Rich Poore couldn’t faint. He wasn’t going to be let off of even one instant of terror. God, watching his cosmic television, wanted his full entertainment.

The vampire glided toward him through moonlight and lacy shadows.

He couldn’t just give up, he couldn’t. Blindly he scrambled back from the approaching specter, skin crawling. Naked, knees and shins stinging, smelling of dead fish and rank sweat, he turned (in spite of the terror of turning his back on the vampire for even one second) and lurched to his feet.

It’s all I’m good for, he’d said it.

He was damned. The God he didn’t believe in had trapped him into saying it and could gleefully slam him into hell for eternity.

He turned to see the vampire again. Awful as it was to look, not knowing where it was was even worse.

One long-fingered hand spread just below its face. The other reached for him as it glided closer. A hungry smile slipped like night mist onto that white, slender face beneath the shining bald head. It looked exactly like he expected a vampire to look, exactly like the vampire face that haunted his dreams sometimes.

A broken branch stump on a thick trunk pressed into Rich’s back and only then did he even realize he’d been backing up and backing up.

His tender feet already ached unbearably. Running was unthinkable. His eyes teared up; he put his hands in front of his face.

Long frozen moments limped by. The final pain did not come, the end did not come. He looked through his fingers.

Inches from his face, the icy face of the vampire grinned. At the palpable evil so close, he jerked back, banging his head. But still the vampire did not touch him.

“Please? Please? Don’t hurt me,” Rich begged. Begged like a normal person; it didn’t count that he’d offered himself as a slave a minute ago. “Let me go, huh?”

He clung to normality for a minute. Then he leaped to: I could be a vampire! If he’d just bite me and get it over with!

He could glide outside the law, outside the rules of man. He’d be the terror in the dark, he would never have to be afraid again. He could creep up to the bedroom windows of beautiful women and watch them fingering themselves, moaning for a man and he could burst in and –

But of course he couldn’t. Vampires can’t come in unless you invite them. He’d be stuck outside, alone in the cold, like always. Waiting to be noticed, waiting for justice, waiting for someone to finally say “Oh you poor baby, everyone else got a big piece of cake and nobody gave you any?”

If he became a vampire nobody would ever invite him in, ever. Even God would say, “You’re not welcome in heaven, you pathetic scum.” God, so happy to torture him “for his own good,” would cast him out with sanctimonious blessedness.

And still the vampire didn’t touch him.

He could feel its coldness, its dark evil, but it didn’t touch him. It just watched him.

“What do you want,” he begged, tears sliding down.

A horrible thought, worse than any he’d ever had: maybe it wanted to … use him. Sexually? Even the thought was like trying to masturbate to a second orgasm right after an empty come, feeling nothing but exhaustion. The pitiful banquet of things that he’d fantasized flitted before him: put his ass in the air, stick fingers up his ass, play with himself, suck the vampire off…

At the thought of its undead cock in his mouth, vomit spat from his gut. Blind with nausea, tender stomach feeling like it had been punched, he retched out the poor dinner he’d eaten cold, falling to his knees again.

What will it do to me for getting puke on its robes?

But it was gone. Shivering, he shot frantic looks left and right. Any shadow in the glade might hold the thing, but he couldn’t see it.

What should he do? Did he have a real chance to escape? Could he somehow make it through the endless night woods to the road? The old hope arose: God would tease and torture him but would keep him alive, the actual end couldn’t be allowed. God wanted his show.

So, panting with fear that time was running out, he started to dress, crying with the hope of escape. Running naked through the woods would be worse than anything.