HALLOWEEN 2025(Bryson) October 31st, 2025, the day of Halloween. The streets across the states are crowded with outfitted youngsters hoping to fill their pouches with sugary treats. Every door illuminated by a bulb is bombarded with hundreds of fists pleading for candy. The older participants of Halloween realize there is more to the holiday than simply candy. Often they will go out in horrifying costumes to terrorize innocent children. Others, like Luke, Monica, and Aaron, choose to explore abandoned automaton facilities. After all, there’s plenty across the barren lands that used to be full of wildlife and flora. Many teens venture inside these buildings despite the vast amount of caution signs and yellow tape that surrounds every facility. These once-booming factories and laboratories were thriving with tons of workers and researchers alike. After all the natural resources of Oklahoma dried up though, they simply laid off everybody and left everything to rot. The structures left behind house great curiosities that can easily lure anybody inside the gated lands.

Luke along with Aaron and Monica have been planning to explore the buildings long before Halloween began. The trio believed futuristic technology was somewhere deep inside a site that they named Site-03. Luke was mostly hesitant as they had only heard about this from school gossipers. But the thought of at least collecting something of intrigue had eventually interested him as well. Each person snuck out of their house at the start of midnight and headed to a gas station across the street from their school. Monica brought a car for the farther travel. Each person felt quite groggy. Aaron had begun to detest the idea. “Could we just go trick or treating instead? Maybe just watch a movie?” But the others rejected the idea. They were too far into the idea to turn back.

Once they parked into the dead grass next to the towering barbed gate of Site-03, they noticed that there were no openings anywhere on the gate. While this likely meant that nobody had entered before, it greatly hindered their plans. Luckily Monica brought a pair of bolt cutters. As Monica was in the process of cutting a hole in the gate, a sudden siren blared from within the building but almost immediately cut off. Luke was greatly worried now but Aaron tried calming him down. They walked towards a pair of rusted doors after Monica made a hole. One of the doors laid upon the floor with discoloration all over it. Soon they found a long downward path. Only Monica had a flashlight on her. Aaron and Luke forgot to bring theirs. As they continued walking down the path, Monica and Aaron realized that Luke was no longer with them. They thought of returning back to the car but the dark hallways intrigued the naive teenagers. Walls covered with elaborate broken wires and half-decomposed blueprints led to a bigger clue somewhere in the place. A sudden clunking sound was beginning to grow as they explored the halls.

Suddenly, Aaron was grabbed by a strange gray hand and was dragged away into the darkness. Monica ran every which way until she stumbled upon the corpse of Luke. His body was mangled and combined with wires and gears. Monica nearly threw up but continued running into any hall she could see. Soon, she found it. A large two-handed device with a needle tip. The whole thing was covered in dials, knobs, and wires. It was at that point that she saw the creature. A robotic humanoid of sorts. Its hands were heavily stained with red blood. The whole body was made of rusted metal bars. The plastic eyes were connected to partially severed wires. Before it leaped towards Monica, she pulled as many triggers on the device as she could as she aimed it. The horrid monster was hit with a spark that melted a part of its body. It squealed horribly in pain as it ran away into the darkness. Now Monica was left alone and traumatized in the deep dark facility. Her torture was just beginning…

A whole year had passed since that horrid holiday. From that day forward Monica had numerous misfortunes befall upon her. From the gutted corpse of her beloved cat in her backyard to the sudden sickness that had struck her mother, a sort of curse seemed to strike Monica’s heart day after day. She endured sleepless nights as the sounds of rummaging and shrieks stalked her ears from outside and she even attempted to investigate such sounds only to discover nothing more than odd patches of uprooted grass and scratch marks along her house walls. Monica knew what the cause was. Her nightmares flooded her mind with dreadful images of the malformed automaton. She knew she had to put an end to the malicious force, lest it plunge her life into eternal anguish.

She readied herself in intervals before the night of Halloween. The thought of returning to the factory had given her immense fear. To enter the abandoned factory housing a murderous robot, who would do such a thing? Yet that is what she had done with her friends. Perhaps she was the one who led Luke and Aaron to their doom, Monica thought. Such ideas clouded her next steps until she finally realized she must put an end to what she started.

8 pm, she drove to the factory’s gate and entered through the opening, then quickly rushed down the unsettling steps with a flashlight in her right hand. She gripped an electric baton tightly in the other hand as she gazed upon every hall for the machine. Suddenly she heard a loud siren-like screech from down one of the numerous hallways. She sprinted towards the source and raised her baton. Once she reached the source, however, she saw nothing but the corpse of the robot: lifeless and torn up. Could this be what terrorized her? Was there something else cursing her life? Monica was left feeling emptier than before. She thought she would enter to either succeed or die horribly, but now she was left with nothing but anger, sorrow, and regret.

---