The yellow-white orbs focused ferociously as the dragon took off in a full gallop toward Horace. He could hear it groaning and growling as it hurled itself forward, and he could make out the thin line that was its mouth, set firmly in steely concentration.

The demon said, Kill it.

The horde on either side of the road screeched and yelled for him to slay the beast. So he walked into the middle of the black asphalt road and leveled his gun, aiming between the headlights of the speeding chicken truck.

He stood his ground, finger on the trigger, as a gnome cried out, Kill it! Kill it! But for some reason he was frozen, transfixed on that place in the road. As the headlights became brighter, illuminating him in full, there was the sound of screeching tires and the truck lurched to the left, hitting the soft shoulder of the road, arcing back onto the highway after some pitching and yawing, the chickens in the back not roused one bit by the sharp swerve. Perhaps the driver, his eyes maybe blood-shot from driving twenty hours straight, his pendulous belly full of coffee and doughnuts and two eggs over easy and toast, had dozed for a mere second, just a second, only to wake to a wraith standing in the middle of this country road; and perhaps now he rubbed his eyes and face, considering what he had beheld, or thought he had beheld. His first thought: a naked black boy with a gun. A thought he would quickly discard after realizing how improbable and ridiculous the idea was, then he would touch on the idea of a ghost, which would make him smile nervously, then he would realize it was nothing more than a deer, and convince himself that the coffee and the doughnuts and the eggs and the twenty hours straight driving had made him envision a colored boy where there was only a deer, and he would maybe turn up his Willie Nelson tape, and refocus on the white stripe on the asphalt hurtling by him, dizzyingly, and forget about the incident entirely.

Why didn’t you kill it? the demon asked.

Horace shrugged, his head down.

I said, Why didn’t you kill it?

Horace turned to look at a Masai warrior before him, his eyes glowing a neon orange, his teeth a luminous white against skin the very color of the night air.

Why? it asked.

I couldn’t.

The warrior whacked him in the stomach hard with his spear shaft. Horace doubled up in pain, as the ache radiated in a circular fashion throughout his body. He hung there doubled over until he heard the voice say, Walk, Goddamn it. Walk. And he did.