Head Dead West Read online

  Head Dead West

  Omnibus, Vol.1-5

  Oliver Atlas

  Copyright © 2018 by Oliver Atlas

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  3rd Edition; published previously (2012) as Head Dead West and (2013) Head Dead West: The Zombie Preserve and Head Dead West: The Ranger Reborn.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1. New Pokey

  2. Milly Ruse

  3. The Station

  4. A Standoff

  5. The Dungeon

  6. The Sleeper

  7. Sleepers Awake

  8. Allies

  9. The Border

  10. The Last Stand

  11. Making Up

  12. Naps and News

  13. Rubies

  14. Midmorning Horror

  15. Blood and a Badge

  16. Kissing Goodbye

  17. The Road and a Rant

  18. The Lord Loves a Hangin’

  19. The Banshee

  20. A Pale Rider

  21. Free Doom

  22. The Western Ranger Rides Again

  23. Buffoons and a Balloon

  24. Durkadee

  25. Escaping Violent Squalor

  26. The Road to Union Powder

  27. Too Much Heart

  28. Outbreak Heroes

  29. Turnabout

  30. Who Hath Ears

  31. Smart Mouth

  32. Just Desserts

  33. Surprised by Rage

  34. Something Like Dignity

  35. To the Victor

  36. Surprises

  37. A Flurry

  38. Pursuit

  39. Love & Snow

  40. Reckless

  41. Sumpter Dredge

  42. In the Meantime

  43. To Bentlam

  44. Dead, But Not Yet

  45. That Yon Whistle

  46. Bentlam

  47. Goodbye, Jenny

  48. The Theologizer

  49. The Message

  50. A Good Chance

  51. The Sewers

  52. What You’ll Do With What You Know

  53. The Nameless One

  54. The High Road

  55. Sylvan’s Secrets

  56. West at Last

  57. Portland

  58. Muses & Polls

  59. The Man & the Myth

  60. Awakening

  61. Escape & Pursuit

  62. The Duchess

  63. The Long Shadow

  64. Kairos

  65. Forgiveness

  66. The Apocalypse Comes to Paradise

  About the Author

  Also by Oliver Atlas

  Foreword

  WEST ONCE MEANT a direction, a destination, an escape. It signified the secret passage to paradise, the way back to Eden. Explorers forded oceans, pilgrims crossed continents. A longing for the unknown beckoned them onward to sheer possibility.

  But then they arrived. They took. They settled. And they discovered that the old world and its demons had come along for the ride. They proved on a historic scale that wherever you go, there you are.

  West doesn't mean destiny anymore. It's not a utopia of Arrival. It's not a trophy of Success. It's not a fate you were born for. West is a dream, a daring, a diving. West is an abiding, a making, a mess. West is the darkness where we confess that we’ll never really live until we die to escapism. West is the dimension where we discover we’ll never really be home until we learn to be present right where we are.

  Prologue

  Go west, young man.

  * * *

  The phrase first struck ink in 1851, composed by a no-name newspaperman named John Babsone Lane Soule of the Terra Haute Express. Fourteen years later it found its way into the edictal arsenal of the influential, Horace Greeley, who ran the New York Tribune. Greeley revised and republished the imperative as “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” The command resonated with the day’s zeitgeist and the dust of wagon trails quickly billowed.

  People racked by the civil war heard it as the pithy expression of their inner longings, the direction of their better angels, even the voice of God. For some, it simply reinforced the ethos they’d received from Puritanical forbearers who left Europe in search of religious freedom. Going further west made exquisite sense. What on earth had they been waiting for?

  For others, for those freshly liberated to be in search of any freedom, religious or otherwise, it was the first time they could imagine themselves being addressed with a command they were truly free to fully Amen. West was the only way left to go. The country was new and flush with opportunity. And perhaps it was finally their country too.

  Only the west wasn’t an empty land, of course. It teemed with peoples and cultures of fabulous depth and diversity. Alas, the same could have been said for the multitude of tribes in Canaan when the Israelites arrived, a few thousand years earlier. You see, history had already decided that roots didn’t matter when they collided with divine promises. Thus, the Bible itself was used to assure Greeley’s audience that the Promised Land belonged to those who could blithely imagine themselves its exclusive promisees.

  And the land’s current inhabitants? They were savage squatters at best, ravenous devils at worst. Either way, in the Calvinistic mythos of the time, they were pseudo beings, sub-humans doomed by God to fill the role of faith-testing antagonists. They were the latest Philistines, predictably impure and expendable.

  And you know the rest.

  Those fleeing brother and sister to the east, flooded sister and brother to the west. Under the banner of liberty, they strode forth as conquerors; in the name of peace, they became the apocalypse. Under the march of their pilgrimage, one world died, and another was born.

  In the new world, smokestacks became railroads, railroads became combustion engines, combustion engines became skyscrapers, skyscrapers became computers… in a few quick generations, the circle of life had given way to the circuit of progress. But what progress really meant, nobody seemed to know (a child in the slums would have been forgiven for thinking it meant having a one-in-a-billion chance to become another oligarch lounging on an oversized yacht).

  And yet somehow those of us still alive think of those as the good ol’ days. The wonder days. The sloganized, harken-back-to, make-it-great-again days. Because of course those days didn’t last long.

  The rich got bored with their yachts and cosmetic surgery. In a dubious quest to prolong their ennui, they began dabbling in an ancient hobby of the decadent, one stretching from Egypt’s Pharaohs to France’s Sun Kings.

  They started meddling with vampires.

  Long story short, their experiments ended up infecting 89 percent of the world’s population with a parasitical entity that turned them into flesh-seeking automatons. And that is how we ended up in the zombie apocalypse.

  The following is the roundabout tale of how I got involved in trying to help set the world aright.

  Chapter One

  New Pokey

  Not an hour before we’re set to arrive in New Pokey, the little girl in the seat beside me starts to cry. I ask her if it’s the dead. Now that we’re near the Wall they’re everywhere, no longer isolated stragglers limping across the grasslands, but a steady str
ing of foot-dragging ghouls on their own trek westward to the Preserve. The girl shakes her head. It’s not those dead she’s afraid of. It’s the ones crammed like cattle into the cars behind ours. What if they break out somehow?

  I observe that we’re already ten hours past Salt Lake City and they haven’t gotten out yet. And, I add, she hasn’t cried until now either. What’s the deal?

  Then the truth ekes out.

  Desperately squeezing her ragged brown teddy bear, she confesses she’s had to go pee for the last six hours.

  That earns her an arched eyebrow. “Wowser. I’m scarier than your bladder exploding? You could have gotten us both drenched.”

  She grimaces through the tears, and, in case her suffering isn’t enough to placate a fierce-eyed, angle-faced bloke like myself, she adds, “I’m nine.”

  I nod, offering what I hope is a reassuring smirk. I can be kind, though, try as I might, my face usually fails to convey that possibility.

  “Okay,” I say, standing up and reaching for the black felt gaucho hat crumpled in the overhead bin. “There’s a lav just behind our car.”

  A redheaded gal who’s been sitting across from us since Boise gets up too. “That’s okay,” she says with a gentle smile. “I can take her.”

  The lady’s wearing a green dress that sets off her blue eyes. As she glances at me, she blushes the tiniest bit. At least I hope she’s blushing. My hat’s now on and I instinctively tip the bill, reminding myself what a sucker I am for redheads.

  “Thanks,” I say, trying not to smile too broadly while reclaiming my seat.

  “If I were you, I’d take that off,” she replies with wry discretion.

  Without thinking, I snatch off my hat. “Why?”

  “Not your hat.” Her eyes are sprightly and relaxed, not tense with adrenaline like everyone else’s. She points to my chest and the simple wooden cross hanging there at the V of my black vest. “People in Oregon don’t think much of that anymore.”

  I twiddle its cord with a smirk. “That’s all right. Folks in most places don’t think much of it anymore. That makes it great bait for amusing rants.”

  The woman winces through her smile. “That’s soon to become a dangerous entertainment. You might simply be taken for a fool elsewhere, but in the Territory you might be taken for a . . . ” Her voice trails off and she glances around.

  “What she means to say,” interjects the big, crook-nosed desperado in the window seat beside her, “is that beyond the Wall your little necklace can be both premonition of and provocation for a good old fashioned hangin’.”

  I chuckle, as though with a joke. “Right. Folks will want to hang me for wearing a cross.”

  The desperado’s eyes are a fierce, ghostly green and they narrow by the slightest degree. Apparently, he is being serious. Folks will want to lynch me good and dead.

  The big man turns back to the window and the woman shrugs in basic agreement with him. She leads the nine-year-old back to the lav.

  Even though the man’s eyes made it clear he’d probably like to hang me himself, I can’t resist pushing my luck: “Do you know the Preserve well?”

  His bearish head swings toward me and if tobacco had been allowed on the train I’m sure he would have spit on my boot. “Know it well enough,” he says. His eyes narrow again: they’re daring me to ask another question.

  Again, I can’t resist. “How about the dead?”

  “What about ‘em?”

  “You have much experience?”

  The man pats a bulge in the side of his brown rawhide. “Just in blowing their wormy brains out.”

  The elderly couple in the seat in front of him begins to fidget.

  “For sport?”

  “For kicks.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  The big man’s eyes are razors. “For sport might imply a respect for legalities. For kicks expresses my penchant to do as I please.”

  “Ah. I see. How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many have you killed?”

  “You can’t kill what’s already dead.”

  “Are you sure they’re already dead?”

  “Why are you still talkin’?”

  “Just making friends.”

  “You’re just makin’ noise.”

  “Touche.” I hold up my cross. “Why would anyone lynch me for wearing this?”

  The man turns a shade paler and gives a sardonic snort. “This is only a hunch, but probably because they know the kind of person who would wear it the way you’re wearin’ it would have the gall to ask what you’re askin’.”

  I try to convey my effort at following his words by letting my eyes dart from side to side. “Could you simplify that for me?”

  He eyes narrow to slits. “It’s mindless ignorance people hate.”

  “Mindless ignorance?” I can’t keep a grin from hooking into the corners of my mouth.

  In response, the man’s pale skin bleeds a bit whiter. “Now you’re all shitfaced tickled, huh?” A vein stands out on his forehead. For a moment I think he’s mad enough to draw his gun. The giant hand on his knee twitches. My rifle is stuffed in the overhead bin. No chance of getting to it in time, even if I thought I could shoot the man. I’ve done it now. But then he laughs, turns back in his seat, and pulls down his tan hat. “You know,” he says, “I hope you do make it through New Pokey without getting skinned. I’d like to meet your sorry hipster ass out on the range.”

  The car door behind us opens and the ladies are back, the nine-year-old a floating grin of relief.

  “How about trading seats for a while, Jenny?” says the redhead. “I’d like to talk to your friend.”

  For a second, Jenny’s expression broadcasts that she loves the idea of getting away from me. But then she notices her new seat, or more precisely the bear of a man beside it. Her eyes widen, she gulps, and if she’d had an ounce of fluid left in her, she probably would have peed herself at last. For all my hard angles and tanned complexion, I’m a miniature milk chocolate koala compared to the man in rawhide.

  “It’s okay,” says the redhead, touching Jenny’s arm. “We’ll trade back in a few minutes and you can have the window seat. The trees are amazing in this light. Besides, we’ll be at the station before you know it.”

  I glance out the window. The trees are amazing right now, approaching full-blooded fall and afire with late afternoon. There aren’t a tenth as many deciduous trees out west, but that they’re rare gives them a special glory. The coniferous greens and browns add a splendid depth to their russets and oranges. All too often I forget to stop and notice these things.

  “Jenny?” prompts the redhead again, touching the girl’s arm.

  Jenny forces her grimace into a pained smile, trying to be brave. “Okay, Milly.”

  Chapter Two

  Milly Ruse

  “Milly Ruse,” says the woman, offering her hand as she settles in beside me. She’s close enough now that her freckles pop. I can smell the lightest scent of sage perfume. Her hand is cool, her handshake firm.

  It’s me who may be blushing a little now. “Good to meet you.”

  Milly grins. “What’s your name?”

  “Blake. Blake Prose.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “That is my real name.”

  With a toss of her long fiery hair she laughs. “Really? Your parents really named you Blake Prose? That’s a true Oregon name if I ever heard one. I guess you were destined to come here.”

  I glance out at the rolling hills, the nearby craggy mountains, and the huge white gray ribbon of the Wall looming up in the west. “That’s the hope.”

  Milly’s manner softens. She casually stretches her freckled arms in front of her. “My real name has about as much western poetry in it as a Jersey accent. I figured coming out here was a great chance to ditch it.”

  “The accent or the name?”

  “The name! I already ditched the accent.” She touches
her face self-consciously. “Can you pick up on it?”

  “The name or the accent?”

  “The accent.”

  “What accent?”

  Milly favors me with an approving smirk.

  I smirk back. “And?” I say.

  “And what?”

  “And what’s your real name?”

  “Pam Johnson.”

  I give a plangent whistle. “That is pretty bland.”

  Milly ducks her head in mock shyness.

  Suddenly full of nervous energy, I scrunch my hat. “So you headed west in order to justify changing your name? That seems a little drastic.”

  She rolls her bright blues and laughs. “Losing ‘Pam Johnson’ was just a perk. I’m really . . . ” She looks around furtively, lowering her voice. “I’m really here to work with ODOZ.”

  The Oregon Department of Zombies. They practically run the Territory. I can’t see anything particularly controversial about that. But in a voice mirroring hers, I ask, “Is that hush-hush?”