Your best friend calls you in the middle of the night asking you to help her move a body, it's hardly unreasonable to assume she's joking, or at the very least exaggerating. The body is a metaphor, meant to invoke the bonds of best friendship into immediate action. That's what I thought at fifteen when I made a promise to my best friend Carly Chan that should she ever need me to, I would help her move a body no questions asked.

It was a benign promise, one I'm sure many other people have made, so when Carly called me at 2am on a Tuesday morning saying: "I need you to help me move a body", I did not take it literally. In fact there was very little emotional reaction beyond annoyance. Being pulled from my bed on a work night was less than ideal not to mention super inconsiderate on Carly's part, although not entirely out of character.

The body was NOT a metaphor. The body was a man. A very real man. The man was not dead, thank goodness for small mercies, but he was bound, gagged, and blindfolded with an arrow sticking out of his thigh.

Standing over this bound and beaten man was my best friend Carly Chan, her black hair tied back into a tight ponytail, her face covered by a blue mask. She was holding one of her many excessively expensive compound bows, a blue one to match her mask of course.

"It's not what it looks like," she said like there was an obvious explication for this completely absurd situation.

"It looks like you dressed up like some kind of superhero shot this guy with an arrow, beat him unconscious, then called me because you realised you couldn't carry him on your own," I said with more composure than I thought I was capable of at that point in time. But then you really don't know how you will react to a situation like this until it actually happens, which is very unlikely. Apparently I am capable of ignoring the blood stained man lying at my feet so I can sass my best friend.

"Okay well then yeah it's exactly what it looks like," said Carly any pretence of innocence had disappeared from her tone. "But he totally deserved it I promise."

"At the risk of indulging your insanity, what reason did you have for shooting this man with an arrow?" I asked with a defeated sigh.

"This," began Carly proudly gesturing to the bloody body at her feet, "is Craig Parker."

I looked at the man lying at Carly's feet again, it was difficult to make out any distinguishing features in the dark but he did seem a similar shape to the man known as Craig Parker.

"That's Craig Parker," I repeated dumbfounded.

"Yup," replied Carly smiling through the word. She was clearly proud of herself.

"The Craig Parker that raped Rosie?" I asked for confirmation.

"Yup," repeated Carly with emphasis on the final letter of the word.

I looked at the man on the ground with a fresh set of eyes and suddenly his injuries didn't seem as severe. But they were still there, and it was still Carly that had inflicted them. Whether or not he deserved it Carly had gotten herself into quite the pickle.

"The Craig Parker that convinced the police, the media, and the general public that he was a victim of slander despite the overwhelming evidence against him?" I continued.

"I'm awesome right?" replied Carly clearly not judging my tone correctly.

"What the hell were you thinking?" I said to Carly in my loudest, angriest whisper. This was not a situation I wanted to draw attention to but I still needed to express my frustration. "That man is Teflon NOTHING sticks to him. He managed to turn himself into the victim and Rosie looked worse than he does right now after he was done with her."

"I know duh," said Carly as though I was the ridiculous one. "Why do you think I went all vigilante on his ass?"

"Because you're an actual idiot who has no idea how the real world works and just expects me to clean up every stupid mess you get yourself into," I said, more to myself than Carly. I'd given up trying to explain the limitations of reality to Carly a long time ago.

"Come on A, you can't be that surprised. Even you must have noticed that I've been spending a lot of time at the archery range lately."

"I just thought it was a weird rich people hobby, like polo." I said and it was the truth. As much as I love Carly, and I clearly I love her enough to go running in the middle of the night when she started acting like a certifiably insane person, the lives of the wealthy are something that I will never understand. All I knew was that their pastimes required a lot of money, and those bows do not come cheap so it seemed reasonable to assume archery was just another elitist fad.

"I don't play polo," replied Carly.

"Your cousin does," I said.

"Well I don't," said Carly.

"Oh I'm soooo sorry I didn't automatically assume your revitalised interest in archery was part of your path to heroism. But come on, it's not like vigilantism is the natural reaction to injustice," I said.

"Maybe it should be," said Carly with finality. And that was that, I knew the discussion was over. I could either help or not and although I was still generally opposed to her entire thought process she was still my best friend. Of course I was going to help.

"So what now?" I asked because there was nothing left to do except deal with the situation. The situation being the body that Carly needed help moving. "Do we bury the body?"

"We can't bury him! He's NOT DEAD," said Carly reeling back in horror.

"Not yet, obviously we kill him before we bury him. It's not like we're going to bury him alive," I said and I'm as shocked as anyone to say that I was being completely genuine. Death seemed the logical conclusion to violent kidnapping.

"We're not going to KILL HIM," said Carly.

"Why not?" I asked.

"I really don't think I should have to answer that question," said Carly.

"You're the one that shot him with an arrow," I reminded her.

"IN THE LEG," yelled Carly.

"I can see that you left the arrow there for everyone to see," I said a little confused by Carly's response. She was the one that started this violence after all, and now she was judging me for suggesting we take it to its logical conclusion.

"I left the arrow in there because I don't want him to bleed out. Why would I tie him up if I was going to kill him?" she asked.

"Why would you shoot him with an arrow in the first place?" I replied.

"Because he RAPED Rosie," she said.

"And that's why we kill him," I said.

In a moment of beautiful serendipity, Craig Parker woke from unconsciousness just as I suggested we kill him. It took him a moment to get with the program but once he realised what was happening he began to scream through his gag. It was a rather distressing sound so I don't think I should be held entirely responsible for my response.

"He's awake! Kill him!" I screamed.

"Oh my god. No," said Carly.

"Well I'm not killing him," I said. "This is your mess."

"For the last time no one is killing him," said Carly.

"But he's awake," I said.

"Relax he's not getting out of those ties any time soon. I tested them myself," said Carly in a smug tone.

"I don't think I want to know this but how did you test the cable ties that you somehow acquired without question?" I asked as a distraction from the distressing noises coming from the man at our feet.

"I told the guy at Bunnings I was getting into BDSM," replied Carly with a shrug. "He was super helpful."

"Great, that's great, we're going to go to jail but hey at least you met a nice kinkster," I said and that's when the panic fully set it. It's amazing I lasted that long really, honestly I think I might have been sleep walking for the first half of this experience.

Carly placed her hand on my chest and turned my eyes to meet her, a natural response to a familiar situation.

"Breath babe," said Carly in what she assumes is a calming tone. "I have a plan."

"You have a plan," I spat at Carly pulling away as my panic morphed into anger. "The girl who thought it was a good idea to shoot someone with an arrow has a plan. Please forgive me for not being reassured by that."

"At least I'm not the one who went to the murder place," she said.

"Sure, make me the bad guy. I'm sure his face is just naturally that lovely mix of purple and blue, that had NOTHING to do with you," I said, raising my voice so Carly could hear me over the muffled cries that were getting louder from the ground below.

"I had to get him to talk somehow," said Carly.

"Obviously, because everyone needs to have a good chat with their kidnap victim," I said.

Carly responded wordlessly by raising an eyebrow and waiting for me to get where she was going with this.

"Wait. You got him to confess," I wondered out loud genuinely surprised by Carly's forethought.

"Better," she said proudly pulling a phone out of her pocket. "I got him to confess on camera. The vid's compressed and ready to go live on every single one of his social media accounts with the push of button, gosh I love living in the age of the Internet."

"Alright, you might be a little bit awesome," I said with a small smile.

"I knew you'd come around," said Carly.

"But if you have it all figured out then why am I here?" I said not even bothering to hide the exasperation in my voice. I decided to focus on anger and frustration as a way of distracting myself from the muffled whimpers Craig was omitting. It worked surprisingly well actually.

"I told you. I need you to help me move the body," said Carly.

Looking around, this seemed like a strange request. We were on the edge of a parking lot, but the lot was mostly empty. Carly's car wasn't here; I knew that without looking because it was sitting at home my driveway where I left it. There was no way we could carry the body all the way to a hospital.

Carly sighed and continued, "the ambulance will have to find him, so I want to move him to his car over there."

"Why didn't you tie him up over there then?" I asked.

"He ran," she replied.

"I'm sure the ambulance officers will find him here eventually," I said.

"Not fast enough to stop the bleeding," said Carly.

"He's not bleeding that bad," I said.

"He will be when I pull the arrow out," she said.

Before I could respond Carly handed me a pair on plastic gloves and moved towards Craig Parker's bound feet continuing: "I know you're upset and I promise you can yell at me all you want when we get home but right now we've got to get him to the car so we can upload the video, call an ambulance and leave."

I nodded because it was a response at least, I was already in too far anyway. I moved to the head of Craig's now violently writhing body thinking that we probably should have done this while he was unconscious. Somehow I managed to get my arms under his shoulders as Carly got hold of his feet but when we tried to lift nothing happened. Well the top and bottom half of his body moved upwards a little but the middle just stayed where it was glued to the ground.

At this point it is relevant to mention that neither myself nor Carly are over 5'5" and while Carly had been working on her superhero physique for some time I regarded exercise as a form of torture that should have be banned by the Human Rights Act. To say that I was out of shape was an understatement. Basically I have the upper body strength of a dead goldfish and should be the last person anyone calls when they need to lift an 80-kilogram body.

"Maybe we should switch places," suggested Carly.

We switched, the result was the same. That body was not going anywhere.

That probably should have been my breaking point but instead of crying or screaming I started to laugh. Loudly. Obnoxiously even. Not a scoff or a giggle but a full on guffaw and once I started I couldn't stop. I looked at Carly and thought for a moment that she was going to slap me because that's what people in the movies do when someone gets hysterical, instead she dropped Craig's legs and joined in. There was nothing else to do, except maybe avoid shooting people with arrows in the future, but I wasn't going to mention that.

"Well. This is awkward," said an unexpected voice knocking the laughter right out of me.

My eyes shot towards the voice, which belonged to a tall figure standing in the shadow of the trees. It was too dark to make out many distinguishing features but one thing was clear, the figure was wearing a mask.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said throwing my arms up in despair.