This Would Be Paradise (Book 3)

by Iverson, N. D.

  “Load up your Beretta.”

  I took the box from him. It was pretty light.

  I filled up my magazine and pocketed another fifteen rounds. I could really use a spare magazine like John had for his automatic rifle.

  “I ain’t goin’ out there without a weapon.” Lucas crossed his arms.

  John reached down into the pile and handed Lucas a crowbar. “Here.”

  Lucas yanked it from John’s grasp with a glare. He knew we weren’t going to give him a gun, but a melee weapon was better than no weapon. Leo had joined us with his shotgun already swung over his shoulder.

  “You’re coming too?” I asked.

  “It’s only the immune going, right?” Leo looked around, confused.

  “Yes, ignore her. She doesn’t know what’s goin’ on,” Rose said.

  “Because no one will fully explain anything,” I growled.

  “Immune people can move among the infected as long as they stay quiet and slow—very slow,” Rose said slowly.

  “So you keep sayin’,” Lucas said.

  “It’s true,” Leo said and we all looked at him. He squirmed under the attention. “I’ve seen it.”

  “At the hospital they sure didn’t seem to leave us alone,” I said.

  “That’s ‘cause you didn’t listen, kid,” Rose said sharply. She started to tap her foot on the ground, the rubber sole of her shoe slapping against the asphalt. “If you had just held still while those infected were in the room with you, they would have left you alone!”

  Rose’s ominous words from my first morning at the hospital came back to me. “Don’t move, don’t breathe, and the dead won’t bother you.”

  Was she really right?

  “Then how’d you get so injured?” Lucas said, motioning to her ribcage.

  Rose’s foot tapping stopped and she looked him dead in the eyes. “These weren’t from the infected.”

  I swallowed. Lucas had the good sense to not press her anymore. It was clear what she was saying. They had used her for a live game of operation instead of throwing her to the infected. John looked at me, a question in his eyes. I shook my head. They hadn’t done that to me. I hadn’t been there long enough to endure that kind of torture. A sliver of pity ran through me for Rose. She may have been bad tempered and all around a pain to be near, but now I couldn’t hold it against her. She’d been through some truly terrible things.

  I stuffed my Beretta into the back of my pants. “All right then, show us.”

  Rose didn’t say anything as she stormed over to the gate, expecting us to follow, and we did. Two infected had squished themselves up against the gate, their grabbing hands reaching inside. Their rasping noises and motions got more intense as the whole group approached them. John unsheathed his large hunting knife and stabbed them one at a time through the eye sockets. There was a wet suctioning sound as John removed the blade from each skull.

  We opened the gate and moved the bodies to the ditch by the road. They would have to be dealt with later as the smell of rot would soon start. John wiped off the knife on the shirt of one of the infected and then handed it to me with the sheath.

  “In case you can’t afford to shoot off a gun.”

  I took the knife and looped the sheath on my belt. “Thank you.”

  “If this works, you’ll be able to get into one of these warehouses and scrounge up some food,” John said, “but I don’t like the idea of you bein’ out there with just them.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t like we had time to do test runs based on Rose’s theory.

  John ran his fingers along the rim of his hat before taking it off. He raked his hand through his hair and placed the cowboy hat back on his head. “Maybe I should go with you guys.”

  “You’re not immune,” I said.

  “I might be. Not like I’ve ever been bit before,” John said.

  I frowned. “Well, I don’t want you to have to find out the hard way. Plus, you need to stay here and hold down the castle while we’re gone. I can dub you Sir John before I go if you’d like.”

  John gave me a tight, brief smile. He wasn’t beyond humoring me at the moment. He was worried about letting me go without him.

  “Let’s just see how this goes with Rose first.”

  We closed the gate as tight to the wall as we could without locking it in case we needed to make a quick entrance while Rose gave us her demonstration. We followed her across the street to one of the warehouse yards. There were a few infected moseying about, but nothing that we couldn’t handle.

  Rose motioned for us to stay where we were as she silently crept up to them. They started toward her once they saw her movement. Immune or not, they still picked up on movement. Two infected got within a very uncomfortable distance to her. She stopped moving and held very still, barely breathing. I found I was holding in my own breath as I watched the scene before me.

  They slowed down as they approached Rose. One immediately turned and went in the direction opposite of her, while the other sidled up beside her. The infected did some kind of sniffing movement, its arm close enough to Rose that it rubbed up against her. I didn’t know how she managed to hold so still. My first instinct was to run every time I got near an infected.

  The infected opened its mouth and I pulled out my Beretta. Leo put his hand on my gun, slowly pushing down on it while putting a finger in front of his closed lips. He had more faith in this idea than I did. The clack of teeth reached us as the infected closed its mouth and pushed past Rose, ignoring her completely. He wandered on to the other side of the warehouse lawn.

  John and I shared a look. This was promising, but not conclusive. Rose started to move very slowly back to us. The infected were facing away from her, so they didn’t come back after her.

  “See?” Rose said, looking very much full of herself.

  “I told you it would work,” Leo said with a smile of his own. It wasn’t as big as the one on Rose’s face though.

  “The dead thing still went after her,” Lucas pointed out.

  “Can’t help that. They’re attracted to movement and noise. As long as you stay still when they get near and don’t make any loud noises to get them riled up, you’ll be fine,” Rose said.

  “So you’re sayin’ we have to move as slow as you did and still stop?” Lucas scoffed. “It’ll take us a day and a half just to get inside a damn buildin’.”

  “You got any other bright ideas?” Rose said with her hand on her hip.

  “What about a distraction?” I suggested.

  “Like what?” John asked.

  “I don’t know. Something that moves or makes noise—but not too much noise. Just enough to get the attention of the nearest infected,” I said.

  Too bad we didn’t have one of those wacky tube men they used at car dealerships. That would get all the infected’s attention.

  “We found a little mower in the storage room like an hour ago,” Leo said. “Looked pretty old though.”

  “Show us,” I said.

  We walked back into the castle motel and they closed up the gate behind us. Chloe met up with us, Amanda close on her heels.

  “Is it true you can walk among the infected?” she asked.

  “Uh, yes and no,” I answered cautiously. One demonstration hardly proved anything. For all I knew, Rose stunk so bad up close that the infected were scared off.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that they still come after you if you’re moving, but it looks like they have no interest in us once we stand still,” I said.

  “That’s good, right?”

  “I guess.”

  Leo led us to the maintenance storage room, judging from the worn sign on the front. The door hadn’t even been locked. It was a skinny, but long room. At the back there was a red mower that had seen better days. Leo snaked in and around the other equipment and brought the mower out.

  “At least it runs on gas; that’s somethin’,” Ro
se said.

  “We willing to waste that much gas?” I asked.

  “It shouldn’t take very much. We only need it to last long enough for us to get into a warehouse,” Rose said.

  “At that snail pace you were goin’, a tank won’t get us far,” Lucas said.

  “It doesn’t need to keep going. It just needs to get their attention and get them moving toward it,” I said.

  I don’t know if I was trying to convince the others or myself of this crazy plan. I still wasn’t sure that I could handle being groped by an infected without screaming and running away.

  “How are you goin’ to bring back food?” Chloe asked.

  Leave it to the kid to point out the flaw in our plan. If we were going on foot to avoid the infected chasing after a noisy vehicle, then we had to bring back the food on foot.

  “Round up as many bags as you can find,” I instructed.

  Within ten minutes, four backpacks and duffle bags had been emptied—one for each of us. The little tank for the mower had also been filled with gas. In one of the courtyard corners away from the front gate, John and Lucas worked on getting the lawnmower working. They had to tinker with it for a bit, but in the end they got the engine to come to life. They quickly shut it down afterwards.

  I grabbed one of the empty backpacks and stuffed the flashlight I had found in the motel office inside, then tossed the pack on. Between the four of us—Rose, Leo, Lucas, and I—we could bring back a decent amount of food, but not near enough to feed twenty people for any length of time. While the point of our run was food, it was also a trial run. If this went bad, then we would have to come up with something else. I just wanted to avoid attracting the attention of the infected. This motel was not fortified like Hargrove had been, and it wouldn’t stand a chance against a barrage of infected. So we needed our runs to attract as little attention as possible.

  If need be, we planned to scout out whatever warehouse we ended up at for a cube van or truck to bring back a larger scale of supplies. It would risk getting attention from the infected though, so it was a ‘Plan-B’ of sorts. I just prayed that Rose’s idea worked and that I didn’t get any more digits bitten off in the process.

  Chapter 22

  “You ready?” Rose asked us.

  We were standing at the front gate, waiting to leave. Most survivors had come out to wish us luck on our run. It just made me that much more uneasy. Ethan had wandered out with Crystal dogging him the whole way to the front gate. The mercenary had hit him pretty hard on the skull; Crystal even guessed that they may have cracked it. His balance was still off and he had some pretty bad sensitivity to light. He was speaking clearly, though. Crystal said that was a good sign because if he had internal bleeding it would have created pressure on his lobes and that usually affected speech. Although, nothing was certain without real doctors or exam equipment. All we could do was hope that he didn’t have any permanent damage.

  Chloe was beside Ethan, keeping a stern eye on him. Not that her ten-year-old frame could do much to stop Ethan’s significantly larger stature from hitting the ground should he fall over.

  “Be careful out there,” Ethan said. “I wish I could help or do somethin’.” He scowled as he touched the gauze wrapped around his head.

  “You’d be a liability. Injured or not, you ain’t immune,” Rose said, ever tactfully.

  I took a breath through my nose. “Just listen to Crystal, okay? I don’t want to come back and find you a drooling mess.”

  Ethan gave me a small smile. “Bring back some of those strawberry frosted Pop-Tarts, yeah?”

  “They grew on you, did they?” I said, thinking back to the time we had raided a Wal-Mart all those months ago. I had squealed I’d been so excited to find those. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Henry and Sheri opened the gate for us to slip through. John gave me one last hug before they locked the gate up. I turned from the others’ pensive faces to the street. Rose was already at the other end of the short side street leading to the castle motel, waving impatiently at us.

  We’re off to see the wizard…

  I must’ve looked ridiculous trying to hold back my laughter with my bottom lip sucked into my mouth and my top teeth biting down. Leo gave me a strange look as I passed him. I just looked straight ahead, not wanting to bother explaining my hysteria. Lucas paid me no mind as he was already on full alert mode. His head was whipping back and forth, scouting for infected as he pushed the dead lawnmower. He was going to make himself dizzy if he kept that up.

  No one talked as we strode down the main street. We were trusting Rose to lead us. The map she had wasn’t specifically for this area, but it did focus on the eastern part of New Orleans. If we got cut off and couldn’t come back the way we came, Rose should be able to direct us to a different route with the map.

  We passed by a bunch of warehouses but nothing stood out specifically as a food company. Some of the buildings were rusting; most were just dirty. An infected wearing a trucker’s hat started toward us, stumbling to get from the ditch onto the actual street. Lucas left the lawnmower to run up to the infected and whack it in the head with his crowbar. There was a metallic dinging sound and the infected dropped to the ground, sliding back into the overgrown ditch.

  “There,” Rose hissed while pointing to a warehouse.

  The decrepit sign was missing a few letters but the last word clearly meant to say, “Grocer.” We had found our food warehouse. Some of the loading bays even still had big rigs backed into them. A chain-link fence was separating the warehouse yard from the others beside it but it didn’t go all the way around, so we were able to just walk right in. Except for the infected standing guard.

  “Slow and quiet,” Rose said, leading the glacially slow charge.

  We basically tiptoed into the yard. It was a bit harder for Lucas since he was pushing our bait. The infected didn’t seem to notice us at first, then they eventually caught on that we were moving. They started toward us from all directions. My muscles started to twitch and my mouth went dry as Rose gave us the signal to hold still. We let the infected approach as we stood still like misplaced statues. I tried to control my breathing but it was hard when my heart started to beat rapidly. Lucas went to pull on the engine cord of the mower, but Rose quietly said, “Not yet. Last resort.”

  They reached Rose first. She didn’t even blink. If the infected had any ability to show emotion, it would have been confusion. They circled Rose as their decrepit heads moved from side to side. I heard a crack and one infected’s head stayed crooked to the side. It was the most decayed of the group, its nose sunken in, and the left side of its face sagged, drooping the eye off to the side. They did seem like they were continuing to decay once they turned. Maybe they would eventually get to a point where they were so decayed that they just dropped. This was a hopeful thought: extinction of the infected.

  I was so lost in thought—a defense mechanism, perhaps—that I barely noticed that the infected had moved on from Rose to the rest of us. They wandered in between our frozen statures, seeming to size us up and down. The one with the crooked head chose me to inspect. Don’t you dare laugh. I looked straight ahead with my lips tight, keeping the infected in my peripheral vision. It rasped right beside me and I nearly jumped out of my skin as its arm brushed against my side. I was breathing through my nose, but that was quickly aborted as the smell of rot consumed me. This one seemed to have been dead for quite a while. My eyes were threatening to water from the smell.

  Stay still. The infected moved from my side to directly in front of me. I desperately wanted to shove it over and stab it with the knife, but any movement would wreck our plan. It got dangerously close to my face. I took a discrete inhalation of air, then held my breath. One, two, three. The infected just continued to stare at me as my lungful of air depleted. Eight, nine, ten. My face was going to turn purple soon. The breath I had sucked in wasn’t as big as it could have been since I was trying to remain quiet. Fourteen, fifteen, sixt
een.

  “Fuck this,” Lucas said.

  He ran straight for the side of the building, abandoning the mower, not even bothering to turn it on. I sucked in as much air as my body would allow when the crooked infected took off toward Lucas. They all had started going after him, leaving the rest of us alone.

  “That dumb shit,” Rose muttered. “Well, at least he got ‘em off of us. Let’s keep movin’.”

  “What about Lucas?” I asked through a cough. My lungs were burning from the lack of oxygen.

  “He made his choice. ‘Sides, if he’s as tough as he acts, he should be able to take care of ‘em.”

  “What about the lawnmower?” Leo asked, his priorities obviously straight. I could almost hear what he was thinking: we went to the trouble of bringing it, might as well use it.

  “We might need it when we leave later, so don’t turn it on,” Rose said.

  I bit my lip. Just leaving Lucas to fend for himself felt wrong, even if he was a douchebag. Rose didn’t leave me anymore time to contemplate right and wrong as she bolted through the rest of the yard. With no infected, we could afford to move fast. Leo looked at me and jerked his head toward the warehouse, silently telling me to get a move on. With one last look at the side of the building where Lucas had disappeared, I started after the other two.

  We tried the front door but it was locked, and there was no way we’d be able to move one of the heavy metal bay doors up. Rose went to the nearest truck first, then to the one after that.

  “Come here,” she hissed from out of sight.

  Leo and I took off after her and found her at the end of a big rig backed into one of the last bays.

  “This guy didn’t know how to back in here properly.”