Morning didn’t fix anything, it just made the destruction easier to see.

I didn’t even bother to hide the smirk on my face when I opened the basement door.

The smell of rot and death was enough to make me gag and my eyes water. I wasn’t the only one. I could heard the guys behind me almost dropped to their knees when they were hit with the stench.

Fuck. Being away from zombies for so long, I really wasn’t used to the smell anymore.

I wanted to go to the windows and open them all up to get rid of the smell, but they were already opened.

Well... broken... but it was the same time.

Looking around, I wondered if there was enough Febreze left in this word to get rid of the ’eau de Zombie’. If not... I would need a lot more scented candles.

My eyes continued to look over the devastation around me.

In addition to there not being a single window left whole, there was blood on the floor, streaked in uneven lines that didn’t match anything I owned. One of the tables had been knocked over, and there were bullet marks in the wall that hadn’t been there before.

Seriously. Didn’t they get that I left the door open for them so that my house wasn’t destroyed!?? The zombie guests weren’t going to be getting a five star review, that was for sure.

My foot landed on a piece of glass and I hissed in a sharp breath. Before I could move again, Yuche was already pulling me up into his arms. "We don’t need to add more blood to the crime scene," he said, his voice had a faint trace of humor that I hadn’t heard since he had come back from getting supplies.

It was like something had shifted between the guys that I didn’t know about, but since they also shifted around me, I hadn’t mentioned it.

But it was nice to see Yuche was no longer hiding in dark corners like a B rated vampire.

"Why not?" I asked as Zhenlan pulled my foot into his hands and gently pulled out the glass sliver. It wasn’t that big, but it definitely hurt like a bitch. "I am actually liking the horror mansion motif. Maybe this way people would stop trying to move into my house."

"Your house?" chuckled Zhenlan as he pressed his white dress shirt sleeve to the wound.

I nodded my head, "My house," I agreed with a smile that dared him to contradict me.

"Your house," he said after a moment. Pulling the cloth back, he looked down at my foot. You couldn’t even really see where I had been injured.

"That’s useful," he murmured, rubbing his thumb into the blood on the arch of my foot. "Is speed healing one of those superpowers?"

I froze at his words, my face turning white enough that both Yuche and Zhenlan stared down at me. "Nope," I said after a moment, shaking my head from side to side. Speed healing wasn’t a superpower in my last life.

But healing was attached to the Earth power... which I did have.

But that isn’t possible. I stayed in the basement. I wasn’t exposed to any part of the bomb that the government set off to kill the zombies.

I shouldn’t have any powers... let alone Earth.

There was an uneasy feeling in the air like I was missing something, but it quickly disappeared when Lingyun opened his mouth, breaking the tension.

"Well," he said, stepping past Yuche to get deeper into the room like he was walking into a show instead of a mess, "this is going to be a bitch to clean. Anyone know a good cleaning service?"

Chenghai stepped out after him and snorted. "I don’t think our old cleaning service would be able to handle this. But it does allow for a complete overhaul of the house."

He hummed as he looked over at Zhenlan who was still rubbing the arch of my foot. "New windows. Stronger this time."

"Bullet proof windows aren’t exactly found at the local Home Depot," Zhenlan replied, finally putting my foot down. I wasn’t about to admit it, even to myself, but I didn’t mind his hand on my skin.

"You just aren’t looking at the right Home Depot," replied Yuche, his voice sounding amused as he stared at Yuche. "I know a guy."

"Of course you know a guy," replied Lingyun, rolling his eyes. "We all know a guy. What matters most right now is if that guy is dead or not."

Yuche hummed. He walked over to the couch that wasn’t quite in the right place. He looked at it for a second, the dark red blood staining in in long groves like a zombie finger painting.

Deciding not to put me down, he spun us around until I was stilling on his lap. He gave Zhenlan a look that I couldn’t quite place before resting one of his hands on my lap.

Chenghai moved to the window and looked outside. "We need to change the house. It’s too easy for people to get in and out. A total security upgrade. Whatever we can get our hands on. We can MacGyver something if we need to. But this has to stop."

I hummed in agreement, even as I reached for the remote that managed to survive on the coffee table in front of me. "They will be back," I agreed, turning on the TV.

Yuche looked down at me, then turned his attention to the rest of the guys settling in around us. The smell was still thick on the air. Blood still covered everything. And yet, the four of them were acting like it was just another day.

It was nice to see that they were starting to fit in in this post-apocalypse era.

"They’ve already been here three times now," sighed Chenghai, his hands gripping the arm rest of his chair. The wood crumbled into dust under his grip and I couldn’t help but snicker. We would have to add more furniture to the list.

This was going to be such a fun shopping trip. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

And the best part was that it wouldn’t cost us a single penny.

"Jiang Meilan isn’t going to let this drop," I sighed after a moment. I closed my eyes and rested my head against Yuche’s shoulder.

Seeing her really was a slap across the face. I was hoping that in this life, I wouldn’t have to worry about surviving, the compound, or that bitch. But fate was fickle.

Or else she hated Meilan as much as I did and wanted me to be her reckoning.

I could live with that.

"You seem to know her well," murmured Yuche, his eyes never missing a thing.

"Nope," I replied with a shake of my head. "I just met her... but she seems like a real bitch."

Yuche hummed, but dropped the subject.

"If they come back, how do we stop them?" asked Chenghai, finally talking about the elephant in the room. "We have no weapons. No security to talk about. An a house that is going to crumble if someone looks at it the wrong way."

"Really?" I replied, cocking my head to the side as I looked at him. "Why do you need guns when you just crushed a chair with your bare hands?"

"What are you saying?" asked Zhenlan, his deep voice and intense eyes making me straighten in Yuche’s arms.

"I saying that if you don’t want them to take our house again, then just don’t let them."