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.
