CHAPTER 68: CELEBRATION!

The supermarket smelled different that night.

Not of blood or dust or the faint, sour musk of the undead pressing at the doors. For the first time since any of them could remember, it smelled like smoke and grease, like meat on fire. The kind of smell that belonged to cookouts, to weekends that had slipped into memory.

It had been Riku’s idea—or maybe not exactly an idea, but a compromise. They had pork sitting in the basement freezer, thawing every hour the power stayed off. By next week it would spoil, and rotten meat in close quarters meant sickness. Waste wasn’t an option.

So he told Murata and Takuya to haul the packs upstairs. Suzune and Miko scavenged grill racks from the hardware section—steel grates meant for concrete curing that scrubbed clean with a little bleach. Ichika dragged up a coil of rebar and rigged it between cinder blocks. And when the fire finally caught, rising in a rust-colored barrel vented with holes, twenty faces leaned close to catch the heat.

The crackle of fat was louder than their voices.

Riku sat a little apart, back against a shelf of expired detergent. He didn’t drink, not tonight, but he let the others pass around the brown bottles they had stacked in milk crates earlier. Beer. Cheap supermarket brands that once sold for loose change, now a prize greater than gold.

Kenji took a hesitant sip, coughed once, then smiled despite himself. "It’s... warm," he said sheepishly. "But not bad."

The teenager beside him—the same one who had swung a mop handle like a spear—laughed in a short, stifled burst. "Better than water, at least."

"Don’t waste it," Miko muttered, though even she accepted a bottle when it came to her. She tilted it against her lips, her eyes half-lidded. Riku caught her watching him from the corner of her gaze before she turned back to the group.

Murata drank like a man taking medicine—slow, steady, more to acknowledge the ritual than to enjoy it. Takuya, on the other hand, tipped his bottle back in long gulps, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Tastes like piss," he declared. Then he reached for another, and the group chuckled under their breath.

They didn’t laugh loud. No one did.

The barrel’s glow painted them all in shifting orange. Outside, just beyond the thick walls and roll-up shutters, the moans of the dead drifted like a tide. Every so often a hand would slap against metal. Every so often someone would stiffen. But then the fire cracked, fat hissed, and the sound receded behind the fragile bubble they’d built.

Suzune turned the meat with tongs scavenged from kitchenware. The pork was salted, nothing fancy, but the smell alone drew sighs from the volunteers. Hana pressed close to her sister, watching the fire with wide eyes, her little hands cupped around a rag-wrapped stick to feel the warmth.

Riku finally stood and walked forward. He wasn’t hungry yet, but he knew they expected him to be there. The "leader." The one who had dragged them through three floors of rot and ruin. He hated the weight of it, but he accepted the plate Suzune handed him. A charred edge of pork, smoky and greasy, wrapped in a scrap of paper towel.

He bit in. Hot, salty, chewy. He chewed, swallowed, and nodded. "It’s good."

The group seemed to breathe easier at that.

Kenji raised his pipe-clean hands like a toast. "To... not dying today?" he said weakly.

There was a pause. Then Murata grunted. "To living tomorrow."

"To living tomorrow," several voices echoed, soft but steady. Bottles clinked against bottles, against pipes, against dented helmets of cardboard.

Riku ate in silence and watched them. He saw shoulders unclench. He saw eyes soften. He saw how quickly people remembered what it felt like to be human when you gave them just a scrap of it back.

The noise stayed low, but conversation trickled. They spoke of things outside the walls: one remembered her grandmother’s cooking, another remembered a baseball game he had skipped work to watch. A girl whispered about her dog, left behind weeks ago. Kenji admitted he used to hate the taste of beer, but tonight he liked it.

It wasn’t joy. Not really. It was survival’s fragile cousin—hope, disguised in smoke and laughter.

Miko leaned near Riku as she passed him another piece of meat. "You know this won’t last, right?" she whispered.

"Food?" he asked.

"Peace," she said. Her eyes flicked over the group—Murata smiling faintly for the first time, Takuya telling some story with big hand gestures, Ichika rolling her eyes at him but smiling too.

Riku chewed his bite slowly. "It doesn’t need to last. Just needs to remind them why we fight for it."

Her gaze lingered on him a heartbeat longer. Then she nodded and moved away.

Later, when the plates were empty and the beer bottles half-drained, Murata rose. He didn’t speak like Riku did—no sharp words, no commands. Just a gravelly voice over the fire.

"You did more than swing pipes today," he told them. "You proved we can do this. Floor by floor. Room by room. We don’t run anymore. We take."

A murmur of agreement rippled. Heads nodded. Even Takuya, who would never bend easily, raised his bottle in silent assent.

Murata glanced at Riku. Their eyes met. Not trust, not yet. But not suspicion either. Something in between.

The barrel burned lower. Pork bones clinked into a tin tray. One by one, survivors drifted back toward the basement, carrying the warmth of the fire in their hands, in their bellies. The beer made some stumble. The food made some drowsy. But for once, the silence they carried wasn’t fear. It was tired, gentle contentment.

Riku stayed behind, staring into the coals. Miko lingered too, pistol resting across her knees, eyes on the shadows.

"You going to take a shift?" she asked him quietly.

"I never stopped," he said.

She gave a small, almost invisible smile. "Then maybe tonight, you can."

He didn’t answer. He listened to the muffled groans outside, the rattle of the paint-can alarm above when wind tugged the shutter. He listened to the breath of his people—because they were his people now—slowing as they finally, finally slept.

And for one fleeting moment, he allowed himself to believe they might just deserve this little pocket of peace.

Some of the younger survivors couldn’t sleep right away. They lingered near the embers, whispering softly.

"Do you think schools will ever open again?" one teenager asked, voice cracking.

"Not like before," another replied, hugging his knees. "But maybe... maybe we’ll build new ones. Different ones."

Kenji, tipsy but clearer than he thought he’d be, spoke up. "If we live long enough, we’ll need teachers. Even now, we’re learning. Radios. Shields. Fighting together. That’s a school."

The teens actually smiled at that.

Ichika smirked and nudged him with her elbow. "Careful, Kenji. Keep talking like that and they’ll make you a professor."

Kenji turned red. "N-no, I just... I think it matters that we’re not only fighting. We have to remember why."

Riku listened from the edge. He didn’t step in. They didn’t need him to. He realized this was the first time he’d heard survivors speak about tomorrow without dread in their voices.

As the fire sank to glowing coals, Suzune gathered Hana onto her lap and hummed under her breath—a lullaby that barely rose above the wind outside. The little girl fell asleep in her arms, face softened, no longer pinched by fear.

That, more than anything, sealed the night for Riku.

For the first time since the outbreak began, they weren’t just surviving. They were living, however briefly.

And late in the evening, when the celebration ended and most of the survivors were now heading to their respective quarters to sleep, Riku was in his office.

He looked at his stats and was just the same as he had previously opened it, although the experience moved a little, still, the leveling sucks! In order for him to progress, he has, at some point, leave in this place and hunt for the special infected.

That’s right, a special infected has the highest experience and SP per kill, and depending on the variant, it could yield to ten to hundred thousand of SP points. But of course, the higher the reward, the more dangerous it gets. Though with his balance in the hundred of thousands, he felt confident that he can fight one.

Now, that this base was secured, the only thing it needed was on the defense. Sure, they had locked every access point in the building, but there will be hostile survivors who will appear sooner or later. He can’t just be the only soldier in their group, he has to entrust someone to fight alongside him. The three girls were already dependable against zombies but he needed someone like Murata.

Although Murata and his men fought him because they thought he was some sort of an invader, he still believed they could be dependable. The problem is he can’t just summon weapons out from the Armory Shop in this building. They would be suspicious. He has to leave the building first and return with a surplus of weapons.

That was it!

"Okay, tomorrow, we go shopping for weapons."