When we Last looked at Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, Akira brought his friends to the isolated mountain village where he grew up, both to check on on his parents and find some way to repay them, as that was another thing on his bucket list.
Volume 5 is set entirely in the village, as Akira tries to encourage his parents to rest and let him take care of the farm for them. This doesn't really work, particularly with his father, but does lead to some important conversations between father and son about dreams and not letting go of them.
The rest of the cast also find ways to pitch in. Kencho, in addition to fencing chickens and chopping a lot of firewood, tries to cheer up a young orphaned girl. Shizuka starts out helping with cooking - and fending off some grief-addled, possibly blind widow, who nonetheless has an unerring knack for grabbing boobs while wailing his wife's name - but is soon using the medical knowledge she's gleaned from reading books to act as an amateur physician. Which is probably a step towards her being a doctor like she dreamed, before her overbearing father forced her onto a different, more financially lucrative path. Beatriz, the German tourist, is introduced to the water wheel that provides power for the electric fence keeping the zombified wild boars out of the village.
(So we've seen zombified boars and a zombified shark. I would be more concerned about zombified birds. Given the living dead's bodies seem to hold together pretty well, flying zombies would be a real possibility.)
The problem is an old classmate of Akira and Kencho's, Higurashi. Higurashi's life wasn't really going anywhere when the apocalypse started, and it was everyone else's fault. He found three people in a similar frame of mind, and they started their own bucket list of things to do before becoming zombies. It is a pretty miserable list, as one of the quartet wants to "fire a gun" and "force his tongue down a pretty girl's throat." But for now, Higurashi will settle for getting revenge on Akira for being so damn cheerful and popular and buying into society.
Which means they move the cars used to block the tunnel into the village, allowing zombies to swarm in. From there, it's Akira and his friends trying to save people, but each running into a different one of Higurashi's crew. Kencho ultimately defeats his opponent, a wage slave who felt unappreciated by his wife and resented her for it, by diving into a pile of shit.
No, I'm not joking. Kotaru Tokata had drawn the pit (which is basically the village's fertilizer) by blurring it into a pixellated state. So when Kencho climbs out, he's also drawn as a bunch of blurry pixels, which is pretty funny, actually.
None of the others are doing as well come the end of the volume, and Akira in particular seems caught in a circumstance where he'll have to sacrifice himself if he wants to save his dad's life.
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