over Bruce's hair and into his eyes. The boy made a sound he couldn't swallow. His father laughed, a dry broken noise.
"See? Weak."
At the doorway his mother was a shadow that never crossed the floor. She put down plates for three and not four. She walked through him like a draft. Shame lived in her face. She pretended he did not exist.
And yet, thinking of it now—remembering that story, remembering that memory, that hatred in his father's eyes, the disappointed look of his mother, the pity of his uncle and his wife—Bruce never hated them. He never blamed them. He blamed himself. He felt sorry. He wanted to apologise. He didn't want to hurt anyone. He just wanted to be good. He wanted to be loved. He wanted to be useful and not a bother to anyone.
He understood why his mother pretended he wasn't there. He understood why his father hated him. He understood even the weak smiles of Ivan and Kristy: not joy, only pity. He tried to make them happy, to make them proud, to make them stop looking at him like that. He failed. Like he failed in everything. By the time he graduated, they were already dead.
Only Frank and Sarah had smiled. Back then they weren't married, just dating—whatever that meant. They invited him to Frank's home on the mountain at the lakeside. Frank, his girlfriend, Frank's family, Sarah's family, their relatives all stood there and said, "Merry Christmas, Bruce. Happy birthday." He had cried. It was the first time anyone had remembered, had clapped, had looked at him with something like joy.
Now, dying on the cold floor of the tower, fading away, Bruce felt sad. Because even Frank—his best friend—and his wife and children, he had failed them too. By dying he had broken his promise never to leave Frank's side. He had failed to show them around the UK. Their trip had come to a short, miserable end, and it was because he wasn't strong enough. He wished he was, but he wasn't. He was a failure, as he always was.
At least he tried. He helped the ones in the tower that he could. He did one thing right.
The pinhole went out. The bedtime voice laughed once in the dark and then, finally, it was gone.
Everything stayed quiet.