Z for Zachariah

out.

He had, as far as I know, never driven a tractor before—hence the five minutes, which is what it would take to work it out for anyone who knew how to drive a car. The clutch, accelerator, and brake pedals were the same; the gear lever similar, two speeds forward and one reverse, plainly marked “1”, “2”, and “R”. Even the ignition key and steering wheel were the same.

Mr Loomis backed it all the way out of the barn, shifted into forward and drove it in a small circle in the barn yard. He shifted into neutral and raced the motor a little as if to hear how it sounded. In forward again, he drove it back into the barn and turned it off.

He untied Faro from the door; the dog picked up my track again and started to lead the way towards the store. But Mr Loomis, already knowing I had gone that way, led him back to the house. It was growing dark. A few minutes later I saw a light come on in the kitchen window. If he was cooking there must be smoke coming from the chimney. In the dusk it did not show, and I thought, if I could not see his, he could not see mine. I had laid my fire; now I lit it, got it going—small but enough to cook over—and crept carefully through the bushes halfway down the hill towards the house.

There I waited until the dusk had turned to full darkness, looking alternately at the house (to see if he came out to look) and up the hill towards my fire. The wall was successful; there was no trace at all of flame or glow. The only danger might be an occasional spark; I would have to be careful about that. I went back up the hill and in a few minutes was cooking myself a dinner of tinned ham, corn meal cakes, peas, and scrambled eggs. I was extremely hungry.

After I had eaten I felt tired and, though I should have gone to the stream to wash my dishes, I began to write in this diary.

I wish now Mr Loomis had never come to the valley at all. It was lonely with no one here, but it was better than this. I do not wish him dead, but I wish that by luck, by chance, he might have taken some other road and found some other valley than this. And I wonder: could there be others? Walking here from his laboratory he came south, and this was the farthest south he had come. Could it be that further south there are more valleys like this, other places that have been spared? Perhaps bigger than this, with two or three or half a dozen people still alive? Or maybe no people at all. If Mr Loomis had taken another road he might have found one of them.

It is possible. My parents explored only a small area. There might be, for all I know, another one only a few miles away, or even several. They would all be isolated from each other, each thinking it was alone.

When Faro returned that day I was astonished and puzzled about where he had been. Could he have been living in another valley? Could he have run to it from this one and then run back? There is no way of knowing. I do not even know which direction he came from when he returned.

Chapter Twenty-one

August 4th (I think)

I am in terrible trouble. Mr Loomis shot me. I haven’t written in my journal for several weeks. I was too sick and too afraid. I had to keep moving. I am hiding now in thick woods high up on the west ridge near the gap at the south end of the valley. There is a hollow tree where I can keep my things and when it rains I get in the tree too. It is all a nightmare. Here is what happened.

For about ten days we had a sort of system. I would go down in the morning and milk, get the eggs, feed the chickens, work in the garden, pick the vegetables. Each day I divided the food evenly, and left his share on the back porch. When he needed drinking water he set out a can and I filled it at the brook. I brought groceries from the store; twice he came to the back door as I was leaving the eggs and asked for specific things—he had run out of salt; he needed cooking oil. The rest of the time I used my own judgment and he accepted what I brought.

There were inconveniences. I missed the kitchen, the stove, the laundry tubs. I looked at the ripening tomatoes and wondered how I was ever going to bottle them; I decided it could be done over an outdoor fire, perhaps near the barn so I could use my father’s work bench as shelf space for the jars, of which there were plenty in the store. I worried, too—ridiculously, I know—about the condition of the house, whether he swept the floors, and even about how he did his laundry, if indeed he did it. My own, such as it was, I did in the brook.

At sunset, after the second milking, I would go back to the cave, always by way of the road and the store. Once or twice I stopped off at the church, but that, like keeping up my notebook, I tended to neglect. It seemed strained. I do not know exactly why. Churches, I suppose, must be associated with normalcy. I did pray a bit, but only at odd times during the day. The Bible was out of reach in the house.

I saw little of Mr Loomis except from a distance. He seemed to have given up and accepted the new order of things; and yet he had not, as I now know, and as I think I really knew then. I lived—what else could I do?—as if it were going to continue this way. I even began to worry about the winter, about cutting firewood.

Each evening he would come out of the house just before dark, almost always with Faro. They would walk, and practise tracking, going a little farther (and Mr Loomis a little more briskly) each time. After the first few days he began trying a new method: he would let Faro off the leash but keep him close, either by talking to him or whistling softly, I could not hear which. Faro already recognized the command “close”, but only when there was a gun there.

Three or four more times he took the tractor out again. Once, towards the end of this period, he took it on a longer ride than just around the barn. He drove it up across the yard towards the house, and then out on the road. There, heading right, towards Burden Hill, he shifted it into high gear and revved the motor up. He ran it at top speed for about three hundred yards—he was obviously trying to see how fast it would go, though I did not know why. It can go at about fifteen or eighteen miles an hour—quite fast enough when you have no windscreen and no springs.

On the morning of the tenth day (or, as I said, it may have been the twelfth or even fourteenth), I got up, ate breakfast, and took my things to the cave. I looked down at the house just in time to see something new.

Mr Loomis came out of the door, walked quickly to the road, and then, looking definitely furtive, started towards the store. He did not stay on the tarmac but went along the edge, the side towards Burden Creek, walking where there were trees and bushes to hide him.

I got out the binoculars to see if I could tell what he was up to. As he walked he stared always straight ahead, up the road towards the store, as if looking for something. But looking for what? Then I realized—for me, of course. He wanted to see me when I first appeared, to see where I was coming from.

He stopped, finally, at a clump of trees where the road made a slight bend. From that point he could see the store itself in the distance.

That meant that if I took my usual route he would see me approaching the store from the pond, and would know at least which side of the valley I was living on. And I thought: why let him know that? Yet I did want to go down as usual, get my eggs and milk and do my work; I had planned that day to spread some more fertilizer on the wheat while it was still short enough and the weather cool.

The answer was simple enough: I used another approach. Staying up on the hillside, near the top of the ridge, I worked my way to the far end of the valley, almost to the gap and the steep cliff on the far side. On the way I passed just above the crabapple tree where I had once picked a bouquet; looking down on it I could see the young green apples hanging thickly on the branches.

I came down to the road far beyond his range of vision—I could not even see the store. I crossed the road and headed back, keeping to the trees that bordered the creek. They gave way to brush, and then the store came in sight.

I walked carefully so as to keep it between me and the spot where he was watching. And when finally I reached it, I stepped quickly out from behind it and on to the road. I wanted to make it look as if I had appeared from nowhere. At least he could have no clue as to what direction I had come from.

I went on towards the house. As I came to the trees where I had seen him I had another thought: suppose he was not just watching at all. I approached cautiously, ready to turn and run—but he was not there, and when I came in sight of the house I saw him on the porch just going through the front door. So he had retreated when I