Welcome to Interlude Literary Magazine
When Day Breaks
Richard Marroquin
No one expected for this to have happened, especially not on a normal- well not normal at all anymore I guess- Wednesday. Who knew human skin and flesh when melted turned into a slush-like consistency, capable of melting other humans and living animals and turning them into slushy-flesh monsters? Yeah, this was the apocalypse, something straight out of a lovecraftian horror, or Stephen King’s stories, except it was something the world lived with for millenia, the Sun. As of 6am PST, daybreak, or as us survivors call zero hour, anyone who had direct contact with the sun turned into these things, the billions of people who never had a chance at survival, turned into what are now classified as mounds, with levels of intensity. Us survivors keep a catalog of these things, what alarms them, what they can do, all of it in mental records, as written ones wouldn’t be seen by anyone who was “alive” anymore. Many people who lived on other sides of the world, those who hadn’t seen daybreak, were warned of these near instantly, but even though this had just started, half the population was gone already. These Things, the mounds, they’re pure 100% flesh, nothing else, nothing more. They omit these sounds, no one other than specific targets can even hear, they sound like people they loved, people they held dear, but these people, if you can even call them that, aren't people. They lure them with the cries and promises from loved ones, the cry of safety and how they aren't in danger, but I guess after the apocalypse people would do anything for another glimpse of their family. The mounds lure people from the shadows, convince them to remove their protective clothing like hoodies and gloves from the sun, to turn them into mounds, to increase. We categorize these mounds from how many people they’ve consumed. We can normally estimate based on the size of them, or by how many faces we can see in their flesh.
- The weakest, we call them Slugs. Normally they consist of 1-3 people, the small ones of the pack. They never cause much threat, but are dangerous when coming into contact with more mounds, or more, much bigger mounds.
- Pretty mild in danger, the Hunters. They consist of 4-14 people, pretty speedy considering they are made of pure flesh, but still cause major threats when you’re a lone survivor and can do nothing but run.
- Run for your life, as if they spot you then you have near no chance of survival, the Leaders. They are relatively smart for dead, fleshy mounds of humans. They don’t get tricked easily, learned the hard way, and they are able to lure in smaller mounds, into becoming bigger, more powerful. Normally made of 15-30 people
- Lastly but definitely not least, we don’t call them anything other than annihilate. If you spotted one they most definitely spotted you, and you better hope you have somewhere to lock yourself inside of with oxygen tight construction, or someone to take the fall and get consumed instead yourself.
2nd Place Winner
In the Flesh, Not the Soul
Kimberly Rodriguez
3rd Place Winner
The wind whistled through the still grounds of the autumn faire. She was the only one there, her only company a crowing raven perched high in the branches of a cypress tree, bare in the wake of fall. Julia shivered as she made her way through the cracked straw beneath her feet, the dim green tractor, paint flaking, abandoned years ago. Webs coated its surface, dotted with dew. She ducked through the trailing fog and into the cold walls of what used to be a corn maze, now a dry, rustling, overgrown mass of husks. Her friend was in there.
Over the years, she had carved out a path. Her footsteps were worn into the ground, husks bent aside, debris and soil packed down beneath her trembling footfalls, a winding road to a single worn rock, painstakingly etched with Abby’s name. Julia closed her eyes, picturing the times when she and Abby would run here, shrill laughter ringing, darting forms beneath the legs of maze-goers. This was their favorite place, a children’s palace away from the watchful eye of parents, a place of play and war. Even when they were teens, even after this place closed down— they still went, it was tradition. That’s why, even when Abby’s parents had arranged her burial in a fancy, green-lotted graveyard, Julia had claimed a place for her here. She reached the center of the maze, a small square of dirt she had cleared of deteriorating decorations that were still piled in the corner. She didn’t care; Abby wouldn’t have wanted them gone anyway.
“Happy Halloween, Abby,” she whispered. Not to the rock, but to the air, to the maze, to the faire, to their special corner of the world. The wind blew a little harder, and Julia liked to imagine that she heard.
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