Mail Horror Bride (One Nation Under Zombies Book 1) (9 page)

She heard the door open again and quickly sat back on the bed, right where he’d left her. The floorboards creaked as he came up the hall but he didn’t enter the bedroom. He entered the bathroom.

Janjai leaned forward to see him dumping two buckets of well water into the tub. Well water? They had water in the house. To her knowledge they had never had to use the water from the well before.

He left with the buckets and again she heard him leave through the kitchen door, returning shortly after.

He came into the bedroom and grabbed the clothes, then her, guiding her to the bathtub with his hand clamped around her bicep. He settled her clothes on the spacesaver over the toilet and pointed to the tub. “Take bath.”

Then he was gone.

Janjai closed the door as far as he ever allowed. Locking doors in the house or even just closing one all the way brought on beatings and after what had to have been a few weeks in that basement room, living off canned food and inhaling the putrid smell of the camp toilet she’d had to use she didn’t think she’d survive a beating.

Her back ached from the time she’d spent on the hard, uncomfortable cot and she smelled. All she wanted to do was slide down into a warm bubble bath and soak but she settled for the cool bubble-free well water. She didn’t bother messing with the bath knobs, knowing that if the water worked, Hank wouldn’t have bothered bringing water in from the well. The water wasn’t plentiful enough for her to really soak but it was enough for her to use the soap and rag to wash away the sweat and grime clinging to her body. She washed her long, black hair as well before emerging to towel off and dress in the clothes Hank had selected for her.

The kitchen door opened and banged shut, followed by the loud voice of Hank’s hunting buddy, Otis.

Janjai rolled her eyes. The last thing she needed after an extended stay in the basement room was a visit from Hank’s friend, but then again, without TV or internet, listening to Otis and Hank talk might be the only way she’d figure out what was going on.

Normally it was Janjai’s job to cook and clean but Hank had managed to cook a whole chicken in an empty coffee can right there on top of the electric stove which, along with everything else in the house, wasn’t working.

They ate the tender chicken and raw broccoli by candle light but the dinner was by no means romantic. Hank and Otis talked nonstop and although Janjai was thankful to finally know what was going on, she had trouble hiding her alarm so that Hank wouldn’t catch on to the fact she understood what they were saying. As they continued talking, she questioned if she really did understand. Maybe her English wasn’t as good as she thought.

From what she gathered, the Russians had injected women with some kind of virus before they left to marry American men. This virus turned them into some type of cannibal that could only be killed by destroying its brain. Hank and Otis called them zombies. She knew what the word zombie meant but had trouble comprehending it as something real. Surely she was not translating their words correctly. Zombies were dead people. Dead people didn’t walk around eating other people in the real world. They only did that in books and movies and that TV show she’d seen Hank watching a few times, with the good looking Korean guy, the sheriff, and the dirty, unattractive redneck that women online seemed to love.

But the more the men talked, the more it seemed like that was exactly what had happened. It was the end of the world as they knew it and zombies walked among them. She thought of her sister and fought back tears as she prayed for her safety and wondered if she’d ever see her again.

“I think we have a good set-up here,” Otis said around a piece of chicken meat. “You got water in that well out there, there’s always gonna be animals in the woods to hunt for food, plenty of land to grow crops, and between the two of us we can shoot them freaks down.”

“I don’t know about that.” Hank shook his balding head. “Before everything shut off, they were saying on the news that them things were grouping together like herds. Shooting down some stragglers won’t be too hard but if we get a group of them, we’re sitting ducks. I say we pack up and move to one of them military camps they put up. Before I lost contact with him, my brother said to head for Nebraska. The military has a base there they’ve set up for survivors. They have food, weapons—”  

“So do we.”

“—and medicine. Doctors. We don’t have that and we could need it.”

“I don’t know.” Otis took off his hat and scratched his head, somehow managing to reach it through the greasy mop of curly dirty blond hair, before replacing the baseball cap. “That’s a lot of road to travel out in the open.”

“But we’ll be on the move. That’s gotta be safer than just sitting here.”

“We have everything we need here. We’re both healthy, no need for doctors. This whole thing could blow over. You remember how scared everyone was about that H1N1 a few years ago, and that bird disease. The news works everyone up into a panic and the stuff always blows over.”

“We’ve never had a nationwide electric outage.”

“How do you know it’s nationwide?” Otis challenged him. “Might just be us. Might not even be related. We haven’t seen a single one of them zombies.”

Hank sat back in his chair, mulling this over. “Could be right. We’ll stay for a while but if I start seeing a bunch of them wandering around, we’re out of here and headed to Nebraska.”

“Good plan.” Otis scratched one of his stubble-covered chins. “If it comes down to us leaving, bringing her along could be dangerous, ya think?”

Hank’s fork dropped to his plate as he sat forward to glare at Otis. “You saying I should leave my wife behind?”

“No, I’m just saying she’d make survival harder.” Otis seemed to shrink in his chair which was an amazing feat considering his girth. “I mean, you tell her to run and she’s not gonna know what you’re saying.”

“She knows simple words like that. She’s my wife. She goes where I go.”

The men talked well into the night, unaware that Janjai understood almost every single word. She simply kept her head lowered, gaze averted, and they suspected nothing. Her supposed meek manner was why Hank had chosen a wife from Thailand. He believed in the stereotype that Thai women were docile, obedient women who lived to serve their husbands and she played his ignorance to her advantage. She’d intended to be a good wife but she hadn’t known the true character of the man she married. All it took was one beating and her loyalty broke. The plan was simple. Her sister had also married an American man, and unlike her, her sister had gotten lucky. Her husband never hurt her and allowed her freedom. All Janjai had to do was wait out the two years until she received her green card and then she was free to leave. Her sister and brother-in-law would take her in until she found work and could support herself.

Listening to the men talk, she’d picked up on a few things. Communication was gone. Phones, internet, television … Nothing worked. Military and law enforcement were busy containing the outbreak. People were pretty much on their own. She doubted the government would care if a Thai woman ran off from her husband before the green card came. This was her chance. All she had to do was wait for Hank and Otis to fall asleep and she was free.

She knew Pimjai and her husband’s address, having received it in a letter from her mother. She knew better than to have Pimjai send her a letter from her American address. If Hank knew her sister was in America he would be even more controlling. He already disallowed her to have any money of her own and planned on keeping her as dependent on him as he possibly could. Unaware that she could speak English, he thought escape for her was impossible. Where would she go in a country where she had no friends and could not communicate with anyone?

But she did speak the language and she did have someone to help her. With a little help from the GPS in Hank’s truck, if it worked, she’d find her way. Besides, she missed her sister and with all the talk of people eating people, she worried about her.

Hank finally fell asleep around two in the morning, snoring loudly next to her in the bed. Janjai quietly rose and slipped on her houseshoes. She’d worn a T-shirt and lounge pants to bed, not daring to change clothes before escaping. The pajama set would have to do. It might be a strange outfit to arrive on her sister’s doorstep in but it beat a nightgown.

She tiptoed around the foot of the bed and out the bedroom door, standing still in the hall to listen for sounds. Otis was staying with them, the two men having decided this house was safer than Otis’s trailer, and if she ran into him it could blow everything.

Hearing nothing, she crept down the hall. She found Otis on the living room couch, asleep.

Unsure how deeply the man slept, Janjai cautiously tiptoed across the kitchen and snagged the keys to Hank’s truck from the peg next to the door, careful not to allow them to jangle. She’d never driven in America but she’d been with Hank plenty of times when he had. It couldn’t be that hard.

She twisted the lock and reached for the knob on the back door, freezing as a howl rent the air. Coyotes. She was used to the sound, given they lived in a heavily wooded area, but the coyotes usually howled from up in the mountains. This one sounded close. She didn’t know enough about them to know if they attacked people so she grabbed a knife from the knife block, just in case she needed it. She doubted she’d be able to harm an animal but holding the weapon in her hand made her feel a little bit safer.

Now somewhat armed, she again reached for the doorknob and turned it slowly, fearful of making any noise. If either man woke up and saw her leaving the house, she was in deep trouble.

The door opened as an animal nearby yelped. The coyote? Janjai peered through the screen door and saw nothing in the darkness blanketing the yard. More sounds came, growls and whimpering, and she reconsidered her escape. But she couldn’t see anything and animals were killed out there all the time. If not by hunters, then by each other. Taking a deep breath to calm her nerves, she unlocked the screen door and opened it.

“Where in the hell do you think you’re going?”

Janjai’s blood turned to ice as Hank’s voice came from behind her. She gripped the doorframe and thought of her options. She had the keys in her hand. All she had to do was make it to the truck. But if he caught her, he’d beat her, probably worse than he’d ever beat her before.

She could turn around, but the result would be the same. With the truck keys in her hand, she couldn’t pretend that she’d been doing anything other than escaping. With the knowledge she would be beaten whether she ran or not, Janjai found the courage to flee, to at least attempt to get away from her tormentor. She had a chance if she ran and it seemed better than just turning around and surrendering.

She quickly found that houseshoes weren’t suitable for running. She tripped as the fuzzy slippers seemed to fly off her feet, but quickly righted herself. The truck was so close, sitting there in the driveway like the Statue of Liberty, promising freedom, if only she could reach it and unlock the door before Hank could get his hands on her. 

Rocks and sticks cut into the soles of her feet but she pressed on, knowing the pain was worth it if it meant saving her life. She heard Hank huffing and puffing behind her between threats, thankful the man thirty years her senior was out of shape.

“Get in that truck and I’ll kill you!” he screamed at her and she could imagine his face flooded with red color. “I own you, dammit! The only life for you here without me is as a whore. Is that what you want?”

She knew all too well that many mail-order brides found themselves as prostitutes after escaping abusive husbands, or worse, being pimped out by the very men they’d thought would give them a better life here, but Janjai was not those women. She spoke the language and she had family. She would make it.

She nearly cried with joy as she reached the truck. She pulled on the door handle just in case but found she would not be lucky enough to find it already unlocked. She had to use the key. The keys shook in her trembling hands as she looked for the right one.

She found the long key that would unlock the door and start the truck but a gurgling, growling sound caught her attention.

She looked up to see a man come around the front of the truck. His eyes were so white they reflected the moonlight as he shuffled around the truck and reached toward her, making that awful sound. Something wet along the bottom of his face glistened and as he neared her she realized in growing horror that it was blood. This was one of the infected people Hank and Otis had been talking about. This was a zombie and there was no way she’d get in the truck before he reached her.

“Jan, look out!”

She jumped backward and turned to run in the opposite direction, only then realizing four more were coming up the driveway. She had no choice but to run back toward the house, toward Hank.

Before she could do that, two powerful hands gripped her shoulders and pulled. She used her hand to push away from the zombie, squealing in disgust as her palm connected with blood covering its chest.

A shot rang out and the zombie jerked back, but did not let go. It growled, opening its mouth wide before another bullet ripped through its head, removing the top half.

Janjai screamed as blood splashed over her, and ran for the house, dropping the keys and knife in the process. The zombies coming up the driveway had almost reached her and more of them invaded the yard, coming from the woods behind the house. Now she knew what had gotten the coyote.