NIGHTSHEED

The sun was too bright for a day destined to end in shadows.

In Abu Dhabi, the heat usually felt like a warm embrace, but today it felt like a warning. The sky was a piercing, unforgiving blue, mocking the horror that was already beginning to coil in the base of my spine.

At the bonfire, the air was thick with the scent of expensive charcoal and sea salt. Victoria was a blur of blonde hair and expensive glass, her manicured thumb hovering over her screen as she curated her digital kingdom. She was the three-time prom queen, a girl who could ruin your reputation with a single "post" button.

Across from her, Jake—the neighborhood’s golden boy—was double-fisting beers with a loud, hollow laugh that echoed off the trees. He was a jerk, a classic frat-boy archetype, but in this circle, he was royalty.

Meanwhile, I sat in the corner of the clearing, a ghost in a denim jacket.

I was the silent observer, smiling and nodding, watching my "friends" celebrate a life I was only just beginning to borrow.

It was my first day as the "New Girl"—a title I had worn in three different cities, but this time felt different. I had walked into that classroom feeling the weight of thirty pairs of eyes, all judging the fabric of my clothes and the way I held my bag. By noon, I had been adopted by the elite:

Jake, the rich kid with a hair-trigger temper; Victoria, who lived through her camera lens;

Tracy, the quiet girlfriend who watched everything with eyes like a hawk;

and Mason, the boy with the luxury car and a smile that never quite reached his eyes.

They invited me to the woods.

I should have stayed in the light . I should have known the silence was wrong

The trees weren’t swaying; they were holding their breath

standing like sentinels waiting for the first drop of copper to hit the dirt.

When we arrived at the clearing, the world went cold. No music. No students. Just the rhythmic tick-tick-tick of Mason’s engine cooling and the sudden, suffocating realization that our phone signals had vanished into the ether. When Jake and Tracy vanished into the tree line to find the "others," the forest swallowed their footsteps without a sound.

We found Jake first. Or rather, we found the art project made of his remains.

He had been dismembered—carved into perfect, horrifying cubes like a puzzle the killer had grown bored of solving.

The blood didn't look real in the moonlight; it looked like dark ink. Victoria’s scream shattered the night, a high-pitched frequency that set my teeth on edge, but Mason just stood there. He didn't blink. He didn't even breathe.

As Victoria scrambled back to the cabin, her breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps, she didn't realize she was sprinting into her own grave.

She returned to the stairs moments later, stumbling, her eyes wide with a shock that transcended pain. Her hands were gone. Her life leaked onto the floorboards in rhythmic, wet thumps—a heartbeat outside of her body—before she finally collapsed into the dark.

Then, the mask emerged. NIGHTSHEED. A wooden face carved into a snarl, a relic from a 90s urban legend that had finally found its way home. But the man behind the wood wasn't a spirit; it was Mason’s father.

The one who had Killed my friends.

The one who was behind all those murders.

All the murders that had happened since i threw the body of masons brother into the lake.

"I know what you did," Mason whispered, his voice like a razor blade cutting through the humidity. "You found my brother's body by the bridge. You threw him in the lake like trash. You let him rot while we searched for months."

I hadn't killed his brother, but I had seen him. I had stayed silent to protect my own peace.

And in Mason’s world, silence is a death sentence. But Mason underestimated the "New Girl." He thought I was the prey. He didn't realize I was the predator waiting for an upgrade.

As he lunged with the machete, I wasn't a victim—I was an opportunist. I didn't just fight back; I took what was his. I left him bleeding in the dirt, his luxury car keys heavy and cold in my pocket.

I ran to the car, the engine roaring to life like a caged animal. That’s when I saw her.

Tracy was huddled in the backseat, her eyes wide and dry, staring at the blood on my hands. We didn't scream. We didn't cry for Jake or Victoria. We looked at each other in the rearview mirror and nodded.

A silent pact signed in the dark.

A silent pact that had costed me my life.

The police station was a formality, a stage where I performed my best "traumatized girl" act. But as soon as the sun dipped low the next evening, Tracy and I went to Mason’s house.

His mother didn't see the blade until it was already humming through the air. I wanted her to feel the weight of her son’s sins.

I took her sight first, making her children witnesses to a feast of horrors they would never forget. The sound of the mother's heart hitting the floor was the only music we needed.

I forced the children to stomp on their mother’s stomach, like it was Nothing but a trampoline, she brought a murderer into this world. It was her fault.

Then i forced the childern to eat their mother’s heart the very thing that gave them life, before I carved them into those same perfect cubes Mason’s father loved so much.

After creating a masterpiece of the mother and her children, i sliced open their mother’s stomach with the machete, and cutting the children into perfect cubes. I placed their cubed body parts in their mother’s stomach. And sewed her stomach back together.

Tracy stood beside me the whole time, handing me the tools with the steady hands of a surgeon's assistant.

Four years later, the "New Girl" is a ghost story whispered in the halls of the school.

When the moon is high and the signal dies, people don't look for Mason's father.

They look for me. And they look for Tracy.

Because I didn't just survive the Night. I became it.