Head Dead West

by Oliver Atlas

  “What other books do you enjoy, Mr. Yaverts?”

  The big man snorts and takes a long swig from a silver hip flask.

  “Pride and Prejudice,” says Jenny, as though remembering a fading list. Yaverts spews his drink and nearly chokes. “Frankenstein,” she continues. “The Turn of the Screw. He also likes O Captain, My Captain.”

  “Walt Whitman?”

  “Enough,” growls Yaverts, getting up. “Time to hit the trail.”

  Grinning, I stand up too. “Next thing I know, I’ll discover you’re a believer in the Cure.”

  “He’s not,” says Jenny, wiping her mouth with an argyle napkin. “But I am.”

  Yaverts has already made it to the door, but he stops. I can see a wash of red run up his neck. “Since when?”

  “The other night in the tent. Blake told me about how some scientists think we can find a medicine to save the dead.”

  “Yeah? Did he explain how some scientists go about their search?” Yaverts turns to face me alone. His expression is suddenly a lot more like the old Yaverts than I’d like. “Did he explain how those scientists use their noble quest to justify treating the living like shit?”

  “Yipes,” whispers Jenny, ducking her eyes. I’m about to end the conversation when Jenny keeps talking, quiet but strong. “Even if some people are doing bad and saying it’s for good, that doesn’t mean good isn’t out there. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Cure. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hope.”

  Yaverts sighs and fixes me in a warning glare. “Well, if you two want my protection, keep quiet about hope. It’s your enemy. It’s annoying.”

  When Yaverts is out the door Jenny rolls her eyes and shakes her head at me. “It’s only annoying because he cares more than he wants to.”

  I cock my head at her. “You think so?”

  She shrugs, gathering up her tote bag and her little ragged teddy bear. “I know so.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Dead, But Not Yet

  As we leave Mitchell, Yaverts slips back into the old Yaverts. He’s brash, uncouth, and mean, bullying everyone from the stablegirl, to the paperboy, to the guards at the gate. I can’t tell if it’s because of the talk about the Cure or because he has a reputation to uphold. Regardless, even though it’s barely 7 a.m., the streets are already crowded with shopkeepers and hunters, and everyone gives us wide berth.

  Jenny tugs at my arm as we lead the horses through the city gate. “Don’t worry,” she whispers up at me. “That’s him. He just growls.”

  Grinning, I check to see if Yaverts heard. If he did, he gives no sign other than his usual scowl.

  Once we’re a mile outside of town, though, his face relaxes and he begins asking me about life in Waco. I tell him about my folks, my brothers, my school. I even tell him about losing my sister.

  “I’m sorry, Blake,” he says, when I’m done. “I’m damn sorry. That’s as hard as it gets.”

  The day goes quietly after that. Our passage grows toilsome, steep and gusty, winding southwest through the Cougar Mountains. Not much is visible from the road other than cliff faces and steep escarpments. One flashflood or bum-rush of dead-heads and I can’t imagine how we’d survive.

  Equally nerve-wracking is the thought of how hunters must love the narrow byway for taking potshots at zombie herds. When we left Mitchell, most of the hunters we spotted were already drunk. I can imagine them now, on the cliffs above us, squinting down their sights, trigger fingers trembling, groggily trying to decide if one of our gaits looks too zombie-like, or if, perhaps, my jeans look too stylish. Many seemed as if they took to the road on a death wish. They came to Oregon to eat and drink, to kill and die. And I have little doubt that, given enough booze, they could project their suicidal nihilism onto anyone with the bravado to tread a place where a passerby might be mistaken by the inebriated for a brain-eater. Surely, claims the projection through the fog of dissipation, that stranger is already as good as dead, surely that stranger is asking to die too.

  But I, for one, have the opposite of a death wish.

  I want to live. I want to live to see Skiss live. To see Milly live. To see my brother and his family live. And not simply to live another day or another decade, but to live deeply and well. May we really live. That’s what my heart groans all morning: May we really live.

  There’s not a single cloud in the cold blue sky, and the few zombies showing on the GPS are north of us by a mile. Other than the inevitable bumps in the road, the day promises smooth passage.

  At midday we come to a small lake with a sign that reads:Marks Lake - No Swimming. Jenny laughs hysterically when Yaverts pulls her off Brom and threatens to toss her in the water. The big man whirls her around, pretending that he’s about to heave her out into the flat blue. It’s good to hear pure laughter—no scorn, no doubt, no fear—only a mingle of suspense, delight . . . and trust. As Jenny flies around in the desperado’s arms, I realize that she trusts him. I also realize that even though he’s saved my life several times in the last few days, I still don’t trust him. Not as far as I could drop-kick him. But maybe I’ve been wrong. I grew up with plenty of puffy-chested macho jerks. Once you won their respect—and once they knew they’d won yours—they were as loyal allies as you could find. I wonder if that pattern holds true with the infamous Rickard Yaverts.

  Suddenly distracted, Yaverts stops spinning and sets Jenny on her own wobbly feet. He peers across the lake, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “Mr. Prose,” he calls. “Let’s see your spotting scope.”

  Ten minutes later and the three of us are standing on the other side of the lake next to the bodies of four hunters, all women. They aren’t mangled at all. They’re not shot or stabbed or drowned. They might as well be asleep. But when I bend to find a pulse, there’s nothing. The GPS confirms it. Only three green dots by the lake, not seven. We’re alive. They’re dead.

  “Hold on,” says Yaverts, raising a hand as I turn to leave. He rummages through his saddlebag and finds a tiny black vial. “Stand back and hold your noses,” he says, clipping a wooden clothespin on his own before opening the vial.

  He waves it near the nose of a stout, gray-haired woman. A minute goes by. Nothing. Yaverts keeps circling the vial under the woman’s nose and another minute passes. I’m about to say enough’s enough when the woman’s eyes shoot open. She gasps and starts coughing and hacking.

  Since she can’t yet talk, Yaverts revives the other three. By the time the four women are all alive and coughing, the stout one can control her throat enough to whisper.

  “Balloon.” Her hand traces an arc in the sky. “Last thing . . . remember.” She pauses, wiping sweat from her forehead, as though speaking the four words has taken everything out of her. “What . . . day?”

  “It’s Thursday,” I tell her.

  Her eyes roll back in her head and I’m sure she’s going to pass out. But she coughs again, nastily, until she finally manages: “Balloon on Tuesday.”

  “Balloon, eh?” Yaverts’ eyes narrow. He tosses the whiffy vial up and down, thinking. “Well, hell,” he says at last, pocketing the vial. “We’re heading west too fast to take on you four, but we can spare supplies enough to get you to Prineville. I know a good doctor there.”

  The older woman shares a look with the younger three and shakes her head. “No,” she coughs. “Back to Mitchell.”

  Yaverts stands and takes Brom’s reigns, signaling our departure.

  But I’m not so satisfied. “So you don’t know what happened? You don’t remember anything?”

  All four women shake their heads, as though they’re still waking up. “No,” croaks the oldest. “Just the . . . balloon.”

  I leave some spare food with the hunters and we hit the road again. Yaverts leads us harder than ever, pushing the horses to the edge. I don’t have to ask why. His urgency obviously has to do with what the woman told us. When I ask him if he knows what happened, all he’ll say is that the Bokor are sick so
ns of bitches. And that’s enough for me. It matches my growing witticism about Oregon: the farther west, the further weird. We simply need to make Prineville by dark—hopefully without being spotted by a balloon full of dreadlocked shamans.

  Night falls and we haven’t made it yet. The mountain passes have opened up to forested hills, and zombies start sprinkling the road. Despite the beautiful night, bright with stars and a slender rip of moon, Yaverts is in no mood for dillydallying. Whenever a dead-head gets close, he fires. Normally, he’d let me talk him into weaving through them a little, but tonight he is moving like a train, straight ahead.

  After an hour in the dark, a giant reservoir appears to our left, stretching for miles, mirroring the stars. There are fishing boats scattered along it too, with yellow lanterns hung at their prows, flicks of silver line cutting through the blackness. Jenny, who’s now riding with me, murmurs about how beautiful they look and how she wants to go fishing. I tell her I’m sure there is safer fishing in Bentlam and that we should be at her new home by this time tomorrow. She starts to cry. I’d forgotten about the timid little girl on the train who was too scared to tell me she had to go pee. But now I remember. And yet this is a different Jenny. It’s only been a few days, but it’s also a different me. Now I know why Jenny’s crying, and it’s not because she’s scared. It’s because she’s sad. She wants to stay with Yaverts and me.

  Yaverts and me.

  Isn’t that rich?

  But more understandably, she probably wants to be with Milly again. The little girl came to Oregon as an orphan bound for an orphanage. Along the way she found the most dysfunctional family ever. And yet she has the humility and the resilience to want that family, to cry over the thought of losing it. If only we all had that posture. If only I did.

  When we reach Prineville’s tall gates, Jenny’s eyes are dry.

  “See,” I say, ruffling her hair. “We made it.”

  “Blake,” she says, looking back at me in the saddle. “Please don’t take me to Bentlam. Can’t I come to Portland with you?”

  I open my mouth, unsure of what to say. But then I catch Yaverts’ leopard gaze. Somehow he has overheard. The corner of his mouth is cocked in a humorless grin.

  “We’ll see,” I tell Jenny, smoothing her hair. “We’ll see.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  That Yon Whistle

  Prineville.

  Another couch.

  And more nightmares.

  This time Jenny’s being taken away by a bloodless hand into a cage. She keeps screaming for me to help, begging to know how I could leave her. I wake up sweating, splash some water on my face, and go back to sleep, only for more of the same. After the third time, when the cage has at least become a dusty cellar, I wake up and decide to stay that way.

  Like most towns in the Territory, Prineville keeps strict curfews, so I can’t go outside. Instead, I tiptoe downstairs to the hotel’s lounge and sit by a smoldering fireplace. Except for a mounted elk’s head, a stack of firewood, and a pile of old books on the coffee table, the big, frumpy room is empty. I pick up a dog-eared copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and pretend to read it until dawn. My eyes take in all the words, but my mind is elsewhere.

  Did he explain how those scientists use their noble quest to justify treating the living like shit?

  Yaverts’ biting question works its way through my mind. Had he been referring to Milly? I know there were times when I felt used by Milly, just another means to an end. There were times when I feared she was using Jenny in the same way. But Yaverts’ sudden fit seemed to betray more than anger at any one person’s moral ambivalence. Was he thinking of ODOZ? Maybe of Schlozfield? Even then, something about the tension around his eyes made me uneasy. I remember him once complaining about how scientists had led to a slew of annoying laws, but I can’t remember him making it so personal . . . No, his recent agitation had something to do with Jenny in particular. That she was supporting the mission of the scientists tripped a wire in the big man.

  But what? And why?

  I sit in the cedar-tinged dark and pick at such questions, wondering if I’m missing something vital, wondering if I’m sitting on my hands without knowing it.

  Until a week ago, my path was simple and certain. I would go to Portland, live a simple life, and write songs that tried to goad people out of their me-and-mine apathy. But now fate, in its unnerving sense of irony, has beaten me at my own game, calling me out of the hypocritical gradualism of my own pretentious plans to comfortably call others out of theirs.

  Crap.

  I mean, whew.

  Ideals are dangerous, especially when you know they’re beyond your own current abilities to live up to them. They set you up, by definition, to be a hypocrite, demanding that you declare war on your own internal duplicities. I wonder if Yaverts holds to any solid ideals.

  I don’t have to wait long for a chance to ask him, but I let the chance come and go. When he and Jenny plunk down the stairs, one look at his face shows he isn’t in the mood.

  “Didn’t sleep?” I ask.

  “Hell,” he says. “This girl jabbers more in one night than I’ve managed in my lifetime.”

  Jenny only snickers.

  Once beyond Prineville, the roads are well kept and we travel fast, south along the Crooked River. During the first hour of our ride, the high desert scrublands glisten with frost. The stars are still out in the clear sky and the air bears the light scent of alfalfa, smothered under the sluggish cold. My eyes run, my nose stings, my ears ring. When Jenny yipes at how cold it is, I laugh and tell her what my dad used to tell me: “It lets you know you’re alive!”

  Probably trying to keep warm, Brom and Enemy run without tiring. The little mare and the beastly stallion keep neck for neck until, by noon, we’ve circled round the south end of Tar Butte, the last mountain between us and Bentlam. The plains break away below, stretching out to an endless sky. I gasp. Bentlam stands against the horizon, its tall white walls sparkling under the high sun. Even from the distance—I’d guess twenty miles—its countless towers and colors trumpet to the eye. But that’s not why I gasp. I gasp because of the zombies.

  Jenny is less in awe and more in disgust. “Blaghk! What are they doing!”

  “Most peaceful place on earth,” says Yaverts slyly. “They want their piece too.”

  Around Bentlam stretches a circular space of perfectly open desert, brown and green sage for five miles. But at the edge of that space, held back by pylons like those used to line the highway, teems a milling mass of the living dead, a gruesome ring of churning bodies.

  Something about the sight’s symmetry, something about seeing such horror in a perfect circle around the world’s most fabled city—it makes me take my hat off. “They must be a half mile thick,” I whisper.

  Yaverts grins sardonically. “At least.”

  “But . . . ” I can’t find the words. “But . . . I know this is Oregon. I know everyone other than me has come to grips with the living dead. But. What. The. Hell. How can Bentlam be Bentlam with a view like that? How could anyone ignore it?”

  “Come on,” drawls Yaverts. “Maybe the same way that right now you’re able to ignore the fact that folks have always been geniuses at ignoring their worst problems.”

  For once, I can’t argue. He’s got me. For all my talk about believing there really is a problem with humanity—a problem rooted more in our souls than our cells—I still act as though all we really need is for everyone to get a degree in literature and make more serious commitments to civil liberties. Yaverts has been too kind. My shock suddenly feels blandly naïve.

  “What now?” I ask.

  Yaverts shrugs. “We make for the highway.”

  Sitting before me on Enemy, Jenny begins shaking her head. “Please. Let’s not go there. Let’s go to Portland. Blake, isn’t there an orphanage near your tea shop? Can’t I work for your brother? I’ll sleep on the floor. I won’t need much to eat, not at all.”

  Befor
e I can answer, Yaverts says, “I wish that’s how it could be, Jenny. But I made a promise.” And that’s all he says. He doesn’t say why we can’t skip Bentlam and head for Portland. He doesn’t tell me why I can’t adopt Jenny, even though I can think of a thousand reasons myself. If Milly were here, I know this is where we’d have some major trouble.

  “Milly said the orphanage in Bentlam is amazing,” I reassure her. “When the time is right, I’m sure one of us will come back for you. It won’t be long, Jenny. Besides, you might like it so much by then, you’ll want to stay after all.”

  The little girl sighs so hard she shudders. “But what if . . . ” Her voice trails off in uncertainty.

  With what I hope is a sorrowful, comforting laugh, I hug her. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Okay, Blake,” she whispers.

  Our destination in sight at last, we trot southward at a leisurely pace. The scattered zombies in our way prove easy enough to dodge. We’re all old pros by now and with so much open space we’re almost playful with the last few miles between us and the highway. Once we’re back on the main highway, between its invisible barriers, we let our tired horses settle into a walk. The dead-heads on either side of the road begin congregating beyond the pylons, shadowing us hungrily. Enemy nickers. Jenny is tense.

  “It’s okay,” I reassure us all.

  “Listen,” commands Yaverts.

  I listen. I don’t hear anything.

  “Hear that?” he says, frowning, his ear cocked up. His eyes slowly widen and then I can see him mouth the word, “Shit.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  Yaverts turns in his saddle and stares east. “Shit.”

  He glances at the already thick walls of zombies on our sides, and ahead to where they form a dreadful Red Sea.

  “What!” I demand, a cold sweat rising on my neck.