Free Mail Horror Bride (One Nation Under Zombies Book 1) by Raymond Lee Page A

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