Above it, on the wall, were haphazard racks of the tools that Robert Neville used. Now it was a room entirely functional, and since Neville's bed and bureau took up so little space, he had converted one side of the room into a shop.Ī long bench covered almost an entire wall, on its hardwood top a heavy band saw, a wood lathe, an emery wheel, and a vise.
Once the room had been warmly decorated, but that was in another time. He passed slowly through the dim silence of the living room, turned left into the small hallway, and left again into his bedroom. It was the last damned mirror he'd put there it wasn't worth it. In a few days, jagged pieces of the silver-backed glass would start to fall off. As he pushed open the front door, he looked at the distorted reflection of himself in the cracked mirror he'd fastened to the door a month ago. He went to the house for a hammer and nails. Sometimes they would lob rocks over the high fence around the hothouse, and occasionally they would tear through the overhead net and he'd have to replace panes.īoth the tank and the hothouse were undamaged today. Sometimes the structure around the tank might be weakened or its rain catchers bent or broken off. In the back yard he checked the hothouse and the water tank. After violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried off, and he had to replace them completely a job he hated. He checked each window to see if any of the boards had been loosened.
He walked around the house in the dull gray of afternoon, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, trailing threadlike smoke over his shoulder. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn't work. On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.
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