I opened my eyes and groaned when I realized I was no longer in Kate's Livingroom, the place I had fallen asleep in.  It had happened again, I had been moved while I slept peacefully.  I was now under a dark sky speckled with stars and a bright almost full moon that provided me just enough light to almost clearly see the rural wilderness around me.  I sat up in my sleeping bag and looked around groggily. I had been placed by the side of a dirt road. On the side closest to me was a cornfield, probably the same cornfield that bordered Kate's backyard.  Kate lived in the middle of the country with nothing but farmland on all sides of her.  On the other side of me, there was nothing but thick woods. The road that had become my bed looked like it hadn't be used in ha while, as evidenced by the thick clumps of weeds that sprouted up here and there and the complete lack of marks made by vehicles on its smooth surface.

               
I was really getting sick of this little game my friends liked to call the body dump.  It was a game that capitalized on the fact that I'm pretty much dead the second my eyes are closed.  It was played at sleepovers where my so called friends would wait until I was asleep, then pick me up and leave me somewhere entirely different and wait until I woke up naturally or unnaturally.  They would then have a good laugh at my bewildered face when I opened my eyes and realized I was somewhere different.

Still, despite this annoying trick that was played on me constantly at sleepovers, I still liked them.  You didn't really get to know your friends until you stayed up till four in the morning daring each other to look up weird things on YouTube.  Or sneaking around the kitchen like ninjas and grabbing as much food as possible before making a break for it.

So anyways, I've woken up in some pretty strange places over the last three years, including on a float in the middle of a pool and butt first inside a cooler in a garage, so this road that wasn't the most creative place I've woken up in, but it was by far the creepiest.

Goose bumps began to prickle my skin despite the hot August air. It felt like I was being watched from both sides of this road, although that feeling was probably coming from the fact my friends were hiding out there somewhere, just waiting to scare the hell out of me.  Or maybe it was one of the many nocturnal animals that prowled places like corn fields and forests at night.  Animals like mountain lions and bears that would love to sink their teeth into defenseless pray like me.

               
I decided at that moment to not think about what might be lurking out there in dark beside my stupid friends, and instead got out of my sleeping bag and looked around to what might've been thrown at me to wake me up.  That's how my friends would usually rouse me from my deep slumber; by chucking small items of me from a hiding place, until I was startled awake like a hibernating grizzly bear.  You see, I've never woke up naturally in the middle of the night by myself in all my fifteen years, but I didn't see anything on or around me. So something else must've woken me up, but what?

               
And then I thought I saw something.  A person-sized shape standing in the cornfield directly beside me, but it was too far into the stalks of corns to make out any features, not even its exact height.  I felt my heart began to pound like a drum inside my chest.

               
"Hello?" I called out nervously to whichever one of my friends it was, but there was no response.   The shadow dissolved back into the corn and it was followed by the sounds of cornstalks rustling like something was moving away from me and further back into the field.  I told myself it was one of my friends trying to lure me into the tall stalks for some kind of scare. The fear that was slowly building up inside me, though, wasn't buying.  I decided the faster I got out of there the better!

               
I turned away from the tall leafy plants, even though I knew if I walked straight through the field it would lead directly back to Kate's house but.... there was someone or something in the cornfield...and surely it was one of my friends being a jerk and trying to creep me out.  But I was barefoot because my friends hadn't thought to give me shoes, and it would be hazardous to walk through a corn field in the dark like that.  Yeah, that's why I wasn't going  in there! Yeah...

               
I looked down the abandoned dirt road.  It glowed eerily in the moonlight and I decided I would walk down it until I found the edge of the corn field and then walk along it until I reached the black tar road and then I would double back to Kate's house.  It would take longer, but at least I would be able to see what was in front of me and below me at all times.

               
I bent down and rolled up my sleeping bag and tucked it under my armpit.  There was some unnamed foul, sticky substance on its underside, and it smelled awful too.   I would certainly have to throw it in the washing machine before I went home.  Once it was safe and secure under my arm, I began to walk down the road.

               
Every so often, I thought I could hear something crashing through the corn field not exactly beside me, but a couple feet back, like someone, was following close behind me. And every time I heard it, I would turn around, but there would be nothing. Just the quiet hush, hush of the wind whipping through the corn and the gentle rustling of the leaves of the forest on my other side. 

The sounds coming from the corn were starting to terrify me, like only the knowledge that a predator was going to bounce on you could. The rational side of my brain kept telling me it was just my friends being a couple of jerks.  But a growing feeling of dread in my belly was telling me that something was going to get me if I didn't start moving faster.  It was hard to move quickly though.  The dirt road was uneven and I didn't want to sprang an ankle or worst.

               
This went on forever until I was almost to the edge of the cornfield.  That's when I heard a particularly big crash, which startled me and I spun around once more to see...to see something standing in the middle of the road.  I felt my blood grow cold as my body went rigid with fright.  And then, quickly, the figure got down on all fours and bounded back into the corn field in one big leap.

               
The whole encounter couldn't have lasted more than three seconds but I had seen all I need to see in that short amount of time to know I was in trouble.  I had seen the thing's large shiny black eyes glinting in the moonlight, a gaping circular mouth filled with sharp teeth, a thin body hunched over long legs bent too far in the front at the knee. And the charcoal like skin and the worst feature, its arms!  They were so long that they were almost touching the ground and at the end of them, claws which were skinny and curved like the teeth of a rake.

               
I shrieked loudly and dropped my sleeping bag in the process and blindly charged into the corn field.  I wasn't thinking that that thing, whatever it was, had just bounded into the same corn field seconds ago. No, I was thinking I need to get to the safety of Kate's house fast and if my friends were out here too, I needed to get help for them or find a way to warn them at least.

Rocks and the pointy end of dead stalks cut my unprotected feet, but I didn't care I need to get back to the house if I could just make it back it would be fine.  We would all be fine.

But I was soon thinking about the creature's presence in the field when I heard something charging at me from the direction I was heading in.   I tried to stop and change directions, but my feet tangle under me and I ended up falling on my side and suddenly I was staring up at the... barrel of a shot gun?

At first, I was frightened as anyone would be staring down a gun like that, but my brain soon scrambled for a quick explanation of my current situation.  Kate's dad must've heard me scream, come downstairs and figured out I was missing, and come to a rescue me with his gun...

That half-baked explanation quickly died though, when I saw the face, the face beyond the gun.  It was a man that I had never seen before with a sunken looking cheeks and a long black beard that was as black as the iris of his crazed looking eyes. His mouth was stretched into a wide manic grin.  He was dressed in a flannel and old ripped jeans splattered in what looked to be blood.

"I finally found you bitch!" he snarled, his voice dripping with malice and poked my temple hard with the end of his gun. "You thought you could escape me, but you couldn't!  Almost did, but you screamed and I found you!"

"I'm sure what you're talking about sir," I managed to choke out, "But there's something in here with us, and we need to get out now!" tears were now streaming down my face, but I wasn't even sure when I had started crying.

  "Shut up!" he shouted and smacked the gun hard into my head and I yelped in pain.  I felt warm blood begin to ooze out of a fresh gash now on the side of my head.

"I'm going to kill you just like the other little bitches!"

Suddenly, the man's eyes widened and his mouth opened into a giant scream and he pointed the gun at the space behind me and began to fire.  I wasted no time in jumping to my feet and running at full speed past him until I broke through the corn and was running across the grass of Kate's back yard.  I could here two more gunshots behind me than a scream, and then what I imagined to be the sound of bones breaking and the wet sound of flesh being torn apart.

  In front of me, I could see that the back sliding glass door of Kate's house was wide open and a light was on.  I ran through it and into safety and into s...s...so much blood.

I must have blacked out because the next thing I remember is sitting in a corner with a phone pressed up against my ear.

"Hello 911 what's your emergency?" a lady said into my ear.

I let the phone fall from my ear and onto the floor while I stared numbly at the thing from the field as it stood in the light of the Livingroom, in the midst of my friend's bloody bodies less than three feet away.  I started into its large black eyes while it reached over with its long arm and placed the gun in front of me gently, where it remained until the police showed up an hour later.

That thing then turned and disappeared into the night.  I watched it run across Kate's yard on all four feet until it disappeared back into the corn.

The police later traced the gun back to a Kevin Steven.  After searching his house, they determined that Kevin had been stalking Kate for months.  They surmised that he had finally decided to take her that faithful night and had entered through the back sliding glass door, only to find her asleep in the Livingroom with four other girls, which included me.  But when he had tried to coliform her he had done it wrong and she had screamed, which woke up everyone, well everyone except me, the deep sleeper.

                He had then shot and killed everyone awake in a blind panic, including Kate's parents who had rushed downstairs to investigate the commotion.  But here was the parts that the police couldn't figure out.  Why had he left his gun in the middle of the living room with his fingerprints all over it? And after Kevin had killed all my friends and Kate's parents, why had he dragged me in my sleeping bag out the sliding glass doors, across the front lawn, and through a corn field and left me alive behind it? When the police had recovered my sleepy bag the discovered the bottom of it was caked in blood from it being dragged through a puddle of my friend blood. Was it to delay the discovery of the grisly murder?

                Too bad Kevin wasn't around to answer those questions.  They still couldn't find him, fifteen years later, even after putting out a warrant out for his arrest and a 10,000$ reward for any information that could lead to his ultimate capture.  But I knew where he was.  His body was in that cornfield still, but I wasn't about to tell the police how he got there or what killed him.  They would think that the murders made me crazy, but I knew what I saw and that was enough.

                I also know that unexplainable creatures walked this earth and not all of them are bad.  And after all these years I'm certain now that whatever stalked the cornfield behind Kate's house had saved my life and had meant me no harm.

               
I'm a mother now, and I have a four year old daughter and today I've brought her to stand at the edge of that same cornfield from that night.  It's still there, even though Kate's house had long been torn down and replaced by a new one.  And as the wind begins to stir the tall stalks of corn I lean in and whisper a thank you into them.