• Waking up, I look at my silver alarm clock. 3:15. I sighed, staring at my ceiling. I think my mom turned on the heater, because it was like fire in here. Reaching up, I searched for the bulky fan. Except it wasn’t there. Rain clouds flew over my head, oozing black. I looked around the massive room, when I realized it wasn’t my room. Black paint, clown figurines, and shadowed hockey mask covered the glossy walls.

    Bloody raindrops began to fall, slapping my pale insomniac face with each horrid drop. I looked over at the small window, expecting to see my Jacoby Shaddix and the Metallica pictures I got at their concert sloppily taped on the frigid glass with blue duct tape. It was nowhere to be seen. Something fell behind me with a thud, lifting dust off of the tiled floors. My eyes glazed over with fear as I turned around. Just a shelf. As soon as I let my breath out, a sharp pain pierced my shoulders, knocking me out for what seemed like hours.

    I woke up, this time outside a rundown house. A ratted scarecrow stood in the middle of an empty cornfield. My shoulders still ached with pain, but my wrists ached even more. My shaking hands were tied up with rusty barbed wire, and my sockless feet were dressed with thick rope. Struggling with the rope, the barbs sunk farther into my raw flesh. A menacing laugh cracked the silence. Startled, I looked up, face to face with a masked man. His emotionless face looked into my soul. He grabbed me by my throbbing neck, yanking the old rope off my feet as the barbs broke apart, falling into my vessels. I felt the veins and nerves tighten, ready to pop.

    “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, “ it’s your turn.” Throwing me into a pile of rotting wood, he took a hold of a bloody machete that was hidden in his black robes. I stood up, legs shaking, and ran away. I passed a field of dead corn- that wasn’t there a few minutes ago- sprinting on a gravel road. “Stop,” the masked man screamed at me. A sudden pain hit my leg as his machete flew through me.

    Falling to the ground, I grabbed for my gushing leg. I felt the warm blood pulse through my hand as it turned a horrid red. The shadowed figure took his time walking toward me, kicking pieces of gray gravel on his way. “Why are you running away from me? Why are you afraid?” he said.

    I tried to speak, but my voice had disappeared. I crawled towards a nearby tree. He grabbed a hold of my ankle, dragging me towards his bloodied weapon. “Why? Isn’t that a question I’ve asked you a lot tonight? I think it has been. Now what I don’t get is why you haven’t said one word, not even a scream. Maybe you’ve lost your pretty little voice, or you’re just too afraid and don’t want to add anymore torture to your list. Whatever the case is, you will die. I shall see to it.”

    He picked up the machete, dragging me farther down the road. The man dropped me, stabbing the machete two inches from my heart, making sure that my last minutes on earth was worse than hell itself. “You must excuse me, but I have run out of people to kill,” he said as he twisted the still machete. “I usually kill senseless teenagers. If you were one, you would’ve been dead the moment I grabbed your pale neck.”

    The man reached up and dropped his mask. What would look like a horrific site to normal people looked normal to me, and his face didn’t scare me. Neither did the rest of his body, or the bone shattering way he talked. “Why… Why aren’t you struggling to get away? Don’t I scare you? Doesn’t my real identity make you want to run away?” I looked up into his eyes, a pale light forming above his head. “You… you aren’t afraid…” He said. Out of the blue, he carefully pulled his machete out of me, steering clear of my heart. “You can’t die. You’re the only one who doesn’t fear me.” Carrying me like a fireman would carry a victim; he brought me to the motionless scare crow and started to bandage me up.