Page 193 of The End of the World As We Know It

All armed. Guns on the ground. Most shot through the lungs, like May had instructed. One had his scalp peeled instead. Steam rose from their wounds.

All was quiet.

Did we do it?

Is it done?

He scanned the hotel windows—

Movement on the third and topmost floor. There was a gleam, a sudden shine, and his guts clenched up—

That’s a rifle—

He eased his head aside, about to roll over when the shot rang out. His gun shook as the back end of the scope burst out, bits of glass sticking in his cheek as he crashed into the underbrush. The gun lay there, scope shattered.The shot came through the scope.Whoever had seen him was a damn good shot. Or lucky.

That meant someone was still in there. One of John Low’s men—

If not Low himself.

May could still be alive in there. The others, too.

He had to go down there. Had to go into the hotel. Another part of him screamed:This isn’t your fight, you’re just you, go home, go back to your father, back to hunting, let this be!But he remembered what happened in Ouray, and knew that could come home to Grand Junction if Low was allowed to live.

Leaf had to know. He had to try.

The circle and the cross.

He kept low, crawling behind the brush, looking for a way down outside of the rifleman’s sightlines. His bladder reminded him again of its need, so he leaned to his side and pissed into the scrub, making sure the little stream of it ran away from him, not toward.

Then, finding a low path forward, Leaf made his descent.

The inside of the old hotel stank of spent gunpowder, spilled blood, and shit. It, like the streets around it, was full of trash, too: fresh filth, bones, food scraps, broken slats of wood, swatches of filthy fabric.

There were bodies everywhere. Shot dead, their blood still pooling, the greasy coppery stink filling Leaf’s nose.

John Low’s men were not like those of Grand Junction—they were emaciated, sore-pocked, branded, and scarred. Their clothes were threadbare. The women had long, ratty hair—the men had beards gummy with food, spit, snot.

They were practically Ravagers—close to being the mad, feral nowhere men whose minds were broken by the last days. Even theirguns seemed janky—pieced together, jury-rigged, the grips and stocks splintered and rotten, the barrels rust-flecked.This is Low’s army?Leaf wondered.

Second floor, that’s where he found Otto. His right eye was a black canker. The back of his head was missing, brains clotted on the wall. It was his gun that Leaf took—a nickel-plated revolver with a black rubber grip. It was heavy as sin.

Stairs to the third floor: Cin Haber, on her back, spread out on the steps. A pair of bullet holes in her chest, the blood blackening her clothes.Shot right through each lung. Leaf’s innards twisted up. Tears burned at the edges of his eyes.Turn around. Go home.But his feet carried him up, up, up. Like he was being pulled to the top floor, a rope wound around his heart, tugging, tugging.

The third floor was just one room.

The stairs topped out at a short hallway, and the door at the end was open.

Like a zombie, Leaf walked through, revolver in his hand—

Mother May I stood above a cradle in the middle of the room. The room had been cleared of all other furniture and here, though there was trash, it seemed somehow artful, purposeful, like it had been mounded up against the walls in such a way to create architecture. A mobile dangled above the crib of little buttons—not buttons that clasped a shirt together, but the kinds of old pin buttons you wore on a jacket. Smiley face buttons, buttons with the old gone-world Stars and Stripes, buttons with the faces of people who might have been politicians or movie stars or comic book characters, but who were long-dead and likely forgotten.

The buttons on the mobile drifted and swayed. May was lifting a baby out of the cradle.

She had a rifle slung over her shoulder.

A nearby window sat open, a breath of cold air whisking in.

“Mother May I,” Leaf said.