"Damn...you beat me again."
Denji let himself fall back onto the floor, controller loose in his hand, staring up at the ceiling.
"Hehe." She sat cross-legged with the controller in her lap, smiling. Her hair fell across her eyes but she was beautiful regardless. "It isn't that hard to beat you, Denji."
She reached over to the table and picked up a slice of bread thick with jam, taking a small bite.
Man. So this is what being normal feels like.
Denji sat up and jabbed a finger at himself, grinning wide enough to show his teeth.
"I want a rematch!"
The girl giggled. "You sure? I doubt you'd win this time either."
"Trust me."
He reached for the bread and took a bite.
It tasted incredible. Warm and sweet and real. But something nagged at the edge of it — a small absence he couldn't quite name.
"What's wrong?" She tilted her head.
"Where's...Pochita?"
"Pochita?" She blinked. "Who's that?"
"Pochita is...he's Pochita. Where is he, he should be—"
Just dreaming of a normal life was enough for me.
"Ah." Denji's hand rose slowly to his mouth.
"Denji?"
Do I not even get to have that much?
"This isn't real."
His eyes opened.
He was running.
Pochita was clutched against his chest, and behind him the dead were coming — lurching, wrong-eyed, wearing the faces of men he recognised.
"We Yakuza boys —" the man with glasses called out from somewhere above, his voice almost conversational, "— we wanted to get stronger too. Make more money. So we made a deal, just like you."
He was floating. Something thick and pale coiled up from behind him — an intestine, Denji realised, an intestine that wasn't his — lifting him into the air like a puppet.
Further back, half obscured by shadow, something waited.
Yellow-skinned. Vaguely human in shape but wrong in every specific — no real arms, no real legs, hovering with its brain exposed and glistening. It looked down at Denji the way a child looks at something small it has decided to destroy.
"Hey, little devil hunter!" The Zombie Devil's voice was almost cheerful. "These guys — total suckers! I told them I'd give them my power and they rolled right over. Now they're my freak slaves!" It let out a long rattling laugh. "Devil hunters kill devils. I hate that. So I kill them."
It gestured lazily toward the horde behind Denji.
"Cut him into pieces. Dump him in a bin."
Carrying blades and knives the zombies had chased after him
It fucking hurts! It hurt so much he could barely keep his legs moving. The first blade had already gone through him somewhere he didn't want to think about, and he was running anyway, because stopping meant dying and dying meant— Something cut his arm. Then his side. Then his legs went out from under him. He didn't feel the rest. Just pressure, and heat, and then a strange cold that moved in fast from the edges of everything. Then nothing. Darkness. Pure and total and silent.
—Pochita—
I remember the first time I saw him.
Denji looked so weak and frail. I thought I could get blood from him easily — that was all I wanted. I was hungry and hurt and he was small enough that it seemed simple.
But when I got close I realised he already wanted to die.
I was too weak to even attack him properly. He could have run. He didn't. He held out his arm and told me to bite him — told me his blood wasn't free, that this was a contract.
I bit him anyway.
He didn't flinch.
After that we were friends. I'm not sure either of us decided it exactly. It just became true.
"Alright…I'm going to name you Pochita!" Denji declared.
We were sheltering under a tree, out of the rain. He looked at me with that serious expression he got when he'd decided something.
"My dad once had a dog named Pochi. And since you look like a dog…I think it makes sense."
Pochita.
"WOOF."
I liked it.
Denji had lost his father and his mother. He owed money to mean people. He used me as a weapon against other devils. He never seemed scared even though he looked like the kind of person who should be scared of everything.
"Hey Pochita…" He was watching a group of middle schoolers pass by in the street below. "I bet going to school must be fun."
Is going to school one of Denji's dreams?
The years passed.
I watched him. That was mostly what I did — I watched him and listened.
He shared his dreams with me. All of them. Big ones and small ones. The ones he said out loud and the ones I could tell just from the way he went quiet sometimes, staring at something ordinary like it was very far away.
We had times of joy. Times of sadness. Mostly we had times of hunger and cold and work, but Denji made those feel smaller than they were.
"Hey Pochita! Time to work!"
VREEEE.
He swung me in a wide arc and I bit through the trunk clean. The tree groaned and tipped and fell heavy onto the grass. Then the next one. Then the next. When he'd cut enough he gathered them and tied them in bundles, breathing hard, not complaining.
Afterwards we rested on the pile together. The sky was pale. Denji split his bread and held half out to me.
"Pochita…I might die fighting a devil someday."
He said it simply. Like it was just a fact he'd been carrying around.
"If I do…you'll be my one regret."
Denji.
"You could starve without me. Or get killed by another devil hunter." He paused. "I heard some devils can take over dead bodies."
He looked out at the town below us.
"If you're one of them…I want to give my body to you. Wait until after I'm in the ground and I bet even the Yakuza won't bother coming after you. Then you could leave this town. Find somewhere else. And then…yeah."
He turned and looked at me directly.
"I want you to live a normal life. And die a normal death."
He lifted me up and smiled. That wide sharp smile that meant he'd decided something important.
"Make my dreams come true for me."
Another dream of Denji's.
Denji had a lot of dreams.
Dreams are good. Humans dream. I love dreams.
Inside this tight dark space his pieces were coming back together — head, arms, body — reconnecting along threads of light like something being sewn back from the inside. I pressed myself against him and became part of it.
"Pochita."
"Woof."
"Did you take my body? Like I told you to?"
I looked at him.
"I've always loved listening to you talk about your dreams," I said.
Denji's eyes went wide.
"This is a contract." I moved closer. "I'll give you my heart."
In exchange —
Show me your dreams.
—Denji—
"POCHITA!"
Denji burst upward from the bin, garbage scattering around him, lungs filling with cold air like he'd never breathed before.
He looked down at himself. The wounds were gone. Every single one.
Something hung from his chest — a cord. Small and orange and familiar.
Pochita's tail.
"Pochita."
He said it quietly this time.
The zombies turned toward him. The Zombie Devil's single eye found him across the dark and went wide.
"We cut him to ribbons and he's still alive?" It recoiled like it had seen something genuinely offensive. "GROSS! I really hate devil hunters!" It swung its gaze to the horde. "YOU GUYS — EAT THAT FREAK!"
The dead started moving toward him.
Denji watched them come. Something in his head had slowed everything down — the shuffling, the reaching hands, the Devil floating above it all with its exposed brain pulsing wet in the dark.
These guys already had plenty. And they still wanted more.
Maybe I'm the same.
I should have been happy as long as I had Pochita. That should have been enough. But I kept dreaming anyway. About girls and jam and video games and things I'd never had.
The zombies were almost on him.
Maybe that's just what it means to be alive. You can't help dreaming. You just can't. And that's not a bad thing.
His hand found the cord.
It's not a bad thing. But—
The rage came up all at once, clean and total, from somewhere below thought.
"IF YOU'RE GONNA GET OUR WAY—"
He pulled the cord.
"—THEN DIE!"
Loud.
Loud.
LOUD.
BDROOOOOOOM.
A chainsaw where his face was. Two more tearing through his arms —
"He has to stay dead if we eat him!"
The Zombie Devil's voice cracked with something close to panic.
BDROOOOOOM.
It drifted back. Just slightly. Just enough.
"What are you?" It stared. "Did that small fry devil take over your body?" A pause. "Then you're one of us, right?"
Denji looked at it.
He crossed the distance between them in one motion and drove the chainsaw through its skull.
SCREECH.
The Zombie Devil didn't finish the thought.
It didn't finish anything.
The horde stood frozen for half a second.
Denji stood in the middle of them dripping, chest heaving, chainsaws spinning down to a low hungry growl.
Then he started laughing.
"I know!" He swung his gaze across the mass of dead faces "If I kill every single one of you yakuza zombie fuckers—"
His chainsaws screamed back to life.
"—IT'S BYE-BYE DEBT! GHAHAHAHAHAHA—"
Die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die die—
Something that used to be a man.
THROUGH IT.
Something that used to be two men.
THROUGH THEM.
The noise didn't stop. The noise was everything. The noise was him. He was the noise.
BDROOOOOOM—
Bone. He felt bone. Didn't stop.
—BDROOOOOOM—
Wet. Everything wet. Didn't stop.
—BDROOOOOOM BDROOOOOOM BDROOOOOOM—
An arm. Whose arm. Didn't matter.
Gone.
A body. Gone.
Three bodies.
Gone gone gone gone—
He stood in the middle of what used to be an army of the dead.
Footsteps.
Human ones.
"Looks like someone beat us to the punch."
A woman's voice.
She stepped into the light with two men flanking her, all three in black coats, picking their way through the wreckage.
One of the men looked at Denji.
"Got a live one."
The woman approached alone. She had pink hair and a face that didn't belong in a place like this. Her eyes were orange with black spirals at their centres.
She stopped just in front of him and tilted her head slightly.
"Hmm." She leaned in, studying him. "You have a particular smell. It isn't human. But it isn't devil either."
Her gaze moved across the carnage surrounding them.
"Did you do this?"
The world tilted.
Denji's legs had been done for a while. He just hadn't noticed.
"H-Hold me," he muttered.
She caught him before he hit the ground — arms around him, her face close to his chest, close to where Pochita's heart was beating steady underneath everything. The chainsaws dissolved slowly, melting away from his face until it was just his face again. Just Denji.
She looked at him.
"You're human."
"Any chance it's a possession?" one of the men called from behind her.
"None." She didn't look away from Denji. "You can see possession on their face." She brought her face closer to his, close enough that he could see every detail of those impossible eyes. "I came here to kill the Zombie Devil. I'm Public Safety."
Denji lay still in her arms and looked up at her.
"You have two choices." Her voice was gentle. Almost warm. "One — I kill you here as a devil." A small smile crossed her face. "Or two — I keep you, as a human."
She tilted her head again.
"If you become my pet I'll feed you. Three meals a day."
"Feed me?" Something moved behind Denji's eyes. "What would I get for breakfast?"
She considered this seriously.
"Let's see. Bread with butter and jam. Salad. Coffee. Maybe dessert."
I want my dream to be me and you eating jam on bread.
Denji smiled. Small and tired and real.
"That sounds like a dream come true."
—END OF DOG AND CHAINSAW—