Page 194 of The End of the World As We Know It

She looked to him, her face sad. She held up the child—a wriggling infant swaddled in crisp, pristinely clean white blankets. “This is John Low.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I,” she said. “John Low is just a child. Look at him. The potential for evil is there, but only if it’s fostered. Only if it’sforced, you see. We can change that. The evil can be met in his heart, Leaf. With the right parents—a father like your father. A father, likeyou—”

A voice, from nearby—from below. Near the floor. A gargled bleat of an accusation: “She’s lying!”

Brightfeather.

There, Brightfeather braced himself against the wall and stood on wobbly legs, blood soaking his chest, but his eyes burning like coals—a long-barreled Magnum revolver in his hand, swinging there like dead weight.

“She lies! She knew what was here, boy. I knew, too. We came to be the ones to foster that evil, to control it, not to save it, and it wasshewho killed us all—”

He swung his gun up—

But May, for being old, was faster. After all, she was uninjured.

And she’s a believer, Leaf realized. But a believer in what? He could not say.

Brightfeather’s head snapped back like a can shot off a fence rail. He crumpled, a scarecrow off his post.

The gun in May’s hand did not waver. She held the baby in her left arm, cradling it there. The gun in the right drifted gently to Leaf.

His own trigger finger itched.

“Why?” he asked. A raggedy, rawboned question.

“Because the carousel must turn, Leaf. Because evil is as essential to the world as good. Light is nothing without the dark. This is not the first John Low and it will not be the last. John Low lives.”

Then, everything happened at once.

Leaf felt his own gun arm rising.

Saw May’s eyes dart to the left of him, shocked—

Something pawed at his side, a dread gurgle from the faceless Brightfeather as his fingers hooked around the young man’s belt, pulling him sideways, dragging him down as May’s bullet carved a path through him—

Leaf cried out—

His own gun went off, but when his hand hit the ground, the weapon spun away into the trash of the room. At his feet, Brightfeather gripped his legs hard, hugging them to his chest as curtains of what was once the man’s face dangled and dripped from the hole in the center of his skull. Something that might’ve once been a tongue flapped there, a dying serpent, flicking a gassy hiss into the world as the man’s last utterance before slumping forward, well and truly fucked.

Somewhere, a child cooed and mumbled. Leaf’s ears rang again and he wasn’t sure if what he was hearing sounded human or… like something else.

Leaf struggled to pull his legs out from the dead man’s grip as a shadow fell over him. May, her gun in her hand. The child, gone again. Back in the crib, Leaf guessed. “You know your way around a revolver and a rifle,” he said, crouching there, coiling like a spring. “Was you that shot at me out there, wasn’t it?”

“It was. No witnesses to this, I’m afraid. Lest they carry word home.”

“I trusted you.”

“Of course you did. Because I needed you to. John Low needed you to.” She smiled, thumbing back the hammer of the gun. “I’ll tell your father you saved me. That’s my kindness to you, son.”

She pulled the trigger.

The hammer clicked, a dry snap. And no shot.

In Leaf’s head, his father’s voice:

Powder isn’t steady anymore…