Bonus Short Story: Horror
The armored truck was parked deep within the nighttime forest of the Garula Canyon. A table was set up beside it, illuminated by the vehicle’s headlights, where Yogiri and Tomochika were eating. There was plenty of room for them to eat inside the truck, so that was what they normally did, but occasionally they liked to change things up a bit.
“I never would have thought a skill like this would be useful in this day and age,” Tomochika said, looking over the food laid out on the table. Arrayed before her was a variety of foods harvested from the body of a deer. She had hunted, butchered, and cooked it entirely on her own.
“I’m impressed you know how to do that,” Yogiri said sincerely. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“I didn’t realize it was strange to know how to do this until I was in middle school...”
The Dannoura family teaches such skills in hopes they might prove useful someday, Mokomoko interjected. Realistically, it would be best if you could learn on a human body, but these days that’s not so practical.
“Wouldn’t that be pretty strange in any time?!” Tomochika snapped back.
“Well, anyway, it looks like you’ll be a great wife someday,” Yogiri said, struggling to find something nice to say.
“Does a housewife need to be able to butcher animals now?” Tomochika didn’t feel the least bit like she had been praised.
“Well, it tastes good, so that’s what really matters, right?”
“Really? And wouldn’t an ordinary person be a bit turned off by that?”
Yogiri, of course, accepted it as totally ordinary. It wasn’t at all off-putting to him.
Well, I suppose that’s that. I’m sure you are all enjoying your meal, but an enemy approaches.
Tomochika stood up, looking around in response to Mokomoko’s warning. As the ghost had said, she could sense something approaching.
“Do you see them, Takatou?”
“Yeah, something’s coming.”
As he spoke, that “something” emerged from the trees. Its warped shape lurched forward with slow, clumsy movements. With the rotting meat and skin hanging off its protruding bones, it was hard to imagine it was alive. But whether it looked alive or not, it was, in fact, moving towards them.
“It’s a zombie!”
“How is it moving, though?” Yogiri wondered calmly, in contrast to Tomochika’s panic. “Its muscles have all come apart, so it doesn’t look like they work. If it’s being moved by some sort of curse or something, shouldn’t it be going a bit faster?”
“You seem awfully calm about all this!” Seeing Yogiri completely unmoved by the sight, Tomochika felt herself relax a bit as well.
One after another, rotting bodies appeared from the woods. Before long, they were surrounded.
“Die.” With a single word from Yogiri, the bizarre creatures collapsed as one.
“I guess I can’t say I’m surprised, but how do you kill something that’s already dead?”
“I played horror games a lot, so I’m kind of used to it.” Yogiri hadn’t even stopped eating.
“That was fast! I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but come on!” Tomochika also returned to her seat.
“Seeing them for the first time in those first zombie games is plenty scary, but by the fourth game they’re just a target to be shot. You sort of get into the habit of shooting everything you see.”
“I was more curious about the mystery at the police station.”
“Well. there’s no end to stories like that. Whether it’s attacking ghosts with a camera or wandering a city covered by fog, those games are all about solving mysteries that have no logical sense to them.”
“Do they actually need mysteries, though?” Tomochika asked. “That doesn’t necessarily seem related to horror.”
“I suppose a mystery isn’t absolutely necessary, but it is still a game.” To Yogiri, there was clearly some sort of distinction there.
“I guess a game with no mystery, where you just fight an invincible enemy that gets back up no matter how many times you beat them, is much more annoying.”
“It’s more like a puzzle game at that point, right?” Yogiri commented. “After getting a grasp on how they act, you kill them here, then move somewhere else. You know they’re coming back, so you have to find out how to kill them in that new place.”
“But once you’ve started worrying about how to proceed in the game, it kind of stops being scary. Being too difficult has its own advantages and disadvantages, too. If it’s really difficult, you’ll get that feeling of being pushed into a corner, but if it goes too far then instead of being scared, you’ll just be frustrated trying to figure out how to move forward.”
“I guess mixing the elements of games with the horror genre isn’t that easy,” Yogiri concluded.
“Why are we talking about this in the first place?” Tomochika found that having a conversation about the horror genre while surrounded by the remains of numerous zombies was a somewhat surreal situation.
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