Z for Zachariah

“Up on the hillside.” I still, for some reason, did not mention the cave. “I don’t know if I could have or not. I could have tried.”

“But you didn’t know the water was radioactive.”

“No. But I knew something was wrong with it.”

“I should have known, too. Don’t you see? I had two Geiger counters. But I didn’t even look. It was my own fault.”

But I worried about it anyway, and I still do.

That was last night. He put on the pyjamas, and after the milk had boiled and cooled he drank a cup of it, warm; I had boiled the cup, too. I will boil everything pertaining to food from now on, or bake it.

He even consented to take two aspirin tablets. Then he fell asleep. I put the lamp away from the bedside, and turned it down low. I thought I should leave it burning, but I did not want him knocking it over. I sat there, in a chair by the window, for about an hour, not doing anything except thinking.

Finally I went to my room and fell asleep. But I got up every hour or so to see how he was, and to check the fire. He slept quietly all night; I wish I could say the same for Faro, who kept dreaming and whining in his sleep. He knows something is wrong.

This morning, as I have said, I went out to the barn to milk the cow, and when I came back I heard him calling before I reached the house. I think he had been having a bad dream just before he woke up, but he did not say anything about it. His eyes looked odd and unfocused, and at first I thought he did not know who I was, he stared at me so hard.

After I got him back in the bed and covered up he stopped shivering and said: “You went away.”

I said: “I was milking the cow.”

“While you were gone,” he said, “I thought—'

“You thought what?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s the fever. It makes me imagine things.” But he would not say what he had imagined. I took his temperature, and it had gone up—it was a hundred and five. It looked strange to see the mercury stretched all the way to the wrong end of the thermometer, as if I were holding it backwards. It only goes to 106 degrees.

He watched me read it. “How is it?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a little higher.”

“How much higher?”

I told him. “Bad,” he said.

“Don’t think about it. I’ll get you some breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“But you must eat anyway.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll try.”

And he did; propped up in bed, he ate most of a boiled egg, some more milk, and a bit of toasted biscuit. When he finished he said:

“You know what I would like? Some iced tea. With sugar in it.”

I thought he must be joking, but he was not. Poor Mr Loomis. I said: “I haven’t got any ice.”

He said: “I know. We didn’t get the generator going in time.”

A few minutes later he fell asleep again, and I decided to try, at least. I could not make iced tea but I could make cool tea, and I thought that what he really wanted was a sweet drink. People with fevers get hungry for odd things—with me it is always chocolate ice cream. There was a tin box half full of tea bags in the pantry—my mother’s, not exactly fresh, but they smelled all right. I boiled some water, poured it into a pitcher and put in two bags. After it had steeped a while I took out the bags, added quite a lot of sugar and put the pitcher in the basement. It will cool in a few hours, and I will give it to him as a surprise.

But now I face a problem. I have to go to the brook for more water, and some time soon I am going to have to go to the store, since I am running out of several things including flour and sugar. But how can I go when he is afraid to be left alone? And I ought to milk the cow again.

This morning I went while he was still asleep. Maybe if I go in broad daylight, and tell him while he is awake where I am going, he will be all right if I do not stay too long. I will have to try that. There is nothing else I can do.

I went, both to the brook and to the store, and it was a bad business, but I could not help it. At least I do not have to go again for a few days. But I can see that I have a very troubled time coming.

I am writing this in the living room; it is night, and I have a lamp lit. Everything is quiet now, at least for the moment.

This is what happened: At about four o’clock this afternoon I knocked on his door and went in. He was asleep (he sleeps about ninety per cent of the time now), but woke up and seemed calm enough. I explained that I had to go out, and he did not seem at all bothered or upset; in fact he was surprised that I was worried about it. (He had not asked me to stay at the house, of course; it was I who was afraid of going, after what happened this morning—which I think, in fact, he does not even remember.) So I felt a little bit silly, as if I had made too much of it. Still I said:

“I will take the tractor and the cart, so I can go faster and carry more.”

“A waste of petrol,” he said.

I had thought of that, but I decided to do it anyway. It was an emergency, and one that was not likely to happen again, after he had recovered.

Despite his reassurance, I rushed to the barn and hitched the cart to the tractor as quickly as I could; fortunately it is an easy hitch, with just a single six-inch pin to slide through the shaft. The cart is a two-wheeled steel trailer, square, and has a capacity of one ton. When I had it hitched I put on to it three fifteen-gallon milk cans; I had not used these when I carried water by hand, since they are too heavy, but with the tractor that did not matter, and they would hold enough for two weeks or more. I put the tractor into high gear (it can go about fifteen miles an hour in top gear) and headed first for the brook. The empty milk cans rattled very loudly, the pasture being bumpy.

I filled them (or nearly—about two-thirds full is all I can lift), went on to the store, and loaded a lot of food supplies, including tinned stuff, dehydrated soup, sugar, flour, cornmeal, dog food and chicken corn. Before leaving I also refilled the tractor’s petrol tank from the pump. After all this, including the ploughing, it had only used about two and a half gallons, not too bad. As I started back up the road towards the house I looked at my watch. I had been gone forty minutes.

I was hurrying towards the house, still in high gear, and was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away when I saw it. The front door flew open and Mr Loomis came out, trying to run but staggering. I could not see his face but the red and white pyjamas were unmistakable. He crossed the porch, stopped at the railing and held on a few seconds, then stumbled down the steps and across the yard towards the tent and the wagon. Faro ran up, tail wagging, and then backed off, staring at him doubtfully.

By this time I had reached the driveway, ! turned in and shut off the motor. Mr Loomis, running in a groping kind of way, as if he could not see well, had not gone to the tent but to the wagon. He opened the end, reached inside, and when his hands came out, to my horror, he was holding the gun, the big carbine. I jumped down and ran towards him, but before I reached him he had fired three shots. He aimed them at the second floor of the house, at my father and mother’s bedroom, and I could see puffs of white paint and splintered wood fly off where the bullets hit. The gun made a terrible noise, much louder than the .22.

I shouted—I may have shrieked; I cannot remember—and he turned towards me, swinging the gun round so it was aimed at me. To my own surprise I stayed calm.

“Mr Loomis,” I said, “you’re sick. You’re dreaming. Put the gun away.” His face suddenly looked incredibly distressed and twisted up, as if he might cry, and his eyes were very blurred. But he recognized me and lowered the rifle.

“You went away,” he said.

Just as before.

“I told you,” I said. “I had to go. Don’t you remember?”

“I went to sleep,” he said. “When I woke up I heard—' He did not want to tell me what he had heard.

“Heard what?”