Photo Gallery

Strawberry Blonde

The first few photos were normal. A teenage girl with long blonde hair, a toothy smile, and some leftover acne from her preteen years.

She had taken a lot of selfies and stupid pictures with her friends.

Judging by her appearance alone, I figured I had been right in the first place, that she was a high schooler.

But why would a high schooler be doing this? Could she even pull it off?

She would have needed a pretty good fake ID to get into the club.

And I think I would have remembered seeing someone so young.

This just didn't make sense.

I continued scrolling. Pretty soon a guy started appearing in the pictures, with messy brown hair and a cheeky smile.

They seemed to be getting pretty close.

Her friends slowly disappeared from her pictures and were all replaced by who I could only assume was her boyfriend.

And then the pictures turned black.

That was it, just blackness. Assuming it was a dud, I went to the next picture.

Black.

We scrolled through a few like this. Anna shrugged.

"This is totally weird." She says with a crinkle between her eyebrows.

She seemed frustrated with this whole situation, but so was I.

I swiped right again, and the screen seemed to explode with colour.

I saw the blonde teen again, but this time she was lying on the ground.

Her hair actually looked like it had turned strawberry blonde. It took me a moment to register that it was matted with blood.

Her head was crooked to the side and her right arm was twisted at an odd angle behind her.

Blood had pooled around her and her formerly bright blue eyes had dulled and were staring out into nothing.

Dead.

Anna screamed as I threw the phone down and ran to the bathroom.

I threw up, I sat on the bathroom floor for a few minutes before I returned.

Anna was shaking and on the verge of tears, sitting on the couch, staring at the phone, still lying where I had thrown it a few minutes earlier.

"Are you okay?" I asked. Putting my hand on hers.

Anna nodded. "What is this?" she asked.

"I don't know," I puffed.

"What kind of sick bastard does this?!" She yells while standing.

I stand next to her, grabbing her shoulders.

"Calm down" I cooed.

"We have to find out who this girl is. And if her boyfriend did this." She says with a look of pity in her facial expression.

I nodded. Gingerly, I picked up the phone again.

I figured the remaining pictures might give us more clues.

Without looking, I swiped past the gory catalogue of the girl's death.

Next was another black picture. And another one.

And another.

My anticipation and anxiety grew with each swipe.

This time, it was the brown-haired boy who appeared first.

I have to admit, up until this point, he had been my first suspect.

She had spent all her time with him, after all.

But when I saw his body half smashed through the windshield of his car, glass sticking into his stomach and blood pouring out of his eyes, I gave up on that theory.

Looking at the screen, I felt his body would twitch any second, as death overcame him on the hood of his own car.

I kept swiping through the pictures.

The next picture was another girl, older than Blondie, with long black hair and crows' feet around her eyes.

She looked like she was in her mid-30s. It was a formal picture, with her looking directly into the camera, standing stiff and straight in business attire.

It looked like she'd taken it for her job.

Next.

A similar picture, but this time it was a man staring into the camera.

Colleagues?

A few more black swipes. Then I saw the woman lying on a patch of concrete, a knife stuck in her stomach, her face stretched out into a scream.

Her eyes were lifeless, but only just so. She'd died just before the picture was taken.

More black stills. Would this ever end?

Then I saw the man. At least, I was pretty sure it was the man.

As he hung from the rafters, his back faced the camera and I couldn't get a good look at his face.

I felt sick again.

I continued swiping through the picture gallery, but I was always greeted with the same sights.

A few normal pictures of a girl and a guy, and then their deaths.

Anna took the phone from me.

"ENOUGH, Amanda. This isn't helping." She yells, throwing the phone on the floor.

I could feel my panic growing. My first thought was the cops, I had to get them involved.

But even that made me nervous. This phone just 'happened' to show up outside my door with pictures of these disgusting murders.

No matter how I presented it, it made me sound suspicious.

Without a word, I picked up my phone and dialed my dad's number.

I got his voicemail, so I left a message explaining what had happened.

"Can you and your partners look into this for me? It's probably just a prank, but it's a good one." I sigh into the receiver.

I took a few deep breaths.

Okay. I have my dad in on this now, it's going to be okay.

I just need to be careful until he gets back to me. It's going to be ok.

Anna picked up the phone again.

"I'm going to look through the contacts. Maybe we can figure out who's doing this. Maybe there's a clue or something in here somewhere." She exclaims with a serious look plastered on her face.

I sat still while she thumbed through the phone.

To be honest, I didn't even want to look at the thing anymore.

I was scared out of my mind.