Eric Cartman, if he had his facts straight, was one of Kenny's best friends and therefore the most likely to know where he would disappear off to in the middle of a Saturday afternoon for no reason. He was also the largest jackass on the face of the planet, fat, rude, loud, selfish, racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted, and generally a giant prick. On top of that, Craig just flat-out hated him. Most of the time he was more than happy to never speak to the bastard, but at this point the sun was going down, Kenny's phone was still lodged silently in his own pocket, and he was starting to get a nervous twist in the pit of his stomach that told him something was very, very wrong.
kenny on his back in his bedroom, his feet bare and his hands covered, stinking of vomit and a tongue that tasted like chalky pills
stabbed himself - right in the throat. went to school with me the next day.
Craig knocked on Cartman's front door with no ceremony, just heavy emphasis. There was a grunt from inside, a shuffle, and then he was faced with the visually impressive, but from experience, physically unimpressive, six foot wide load Eric Cartman.
"What do you want, Craig?"
At least there was that. Open hostility was easier to handle than Kyle's passive aggressive bullshit.
"I'm not here to see you, fatass. Kenny left his phone at my place and I can't find him. Usually I'd think he was just fucking off getting high, but I dunno. Instinct. I think something's wrong."
"Thought you didn't care about shit like that. Thought that you liked the easy and boring path of life."
Craig's eyes were starting to itch. Being near Cartman must be more irritating than he thought - or maybe he was allergic to his four cats. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm, and shrugged.
"Yeah, usually." Then without asking to be invited in, he shoved past Cartman (who let out and offended squawk), and planted himself firmly in the center of the living room. Then he glared at Cartman, willing him to say something useful.
"You think Kenny's in trouble." Cartman said as he shut the door, and this time there was a smug little smirk on his face. "You really love him, don't you."
"Do you know where he is, or not?" Craig asked, feeling ironically relaxed in reaction to Cartman trying to get a rise out of him. He felt his lips tug up in a smirk, to match his, which made Cartman frown, disappointed that his barb didn't land.
"Maybe. I don't know where he goes - but he's been acting up lately. More fucked up than usual, I mean. He hasn't been drinking, or getting high, and he's been coming over at really fucked up hours of the night. He busted the lock on the cellar and made himself a nest in the basement. I keep kicking him out but he just- " Cartman put his hand over his mouth to mimic Kenny's tendency to wear his hood or scarf too high at almost all times and raised the octave of his voice (even though Kenny's voice was actually deeper than his)-
"'Cartman if you know what's good for you you'll butt out of my shit before I kick you right in the nuts.' I wrestled him to the ground of course, but he's a little fucker in a fight so most of the time I just let him stay over out of the kindness of my heart."
"And? That doesn't tell me jack squat except that you're scared for your balls and Kenny's bullying you into letting him stay in your basement. I don't blame him, it's better than his place, even with your farts stinking up the entire house."
"Very funny, Craig. One other thing is, he's always...bleeding. Not a whole lot, but he cuts himself, like some kind of emo freak. He doesn't really tell me what he's been doing, but I know he's been to the Western Plant graveyard, because he's always bringing back bits of bone covered in ash and dirt. I'm like - Kenny that's not cool you can't fucking dig up bones, they put people in jail for grave robbery - I'll show you, in the basement, he left fucking bones down there, it's disgusting."
Craig, intrigued despite himself, followed him down to the basement. It was chilly, but at least carpeted now, since his mom had had it refinished after the many levels of abuse they had all laid into it as kids. Craig still remembered when there was a giant hole right in the foundation, and Cartman had used it for a variety of disturbing activities involving stuffed toys. Craig suspected he still had the toys somewhere. In the corner there was a group of boxes laid out roughly in the shape of a bed, and a nest of blankets on top that was looked as if it were frequently occupied.
"They're right over...here...wait...what the fuck..." Cartman was rooting around near the makeshift bed, trying to find what he had brought Craig down here to see, but his irritation became obvious almost as soon as they got down there. "They're gone - I swear to christ they were here, almost a full human fucking skeleton. It was so fucking creepy-"
"Can it, Cartman, I don't care about your fucking bone story. But Kenny's really been sleeping here?"
"Yeah, that much is obvious, isn't it?"
Craig lifted up a part of the blanket, and held a palmful of it to his face, and breathed in. Sweat, honey, and that mysterious dead hospital smell his whole room had. Yeah, Kenny had been here all right. Cartman was giving him a suspicious glare, and Craig smirked smoothly in response, and let the blanket fall back into its crumpled nest.
"So he's at Western Plant."
"Probably. He goes there a lot during the day, but he'll be back before night - he told me he never stays there after dark."
"Okay."
The cellar door was open, so he pushed past Cartman (ignoring another grunt of protest) to let himself out of it the same way Kenny came and went.
The Western Plant graveyard was technically not even in South Park. It was a gray patch of dead earth on the outskirts of town that some people claimed was actually larger than the town itself, due to their lovely town's lack of expansion thanks to a high death rate and low birth rate. Craig wasn't one to doubt it. Most of South Park's dead, however, were buried in South Park - in the little plot behind the church, in family graveyards, in a plot near the park. West Plant was rumored to be infected with radiation - or the dead zombie skeletons of Native Americans, depending on who you talked to. Kids would take opportunities to thrill-seek out there, and each group came back with stories wilder than the last, but Craig had never gone out, because he knew they were all liars. And because he couldn't imagine anything more boring than a graveyard out in the middle of nowhere. No dead people he had known were even buried there, and if they had been it'd have to be tough luck for them, because it was just too damn far a drive to start at some stones in the ground.
So congratulations, Kenny, Craig thought to himself grumpily as he walked to the bus stop with his hands shoved in his pockets, You're officially the biggest pain in my life.
He got on the bus that went the furthest to the end of town, shoved a crinkled dollar bill and some change into the slot, and sat down. Longest route also meant slowest-moving, apparently, and Craig started to get hungry halfway along the ride. A woman who smelled like roses sat next to him, and smiled. He shrugged back, and put his chin on his palm and looked out the window. He heard the rustling of paper and felt a soft nudge at his shoulder about a minute later.
"Hungry, dear?" She was holding out a turkey sandwich, not fast food wrapping, but clean white paper with a little bit of masking tape holding it together. "I wouldn't presume, but you see, your stomach is literally growling. I have four children, so I hate to see one go hungry."
He eyed the sandwich and the woman suspiciously for a few moments, and then took it casually with one hand, sniffing it for any tell-tale scent of narcotics or poison.
"Thanks, I guess. Did you get on this bus just to hand out suspiciously well-made sandwiches to starving kids, or are you going somewhere?"
The lady chuckled, which didn't endear her to him. He didn't like it when people bypassed his sarcasm. Dry wit was his forte.
"Yes, I'm on my way. The Company is about to arrive. You're not part of The Company, are you?"
Craig screwed up his face a little, and took a bite of the sandwich with a defiant shrug. He wasn't going to ask what "The Company" was, and he wasn't going to continue this conversation. He was just headed to the graveyard to make some sense out of Kenny's disappearance, and convince him to stop making him feel like any day now he was going to fade away and disappear for good. Keeping him alive was like trying to hold on to the end of a match without letting it go out. But he knew it would - it only had so much wood to eat. Maybe he could let it burn his finger - just for a little while - so he could lead it to a new string of matches and let the flame keep traveling forever.
"Honey? I asked you what your name was. Please do tell me."
Craig was about half-done with the sandwich, and the friendly-creepy lady was asking smiling earnestly and expectantly. He shook his head.
"I'm eating your sandwich because I take enough drugs to know whether they're poison or not. But I don't go around giving strangers my name. Especially when they smile at me like that."
The bus stopped, and let three people on. That was odd. They could only be about a few stops away from the end of the line, but he could already see four more people waiting at the next stop. Weird.
"Well, aren't you just a button," She giggled, and took out some knitting needles and yarn that was in pastel purple and canary yellow. Looking at the needles flashing in her yarn was making him feel sick, so he distracted himself by watching the people now literally pouring into the bus. Most of them looked dirty and run-down, and none of them were paying fare. Some of them looked homeless, most of them smelled homeless. He saw a tall, sallow-faced kid he thought he recognized from school, but not recently - he had dropped out due to an addiction to ...something. Painkillers? Craig wasn't sure, and wasn't eager to find out. He pulled his hat further around his cheeks and hoped he didn't look his way. Then he saw the bum from the other night - the one who had shouted at him from across the street while Kenny was getting their fried chicken. He burst into a toothy grin as soon as he saw him, and waggled his eyebrows in a way that made Craig's nausea intensify. The bus was packed, so the guy couldn't reach him, but he was elbowing a man standing next to him and whispering excitedly, which made Craig deeply uncomfortable. Finally, he hissed out a question to the woman serenely knitting beside him.
"All right, you win. What's this "Company"?"
"The Company of our Lord of the Ancient World, of course." She looked over at the still wildly gesturing hobo at the other end of the bus, and her smile brightened by a small degree, though she showed no other sign that she cared about what was going on around her. "We're all heading to Mass - and it's a very special night, tonight. Shall I tell you why?"
Craig was now painfully aware that the bus wasn't following the regular line - it was taking them to the graveyard directly. This bus went to the graveyard, specifically, and nowhere else. That was fucked up. He nodded mutely in response to the question, and frowned as he waited for her to continue.
"Tonight is the night we'll open the gate to the Ancient World. Tonight is the night the two worlds become one, and the Gods of Old will be here to rule as they once did, and we will do Their work, and the world will be at peace."
"That sounds really fucking stupid to me," Craig hissed, his skin crawling from the woman's serene tone, as she talked about what basically sounded like an apocalypse, the sort of which his humble, white-bread town seemed to threaten the poor earth with about once every six months or so. "Forget that the whole thing is bullshit, but the world wouldn't be at peace if these 'Gods of Old' want it. We don't want to be ruled."
"It will be at peace," she said simply, and smiled. The points of her knitting needles caught the faint greenish light of the bus' halogen lamps. "The wicked and faithless will be smited. Once the earth is irrigated with their blood, those left will love each other; the earth will be born anew, and the Gods will reside in the Temples we will spend our simple lives building for them."
"Last stop," the driver grunted from his seat, and turned off the motor. Craig stood up, and the packed crowd inside the bus was all eerily silent as they all looked out the window. Out on the horizon he could see the faint shadows of the grave markers, and otherwise - desert. Gray cracked earth stretched for almost as far as the eye could see, with nothing but fog on the horizon, nothing to give a hint that this bleak terrain eventually ended. No trees, no cover, no buildings. Just graves and desert. Craig's heart was pumping and he was beginning to feel very strongly that he had made a mistake. Screw Kenny McCormick and all the weird bullshit he got up to; during the day or at night, it didn't fucking matter. If he was here then he could stay here, and Craig would drive this bus back home himself if he had to. But this didn't seem to be an option. The crowd started to file in an orderly manner off the bus - but there were about fifty people on the bus, and none of them were letting Craig cram himself back into his hard plastic seat. Instead they seemed to press in around him at all sides like a school of fish, and were squeezing him towards the door. Eventually it was easier to just let it happen, and he took a deep breath of cold fresh air when he was out of the bus - finally able to extract himself from the crowd. He wished he hadn't eaten that sandwich, now, because he definitely felt like he was about to throw it up.
Now that he was off the bus he could see the true surreal nature of the scenery. The stars were out in gorgeous full bloom, with a hint of pink still in the sky from the nearly-complete sunset. The ground was gray. The graves were in the distance. Between them and the looming, shadowy graves was a huge white banner of a material fluttering lightly in the practically non-existent wind. In a dark, sticky red was painted on it exactly one word:
WELCOME.