Eat Them All

NOTE: Cannibalistic horror, violence, and foul language.

Kaitlyn’s molars punctured Steve’s trachea. As his cartilage split, Kaitlyn’s mind severed from her body to observe and catalog the feeding. Steve’s blood flooded her palate, his carotid hammering at 180 beats per minute. Betrayal weighed heavy as his fingers clutched her hair.

“Sorry,” Kaitlyn said, the word gurgling out a mouth full of blood “Steve—”

Her jaw dislocated. Tendons snapped and regenerated around hunger that predated human drives. Steve’s brain and body released everything sacred. His fear tasted fruit-juicy from a flood of zesty cortisol, tangy adrenaline, and sweet endorphins. Steve’s wedding ring cracked against her canines. Three months ago, she’d fucked him in the jewelry store bathroom after choosing it, hunger already manifesting as passion. The metal carried promises she now devoured with his flesh.

Turning to her other friends, Kaitlyn cracked Angelo’s spine by slamming him against the sharp edge of a stone banco framing the base of the cabin’s fireplace. He held an ice axe that shook and fell from his twitching hand. Smitty froze in fear and squeezed her blue eyes shut awaiting her fate. Kaitlyn obliged. She took up the axe and struck the center of Smitty’s flawless forehead. The cousins, Parker and Powell, retreated into an interlocking fetal ball, Powell becoming the carapace of this shivering, sobbing armadillo.

Ancestral programming overrode Kaitlyn’s executive functioning. She dragged her body toward Angelo, stomach distended with some of Steve, spreading wet shapes across the pine floor. Inside her skull, Kaitlyn shrieked apologies that couldn't breach her occupied throat.

“Kait.” Angelo's quaking voice shattered octaves. “Fucking STOP.”

The meat-thing wearing her paused. Grandmother Elizabeth’s words echoed: Winter counts its children in teeth.

Not metaphor. Mathematics. She was sum and subtraction, appetite and appetizer, splitting into portions until the mountain’s ledger balanced.

Her fingers found Angelo’s ankle through his boot. His pulse transmitted hummingbird-fast through leather and a thick wool sock soaked with terror-sweat.

“Run,” she managed through her restructuring throat. “Can't stop. I’ve begun.”

Outside the cabin, the blizzard had dumped enough snow and ice to seal them in. The mountain had finished calculating.

Two weeks before, Kaitlyn surmised more secrets lie hidden. She opened the family’s archive in the cabin’s basement with a keycard once belonging to Grandmother Elizabeth. Inside, she found forty years of mold-sweetened ledgers calcifying terrible family decisions.

Nathan’s leather-bound journal squatted on the third shelf, tumor-like.

Kaitlyn knew before touching. Knowledge crawled from bone marrow, ancestral memory in nucleotides remembering the mountain’s older names. Her fingers touched the metabolically warm leather, and ingested the contents page by page.

Day 12: Hipbone requires lower heat. Cartilage renders at 180°F. Marie asked about smell. Told her we’re smoking elk.

Nathan’s psychotic and precise grocery lists hinted at wound after wound. He’d written these in and the detailed recipes in a hybrid of English, Latin, and Algonquin.

Day 19: Metacarpals work best as stock. Emil stopped screaming second hour of boiling. Note: soundproof kitchen.

She belched and sniffed the remnant flavors of a breakfast concocted with tripe and cat liver. Her body, more than her mind, understood Nathan’s text. Salivary glands activated. Molars ached. She’d been dreaming of these journal recipes for months, waking with the sensation of cartilage, marrow, and blood coating her palate.

“You're early.”

Elizabeth materialized between freezers, violating physics and her psychiatric restraining order. Algonquin words hit Kaitlyn’s limbic system as pure mammalian dread before translating.

“Winter counting starts in three days,” her grandmother continued, her English cracking like permafrost. “But you're ripening ahead. Your father did too.”

To them both, the freezer reeked of cold sweetness. Long pig, her brain supplied. The unlabeled meat hanging in there triggered recognition her nose had always carried.

“Where's Dad?”

Elizabeth’s laugh stripped paint. “Eating himself traditionally. One finger at a time. Disciplined, unlike Nathan.” She gestured at the journal. “Nathan took shortcuts. Fed on guests. The mountain noticed.”

Every entry aligned with blizzards. Every blizzard with disappearances police stopped investigating. The Whiterock Resort Cabins digested city folks down to socks and shoes.

“There's purity in self-consumption,” Elizabeth whispered. “But you’re not strong enough. You’ll feed outward. Like your brother.”

“I don't have a—"

Memory assembled from scattered, pulsing neurons: Aiden, twin umbilicals wrapped promise-tight, born hungry in ways that made the midwife cross herself.

Elizabeth’s ice-cold fingers traced the journal’s binding. “Every recipe works. Winter’s coming. And winter counts its children in teeth.”

Kaitlyn clenched her jaw, squeezing out a two-month-old memory of eating medium rare venison in Whiterock’s dining hall. The meal had triggered molecular rebellion. Kaitlyn's throat fisted against protein her body recognized as fundamentally wrong—not the meat, but its cooked state. Denatured. Dead in ways that offended primordial customs.

She forced the swallow. Meat lodged halfway, burning her esophagus. Steve’s hand found her thigh, mistaking her tremor for arousal. His thumb traced circles while her molars loosened, dental ligaments evolving, allowing new configurations.

“You okay, baby?” he asked.

Kitchen staff comprised of family watched. All Whiterocks present witnessed her begin. Aunt Marie tracked Kaitlyn’s swallow reflex with objective precision. Great-uncle Emil nodded at the sight of her fingernails thickening with fresh keratin. They whitened ever so slightly.

"Bathroom," Kaitlyn wheezed, the word scraping past the throat obstruction.

The mirror reflected an early metamorphosis. Receding gums exposed eager tooth roots. Her incisor shifted when pressed, flexing, adopting optimal tearing positions. Nostrils flared, eyebrows thickened. Veins in her arms and hands darkened.

Raw elk called from the walk-in freezer. She found herself there, hands tearing butcher paper with surgical nails. Fresh frozen meat chunks slid down her welcoming throat. Euphoria rushed outward. Her pupils dilated.

“First feeding’s always rough.” “Aunt Marie blocked the exit, her silhouette registering as pack hierarchy in Kaitlyn’s hindbrain.

“Steve doesn’t know.”

“Outsiders never do. Until the dining begins.” Marie slinked aside. “Emil saved the tenderloin for when your teeth finish moving.”

Back at the table, Steve had eaten half her portion, oblivious to how every Whiterock tracked him like livestock. She kissed him and tasted the banquet, his magnificent ignorance, and Grade A quality. Her drooling maw calculated savory entry angles.

Kaitlyn had seen Steve so differently last winter when they found her father’s clothes near a steep crevice not far from the cabin. They sat folded with military precision, boots at attention. Pine needles spiraled inside, between garments, making some of Kaitlyn’s newest neurons misfire. Her father’s absence seemed shaped for an appointment requiring specific etiquette.

Though drawn to the details of the scene, Kaitlyn still noticed Steve’s calm first-responder bearing. “Kait, we need to call this in,” he said. “Search and rescue will find your father. They know this mountain well.”

“Yes,” Kaitlyn whispered. “Hold me.”

As they embraced, Grandmother Elizabeth appeared. She stood barefoot a few meters away, the mountain rising behind her, sub-freezing wind wafting her hospital gown.

“He chose the old way,” she said, loud and firm. Smiling, she added, “One finger at a time. Disciplined. Unlike the weak ones.” She set her eyes on Kaitlyn, who began to shiver. “He went through the ice, into the caves. Into the belly of the mountain.”

Kaitlyn looked at Steve’s kind face and back at Elizabeth, but her grandmother had vanished. She and Steve withdrew into the cabin. While he called search and rescue, Kaitlyn wandered into her father’s room. As she approached his antique dresser, she began to feel feverish, chilled and achy. Kaitlyn needed to eat, and as she read some of her father’s papers, she found notes with decades of date. Written next to the final entry, that day’s date, her father noted an Algonquin word that Kaitlyn understood deep inside her belly: becoming.

Her pocket birthed father's molar, a filled cavity, with stress-grinding wear patterns. It materialized with the knowledge he lived somewhere, eating himself patiently, understanding disciplined transformation required devouring piece by piece.

Beneath her father’s papers, Kaitlyn found a journal, hardback, small compared to Nathan’s leather-bound tome. She opened it, smelling meat, and saw a neat script titling the book as “Jeremiah’s Winter.” Kaitlyn plummeted through time, neurons hijacked by ink carrying genetic memory. Sensory-filled scenes became knowledge and her reality.

Day 43: Samuel died 3:47 AM. Wrapped in good canvas. Cold will keep.

The lie tasted rancid across centuries. Samuel died three days before the acknowledgment while Jeremiah’s stomach digested samples. His wife, Sarah, waited pregnant in Boston. The Whiterock camp depended upon survival. Samuel would understand so he was already meat.

Day 51: Blizzard continues. Made preparations.

Kaitlyn’s hands cramped around phantom knives. Jeremiah’s muscle memory overwrote her own story. The blade angled to free frozen muscle, frozen bone. Samuel’s crystalline eyes stayed accusatory while Jeremiah sectioned a thigh with the quick precision of a butcher.

Day 52: God forgives. Sarah carries fat child.

The taste erupted—ice, protein, human fat’s specific sweetness. Jeremiah gagged from recognition, not disgust. Understanding what he’d always craved.

Something watched the camp from the tree line. Not quite visible but there, leaving spiral tracks. Not footprints. Absence shaped by intention.

Day 60: It spoke without words.

Communication through heartbeat gaps, consciousness flickers. Hunger was holy. Self-eating the highest prayer. The bloodline would carry this forward, splitting into fed and feeding, just as the mountain ordained.

Day 73: Becoming.

Not physical transformation but chromosomal rewriting. Sarah’s pregnancy already twinned, zygotes dividing into predator and prey before forming fingernails.

Kaitlyn surfaced gasping, Samuel’s aftertaste on her tongue 176 years later.

Steve texted about joining the search party.

She replied: Go. Becoming feverish, staying here. Be safe.

Grandmother Elizabeth appeared. She sat on the bed with a family tree sprawled across the blanket. Names bled through generations in orderly, binary fission. Two children always. Never more, never less. The mountain’s rules standardized suffering.

“Your great-great-aunt Martha ate her liver over six weeks,” Elizabeth squawked. “Started left lobe.”

Each generation’s twins split surgically, one vanishing into winter, one remaining to operate, breed, feed outward. The doctrine held through wars, depressions, pandemics.

“Where do they go?” Kaitlyn asked.

“They become somewhere. Ice caves throughout the mountain. Prayer cells for self-consumption.”

Elizabeth produced Polaroids from her hospital gown showing ice cathedrals containing bodies, parts of bodies, Whiterocks eating themselves with geological patience, metabolisms slowed, sustaining on their own flesh.

“Your father’s on his nineteenth knuckle. Disciplined. Unlike Nathan who chose guests. The mountain noticed.”

Genetic memory bubbled up. Christmas dinners were rehearsal. Family reunions were roll calls.

“I don't have a brother—"

Words liquified.

“You do”

Aiden formed as a scent in Kaitlyn’s nostrils, as salivation on her tongue.

“Aiden feeds outward,” Elizabeth said, producing a birth certificate. “You were marked for caves but ripening wrong. Backward hunger. Undisciplined.” Her eyes twinkling, Elizabeth licked her lips and said. “Unless you eat Aiden first.”

Twin footprints on the certificate, impossibly small, already oriented apart. Mirror hunger waiting twenty-eight years to converge.

Her phone buzzed coordinates. Ice caves where she belonged.

But her teeth loosened for outward feeding. Backward evolution. Aiden would come to correct the equation.

Back in the cabin with her friends, Kaitlyn’s awareness of the present engulfed her, loud and bright. Steve’s jugular pulsed against her molars while consciousness split, the meat-thing feeding and the observer cataloguing.

Angelo’s ankle cracked between her fingers. Bone separated from meat. His scream hit prey frequencies where language dissolved into food chain gibberish.

Father emerged, naked, laughing and descending the old creaky staircase. Not all of his body was present. Pieces were missing—thigh and forearm chunks, six fingers, left ear. Wounds cauterized, weeping crystallizing fluid. His exposed muscle pulsed with autonomic confusion between self and food.

“You’re backward,” he slurred, his tongue halved by self-consumption. “Hunger gone wrong. Violating the mountain.”

Becoming, Kaitlyn thought. A sharp realization cut through her mind and body. Backward wasn’t corruption but evolution.

“Where’s Aiden?” she shouted over the messy noise around her.

Her father’s laugh could’ve cracked ice. “Coming. You should be in caves eating yourself. But you feed outward. He will right you.”

Parker and Powell crawled toward the window, but the glass shattered, the blizzard entered, and Aiden climbed through.

“Sister,” he said.

Clean. Fed. Teeth perfectly designed, never needing unhinging.

“The mountain treats you well, Aiden,” Kaitlyn said. “You’ve been feeding outward for almost thirty years, haven’t you?”

“As ordained, yes.” Aiden gazed at the flesh-filled room. “Not backwards, like you. But there’s still time. The counting isn’t finished.”

Something shifted. Not acceptance—acceleration.

“Fuck the count.” Kaitlyn’s powerful voice startled her brother. Her father bit his lip. “Fuck caves. Fuck eating myself while you feast.”

She released Angelo and stepped toward Aiden, who said, “You don’t understand the rules.”

Kaitlyn’s jaw unlocked and her mouth opened, showing redesigned dental architecture that abandoned human pretense.

“I do.” Kaitlyn’s muscles swelled. “And I reject them. Fuck you and your mountain!”

They collided. His perfect teeth aimed for Kaitlyn’s throat but her evolved jaw was already reconfiguring, cartilage sliding into new geometries. Parker and Powell pressed into the corner, bearing witness to the Whiterock curse tearing itself apart.

Aiden fought with the confidence of one who’d always fed freely, but Kaitlyn carried the rage of enforced famishment. Her restructured hands found his cervical vertebrae. The decapitation happened in an instant, with her knowing this anatomy like an embodied blueprint.

His head rolled. His body didn’t die.

The headless thing flailed, hands grasping for what they couldn’t see, perfect muscles still receiving improvised signals from a nervous system that refused to acknowledge disconnection. Kaitlyn’s consciousness observed her own mouth working through facial tissue. She dined on his face, the soft tissues that had smiled while she was marked for caves.

Parker whimpered. Powell vomited. They crawled over Smitty’s deceased form toward the door, their flight instinct overriding all others.

Kaitlyn’s next steps took her and her haul down to the basement freezer, which accepted the harvest with the familiarity of six generations of practice. Steve. Angelo. What remained of Aiden still twitching in plastic. The compressor hummed its mechanical hymn while Kaitlyn arranged the inventory, her transformed hands working with new precision.

She climbed the stairs. Each step shed another layer of the old mathematics.

The main floor blazed with light.

The blizzard had ended while she’d been organizing meat. Sunlight struck the ice-encrusted windows, fracturing into beautiful rainbow spectrums. The landscape beyond gleamed, white and crystal and pure in the way that follows absolute destruction.

Kaitlyn stood in the doorway where the basement’s darkness met the light of a brilliant day. Blood froze on her evolved teeth. The mountain’s accounting was broken. She’d eaten the equation itself.

In the distance, ice caves called with her father’s frequency in the old way. She turned from that sagging noise to sing her own song, one celebrating a new calculus, in defiance of the mountain’s obsolete and dilapidated mathematics.