Part 1

My name is Jake, and I’ve spent my entire life navigating the brutal, freezing wilderness of Northern Alaska. I’m a guide. I know the snow, I know the silence, and I know the dangers. But nothing—absolutely nothing—could have prepared me for April 7th.

It was supposed to be a standard scouting run. Me and two other local guys, Mike and Sam, were trekking near the coastline, looking for seal movement or caribou tracks. The air was biting, that specific kind of cold that freezes the moisture in your nose instantly. We were approaching a massive ridge of ice and snow that blocked our view of the frozen ocean below.

I remember the silence. Usually, you hear the wind or the cracking of ice. That morning, it was d*ad silent.

Sam, being the youngest and most eager, ran up the ridge first to get a look at the coastline. I watched him crest the hill. He stood there for a second, his silhouette against the gray sky. Then, he froze. He didn’t wave us over. He didn’t point out an animal. He just stood there, staring down, and then he crouched low, terrified, and frantically signaled for us to get down.

I felt my stomach drop. In the Alaskan bush, that reaction usually means a polar bear or a pack of wolves. Mike and I scrambled up the snow, keeping low, hearts pounding against our ribs. We crawled up next to Sam and peered over the edge.

My brain couldn’t process what I was seeing.

Down below, on the frozen shoreline, there was a procession. It wasn’t animals. It was men. About forty of them. They looked like Americans—hikers or explorers—but their clothes were tattered rags, hanging off skeletal frames.

But it was the way they moved that made my blood run cold. They weren’t walking; they were shambling. They jerked forward with uncoordinated, puppet-like movements. Their heads hung low or stared blankly ahead. Even from this distance, through my binoculars, I could see their skin was a mottled black and blue, ravaged by frostbite and something else… something sickening.

They looked like the walking d*ad.

And they were dragging something. A massive, heavy sled covered with a dark tarp. They pulled it with a grim determination, ignoring the biting wind, ignoring each other.

“Are they… are they drunk?” Mike whispered, his voice trembling.

“No,” I whispered back, gripping my rifle tighter. “They’re sick. Or insane.”

We watched in horror as one of the men in the back of the line suddenly stopped. He started writhing, his body twisting in unnatural spasms. He let out a scream—a guttural, broken sound that echoed off the ice walls. It wasn’t a scream for help; it was a scream of pure madness.

Then, he collapsed into the snow.

What happened next is the image that wakes me up in a cold sweat. The other men didn’t rush to help him. They didn’t panic. They didn’t even show an ounce of emotion. The men pulling the sled simply stopped, turned around, and dragged the heavy cargo over to the fallen man.

They pulled back the tarp.

Underneath wasn’t gear. It wasn’t supplies. It was a pile of bodies. Stiff, frozen human bodies.

They picked up the man who had just collapsed—who might have still been breathing—and tossed him onto the pile like a sack of flour. They covered it back up, turned around, and kept marching into the endless white void.

We lay there on that ridge, paralyzed by fear. We were witnessing a nightmare unfolding in real time. We knew we should help, maybe offer food, but every instinct in our bodies screamed that these men were beyond help. They were dangerous.

We waited until they were miles away before we dared to move. But curiosity, that fatal flaw, got the better of us. We decided to track them from a distance, to see where they had come from.

We backtracked their footprints for hours until we found their abandoned campsite nestled against a rock face. It was eerie. A fire pit was there, cold and dead. Tools were scattered around—expensive gear, things you wouldn’t leave behind if you were trying to survive.

But sitting right in the center of the camp, sitting over the cold ashes of the fire, was a large metal cooking pot with the lid still on.

I don’t know why I walked toward it. Maybe I wanted to see what they had been eating, to see if they were starving.

I stepped into the silent camp. The wind whistled through the rocks. My hand trembled as I reached out for the cold metal handle of the lid.

“Jake, don’t,” Sam warned from behind me.

But I had to know.

I lifted the lid. And what I saw inside broke me. It shattered my understanding of humanity. I reeled back, gagging, dropping the lid into the snow with a loud clang.

Part 2

I stared into that pot, and for a solid ten seconds, my brain simply refused to accept the visual data it was receiving. It was a defense mechanism, plain and simple. A psychological wall slamming down to protect my sanity.

Inside the pot, floating in a sludge of gray, half-frozen broth, wasn’t seal meat. It wasn’t caribou. It wasn’t even a desperate, starving man’s attempt to boil leather boots for sustenance.

It was a human jawbone.

The teeth were still attached—molars capped with expensive dental work, gold and ceramic fillings glinting dully in the flat, gray light. Strips of pale, boiled flesh still clung to the bone. It had been cracked open, split down the center, presumably to access the marrow inside.

The smell hit me a second later—a thick, coppery, rancid odor that cut through the crisp, sterile air of the Alaskan tundra.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t gasp. I just stumbled back, my boots catching on a buried rock, and fell hard onto the snow. The metal lid slipped from my numb fingers and clattered against the pot, the sound ringing out like a dinner bell in the silent wilderness.

“Jake? What is it?” Sam’s voice was high, tight with panic. He stepped forward, curiosity warring with fear.

“Don’t look,” I choked out, scrambling backward on my hands and heels, kicking up snow. “Sam, do not look in there!”

But it was too late. Mike, the toughest guy I knew—a man who had field-dressed thousand-pound moose without flinching—leaned over. He took one look, turned pale as a sheet, and violently vomited into the snow.

“Oh god,” Mike heaved, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand. “That was… that was a person, Jake. That was a f*cking person.”

The reality of the situation crashed down on us like an avalanche. The “walkers” we had seen on the ridge, the stumbling figures dragging that heavy sled… they weren’t just lost hikers. They weren’t just starving. They were predators. They were eating their own dead.

“We have to go,” I whispered, scrambling to my feet. “Right now. We have to move.”

“We need to call the Troopers,” Sam stammered, fumbling for the satellite phone clipped to his vest. “We need a chopper.”

“Do it while we walk,” I ordered, grabbing his shoulder and spinning him around. “If they come back… if they realize they left their ‘meal’ behind… we are next.”

We didn’t walk; we ran. We retraced our steps, putting as much distance between us and that nightmare campsite as our legs could handle. The snow was deep, thigh-high in places, sucking at our energy, burning our lungs. Every shadow looked like a lurching figure. Every gust of wind sounded like that guttural, broken scream we had heard earlier.

Sam tried the sat-phone over and over, but we were in a deep dead zone, tucked under the magnetic interference of the northern ridge. All he got was static.

“Where did they come from?” Mike asked, his voice breathless as we crested a rise about three miles away from the camp. He was scanning the horizon with his binoculars, looking for any sign of pursuit. “There’s no roads out here, Jake. No airstrips. You can’t just walk forty men into this part of the bush without support.”

“I don’t know,” I said, leaning hands on knees, gasping for air. “Maybe a plane crash? But we would have seen smoke. We would have heard the ELT beacon.”

“Look,” Sam said, pointing toward the coastline.

I stood up and followed his finger. In the chaos of spotting the walkers earlier, we had been focused on the land. But now, looking further out onto the frozen bay, we saw it.

It was a ship.

But not just any ship. This wasn’t a fishing trawler or a rusted-out barge. Even from miles away, locked in the grip of the pack ice, it looked sleek. It was massive, painted a dark, matte gray with orange trim. It looked like a high-end, privately owned expedition vessel—the kind billionaires take to the Arctic to pretend they are explorers, sipping champagne while looking at polar bears through bulletproof glass.

It was sitting completely still, listing slightly to the port side, trapped in the ice about half a mile offshore.

“That’s where they came from,” I said, the realization hitting me. “That’s their base.”

“It looks… intact,” Mike muttered, lowering his binoculars. “No smoke. No damage. Why would they leave?”

“Let’s find out,” I said, a dark curiosity taking hold again. “If there’s a radio on that ship that works, we can call for help. And maybe… maybe there are weapons.”

We made our way down to the ice. The bay was frozen solid, a chaotic landscape of jagged pressure ridges and smooth, wind-polished sheets of ice. We walked in single file, weapons drawn. I had my .30-06 rifle, Mike had a shotgun, and Sam had a heavy-caliber revolver. Against a polar bear, we were okay. Against forty cannibalistic lunatics? I wasn’t so sure.

As we got closer to the ship, the silence grew heavier. The vessel was named The Northern Star. It was magnificent, easily 150 feet long, with a reinforced hull designed for ice-breaking. But it was dead. No lights. No generator hum. No movement on the deck.

A gangway had been lowered to the ice, covered in snow. It was like an invitation.

“This feels wrong,” Sam whispered as we stood at the bottom of the ramp. “This feels like a trap.”

“We need a radio, Sam,” I reminded him, though my gut was twisting in knots. “We go to the bridge, we make the call, we lock the doors, and we wait for the cavalry. We don’t touch anything else.”

We crept up the gangway, the metal groaning softly under our boots. The deck was littered with debris—expensive gear abandoned in haste. A high-tech parka here, a dropped camera there. It looked like an evacuation, but a chaotic one.

I tried the door to the main cabin. It was unlocked.

We stepped inside, and the cold followed us, but the wind died away. The interior of The Northern Star was warmer than the outside, insulated by thick walls and double-paned glass.

And it was opulent.

We were standing in what looked like a lounge. Mahogany paneling, leather sofas, a bar stocked with crystal decanters. It was a floating palace. But it had been trashed. Cushions were slashed. Furniture was overturned. There were dark stains on the carpet—dried bl*od, black and crusty.

“Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone onboard?”

Silence. Just the creaking of the ship shifting in the ice.

“Check the bridge,” I told Mike. “Sam, stay at the door. Watch the ice. If you see them coming back, you yell.”

Mike and I moved deeper into the ship. The air inside smelled stale, a mix of unwashed bodies, alcohol, and something sweet and rotting. We passed crew cabins with doors hanging open. Inside, bunks were tossed, clothes scattered.

It didn’t make sense. If they had evacuated, why leave this shelter? Why go out into the -30 degree weather to live in tents and eat… each other?

We found the galley (the kitchen) and the mess hall on the second deck. This is where the mystery turned into something completely baffling.

The tables in the mess hall were set. Silverware, china plates, crystal glasses. There was food on the tables—or what was left of it. Moldy bread, dried-out stews in bowls, bottles of wine half-drunk. It looked like they had been in the middle of a meal when something happened.

“Jake,” Mike whispered, standing by the door to the pantry. “Look at this.”

I walked over. The pantry door was wide open. Inside, floor-to-ceiling shelves were packed with food.

I’m not talking about military rations. I’m talking about gourmet survival food. Canned goods, vacuum-sealed meats, sacks of rice, flour, dried fruits, cases of expensive bottled water. There was enough food in this room to feed a crew of fifty for two years.

I grabbed a can of peaches. It was heavy, sealed, perfect.

“They didn’t starve,” Mike said, his voice shaking. “They aren’t starving, Jake. Look at all this. They have tons of food. Why are they eating people out on the ice when they have this?”

This was the question that made my skin crawl. The narrative in my head—the tragic story of a shipwrecked crew running out of supplies and turning to cannibalism—shattered. They had chosen to leave. They had chosen to abandon a warm, food-filled ship to wander the freezing wasteland.

“It’s madness,” I said quietly. “Something drove them crazy. It has to be.”

“We need to get to the bridge,” Mike said, backing out of the pantry. “I don’t like being in here. I feel like I’m being watched.”

We hurried up two flights of stairs to the bridge. The view from up here was incredible—a panoramic sweep of the frozen bay. I could see our footprints trailing back to the shore. I could see the distant ridge where we had spotted the walkers.

The bridge was a wreck. Monitors were smashed. Charts were torn down. The radio equipment—our lifeline—had been destroyed. Someone had taken a fire axe to the console. Wires sparked sporadically from the ruined dashboard.

“They destroyed it,” I said, slamming my hand on the console. “They didn’t want to be rescued. Or someone didn’t want them to call for help.”

“Jake,” Mike said, holding up a thick, leather-bound book he had found on the floor. “The Captain’s log.”

We huddled together in the fading light of the afternoon, opening the book. The handwriting started out neat, precise—the mark of a professional mariner.

Entry: October 12th. Expedition proceeding as planned. Ice levels higher than expected, but The Northern Star is holding. Guests are in high spirits.

We flipped forward.

Entry: November 15th. We are locked in. The ice came too fast. We will have to winter here. Supplies are plentiful. We will wait for the thaw in spring. Morale is good.

Then, the handwriting started to change. It became jagged, rushed. The ink was pressed harder into the page.

Entry: January 4th. The sickness is spreading. It’s not the flu. It’s something else. The men are irritable. Fights breaking out in the mess hall over nothing. Smith broke Jones’s nose over a game of cards. The guests are scared.

Entry: January 20th. Paranoia. Everyone is whispering. The Chief Engineer claims he hears voices in the ventilation. I’ve confiscated the firearms, locked them in the armory. I feel it too. A fog in my head. Hard to focus. My stomach hurts constantly.

Entry: February 14th. Valentine’s Day. There is no love here. Only hate. We are being poisoned. I know it. Someone is poisoning the water. Or the air. I can’t trust the doctor. He smiles too much. His teeth look gray.

I flipped toward the end. The pages were stained with grease and something dark that looked like blood. The writing was barely legible, scrawled in huge, looping letters.

Entry: March 2nd. THE SHIP IS CURSED. It breathes. The walls are closing in. We have to get out. We have to leave the food. The food is part of it. The food is the poison. We need fresh meat. We need the purity of the cold. We are leaving tomorrow. I will lead them. We will find the ancients. We will cleanse ourselves.

Entry: March 3rd. (The final entry).

They are hungry. I am hungry. God forgive us.

I closed the book, my hands shaking. “The food,” I whispered. “He thought the food was poisoning them.”

“Was it?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe cabin fever just snapped their minds. But they left a perfectly good ship because they thought it was trying to k*ll them.”

Suddenly, the ship groaned. A loud, metallic CLANG echoed through the hull, coming from deep below us.

Mike and I froze.

“That wasn’t the ice,” Mike whispered, raising his shotgun. “That was a door.”

“Sam,” I hissed into my radio (we had short-range walkies that worked line-of-sight). “Sam, do you see anything outside?”

“Negative,” Sam’s voice crackled back, sounding tense. “Nothing on the ice. Why?”

“We heard a noise inside. We’re not alone in here.”

“Get out,” Sam urged. “Just get out now.”

“We have to check,” I said, though every instinct screamed to run. “If there’s a survivor, someone who hid… they might have a working handheld radio. Or keys to the snowmobiles in the hold.”

We moved out of the bridge, heading down. The sound had come from the lowest deck—the crew quarters and the cargo hold.

As we descended the stairs, the air got colder. The smell got worse. It wasn’t just rot anymore; it was the sharp, ammonia scent of urine and filth.

We reached the bottom corridor. It was dimly lit by emergency red backup lights that were flickering, casting long, dancing shadows against the steel walls.

At the end of the hall, a heavy steel door—the kind used for secure storage or a brig—was dented outward. Someone had been banging on it from the inside.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The rhythmic pounding started up again. It was slow, weak.

I signaled Mike to cover me. I walked slowly toward the door. There was a small, reinforced glass window at eye level.

I stepped up to it and peered inside.

It was a small room, maybe a secure storage locker. Sitting in the corner, huddled under a torn blanket, was a man. He wasn’t like the walkers outside. He wasn’t dressed in rags. He was wearing a dirty but intact officer’s uniform. He was emaciated, his face a skull with skin draped over it.

He looked up, and his eyes locked onto mine. They were wild, bloodshot, surrounded by dark bruises.

“Help,” he croaked. The word was barely a whisper.

“I’m going to open it,” I told Mike.

I grabbed the heavy latch and heaved. It was rusted or frozen, but with a grunt of effort, I wrenched it upward. The door swung open with a screech of metal on metal.

The smell rolling out of that room was unbearable.

“Stay back!” the man shrieked, scrambling deeper into the corner as soon as the door opened. He held up a hand, his fingers trembling. “Don’t touch me! Are you real? Are you real?”

“I’m real,” I said, keeping my voice calm, hands visible. “I’m Jake. I’m a guide. We’re here to help you.”

“Did they send you?” the man whispered, his eyes darting around the room, looking at shadows that weren’t there. ” The Captain? Did he send you to bring me to the sled?”

“No,” I said. “We saw the sled. We aren’t with them. We want to get you out of here.”

The man started to laugh. It was a dry, hacking sound that turned into a cough. “Out? There is no out. The lead. It’s in the lead.”

“The lead?” I asked, stepping closer. “What do you mean?”

He pointed a shaking finger upwards, toward the mess hall above us. “The cans. The solder on the cans. It was cheap. They bought cheap supplies for the expedition to save money. We ate it. Every day. For months. It tastes like… metal. Sweet metal.”

My blood ran cold. I knew exactly what he was talking about. It was the same thing that happened to the Franklin Expedition almost two hundred years ago. Lead poisoning. It doesn’t just k*ll you physically; it destroys your mind. It causes aggression, paranoia, hallucinations. It rewires your brain until you aren’t human anymore.

The men outside weren’t zombies. They were victims of severe, heavy metal poisoning. They were literally out of their minds, driven into a primal state of violence by the very food meant to keep them alive.

“We have to get you out,” I said, reaching for him.

“No!” he screamed, recoiling. “It’s too late for me. I can feel it. The worms in my brain. But you… you have to run.”

“Why?” Mike asked from the doorway.

The man’s eyes went wide, staring past me, staring at the open door.

“Because they didn’t leave everyone,” the man whispered. “They left the hunters behind to guard the ship.”

I spun around.

From the darkness of the corridor behind Mike, a shadow detached itself from the wall. It was huge. A man, but massive, wearing a butcher’s apron over his parka, stained black with old blood. He was holding a fire axe.

Mike didn’t even have time to raise his shotgun. The man didn’t roar; he didn’t scream. He just lunged with terrifying, silent speed.

“Mike, look out!” I screamed.

The handle of the axe slammed into Mike’s chest, knocking the wind out of him and sending him flying backward into the steel wall. The shotgun skittered across the floor.

I raised my rifle, but the corridor was too tight. The giant man—the Butcher—was on me in a second. He swatted the barrel of my rifle aside with a strength that felt inhuman. His hand, thick and calloused, clamped around my throat.

He lifted me off the ground.

I kicked, clawing at his wrists. His face was inches from mine. His skin was gray, his gums bleeding, his teeth rotting out of his head. But his eyes… there was no humanity in them. Just a burning, chemical rage.

He threw me. I flew through the air and crashed into the metal shelving inside the cell, landing in a heap next to the starving officer.

The Butcher stepped into the room, blocking the only exit. He raised the axe high above his head.

“Meat,” he grunted. The word sounded wet, bubbling up from a ruined throat.

I scrambled for my pistol, my sidearm, but the holster was pinned under my hip.

BANG.

The gunshot was deafening in the small steel room.

The Butcher jerked forward, a hole appearing in his shoulder. He roared—a sound of pure fury—and turned.

Mike was on the ground in the hallway, gasping for air, holding his backup pistol with shaking hands.

BANG. BANG.

Two more shots. One hit the doorframe; the other caught the Butcher in the thigh.

The giant stumbled but didn’t fall. He turned his attention back to Mike, raising the axe again, limping toward him.

“Close the door!” the starving officer screamed from beside me.

I didn’t think. I just reacted. I lunged forward, grabbing the heavy steel handle of the cell door. I pulled with everything I had.

The Butcher realized what I was doing and spun back around, swinging the axe. The blade sparked against the metal jamb, missing my fingers by an inch.

I slammed the door shut.

But we were on the inside.

“No, no, no!” I yelled, fumbling with the latch. But this was a brig. It locked from the outside.

Through the small reinforced window, I saw the Butcher turn back to Mike. Mike was scrambling backward, trying to get away, but he was hurt.

“Mike!” I screamed, pounding on the glass.

The Butcher loomed over Mike. He raised the axe.

And then, a sound cut through the ship. A siren. A loud, piercing alarm began to blare, accompanied by flashing red strobe lights.

The Butcher froze. He looked up at the ceiling, confused. The noise seemed to hurt him; he dropped the axe and covered his ears, howling in pain. The sensory overload from the lead poisoning made the loud noise unbearable for him.

“Sam,” I whispered. “Sam tripped the alarm.”

Taking advantage of the distraction, Mike rolled to the side, grabbed his shotgun, and scrambled up the stairs, disappearing from view.

“Mike, get out! Run!” I yelled, though he couldn’t hear me through the heavy steel door.

The Butcher, still clutching his head, stumbled out of the corridor, fleeing from the noise, disappearing into the darkness of the cargo hold.

I slumped against the door, sliding down to the floor. We were safe from the Butcher for the moment, but we were trapped. Locked in a 10-by-10 steel box with a dying man, on a frozen ghost ship, with a psychotic giant roaming the halls.

The officer next to me started giggling. It was a wet, bubbling sound.

“He’ll come back,” the officer whispered, rocking back and forth. “When the noise stops… he’ll come back. And he’s going to need more meat for the pot.”

I looked at the heavy steel door. I looked at the starving, mad officer. And I realized the true horror of our situation.

We weren’t the rescuers anymore. We were the pantry.

Part 3

The alarm cut out.

One second, the brig was filled with the deafening, pulsing shriek of the siren and the disorienting strobe of red light. The next, it was plunged back into a heavy, suffocating silence. The sudden absence of noise was almost worse than the alarm itself. It meant Sam had either turned it off, or he had been stopped.

“They cut the power,” Lieutenant Miller whispered from the corner. He was hugging his knees, shivering violently, his eyes darting around the small steel room like a trapped animal. “They know how to route the systems. The Chief Engineer… he’s one of them now. He’s the one who sharpens the knives.”

I was sitting with my back against the cold steel door, my pistol—a 9mm compact I carried for backup—resting on my knee. I had one magazine left. Seven rounds.

“Miller,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Is there another way out of here? A vent? A maintenance hatch? Anything?”

Miller laughed, that dry, rattling sound again. “This is the brig, Jake. It’s designed to keep people in. We are the livestock in the pen. You don’t put a back door on a slaughterhouse.”

I pulled my radio from my belt. “Sam? Mike? Do you copy?”

Static. Then, a crackle.

“Jake…” It was Mike’s voice, breathless and distorted. “I’m with Sam. We’re in the… I think it’s the engine control room. We found the breaker panel. That’s how we killed the alarm. But Jake… we saw them.”

“Who?”

“The hunting party. The ones from the ridge. They’re coming back. They must have seen the ship lights or heard the siren. They’re crossing the ice, Jake. There’s dozens of them. We have maybe ten minutes before this ship is swarming with forty maniacs.”

My stomach dropped. The Butcher was bad enough. But forty lead-poisoned, starving, cannibalistic men swarming the corridors? We wouldn’t stand a chance.

“We have to leave. Now,” I said. “I’m trapped in the brig on the lower deck. The door is locked from the outside. The Butcher is down here somewhere.”

“We’re coming,” Sam’s voice cut in, sounding surprisingly steady for a twenty-year-old kid. “We found something in the armory locker. Flares. And a pneumatic bolt gun. We’re coming down.”

“Be quiet,” Miller hissed, grabbing my arm with his skeletal hand. “Listen.”

I held my breath.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

It was the sound of metal dragging on metal. It was coming from the corridor outside. Heavy, rhythmic footsteps accompanied it.

“He’s back,” Miller whimpered, curling into a ball. “And he brought his tools.”

The scraping stopped right in front of our door. Then, a blinding white light erupted in the center of the steel door. Sparks showered onto the floor inside the cell.

A welding torch.

The tip of the blue flame pushed through the steel, turning the metal cherry-red and molten. They weren’t trying to unlock the door. They were cutting the lock out.

“Get back!” I yelled, scrambling to the far corner of the cell, dragging Miller with me.

Through the small reinforced window, I saw a face. It wasn’t the Butcher. It was another man, wearing a dirty chef’s coat, his face smeared with grease and soot. He was grinning, his teeth gray and rotted, as he worked the torch.

Behind him, I saw the massive shadow of the Butcher, waiting.

“They’re going to cook us,” Miller sobbed. “They like the meat fresh. That’s why they kept me alive. To keep the meat fresh.”

I raised my pistol, aiming at the window. “Not today.”

BANG.

I fired through the glass. The safety glass spiderwebbed but didn’t shatter. The bullet deflected. The Chef just laughed, the sound muffled by the door, and kept cutting. The molten metal dripped onto the floor, hissing.

“Mike! Sam! I need you now!” I screamed into the radio.

“Turn 4,” Sam’s voice crackled. “We’re at the stairs.”

Suddenly, the hallway outside erupted in chaos.

I heard the boom of a shotgun—Mike’s 12-gauge. Then a wet, thumping sound, like a melon being smashed with a hammer.

The Chef stopped cutting. The blue flame vanished.

“Hey! You ugly freak!” That was Sam screaming.

I heard the thwump-hiss of a magnesium flare being struck. A brilliant, blinding red light flooded the corridor, shining through the small window of my cell.

“Eat this!”

There was a roar of anger from the Butcher. Then, the sound of heavy boots running, followed by the metallic clang of a pneumatic tool firing.

CLUNK.

A scream of pain—human and raw—tore through the door.

“Get the door! Get the door!” Mike yelled.

The latch on the outside was wrenched upward. The door swung open.

Mike stood there, his face pale, holding the shotgun. Beside him, Sam was holding a lit road flare in one hand and a heavy-duty industrial bolt gun in the other.

On the floor of the corridor, the Chef was writhing, a steel bolt driven through his thigh, pinning him to the deck.

But the Butcher… the Butcher was gone.

“Where is he?” I asked, rushing out, pulling Miller up.

“He ran,” Sam panted, pointing down the hall toward the cargo bay. “The flare scared him. The light hurts their eyes. They’ve been living in the dark for months.”

“We have to go,” Mike said, looking at Miller with a mixture of pity and horror. “Who is this?”

“Lieutenant Miller,” I said. “He’s coming with us.”

“We can’t go up,” Miller rasped, leaning heavily on me. “The others… the hunting party… they’ll board from the main deck. If we go up there, we run right into them.”

“Then how do we get off this ship?” I asked.

Miller pointed a trembling hand toward the cargo bay—the darkness where the Butcher had fled. “The loading ramp. In the hold. It lowers directly onto the ice. It’s where they brought the… the sleds in.”

It was a terrible plan. We had to go into the dark, into the Butcher’s territory, to escape the army of cannibals coming from above.

“Let’s move,” I said, reloading my pistol.

We moved in a tactical formation. Mike on point with the shotgun, Sam in the middle with the flare (our only real shield against the dark-adapted maniacs), and me in the rear, half-carrying Miller.

The cargo hold was cavernous. It was two stories tall, filled with crates, snowmobiles that had been stripped for parts, and barrels of fuel. The only light came from Sam’s sputtering red flare, which cast long, dancing shadows that looked like monsters.

“The control for the ramp is on the far wall,” Miller whispered.

We were halfway across the bay when the ship groaned again. But this time, it wasn’t the ice. It was the sound of footsteps on the metal catwalks above us.

I looked up. In the red gloom, I saw faces peering down from the railings. Pale, gaunt faces. The hunting party had boarded. They weren’t on the deck; they were in the vents, the catwalks. They were already inside.

“Run!” I screamed.

We broke into a sprint toward the ramp controls.

From the catwalks above, bodies started dropping. They didn’t use ropes; they just jumped. Some broke their legs when they hit the steel deck and kept crawling toward us, dragging their broken limbs, hissing and snapping their teeth.

“Shoot them!” Mike yelled.

BOOM. BOOM.

The shotgun roared, echoing in the metal chamber. Two of the jumpers flew backward, but more were landing. It was raining men—sick, twisted men.

We reached the control panel. “Sam, get the ramp!”

Sam holstered the bolt gun and slammed his fist onto the green button. Hydraulic pumps whined to life. The massive rear door of the ship began to lower, revealing the white, frozen expanse of the bay outside. Fresh, cold air rushed in.

But the ramp was slow. Too slow.

“Behind you!” Miller shrieked.

I spun around.

The Butcher exploded from behind a stack of crates. He wasn’t running away this time. He was cornered. And he was holding a harpoon gun—a heavy, whaling tool.

He fired.

The spear, a three-foot steel rod, whistled through the air.

It missed me by inches. But it didn’t miss Miller.

The spear took the Lieutenant in the chest, lifting him off his feet and pinning him to the wooden crate behind us.

“No!” I yelled, dropping to my knees beside him.

Miller gasped, blood bubbling from his lips. He grabbed my jacket. “Go,” he wheezed. “Don’t… don’t let them put me in the pot.”

There was nothing I could do. The wound was fatal.

The Butcher dropped the empty harpoon gun and picked up his fire axe. He roared, a sound that shook the fillings in my teeth, and charged.

Mike racked the shotgun. Click-clack. He pulled the trigger.

Click.

“Jam!” Mike screamed, frantically trying to clear the shell.

The Butcher was ten feet away. Five feet.

I raised my 9mm. I fired three times. Pop. Pop. Pop.

The bullets hit the Butcher in the chest, puffs of dust flying from his parka. He didn’t even slow down. The lead poisoning, the adrenaline, the sheer mass of the man—he was a tank.

He swung the axe at me. I dove to the left, rolling across the oily floor. The blade sparked against the steel where my head had been a second ago.

I was on my back. The Butcher towered over me, raising the axe for the killing blow.

Then, a red streak flew through the air.

Sam had thrown the flare. It hit the Butcher square in the face. The magnesium burned at 3,000 degrees.

The Butcher screamed—a high, shrieking sound—and clawed at his burning face. He stumbled backward, blind and flailing.

“The fuel!” Sam yelled, pointing at the barrels the Butcher had backed into. “Shoot the fuel!”

I didn’t hesitate. I lined up my sights on the red barrel labeled DIESEL.

I squeezed the trigger.

The spark ignited the fumes.

WHOOSH.

A fireball erupted, engulfing the Butcher and the stack of crates. The force of the blast knocked us flat. The heat was instantaneous and searing.

The Butcher, now a pillar of flame, flailed wildly, setting other crates on fire. The “walkers” who had jumped down from the catwalks recoiled, screeching as the fire spread rapidly, blocking their path to us.

“The ramp is down!” Mike shouted, grabbing me by the vest and hauling me up. “Go! Go!”

We sprinted down the lowering ramp, jumping the last few feet onto the uneven sea ice.

We didn’t look back. We ran. We ran until our lungs burned, slipping and sliding on the ice, scrambling over pressure ridges.

Behind us, The Northern Star began to die. The fire in the hold had evidently reached something volatile—maybe the main fuel tanks or the munitions locker.

A massive explosion ripped through the stern of the ship. A mushroom cloud of black smoke and orange flame punched into the gray sky. The shockwave knocked us off our feet a quarter-mile away.

We lay in the snow, gasping, watching the ship burn.

The silhouette of the vessel was breaking apart. We could see small, dark figures running on the deck, diving into the freezing black water to escape the flames.

“It’s over,” Sam whispered, staring at the inferno.

“No,” I said, struggling to stand up, watching the dark figures crawling out of the water onto the ice, heading in our direction. “They’re not dead. And they’re still hungry.”

We turned our backs on the fire and began the long, brutal trek home.

Part 4

The trek back to civilization is a blur in my memory—a montage of whiteouts, frostbite, and the constant, paranoia-inducing sensation of being hunted.

We didn’t stop. We couldn’t. We knew that whatever humanity was left in those men on the ice had been burned away by the lead and the fire. They were simply organisms now, driven by a biological imperative to consume.

We walked for eighteen hours straight.

Mike started hallucinating around hour twelve. He kept seeing the Butcher in the drifting snow. Sam went silent, his eyes glazed over, putting one foot in front of the other like a machine. I kept us moving by sheer force of will, checking the compass every five minutes, terrified that the magnetic interference would lead us in circles until we froze to death.

We finally reached the outskirts of our village just as the sun was trying to break through the storm clouds. I’ve never been so happy to see a rusted-out pickup truck and a cell tower in my life.

The Alaska State Troopers arrived within the hour. Then the FBI. Then men in suits who didn’t say who they worked for, but showed us badges that looked heavy and official.

They quarantined us immediately.

We spent three weeks in a sterile isolation ward in Anchorage. They told us it was for “exposure and potential contagious pathogens.”

They took our blood. Every day. Vials and vials of it.

I asked the doctors about the lead. I told them what Miller had said—about the cans, the solder, the madness.

The doctors just nodded, writing on their clipboards, their faces impassive behind surgical masks. “High levels of heavy metals were detected,” one doctor finally admitted to me, “but nothing that explains… the behavior you described.”

They didn’t believe us. Or at least, they pretended not to.

When we were finally released, the official story was already on the news.

“Tragedy in the Arctic: Private Research Vessel ‘The Northern Star’ Suffers Catastrophic Engine Failure and Fire. All Hands Lost.”

There was no mention of the walkers. No mention of the cannibalism. No mention of the horrifying journal entries or the jawbone in the pot. The official report stated that the crew had died of “smoke inhalation and hypothermia.”

They scrubbed it. They erased forty men and the horror they became.

Mike moved to Arizona a month later. He said he couldn’t handle the cold anymore. He couldn’t handle the silence of the snow. He needed heat, noise, and people. I don’t blame him.

Sam stayed in town, but he’s not the same. He works at the gas station now. He doesn’t hunt. He doesn’t go into the bush. He sits behind the counter, staring at the door, jumping every time the bell rings.

I stayed. I’m a guide. This land is my home. I won’t let them take it from me.

But things are different now.

Last week, I was at the local supply store, picking up gear for the upcoming season. I was in the food aisle, grabbing supplies for a client trip.

I reached for a can of peaches.

It was a premium brand. Expensive. Imported.

I turned the can over in my hand. It looked normal. But then, I ran my thumb along the seam of the lid.

The solder looked… thick. Gray. Soft.

I froze. The sounds of the store—the hum of the freezer, the chatter of the cashier—faded away. All I could hear was the phantom sound of a fire axe dragging across a steel floor. All I could smell was the copper scent of boiled blood.

“It tastes like sweet metal,” Miller had said.

I dropped the can. It hit the floor with a loud thud that made me flinch.

I walked out of the store without buying anything.

I drove out to the coastline yesterday. I stood on that same ridge where we had first seen them. The ocean is thawing now. The ice is breaking up. The wreckage of The Northern Star is gone, swallowed by the deep black water of the Arctic.

But sometimes, when the wind blows from the north, carrying the scent of salt and rot, I swear I can hear it.

Not the wind. Not the waves.

I hear the low, guttural groans of men who are cold, and lost, and hungry.

Because here is the thing that keeps me awake at night, clutching my pistol in the dark:

We saw footprints leaving the burning ship. We saw figures crawling onto the ice.

The authorities said they searched the area and found no survivors. They said the elements would have killed anyone who escaped the fire within hours.

But those men… they survived months of poisoning. They survived starvation. They survived freezing temperatures in ragged clothes. They survived eating each other.

Lead poisoning doesn’t just make you crazy. It damages your nervous system. It numbs you to pain. It turns off the part of your brain that says “give up.”

I don’t think the cold killed them.

I think they are still out there. wandering the vast, empty wilderness of the North. Waiting for the next group of hikers. Waiting for the next expedition.

So, if you ever come to Alaska, and you’re out in the wild, and you see a group of men walking in the distance… don’t wave. Don’t call out.

Just run.

And for the love of God, check your canned food.

[END OF STORY]