A solitary light in the darkness; the sharp red digits of my alarm clock spell out five in the morning, but I'm not blearily staring at them from the comfort of my bed. I'm just glancing behind my shoulder, standing by the closed bedroom curtains, gripping an unhappy lump of nickle-plated steel. Despite the futility of it all I've been standing a vigil watch all night, staring into a whirl of ivory spots. The unsettling feelings I had as a child looking out into the oppressive fall of night and snow never left me.
When I ran away from South Park so long ago I was sure that was the worst of it: just feelings and imaginations of fresh frozen hell rising to engulf me. But the waking nightmare that kept me frozen on my feet was the fact that my dark imagination was my reality. One night long ago, out there, I was walking home late from a still and quiet evening at the frozen lake where I would cast out my dread to sink to the bottom. Arriving at my doorstep I heard a noise and I turned my head. There was nothing behind me, save for my footprints, and another set of foot prints that had followed me closely with no owner in sight upon discovery. I walked back to the lake in the morning, pulled by the dreadful feeling in my stomach and discovered a lump of bright orange soaked with bright red. I felt my sanity leaving me in heaps of sick and streams of tears and broken wheezing cries, burying a horrifying truth under clean and crisp whiteness in my mind.
My dear old friend Kenny Mccormick is a feckless seed of unspeakable evil created so that even death may die, and the sum of our fears may awaken to devour the world whole again and again and again. A gun can't kill that. A gun can't kill Kenny Mccormick either. This gun is a shortcut to hell, a place preferable to the kingdom of the mad dreamer and his regenerating livestock. This gun is loaded with two bullets. One for myself, and one for the only person that could have possibly brought me back here to piece back together the prophecy of our demise, my love that made me run when impending calamity could not: Kyle Broflovski, in my bed asleep and bare, fingers curling and lips twitching whispering the chorus of a dirge to humanity. My eyes have left the clock to look upon him now and I'm lulled into a fool's peace.
When my survival instincts snap me alert once more to look back out the window it's all I could do not to snuff myself then and there. A black mass is approaching my home, their parade proceeded by a monster in orange wearing a wide gaping smile with eyes wide open turned up at me.
My frozen surface is cracking, breaking up, I'm sobbing and shaking and Kyle's slender fingers are wrapping over mine, over my grip on our emergency exit. He's wreathed with the white sheet from my bed like the Helen of Troy, standing close behind to plant chilling pecks of his smooth and glassy lips upon the nape of my neck. His whisper of a song has reached it's outro and he's guiding me around to face him so that he may comfort me as always, to take my eyes off of the willing slaves of the deep and old ones outside who wait to drag us under and join them in an octopus garden at the bottom of the darkest ocean.
Kyle is nudging my blubbering lips with his in slow, deliberate kisses just as he's slowly lifting my hand to bring the barrel of my gun to his temple. "I'll go on ahead, Stan. I'll make a spot for us in the shade. I really am so glad you came back for me. So glad that you finally believed in me the way that I always believed in you. Don't make me wait. Not anymore." I can hear the crunching of wood downstairs as my front door is impacted with the heavy blows of axes. I've pulled back the hammer of the gun while telling Kyle how much I love him. So long ago I escaped from this place, but my heart remained with Kyle, and once I had returned to find them again, I was forced to accept my harrowing destiny of sinking into oblivion in the wreckage of South Park.