Z for Zachariah

by Роберт C. О Брайен

  Tonight before I go, if I go, I have to get some more water into the cave, and to cook some stuff. I won’t be able to build a fire after he reaches the valley. By day he would see the smoke, at night he would see the flames because it has to be outside. We built a fire in the cave once, and had to run outside because the smoke got so thick. Tonight I will cook some chicken, boil some eggs (hard), make some cornmeal bread, so I won’t have to eat just tinned things, at least for a while.

  I could get water by sneaking to the brook at night. But I think it is safer to store some. I have six big bottles—cider jugs—with tops.

  That was another thing I had to decide about when the electricity went off: water. There was—there is—a drilled well near the house, about sixty feet deep, with an electric pump. We had an electric hot water heater, a shower, bath, all that, but of course they all stopped working. So I had to carry water. You can’t lower a bucket into a drilled well; the hole is too small, so that left me a choice of two brooks. The one that flows past the cave, the one I can see from here, goes on down towards the house but then turns left into the pasture, where it widens into a good pond—a small lake, really, clear and quite deep, with bream and bass in it. The other, named Burden Creek (after my family, like the hill—the Burdens were the first to settle in this valley), is bigger and wider, also nearer to the house. It flows more or less parallel to the road, and out of the valley through the gap at the south. It is really a small river, and quite beautiful, or used to be.

  Since it was nearer, I thought I would carry water to the house from that—two buckets at a time as needed. Then, just in time, I noticed something. It had fish in it, too, though not as big or as many as the pond. But the first time I went to get water I saw a dead fish floating past. I found a dead turtle on the bank. This stream flows into the valley out of a sort of cleft in the rock ridge to the left of Burden Hill—the water comes from outside, and it was poisoned. I looked a long time (I kept back from it, though) and I saw that there was nothing left alive in it at all, not even a frog or a water-bug.

  I was scared. I ran (with the buckets) all the way to the pond, up to the far end where the small stream flows in. I was never so glad to see a bunch of minnows in my life! They scooted away, just as they always had. The water was all right, and still is. It rises from a spring up the hill, inside the valley, and it must come from deep underground. I catch fish in the pond all the time, and eat them; they are one of my best food supplies except in the middle of winter, when they stop biting.

  I think I will definitely go in the morning, as soon as it is light. Now that I have decided, I am beginning to worry about something that I know is really foolish: how I look. How I’m dressed. I thought about it this morning when I was at the house, and I looked in the mirror, which I don’t often do anymore. I have on blue jeans, but they are men’s blue jeans (there are cartons of them at the store, but no girls’) so they don’t fit too well, but are rather baggy. And a man’s work shirt, cotton flannel, and boys’ tennis shoes. Not exactly elegant, and my hair isn’t exactly stylish—I just cut it off square around my neck. For a while I used to curl it every night—the way I did for school—but that took time, and finally I realized that no one would see it besides me. So it is straight but clean and has turned much lighter because I am outdoors so much. I think I am not as skinny as I used to be but it is hard to tell in these clothes.

  But what I wonder—should I wear a dress? Suppose it is a real rescue party, an official group of some kind? Perhaps I could sneak back and change. I do have one pair of real slacks left. The others wore out. But I haven’t had on a dress since the war. Anyway, I can’t climb a tree very well in a skirt. But I think I will compromise and wear the good slacks.

  May 24th

  It is a man, one man alone.

  This morning I went as I planned. I put on my good slacks, took the .22 and hung the binoculars around my neck. I climbed a tree and saw him coming up the road. I could not really see what he looks like, because he is dressed, entirely covered, in a sort of greenish plastic-looking suit. It even covers his head, and there is a glass mask for his eyes—like the wet suits skin divers wear in cold water, only looser and bulkier. Like skin-divers, too, he has an air-tank on his back. But I could tell it was a man, even though I could not see his face, by his size and the way he moves.

  The reason he is coming so slowly is that he is pulling a wagon, a thing about the size of a big trunk mounted on two bicycle wheels. It is covered with the same green plastic as his suit. It is heavy, and he was having a hard time pulling it up Burden Hill. He stopped to rest every few minutes. He still has about a mile to go to reach the top.

  I have to decide what to do.

  Chapter Three

  Still May 24th

  Now it is night.

  He is in my house.

  Or possibly not in it, but just outside it, in a small plastic tent he put up. I cannot be sure, because it is too dark to see clearly. I am watching from the cave, but the fire he built—outside the house, in the garden—has burned down. He built it with my wood.

  He came over the top of Burden Hill this afternoon. I had come up to watch, having eaten some lunch and changed back to my blue jeans. I decided not to show myself. I can always change my mind later.

  I wondered what he would do when he reached the top. He must have been pretty sure, but not quite, that he was coming to a place where things were living. As I said, you can see it from the Ridge, but not too well—it is a long way. And maybe he had been fooled before; maybe he thought it was a mirage.

  There is a flat place where the road first reaches the top of the hill—a stretch of about a hundred yards or so before it starts descending again, into the valley. When you get just past the middle of this you can see it all, the river, the house, the barn, the trees, pasture, everything. It has always been my favourite sight, maybe because when I saw it I was always coming home. Being spring, today it is all a new fresh green.

  When he got to that place he stopped. He dropped the shaft of the wagon and just stared for about a minute. Then he ran forward down the road, very clumsy in his plastic suit, waving his arms. He ran to a tree by the roadside and pulled a branch, tearing off the leaves and holding them close to his glass face mask. You could tell he was thinking: Are they real?

  I was watching from a place only a little way up the hillside, a path in the woods. I had my gun beside me. I did not know whether he could hear or not with that mask on, but I did not move or make a sound.

  All at once he pulled at the mask, at a fastening at the neck of it, as if he were going to take it off. So far I could not see his face at all, but only the glass plate, so I was staring. Then he stopped, and instead ran back to the wagon. He unsnapped the plastic cover at one end and pulled it open. He reached inside and took out a glass thing—a sort of tube with a metal rod in it, like a big thermometer. It had some kind of a dial or gauge on it to read—I couldn’t see from where I was, but he held it in front of his mask and turned it slowly, studying it. He walked back down the road to the tree, looking at the rod. He held it down close to the road, then up high in the air. Then back to the wagon again.

  He took out another machine, something like the first one but bigger; after that he pulled out a black, round thing: it was an earphone, with a wire dangling from it. He plugged the wire into the machine and put the earphone up beside his mask, next to his ear. I could tell what he was doing: using one machine to check against the other. And I knew what they must be; I had read about them but never seen one: radiation counters, Geiger counters they call them. He walked down the road, a long way this time—half a mile at least, watching one counter, listening to the other.

  Then he took off the mask, and shouted.

  It startled me so that I jumped back. I started to run—then I stopped. He was not shouting at me. He was cheering—a long “Haaay” sound, the kind they make at football games. He didn’t hear me (luckily); the shout went echoing down the va
lley, and I stood absolutely still again, though my heart was still thumping—it was so long since I had heard a voice except my own, when I sing sometimes.

  Then silence. He put his hands beside his mouth and shouted again, aiming down the hill. This time he called, very loudly:

  “Anybody here?”

  It echoed again. When it stopped it was strange how much quieter it seemed than before. You get so used to silence you don’t notice it. But the sound of his voice was nice, a strong sound. For a minute I almost changed my mind. It came on me in a rush, very strong. I wanted to run down the hill through the woods and call, “I’m here.” I wanted to cry, and touch his face. But I caught myself in time, and stayed quiet. He turned, and I looked through my binoculars watching him. He was walking back to the wagon, with his mask hanging down his back like a hood.

  He had a beard, and his hair was long and dark brown. What I noticed most, though, was that he was extremely pale. I am so used to the tan colour of my own hands and arms, but I have seen pictures of coal miners who work all day underground. He looked like that. His face, as well as I could see it, was narrow and long, with quite a big nose. With the long hair and the beard and the pale white colour he looked quite wild, but also, I have to admit, rather poetic. And not very healthy, but thin.

  He came back to the wagon, looking over his shoulder a lot, in the direction of my house. I supposed he was thinking: there might be someone there; they could hardly hear from here. He was right. It is nearly a mile from the hilltop to the house. He put one of the machines back into the truck and then he did a surprising thing. He took out a gun and laid it on top of the plastic cover as if he wanted it handy. He kept the other counter out too, the one with the earphone. Then he picked up the shaft of the wagon and started down the hill. When the slope got steep he turned the wagon around, so it went ahead and he was pulling back on it. Every fifty feet or so he would turn it sideways, stop, and listen to the earphone. Twice more, too, he called again.

  At this slow speed he reached the bottom of the hill about five o’clock (by my watch) and got to the house just about dusk. I came back along the high path to the cave, where I am now, and watched him through the binoculars.

  When he got to the house he put down the wagon shaft in the front garden. I am glad now that I did not have time to mow it—I decided last summer that I wouldn’t even try, so the grass is knee high and a lot of weeds have sprung up. Then he began to act in a strange way, to move with great caution. Instead of going to the door, he walked around the house and looked through every window. He stayed back as if he were afraid or did not want to be seen. Finally he went to the door and called again, the same words as before:

  “Anybody here?”

  This time he said it more quietly, as if he knew somehow he was not going to get any answer; he had been through it before. Without knocking, he opened the door and went in. Then I was nervous. Had I left anything? A half-bucket of fresh water? An egg on the shelf? A lot of things went through my head. Any one of them would give me away. But I don’t think I had.

  About twenty minutes later he came out, looking a little bit puzzled. He stood in front of the doorway, staring at the road, thinking. He started towards it, and then apparently changed his mind. I think he was considering going on to the church and the store. You can’t see them from the house, but he had seen them both, of course, from the top of the hill; so he knew about where they were. Anyway, he looked at the sky instead; the sun had set and it was getting dark, so he came back to his wagon and opened its plastic cover. This time he pulled several things from it, including a bulky square which he unfolded and set up—the tent.

  He had obviously looked out of the kitchen window and seen the woodshed, because when the tent was ready he walked around the house and got some wood to build his fire. When he got it going he took some more stuff from the wagon. I could not see very well by the firelight—it had grown completely dark—but after a while I could tell he was cooking a meal of some kind. When he had eaten he sat by the fire for a long time while it slowly died down. Then, as I said, I couldn’t see much but I think he got into the tent. Now I think he is asleep. He could have slept in the house, but I suppose he didn’t trust it. I think that green plastic stuff—the suit, the tent, the wagon cover—is something that stops radiation.

  I will go in the cave now and sleep. I am still afraid. And yet it is—what is the word I mean?—companionable to know there is someone else in the valley.

  May 25th

  It may be that he has made a mistake. I am not sure. And if it was a mistake, I don’t know how bad. It worries me, because I suppose I could have stopped him, though I don’t know how. Not without showing myself.

  When I came out of the cave this morning, very carefully, on hands and knees, keeping my head down, he was already awake, though the sun was barely up. He was folding his tent; he put it back into the wagon, and then several things happened very quickly.

  First, somewhere out behind the chicken yard one of the hens cackled. It had laid an egg, of course. Almost immediately a rooster crowed. And from the distance, as if it were answering, one of the cows mooed, a real bellow, long and loud. He dropped a pan he was holding and jumped up, listening. He looked amazed, as if he could not believe it. He probably had not heard an animal sound for more than a year.

  He stood there for a minute, just listening, staring and thinking. After that he got quite busy. He pulled out his radiation counter again—the small one—and looked at it. He was still wearing his plastic suit, though without the helmet. Now he pulled at some kind of fastening on the cuffs, and removed the glove-parts that had covered his hands. He reached farther into his wagon and took out another gun, a big one. It looked like an army gun, a carbine I think, with a square magazine sticking out from the bottom. He looked at it but put it back and got the smaller gun from the tent. The other was a .22 like mine, only bolt-action and mine is a pump. He carried it towards the chicken yard.

  The chickens weren’t in the chicken yard, of course, because I had shut the gate when I chased them out. But some of them, at least, had stayed around it—I knew they would, because that’s where I feed them. I couldn’t see him back there, because there are some big bushes (lilac and forsythia) between the house and the fence. But in a minute I heard the rifle crack, and a couple of minutes after that he came back carrying a dead chicken. One of my chickens!

  I could hardly blame him, of course. I don’t know what kind of food he carries in that wagon, but whatever it is I’m sure there is no fresh meat, or fresh anything. So I can understand how the thought of a chicken would make him hungry. (In a few days, I expect, I’ll be feeling the same way.) But shooting is not the accepted method of killing a tame chicken. I eat them myself, as we always did, and I have not yet fired a shot from any of my guns, not once since before the war.

  He put the chicken down on top of the wagon, and then, without waiting to pluck or clean it, started out immediately down the road in the direction of the church and the store—and the cows. He took the smaller rifle with him; also the glass tube.

  For this first day, at least, I thought I had better keep him in sight as much as I could—until I get to know something about his habits. So again I went along a path I know in the woods, about two-thirds of the way up the hillside. That way I could watch him closer up, better than from the cave, where the road disappears for stretches when trees grow near it. I took my binoculars and my own rifle.

  He saw the cows right away, as soon as he got past the barn and the fence. They were off by the pond, in the far field. My father used to grow oats there, but luckily that last spring he had rotated it to fescue. They were grazing there quietly, with the calf between them; they were not fenced in, but as I thought they would, they had stayed near home. When he came towards them, a stranger, they ran off, though not very far. Cows can tell people apart all right, though it’s true they don’t care much.

  He started to follow them, then changed his
mind and walked to the edge of the pond. He stared into the water, first from a few feet away then, obviously very interested, kneeling down with his face close to the surface. I could tell. He was looking at the minnows—there are always some up near the edge. He took his glass counter and held it close to the water; finally he stuck one end of it in the water. He put out his hand, cupped some and tasted it. It tastes fine; I know, I drink it all the time, though I get it from the brook at the other end. You could tell he felt like cheering.

  He went on. To the church, where he stayed a few minutes. To the store, where he stayed much longer. I couldn’t tell what he did inside—examined what was there, I suppose, and checked it with his counter. When he came out he was carrying a box of something, tinned stuff I thought. That’s as far as he walked; from the store he headed back towards the house. With the box, the rifle and the counter he was quite heavily loaded.

  Once, on the way, he suddenly put the box down, raised the rifle and fired into some bushes by the edge of the road. He probably saw a rabbit. There are quite a few in the valley; also squirrels, though the song birds are all gone except for a few crows who seem to have had the sense to stay in it. The other birds, moving around as they do, flew out into the deadness and died. Apparently he missed the rabbit.