Z For Zachariah

That afternoon, Ann goes fishing. She catches three fish and gives half to Loomis, leaving them on his porch. She then walks back toward the store. However, she stops when she hears the tractor. As it grows louder, she realizes that he is coming toward her, so she runs into the woods and hides. She watches as Loomis appears on the tractor, carrying his gun. He parks in front of the store and then goes inside.

Loomis is inside for several minutes. He comes back out a few times, looks around the outside, and then goes back in. Ann realizes that he must be on the second floor in the apartment of the owners. Having watched him for so long, she thinks of how she is “beginning to get used to the way his mind work[s]” (214). She knows that Loomis knows she was watching him on his arrival, probably for several days, and that she is refusing to come back to the house—which means that she must have a comfortable place to live. Based on where she came out when he was watching, she assumes that he has incorrectly guessed that she is living in the store’s apartment. She also figures that he has assumed that she has a gun, given how her family lives. It occurs to her that he did not bring his own gun to shoot her, but rather because he was afraid that she would shoot him.

As it grows dark, Loomis emerges from the store a final time, carrying something. He stops at both the front and back doors and then leaves. After Ann hears the tractor engine fade away, she goes down and finds that Loomis put padlocks on both entrances to the store.

That night, she cooks her fish. She thinks of how frustrating it is that she has to ask him for permission to use the tractor or go to the store. Then, an even more frightening thought occurs to her: He is not going to let her use either one.

The next morning, Ann decides that she needs to confront Loomis about the padlocked store. Either he will give her the key, or he will not let her in; either way, she wants to know now so that she can make other plans.

Ann arrives in the front yard. She is contemplating whether to go knock on the door when she hears a loud noise and feels a sting on her leg. She hears another noise and then realizes that Loomis is shooting at her from the upstairs window. She sprints into the forest, expecting him to shoot again, but he never does.

After a while, she stops and looks at her leg. The wound is very small—just a scrape—but she knows that she has no way to care for it. As she sits by the pond and cleans it, she realizes that Loomis never intended to kill her. Instead, he was just trying to incapacitate her and force her to come back to the house. Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of the tractor starting.

Ann hides in the woods and watches the tractor approach the store. She sees Loomis with his gun and Faro riding with him. Loomis turns off the tractor, gets off, and starts using Faro to track her.

Ann flees back up to the cave. She quickly gathers whatever she can and then moves above the cave. She realizes that she has to kill Faro; otherwise, Loomis will always be able to track her. She watches as Faro and Loomis come up the hill. When they are close enough, she aims at Faro; however, he gives out an excited bark in greeting, and Ann realizes that she can’t shoot him. She hides as Loomis approaches the cave.

A few minutes later, Ann sees a column of smoke. She waits, watching the smoke, until she hears the tractor start again back on the road. She returns to her cave and finds that Loomis has burned all the things she left behind, including a book of short stories that she was reading in the cave. She is distraught to lose her home and supplies, but even worse is her realization that she was going to kill Faro. Even though she didn’t do it, that does not “alter the fact” that she would have, which “makes [her] feel as much a murderer as Mr. Loomis” (225).

Two days later, Ann writes in her journal from the crook of a tree, trying to protect herself from the rain. She feels hopeful, however, as her ankle is healing and she has made a plan to steal the safe-suit and leave the valley.

She keeps having the same dream over and over, which has convinced her that she has a safe place to go outside the valley. In the dream, there is a classroom filled with children and books. The children have “no one to teach them, so they cannot read” and “look as if they have been waiting for a long time” (228). As she had the dream more and more, she realized that the children are waiting for her.

It has been over a month since Ann was shot, and Loomis has left her alone in that time. She assumes that he did not know how badly she was injured or thought that he missed with his shot; however, she spent most of the time delirious and feverish as she recovered. She was able to check on Loomis a few times, and each time, he was doing work on the farm. She has decided that Loomis is “insane” and that there is nothing she can do to live with him peacefully. She constantly thinks of the fire he set at the cave and one of her books burning in it; she vows to steal his safe-suit as revenge.

Ann recounts the moment when she decided that she needed to steal the suit and leave the valley. She was collecting berries one day near the store when she noticed that the door was open. Because of her hunger and lack of supplies, she decided to wait by the store. After several hours, Loomis never came out, so she went down to the road. However, Loomis immediately shot at her from the store window. She fled into the trees, creating a winding path as Loomis followed her with Faro. She intentionally went to Burden Creek, which she crossed by jumping on stones. When Loomis came out of the brush, she shot at him, and he ran back into the trees but released Faro. Faro jumped into the creek and swam to Ann. She took Faro back to her camp, thinking that he might get sick like Loomis did, but instead, he died overnight.

Now, Ann writes that she is going to act tomorrow morning to steal the suit. She is not sure if she will survive or if she will get the chance to write again.

Ann packs up her belongings and hides them by the road near the exit from the valley. She goes down to her house and leaves a note for Loomis on his porch. She tells him to meet her at the south end of the valley—unarmed—so that she can talk to him. Then, she waits in the trees nearby until Loomis comes out.

To Ann’s surprise, Loomis reads her note and then, after only a few minutes, leaves his gun on the porch and heads south. She waits until he is out of sight and then runs down to the house. She takes the wagon—which is still loaded with Loomis’s supplies, the tent, and the safe-suit—and then runs back toward her supplies.

As she passes by her house, the church, and the pond, she thinks of her childhood in the valley. She is saddened by the idea of leaving her life behind, but she conjures the children from her dream to motivate her.

Ann stops, picks up her supplies, and puts on the safe-suit. She walks out of the valley and leaves everything on the way to Ogdentown. She then returns with only the suit, her gun, and the journal. Now, she waits for Loomis at the top of Burden Hill, looking down into the valley. She is determined to talk to him one more time before she leaves. She thinks of how dangerous it is and how she could never shoot him; however, she realizes that she cannot just walk away from her life in the valley and all the “hope” she had for it without at least trying to talk to him one last time.

When Loomis returns, he drives straight up Burden Hill in the tractor. Ann fires her gun in the air to try to get him to stop, but he does not even slow down. She can see the gun across his lap. Loomis jumps off the tractor, with Ann in her hiding place behind him. She yells for him to drop his gun, but he immediately turns and fires in her direction.

In that moment, Ann realizes that she is likely going to die. However, “a wave of disappointment” overwhelms her, and it is so strong that it “wipe[s] out even [her] fear” (246). When Loomis sees her, he immediately looks at the suit and tells her that it is his. Although Ann holds her gun on him, she knows that she cannot shoot him. When he aims his gun at her, she tells him that he could kill her, just as he did with Edward. She does not know why she said it, but she realizes that it saved her life. Loomis lowers his gun and turns his back to her, and Ann thinks that she can see him trembling. He explains that Edward was stealing the suit, and Ann tells him that she has no choice but to do the same. She says that if things had continued as they were, she would have died in the winter, and she refuses to be his “prisoner.”

Ann thinks that Loomis is going to cry. He begs her not to leave him alone, but she tells him that he can survive in the valley until she finds people and then she can tell them where he is. Feeling “bitter” and “near tears” herself, she adds that he “didn’t even thank [her] for taking care of [him] when [he was] sick,” realizing that her last words to him are “childish” (248).

Ann walks out into the waste, expecting a bullet to hit her, but it never comes. As she walks, she hears him yelling, and she turns back to him. He tells her that he saw birds in the west but couldn’t find where they were coming from. She raises her hand in acknowledgement and then turns and keeps walking.

Ann walks through the night out into the waste and then sleeps by the side of the road. When she wakes up, she writes in the journal that she dreamed of the children in the schoolhouse. She sees a stream heading west and decides to follow it. As she looks for green on the horizon, she is “hopeful.”