Wanted: Alive or Undead

The telegram said the dead were walking in Gritwood. It didn't say they'd learned to think.


Bounty hunter Jed Colt has buried enough men to stop believing in ghost stories. So when an old friend's telegram begs him to ride into the dying town of Gritwood, he expects bandits, maybe fever — not corpses that rise with cracked skin and glassy eyes, moving in silence toward anyone still breathing.

What's spreading through the frontier isn't a plague, and it isn't the devil. It's something older and patient, rooted deep in an abandoned mine and reaching outward through the grief and fear of the living. Bullets barely slow it. Fire buys a night, no more. And every town Jed saves seems to seed the next one.

The only man who ever taught him how to fight a thing like this was a merchant named Omar, met years ago on a hard road south — a man who faced the unseen not with a gun, but with conviction. Jed spent years telling himself that was just a story. Now, with a boy's life in his hands and the infection whispering its way into his own head, he's about to find out whether the merchant was right.

To end it, Jed will have to stop running, stop burning, and understand what the thing truly feeds on — before it turns the whole frontier into one long, patient memory.

A lean, fast-riding horror-western about true faith, fear, and the cost of the choices we outrun. Clean of gratuitous content, built to be read in one sitting.


FEATURES

A fresh spin on the western: a thinking, spreading infection that hunts through fear and memory rather than a mindless horde

A hardened, haunted hero in Jed Colt — and a quietly unforgettable mentor whose lessons drive the story's heart

Tight, cinematic chapters engineered for momentum, from the first burning town to a finale that actually resolves

Genuine dread over gore — tension you can hand to a wide audience of adult readers

A thread of true faith and redemption woven through the action, giving the scares real weight

Written by a board-certified family physician who builds his horror on how people actually break — and endure


MAY BE PERFECT FOR FANS OF

Dead Reckoning and other weird-western mashups where the frontier meets the supernatural

Joe R. Lansdale's genre-blending grit

Justin Cronin's The Passage — an infection with intelligence and reach

Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead — survival, dwindling numbers, hard choices

The slow-burn dread of a good campfire ghost story, stretched to novel length


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Rabea Hadi is a board-certified family physician who writes full-length fiction and educational nonfiction. Across horror, western, and adventure, his stories share one obsession: ordinary people forced to make hard choices when the ground gives way beneath them. Wanted: Alive or Undead grew out of a career spent listening to real stories — the resilience, fear, and stubbornness of people under pressure — and channels them into characters who bleed, doubt, and keep standing anyway. He publishes under the Choose Your Quest banner, where the aim is simple: propulsive, clean reads built to stay with you after the last page.



And because picking up this book already makes you the kind of reader Jed would trust at his back, there's more waiting inside:

A gift interactive gamebook from the Choose Your Quest series — 50+ choices, yours to claim via the QR code up front

Two bonus gift books unlocked at the end of the story


Ride into Gritwood tonight — one click, and the frontier is yours.