I was 16 when this all happened. We lived in the Arizona desert back when we still lived on the farm. Yet, i still wonder what the hell we experienced all those years ago.

It started subtly, like most things out here in the quiet hum of the Arizona desert. You live out here long enough, you get used to the strange sounds – the coyotes’ evening chorus, the distant rumble of a passing train, the wind carrying dust devils across the mesa.

We raised goats, grew some tough, drought-resistant crops. The nearest town was a good hour’s drive, which suited us just fine.

The first sign was the dogs. We had three working dogs, loyal and fierce. Usually, they were a symphony of barks at anything that moved too close to the property line – javelina, bobcats, even the occasional lost hiker. But a few nights back, they went from their usual boisterous alerts to a low, guttural whine that felt different. It wasn’t anger or aggression; it was pure, unadulterated fear. They huddled by the back door, tails tucked, ears flat, staring out into the moonless blackness of the desert beyond our fence line. Their hackles weren’t raised; they were just… frozen. I’ve seen those dogs face down rattlesnakes and mountain lions without a flinch. This was different.

"What is it, guys?" I murmured as my older brother and I went to check on the goats in their pens, checking to see if the fences were still intact.

"Everything alright?" my brother asked, shining a flashlight from ahead of me, standing already at the fence.

"Dogs are riled up." I said simply looking around.

"Could be Coyotes. We had problems with them a few days now." he replied.

I shined my heavy-duty flashlight out. Nothing. Just the endless, thorny expanse of creosote and saguaro cacti. The air was still, too still. Even the crickets seemed to quiet down.

The next morning, my brother and I found tracks. Not coyote, not dog. They were vaguely canine, but too large, and there was something off about the gait. Almost... bipedal in places, like whatever made them sometimes walked on two legs. They led right up to the perimeter fence, paused, and then veered sharply away into the brush, disappearing. We thought they would have belonged to wolves, but they were quite rare in these parts. Heck, seeing one was a miracle.

We showed our dad the tracks, he simply told us not to tell our mother so she didn't have to worry much since she had been dealing with hypertension for awhile then. His face, though confirmed the fact that they couldn't be wolves. Our dogs have seen wolves, and they never reacted like that to one like they did the previous night.

That afternoon, while my brother and I were helping our dad fix a broken irrigation valve near the back forty, we heard it. A sound that couldn't make sense.

It was our mother's voice.

"Honey? Boys? Are you out here?"

"Yeah, mom. We're here." my brother replied, standing still and pausing to listen.

"Okay," the voice replied, closer than it should have been, almost right behind the line of tall salt cedar bushes twenty feet from us.

My dad walked over to the bushes. "What do you need, baby?"

Silence.

He pushed the dry branches aside. Nothing. Just the dirt, the humming heat, and the slow drip of water from the leaking valve.

Dad looked at us before pointing at me, who had my phone on me.

"Call your mother."

I quickly pulled out my phone with shaking hands and dialed her up, waiting for her to pick up.

"Yes, honey? You need something?" mom said, her voice clear and a bit annoyed.

A cold tremor ran down my spine. "W...we thought you called us. Just now. Out by the back field."

"No," she said, firm. "I haven't left the kitchen all morning. You must have misheard the wind."

I ended the call before looking at my brother and dad, who waited with expectant eyes.

"She said she was in the kitchen all morning. Never left the house." I said with a shaky voice.

"How's that possible? We just heard her." my brother said.

"Let's just pack up." my dad chimed in, he looked calm but I knew he was freaked out too. "Think we're done for the day."

I tried to shake it off, blaming the heat. But I know my mom's voice. And the thing that terrified me was that the voice I heard, though an accurate mimicry, lacked the little, familiar cracks and hums that usually characterize her voice when she's talking outdoors. It was too perfect. Like a recording played back without static.

As the days went on, a day came when one of the sturdiest yearling bucks, a black one named Samson, was missing.

My brother and I volunteered to go look for the buck, giving our dad the free time he needed to finish up the valve. Though, he let us take his rifle as a precaution because he didn't want us defenseless out there.

We followed the paths that were grooved into the hard ground as rock crunched beneath our boots, as we walked. It was quite hot by 11 am already, with the cicadas going crazy and the heat of the sun blazing down on us.

After we trekked down the path for a good 30 minutes, I started to slow down at some point and realized something was off. I couldn't see it but I could feel eyes on us, I turned to look around but there was nothing. Just the silent breeze sifting through the bushes, even the cicadas started to quiet down which was unusual.

"Keep up." my older brother said way ahead of me, he was turned toward me, watching me as I sped up.

"Sorry."

We walled for a few more minutes before we started to hear the buzz of flies to our left off the trail, we stopped and listened.

"You hear that?" he asked glancing at me.

"Yeah. Flies."

We got off the trail and rounded a large rock.

What we saw still shakes me to my core. It was Samson, our goat buck and he lay on the ground on his side. We knew he was dead because he was disembowled and all its guts were outside, what disturbed me most was how the organs were placed around its corpse in an imperfect circle. Bodily fluids soaked the ground, along the circle of organs and it made me gag, my brother merely touched my back.

"My God." he said.

"What the fuck does this?" I asked in a heavy voice.

"Homeless Hitch hiker, maybe. But I didn't see anyone." he said, I could see his eyes moving rapidly trying to rationalize what he was seeing. Trying to find an explanation, any explanation.

Our thoughts were cut off by the yips and cries of coyotes, we looked around at that but couldn't see anything. They sounded distant at first, bit then they started to come closer.

"That's our cue to leave. We need to get away from this body now." my brother yelled as he grabbed me and ran.

We ran down the trail, but we were caught in a circle of sounds. The cries of the coyotes sounded like they were coming from everywhere and surrounding us, like they were trying to disorient us.

"Don't stop!" my brother yelled, as I kept up to him as I ran for my life.

We ran past two rock like boulders on either side of the trail, then I decided to turn and look back.

A figure jumped onto one of the rocks and stood in a crouched position, its head was locked toward us and I knew it was watching us as we ran. The figure was wearing a fur pelt type of thing on its back, and the pelt had eyes and ears of...something on its head. The figure had long black hair that I could see under the pelt that it had on, and it looked to be female from what I could see. Her fingers were grey from what I could tell was maybe ash or something, there was also a feather attached to one of its forearms.

I saw its mouth move and the sounds that she made were horrific, sounds that no normal human could produce. The disorienting coyote sounds we heard were coming from her, and it was still deafening.

To my horror, she jumped off the rock. And started to move.

It moved like something that has never properly learned how to use joints, transitioning from standing to a quadrupedal run in one sickening, fluid motion. It was dark, a smudge against the dying light. But then, it got up and started to full sprint at us and I screamed in terror as I saw this thing, pretending to be a woman, start to close the gap on us quickly, at a speed that was impossible.

My brother reacted on instinct and yelled before firing the rifle, the thing jumped over us and ran ahead into the nearby bushes before turning to shriek at us with that horrible sound from earlier. It then took off into the bushes without rustling even one bush straw.

"I hit it! Holy cow, I hit it!" my brother exclaimed in relief and panic.

I snapped out of my thoughts and saw him pointing at the ground, I looked down and saw blood on the ground before it traveled along the ground in the direction of where the thing disappeared. The blood was strange, it looked red from an angle but it looked black from another and it scared me even more.

"Let's go! Let's go!" my brother said roughly pulling me.

We got home eventually and told our parents everything that happened, our mom got up and left the kitchen after we were done explaining and our dad merely sighed and sat quietly. They never responded to our explanations, only the months following that event, we moved away from the farm and sold the goats. We never got back there ever since and our parents urged us to never talk about it ever again.

But sometimes I cant still help but wonder what the hell that thing was.