Every day, a 70-year-old retired woman bought 40 kg of beef from a regular butcher. One day, the butcher decided to follow her, and when he saw where she kept the meat, he called the police.

Part 1: The Strange Customer at Joe’s Butcher Shop
Oakhaven, Ohio, is where the doorbell of Joe’s butcher shop signals the start of life. Joe, a man in his fifties with muscular arms and sharp eyes, has been a butcher for over thirty years. He knows the preferences of each customer, but Margaret is a puzzle he can’t solve.

Margaret, 70, a retired elementary school teacher with a kind face and neatly tied-up gray hair, lives alone in an old Victorian mansion at the end of Elm Street. Every morning at exactly 8 o’clock, she appears at Joe’s shop.

“The usual, Margaret?” Joe asks, his hand ready with his butcher’s knife.

“Yes, Joe. 40 kilograms of beef rump, the freshest, large cuts,” she smiles, her voice trembling but her eyes holding a strange determination.

This had been going on for three months. 40 kg a day. Joe had joked that she was feeding an army, but she would just silently pay in cash and laboriously drag her cart out the door. A 70-year-old woman couldn’t possibly consume nearly half a hundredweight of meat a day. There was no zoo in Oakhaven, no large dog kennel, and Margaret didn’t own a restaurant.

Joe’s curiosity turned to concern when he noticed a strong, foul odor emanating from Margaret’s clothes every time she visited the shop. It wasn’t the smell of fresh meat, but the smell of decay clumsily masked by cheap perfume.

Part 2: The Shadowy Tracking
One Saturday afternoon, after delivering his last shipment, Joe didn’t go home. He waited for Margaret to leave the shop with her usual 40 kg of meat and then quietly followed her in his old pickup truck.

Margaret didn’t take the main road. She pulled the cart along the muddy paths behind the small woods, toward the secluded cellar at the back edge of her garden. Joe parked a short distance away, his heart pounding. He watched Margaret open the heavy iron door of the cellar, and a blast of cold air and a pungent smell, so strong Joe had to cover his nose, rushed out.

Margaret began to tossing chunks of beef into the darkness of the cellar. But what sent shivers down Joe’s spine was the sound coming from below: the gnawing, the cracking of bones, and a low growl unlike any animal he had ever known.

When Margaret emerged, the cart was empty. She stood there in the moonlight, murmuring, “Eat, son… eat so you’ll get better. I won’t let you go hungry again.”

Joe felt his blood run cold. Margaret’s son, shockingly, had been reported missing in a mine accident ten years earlier. Joe immediately pulled out his phone, his hand trembling as he dialed 911.

Part 3: The Climax – The Gates of Hell Open
Fifteen minutes later, Sheriff Miller and his two assistants arrived. They found Joe standing motionless beside the cellar.

“Joe, what the hell were you talking about raising monsters?” Miller asked, his hand on his gun holster.

“Just look inside,” Joe pointed toward the iron door.

They broke the lock and stormed in. A powerful flashlight beam swept through the damp space. On the floor lay piles of stark white bones—not just cow bones. There were tattered rags, old shoes, and… human skeletons gnawed through.

In the corner of the cellar, Margaret was cradling a large, hairy, and deformed figure. It had a human face, but its teeth had grown long like a beast’s, its eyes bloodshot and lifeless. It was a mutated creature, or something far worse.

“Don’t hurt it!” Margaret screamed, shielding the creature with her arms. “It’s Tommy! He’s back from the mine! He’s just hungry!”

Chief Miller was about to fire as the creature lunged, but Joe yelled, “Wait! Look at its collar!”

Part 4: The Twist – The Horrifying Truth
Under the lights, around the creature’s neck was a rusty iron collar engraved with the words: “BLACKWOOD PHARMACEUTICAL CORPORATION – EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECT NO. 09”.

It turned out Tommy hadn’t died in the mine collapse. The mine was a secret Blackwood laboratory where they were testing a cell-regenerating serum on trapped miners. Tommy had survived but had become an insatiable cannibal. He had escaped and found his way home.

But that wasn’t the final twist.

When the police subdued the creature, they checked Joe’s meat sales records for the past ten years. Joe’s face turned pale.

“Joe,” Miller said, his voice icy. “Margaret has only been buying meat from you for three months. So what did she feed this thing for the nine years before that?”

Margaret looked at Joe, a sinister smile on her lips. “Joe, don’t you remember? The missing tourists, the vagrants you always complained about polluting the town… I didn’t take their meat. You sold it to me under the label ‘beef’ for nine years to make a profit. Have you forgotten?”

The entire cellar hall fell silent. Joe looked down at his hands, the hands that had sliced ​​tons of unlabeled “meat” that he had smuggled from a mysterious source to increase his profits. He had…

He inadvertently became an accomplice, feeding this monster with the flesh of his own kind, all because of greed.

Part 5: The Extreme Climax – The Punishment
Joe tried to run away, but Miller handcuffed him. At that moment, the creature in the corner of the cellar—Tommy—suddenly uttered a weak, human voice: “The smell… the smell of Joe… so familiar.”

The monster recognized the scent of the one who had indirectly fed it the most disgusting things for ten years. It let out a heart-wrenching roar, broke free from the police chain wrapped around it, and lunged straight at Joe before anyone could fire a shot.

Gunshots rang out in the dark cellar, but it was too late for Joe.

The next morning, Oakhaven no longer had Joe’s butcher shop. Margaret was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and the monster was destroyed. But the secret of what the townspeople had been unknowingly eating from Joe’s shop for the past ten years became an obsession that meant Oakhaven could never be at peace again.

Part 1: Project “Lazarus”
Following Margaret’s arrest and Joe’s death, a federal task force took over the scene. The documents seized from the old woman’s cellar were not just scraps of paper, but detailed medical reports bearing the Blackwood Corporation’s security seal.

It turned out that the Oakhaven mine had not collapsed due to a natural accident ten years earlier. It was a deliberate explosion to bury Project Lazarus—Blackwood’s attempt to create tireless, sleepless “superworkers” with the ability to heal themselves at lightning speed.

Tommy, Margaret’s son, was the only successful test subject, but with a horrific side effect: his brain had degenerated to a bestial level, and his body required an enormous amount of protein to sustain its frenzied metabolism.

Part 2: The High-Class Flesh Eaters
As the detectives delved into Joe’s financial records, they uncovered an even more brutal truth. Joe wasn’t just smuggling meat of unknown origin to sell to Margaret.

He was a link in Blackwood’s evidence-destroying network.

Whenever a test subject failed or an employee “knowing too much” was eliminated, their bodies were delivered to Joe’s butcher shop in sealed, frozen containers. Joe received payment to grind them up, mix them with beef, and sell them back to Margaret to “feed” Tommy—creating a closed loop of crime.

“They’re not just killing people,” Miller muttered as he read the list of missing persons. “They’re making us eat our own neighbors to cover up the crime.”

Part 3: Climax – The Raid on Blackwood Headquarters
The climax erupts when police find the coordinates of the actual operations center, deep underground beneath Blackwood’s glass skyscraper in the city center.

When the task force stormed in, they didn’t find clean laboratories. They found iron cages. Dozens of other “Tommy”s were imprisoned, emaciated, their eyes bloodshot from starvation after Joe’s death and the cut-off of their “food” supply.

The CEO of the corporation, Elias Blackwood, stood on the rooftop balcony, looking down at the police force with a nonchalant expression.

“Do you think you’re administering justice?” Elias sneered, holding a remote control. “We’re saving humanity from aging and disease. Tommy is just a somewhat… messy stepping stone.”

The Twist: Margaret’s Key
Just as Elias was about to press the button to destroy the entire facility to cover his tracks, a gaunt figure emerged from the shadows behind him.

It was Margaret.

She had miraculously escaped from the mental institution. In her hand wasn’t a knife or a gun, but a test tube filled with a greenish liquid—the original serum she had stolen from the mines ten years earlier.

“Elias,” she said, her voice trembling but filled with hatred. “You said Tommy was the future? Then taste your own future.”

She smashed the test tube on Elias’s body. The liquid seeped into his skin, and in seconds, Elias’s screams turned into the growls of a beast. His body swelled, his clothes ripped, his bones shattered and instantly reformed.

Elias Blackwood—the ringleader of the crime—had become the very monster he had created.

Part 4: The End – The Silence of Oakhaven
The subsequent explosion leveled the Blackwood building. The files on the Lazarus project vanished in the rubble. Margaret was never found again.

Oakhaven returned to its false sense of peace. People still went to the market, still bought meat at the newly opened shops, but no one dared look each other in the eye. Whenever they smelled the aroma of grilled meat from some garden party, they shuddered, wondering about the true origin of what they were eating.

Tommy and his mother had disappeared into the darkness of the forest, where nightly, mournful growls echoed from the old mine—a reminder that the price of salvation is sometimes the complete disappearance of humanity.