I remembered 'Fantasy Flan' from a television cartoon I grew up with. I thought it was yogurt or something. People got all weird about eating it. That's why I called the stuff Flan, it's the only thing I could think to call it. It's this stuff they sell in the cold food aisles at grocery stores now.

Somehow it got through regulations they use to control food quality. It just appeared there. People said that nobody stocked the shelves with it, the stuff just appeared. The stores were selling it, but nobody knew where it came from or had any record of its delivery.

My friend Peter said it was like a movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I don't think that movie really covered just how nasty people get without their Flan. It sickens me, to see people acting that way, but I am sure it is the Flan.

Perhaps you've heard of Flan, like a recipe or on a menu. That is flan, with a lower case f. It is fine to eat that stuff, although I don't ever think I'll try it. If I saw a dessert that looked like the stuff I saw people killing each other over, I wouldn't touch it. I just wouldn't feel safe, even if you took a bite first. It doesn't all set in in just one bite.

Flan is some kind of hell pudding. It's evil, I watched so many people I knew gorge themselves on it and start fighting over what was left. That's the worst kind of thing to give to humans.

Why they started to eat in the first place it is hard to say. It just became a cultural meme to try it, since it was very cheap and had a nice label and nutrition facts in mostly zeros and various kinds of artificial sweeteners and spring water.

I wondered if it was literal, like something from hell had sprinkled artificial sweeter into spring water and Flan had sprung forward. The thought terrified me.

Peter and I walked slowly and apprehensively towards all those who had fallen while trying to get the last crate of Flan as it was being hauled away by soldiers. Their bodies lay there while the trucks sped off. Somehow they didn't look all the way dead.

Instead of blood there was a white syrup leaking from them. It retracted into their bullet holes and they got up, with glazed looks in their eyes. We were startled, I fell down and screamed I was so scared, and Peter ran away.

The limping and damaged Flan-puppets came for me. I yelled for Peter's help and he came back, but the Flan-puppets grabbed him and started regurgitating buttery chunks of half digested Flan down his throat while he struggled.

This time I got up and ran. I felt sick to my stomach and terrified. The Flan had taken my friend Peter. I was the last person left in Paper Town. I ran to the position left by the soldiers, hoping they had left a radio or a machinegun. When I got there neither of those items were apparent.

The Flan-puppets started coming after me. I had to get out of there, I had no more time to search. I ran out under a streetlight and a very bloated consumer of Flan belched and large spongy bile filled chunks of fermented Flan began splattering all around me and sizzling, burning into things acidicly.

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I climbed up a ladder to a rooftop and found a toolbox. I looked to where a radio tower stood in the distance, and decided to try and call for help. I took my phone with me too, just in case it started working.

The Flan-puppets were looking for me below, they couldn't see me on the roof and they soon forgot about me. I put on the tool belt and went to the ladder and unscrewed it and pulled it up. It was very heavy, so I levered it with a rope. The tool belt helped a lot.

I waited until the creatures had gathered on the side of the building where I took the ladder. They had noticed me. Then I went to the other side of the building and used the ladder to get down. The ladder was too heavy and awkward to carry, so I left it propped there, in case I needed to escape the Flan-puppets.

My ordeal after that took hours of sneaking past them. It grew dark and I was stressed out. That is when Trevor came running up and I shot him. I didn't mean to. He wasn't dead, and I vowed to try to help him.

In the end, the Flan-puppets took him from me and upchucked into his gullet with their creamy horror and filled him with custard. He became one of them, and got up and led them after me. I had to shoot him over and over to keep him from getting to me.

I threw away the gun, so I could run further, for they were hot on my trail. That is when I found the humvee with nobody in it. So I got in and found all I had to do was push a start button and it went. I drove out of there.

I did not know about the special forces personnel who needed their humvee. I guess I thought it was abandoned, or that it was left behind in case of survivors, like me.

I heard the gunshots and guessed I had mistakenly stolen someone's ride. I did go back that's how I got all their guns. I parked the humvee and waited until morning when I could see better and then I went up the ladder and figured out where they all were.

None of the special forces personnel that I saw were uninfected. The numbers of the Flan-puppets had gone up. I went around and gathered all their assault rifles and discarded gear like ammunition and grenades and combat knives and stuff like that. I took it all back in armloads, carefully avoiding the Flan-puppets, and loaded it into the humvee in case I needed it.

With only a little gas left, I drove to the radio station. I went in and remembered the field trip. I got on the air and said I needed help and started counting all the Flan-puppets outside the barbed wire fence that someone hard wired with electricity.

A helicopter came flying by with a light on them that night, but by then there were hundreds of Flan-puppets. They announced they were not able to land with so many Flan-puppets and left me there.

I started using the guns and grenades on them, but there were still too many when I ran out of ammo. I had no idea what I was going to do and I broke down, in tears, with sheer terror of knowing the Flan-puppets would break through, as the electricity wavered.

Just then the trashbin, emptied and holding the radio station's owner, opened. The radio station's owner popped out holding some kind of homemade flamethrower. "Get inside" He told me, and proceeded to torch the surprised Flan-puppets.

When many of them were on fire, they ran away, trying to put out the crude napalm. They didn't regroup all the way. I went in and used the radio and asked the helicopter to come back, saying we'd torched the Flan-puppets.

They came back and we ran out there to get on the helicopter. Just then a burnt Flan-puppet came running up to attack the owner of the radio station and he shot napalm on it and ignited it. The creature was molten Flan, bubbling out of the dark burnt crust around it.

He was engulfed in molten Flan and it started to dissolve him into it. The person the Flan-puppet was before had become curdled boiling globs of Flan. They began to take on uniform size and shape and roll towards the grocery store.

I watched it restock itself on the shelves, and I laughed maniacally to know the revelation of where it came from. I said:

"So that's where Flan comes from."

And then I was asked if there was anyone else and what happened to me down there, how did I survive?