Page 117 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

An alarm. Leaf whined in the back of his throat as he put the crosshairs on the chest of the first man and—

He jerked the trigger too hard. The shot went in front, kicking up dust from a pile of trash. The two men flinched; they knew now they were being shot at, but they wouldn’t have factored where, not yet—

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon —

Hand on the bolt, ratcheting it back, another round in the chamber—

Clackity-clack —

Another shot. This time—

A red flower bloomed in the side of the man. Kicked the wind out of him like a horse and his right leg folded under him like a house of cards. Down he went. The second one joined him a moment later, with the third shot.

They didn’t ring that bell.

But it wouldn’t matter, because the shooting had started.

It took minutes, at most, but to Leaf, it seemed to take hours.

Everything was fast, but slow, too, like time didn’t mean shit anymore.

It all ran together like paint; it formed no image, only chaos.

Men running toward the hotel. The bolt, back, up, forward.

Bang . Blood on the pavement, blood in the trash.

His shoulder, numb now from the times the butt of the gun punched him there.

The air smelled eggy and raw. His ears rang not like that bell but like a howling gale.

Reloading, firing, never missing once, not after that first shot, no sir, no ma’am, and Leaf thought and kept on thinking, I hope they’re proud of me, hope Pop is proud, hope Mother May I is proud, we’re the angels here, and we are meeting the devils and sending them back to hell, I hope they’re proud of me—

And then, fast as it started, it was over.

Nine dead men on the street.

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 their guns 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.

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’s forced , 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, like you— ”

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 was she who 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…

Rifle’s for long work…

Knife will do the work up close…

Leaf’s hand at his side, he launched himself up—left hand catching May’s wrist, his right sticking in fast with the knife. In through the side. Right into the lung. Clean as a whistle. Mother May I said nothing as she died.

It took a long while standing over that crib before Leaf knew what he was going to do.

He tried to think of it in an animal way.

Birds killed the babies of other birds sometimes, right there in the nest. Wolves would kill coyote cubs, coyotes would kill fox kits, and they’d do this to eat, yes, but also to get rid of the competition.

That was the simplest thing, the cleanest thing.

If Leaf believed himself good, and this child was evil, then the way forward was clear.

Then again, if he saw himself as a hunter, a human hunter, not just a wolf or a coyote or a house sparrow, he knew you didn’t hunt the fawns, cubs, calves.

You let them grow up. To see what they became.

But maybe he needn’t be a beast or even a hunter of beasts.

Maybe he just needed to be the son of his father.

Be good. Above all else, be good .

He picked up the cooing child and left.