A Halloween Massacre short story

Vacations were supposed to be something joyful and memorable; this vacation wasn’t like that at all. This vacation was the opposite. It was a traumatic nightmare. It was one that would haunt Veronica until her death.

When you watch horror and thriller movies you never expect something like that to happen to you. It’s something that happens to other people and to characters in fictional books. We forget that these things do happen. They can happen at any time. They can happen to you. 

Veronica was only gone for fifteen minutes. In that span of time a bloody massacre had happened and she was completely unaware that it could have happened. She could clearly remember laughing with her family before she left to run to the store. They were alive only fifteen minutes ago.

Now, they lay lifeless in the body bags as the ambulance drives them away to a morgue.

It had been dead silent when she returned. It only took a few seconds for her to discover that her family had been murdered; their throats messily slashed and wounds all over their bodies. Their blood leaking out and drying around them.

Her mother was the first she found. She was sitting in the brown reclining chair in the family room. Her father was a couple feet away from her on the floor. The detectives could determine that it was a blitz attack; they hadn’t expected it. They said the attacker must’ve slashed her mother’s throat then her father heard the commotion and came running in, but soon met his tragic fate by the edge of a blade.

His face was barely recognizable.

Veronica’s two younger sisters were outside behind the house; their bodies had been dumped into the small pond. They were floating face down. The water was blood red. The police guessed they had tried to run, but were unsuccessful.

She couldn’t stop picturing them flailing and choking on their own blood as they bled out. She only hoped that the killer was merciful enough to wait until after they died when he had cut out their eyeballs, chopped their fingers off and carved into their hearts.

The last thing Veronica found, which chilled her to the bone, were the words “Happy Halloween Veronica.”

It was written in their blood on the wall.

A few days later she received a package from an anonymous sender. In the package, she found her family’s fingers and eyeballs. There was also a note.

Trick or treat! You get a trick since you didn’t accept my offer to treat you to a dinner date. Tsk tsk. Wrong choice Veronica. Hope you enjoyed your Halloween.

There was no signature but Veronica knew who it was from. The massacre hadn’t been a random act of terror and worst of all the killer wasn’t just some stranger. She knew him. Now her family was dead just because she had refused to go out on a date with her best friend.