Last chapter before the epilogue, my dears!
Lovely Jew: I got excited too, when I got the email with your review. Kenny has a special place in my heart, he's like a flower that's broken through the asfalt and bloom in the middle of the road. Your optimism and eagerness brightens my world!
thequillofdestiny: The end finds us all in the…uh…end? Lame wording, meknows. Now it has truly come, but I can promise you that this isn't the last you've heard of me! BTW, I think Kenny and Wendy have a kind of chemistry, you know? Well, there's a chemistry between Kenny and anyone, really…
Animegrl421: Your wish is my command, sweetie! No more cliffhangers, for cereal! *cough* in this story *cough*
Forgotten. Thirteen: Thou aereth not forgotten! Or something. I suck at Shakespearian, but you get the point. I'm glad you found the time to read this story, and I'm even happier that you liked it!
syntic: You had me grinning for a day and a night when you told me that you caught that! I was hoping that someone would, since it, as silly as it may sound, was a part that meant a lot to me. And you made me catch an error I had missed, thank you for that as well! ^^
Chapter X – Remembering the Past
Two years earlier
"Don't you die on me, you worthless scumbag," Bebe muttered as she tended to the injured man lying unconscious on a bad that used to be white.
When Bebe was still a little girl, it had been her dream to be either a doctor or a nurse. It wasn't the wage that encouraged her in her persuasion; as a matter of fact, many nurses were underpaid and in all honesty, she would prefer being a nurse before a doctor. A doctor was always busy and running back and forth between the sick and injured, but nurses had the time to sit down and talk to the patient. At least, that was what she had gathered, spending half of her life at Hell's Pass, either in a sickbed herself or visiting one or several of her classmates.
More than money, Bebe liked helping others. While she wasn't as obsessed with the well-being of just about every living creature on the planet as Wendy was, she still cared about the people close to her and wanted them to feel good, both physically and emotionally. When it came to the affair of illegal fishing of tuna, she didn't give a damn as long as the price per can still was reasonable.
Still, this wasn't exactly what she had had in mind when she had become the medic in their organization. Oh, she knew that she was lucky; as good as anyone who entered the hospital ward eventually left it. However, to a girl who had dreamt of comforting a wrinkly, old woman, telling her everything would be fine, the act of cleaning up gunshot wounds or sewing legs and arms back onto torsos seemed rather gruesome.
At times like these, she didn't even have her heart in her work. It was different when it was her friends or other members of La Résistance, but the man lying in front of her, struggling for his life, was one of Cartman's soldiers. She hardly found the energy to help him; but she had been asked by Kenny to keep him alive. He would be questioned, Kenny had said. Bebe didn't know what they would ask him, but she was fairly sure that they wouldn't get any answers. Somehow, the men working for Cartman had a bizarre fondness of their leader, a fondness none of them could understand.
Maybe it was the cause of that unconditional love they sought; they knew basically what it was, but not how. If that was the case, she sure hoped that they'd manage to get what they wanted. Even if she wasn't a major figure on the battle field, she had still seen Cartman's soldiers enough times to be intrigued by them and the way they seemed to place their own lives rather low on their list of priorities.
Yet, she thought as she frowned when checking the bandage on the man's head, which had already taken on a pinkish color, if they needed them alive, they should have the decency to turn them in at least half so. The man had taken a, well, maybe not a shot but something like it, to his head and had lost a bit of his skull. The brain, be it a wondrous thing that gave them the miracle of thinking and whatnot, looked pretty disgusting in the state it was.
"Aren't the brains supposed to be, like, grey or something?"
Flinching with a used scalpel in your hand is a really foolish thing. Fortunately, Bebe had become accustomed to the occasional interruptions, usually by Wendy, Stan or Kenny. Lately, even Craig, the ass that had tried to scare her, had taken up the habit of walking straight into her ward without a word of precaution. The way he eyed her medical cabinet had long ago made her draw the conclusion that he was after the alcohol. Well, tough luck, that shit was for her patients.
Besides, it tasted god awful.
"Yes, well, they are, if they're not covered with blood, that is."
"They look gross," Craig commented plainly and came to stand by the shorter side of the bed; close enough to see the exposed organ, but not close enough the disturb her in her work.
Biting her tongue to keep back the childish remark "Well, so do you!" Bebe went back to her work. Craig was simply one of those persons that could piss her off even when they weren't trying. It might be his nonchalant and arrogant attitude, his lack of human emotion other than anger and bitterness, or the fact that every other time she glanced up at him, he flipped her off.
Yet even if she at times wanted nothing more than to just slit his throat in a sinister reenactment of the pig hunting in Lord of the Flies, he had been her classmate and grown up by her side. Whether she wanted it or not, Craig was her friend, and there was little she could do about it.
Of course, just because he was her friend it didn't mean that she had to like him.
For a while they just continued with what they were doing; she was stitching up a wound in the injured man's chest while he stood by, watching silently. The lack of action was enough to make her temporarily forget about him and get lost in her work, until he interrupted her again.
"What's that sound?"
Annoyed at the additional interruption, Bebe looked up and glared at him half-heartedly.
"What do you mean? What sound?"
"Quiet, just listen. It's soft, but it's there."
At first, she had just assumed that he was screwing with her, but the intense and befuddled look on his face told her otherwise. After coming to the conclusion that, if nothing else, she'd at least have the opportunity of straightening her back for a while, she stood straight and listened attentively.
The sick ward was completely silent. There were no patients at the moment, and it was located in the back of their underground network of tunnels, in order to keep it calm and quiet for the patients. The only sound was that of two people breathing.
No, she frowned at the sudden discovery, that wasn't true. There was a soft sound, just as Craig had said, and it came back with even intervals. Her eyes locked with Craig's and in unison, they looked down at the unconscious man.
Carefully, Bebe lowered her head so that she was in the same level as the man on the table. Experienced fingers trembled as they slowly removed the bandage from the soldier's head.
"It's stronger here," she whispered softly, and it was true. Now that she was searching for it, she could easily find it and notice a change in its intensity.
Finding the box containing disposable gloves, she ripped out a pair and slipped them on her hands, an action she did often enough to do it without looking. The bile rose in her throat as she removed hair that stuck to the open wound. It was disgusting, absolutely vile, but she didn't have much choice. Warily, the young woman let her plastic covered hands slip over the slimy surface, until she found what she was looking for.
"Get Ike!" she barked at Craig, who looked anything but happy with being ordered around. "It's a chip or something."
"Jesus, don't get your panties in a bunch," Craig muttered, but he understood the gravity of the discovery and slipped out the door as quickly and quietly as he had entered, leaving Bebe alone with the soft pulsation coming from the unconscious man's head. She shivered and diverted her gaze.
She could handle wounds and cuts without a flinch. She dealt with surgeries and managed to treat and heal organs and limbs looking so bad that they would have made her throw up when she was younger. However, the gentle beating from that chip was more than she could handle.
They knew that Cartman was brainwashing his men. It was common knowledge amongst those against Cartman's ruling. How he did it, they didn't know, but it was obvious. Throughout history there had always been men in the armies who questioned their leader's motives, or broke down as they couldn't handle the blatant cruelty and lack of humanism that was war. La Résistance had experienced several of these mental breakdowns, even if they knew that they were fighting for the right cause.
Cartman's men were, unlike the rebels, recruited by force, but none of them ever expressed even the slightest hint of doubt when they were battling. She doubted that men and women who had been hiding to escape the clasps of the military would experience such a drastic change of mind.
"Let go of me, you donkey-raping shit-eater!"A familiar voice called from down the hall.
Craig came back through the door, dragging very annoyed Ike by the arm. Said Canadian was clearly about to go to bed, as he was dressed in pajama pants and had a red toothbrush held tightly in his fist. He had apparently been caught in mid-action too, as he had the look of a man heavily infected with rabies with white foam on his lips and at the corners of his mouth.
Bebe fought to keep a smile down.
Craig allowed the young man to free himself, slightly bemused as he had expected more of a fight from a man three inches taller and five years his junior, but clearly he was mistaken. Rubbing his abused arm, Ike didn't look very happy either. Making the decision to ignore the stoic pest, Ike turned to Bebe and arched a brow in true Broflovski fashion.
"Would you mind telling me why this bonehead found it necessary to kidnap me in the middle of the night?" Ike asked, trying to keep his voice bored and disdainful, but too much of a kid to completely repress that part of him that was delighted to experience a midnight adventure.
"Actually, yeah. I discovered-" A sharp cough from Craig cut her off. She glared at him and continued. "We discovered something quite unusual. You, the mastermind of all things technological, should take a look at it and explain it to us plain mortals."
Ike blushed a lovely shade of red, but moved over to where she stood and bent down to see what she was talking about. Bebe gestured toward the visible inside of the man's brain. Wrinkling his nose, Ike muttered a request of gloves, which were handed to him.
"I'm pretty sure I can't remove it without damaging the brain, and it's placed in the part of the brain that regulates pain," Ike muttered as he poked at the chip. "Not the kind of pain that only lasts for a second, like when you get burned and need to withdraw the offended limb, but rather the pain you feel when you've been stabbed or something. Should I try to get it out, I could accidently have him go into a shock due to the sudden pain, or it could actually hurt enough to close down his systems. He could die."
The last words fell softly from Ike's lips. Shaking his head to get rid of the sentimentality, Ike spoke up again, this time in a voice more sober.
"Bebe, you have monitors, don't you? Get one over here, and I'll set it up. We probably won't be able to decode the signals, but it's a start."
Immediately on her feet, Bebe was about to fetch the requested instrument, but Craig beat her to it. Without as much as a word, he disappeared into the closet where she stashed the medical machinery. He came back, rolling the monitor in front of him. Surprised, Ike eyed him, but kept quiet as he created a link between the monitor and the chip in the man's head.
When the signal appeared on the monitor, Bebe couldn't hold back the surprised gasp. After working as a medic for as long as she had, she'd recognize a heartbeat in, well, a heartbeat.
As the two men looked up at her, she explained to them. "That's a heartbeat, or at least it's what it looks like. I'd say that it belongs to a man of average physic, but since it's night and the owner is presumably sleeping, it could also belong to an overweight man resting."
Judging by the looks on their faces, Bebe assumed that they had come to the same conclusion as she had.
"So, you're telling me," Craig spoke up for the heck of it, "That there's a chip with Cartman's heartbeat inside the head of one of his soldiers?"
"Or several of them." Ike looked at the soldier in disgusted fascination.
"So it would seem." Bebe nodded. "But why?"
Ike shrugged. "As long as it's in there, I can't really do any testing" He glanced at them both with hard eyes. "Don't bother asking Kenny for permission either. There's a difference between killing a man in self-defense and turning his brain to mush in experiments."
Bebe nodded, possibly understanding better than Ike himself. Even Craig kept his mouth shut, for once passing up the opportunity of calling Ike a pussy-assed fag.
Two days later, the man died from his severe wounds, never having regained consciousness. The chip was handed over to Ike, who, only hours after receiving it, barged in on a meeting. The others attending the gathering quickly came over the annoyance over Ike skipping it in the first place, as the news he carried were nothing short of astounding. The signal let out a stimulus that slowed down the impulses of pain, but since only the brain was affected, the basic reflexes remained.
However, should the signal cease, the chip would send out a wave of electricity, enough to send the receiver's body into a state of so much pain that they died.
In short, when Cartman fell, so would his empire.
Like vampires, as someone had said. Get the source and the rest will follow.
One year earlier (because I'd rather not have this in the epilogue)
Ze Mole, a.k.a. Christophe DeLorne, or Chris, as his mother called him, dragged a sack of canned beans in tomato sauce over the dirty ground that was made out of just that, stomped dirt.
He was in the middle of restocking his seventh underground hideout, not counting the one in a cave in Aspen or the two in Mexico. Some might say, although it was generally considered to be very stupid to openly disagree with or insult Ze Mole, that he was paranoid. Christophe himself preferred practical.
But nevertheless, restocking, according to Christophe, sucked harder than God himself. Almost. Finding food was not too troublesome, and if someone wasn't too eager on giving up their supplies, well, that was why he carried a gun. And a shovel. Even in times of war, one should never forget about disposing the evidence that came from one's actions.
No, getting food wasn't the problem; the problem was that as he traveled between his hideouts, the food had to be either canned or dried. Christophe hated all sorts of animals, especially guard dogs, and he knew from experience that many kinds of rodents were drawn to dried food, which only left cans. This would have been fine as well, if it weren't for the fact that just about all of his cans held the same content. White beans in tomato sauce.
Christophe had come to hate beans. And tomatoes.
Still, food was food and he would eat it, even if he cursed God for every bite.
That had been the thought, at least, as he continued walking along the long, dark isle. This particular hideout had been a mine many years ago, stone and rubble now cut off both endings. As so, the only way to get inside was through one of the exits that Christophe had dug, one by each end of the three mile long tunnel.
Unless, of course, one did as Stanley Marsh and came crashing through the roof of the tunnel, bringing with him earth, stone, grass and three friends, all crammed together in a small and very abused creation of metal that vaguely resembled a car, if one looked past the numerous bullet-shaped holes and the windows that had been reduced to shards.
From above, he heard loud sirens and a strong, bright light was directed at the hole the car had created.
For once in his life, Christophe was stunned to silence.
"Fucking sheet!
Almost.
Stanley Marsh stared at him dumbly, as did his companions, apart from a dark-haired man whose focus was on the ruckus above. Christophe remembered him vaguely from the American-Canadian war. He also remembered that he didn't like him, when the dark man flipped him off.
"Uh, hi?" Stanley said, more as a question than an actual greeting, sounding just as stupid as he looked.
"'Ello."
Thankfully, being around morons made Christophe regain the control of his mind. In a swift motion, the mercenary had his shovel, the rusty metal glimmering dangerously, not so safely tucked against Stanley's throat.
"Move azide, I'm taking ze wheel."
Eager to get away from the menacing shovel, Stanley scrambled to the side and left room. Without as much as a glance at those already in the car, Christophe jumped in and forced the vehicle to move forward at an alarming rate, while still in the mine, which was now thankfully lit up by the lights on the car.
"Are you Ze Mole?" Stanley asked tentatively, not willing to anger the intimidating man driving his car.
"Oui, and when I 'ave you back where you belong, you will pay for what you deed to my lair, beetches."
Christophe scowled at the other residents in the car, who cowed and shrunk back. Satisfied with himself, he drove the car toward the exit that would take them to the middle of a forest, where he hid his jeep.
Many years ago, the fat bastard that ran the country he was in had gotten Christophe killed, but a boy named Kenny had sacrificed himself for the humanity, and thus brought him back to life. He still owed him for that, and had promised himself that he'd pay back the debt some day. Bringing four of Kenny's friends back to him safely would be a good way to pay him back.
Ze Mole never broke a promise, at least not those he made to himself.
Present time, 2030.
All over the nation, radios were pulled from their places hidden within cupboards and closets. They had been banned long ago, together with TVs, newspapers, telephones and the internet. The only means of contact were that face to face, and the only news brought to the Americans came through the military. There were stories circulating, tales of parents who wished to make a child happy or a birthday special by putting on an on Disney movie to see smiles on the children's faces, but had their doors kicked in as they were watching and taken away before the eyes of their kids.
For a long time, these things had been a source of constant fear. Lately, however, rumors had spread, rumors that brought the hope people needed in order to dare drag their old radios out. No one really knew which bird had sung first, but it didn't change the message; words were that Lady Justice had finally realized her mistake and ridden the world of the burden that was Eric Cartman.
Encouraged but still doubting, the Americans soon found themselves twisting and turning on the buttons of the radio to find a station.
In the Burke family, the oldest daughter Julie was in charge of the radio during the evenings. For five days she had sat by it and zapped between the channels in order to find anything of interest, not really believing that she would find what she was looking for. Thankfully, whenever the urge to just smash the old thing and leave the room became too strong, her mother glared at her from the other side of the room, where she sat and played with her youngest.
Halfway bored to death, Julie switched channel every other second. Distracted by her own thoughts, she didn't notice the sudden change of tone, and would have continued if it weren't for her mother, who leaped from the couch with haste unbecoming a woman of her age. Lilly Burke, a hippie in her younger years, had never cared about what she should or should not do, and was quite willing to pay a week's worth of back pains if it meant that she could stop her mindless daughter.
Pushing the girl, who spluttered indignantly at her mother's harsh treatment, away from the radio, Lilly soon found the channel again. After a few minutes of nothing but buzzing and her daughter's whining, the radio gave a cracking noise, and soft swearing was heard in the background. Lilly leaned closer in order to hear what they said, but almost fell out of her chair at the sudden "Cock!"
"Transmission seems to be working. How's the sound, Thomas?"
A high, clear voice filled the room, instantly calling the rest of the family to gather.
"Fuck! Shit! I'd say that it – Cock! – is working all right."
"Then maybe you should get away from the microphone. I mean, you're a great dude and all, but there might be children listening."
Something happened on the other end of the radio, and the nervous, cursing voice was replaced by one clearly belonging to a female.
"I'm sorry about the strange opening, people. We are new to this, and the equipment doesn't belong to us. It belongs to Eric Cartman, but it's not like he can oppose to us using it, which brings me to our main subject. Six days ago, the opposition, La Résistance , managed to bring down Cartman once and for all."
Even Julia was now listening, her eyes as wide and round as plates.
"At approximately ten thirty on the evening of June the sixth, the leader of La Résistance, Kenny McCormick along with several of his men, gave their lives so that we can live in freedom once more. As you surely have noticed, this is a day of joy and celebration, a day of change."
Mrs. Burke pulled her daughter into her arms, wearing a grin as genuine and brilliant as never before.
"But I've learned something during these years. Don't you see? This time we barely managed to escape from the clutches of evil, and we have only started to pay off our debt. Many sons and daughters of this nation have fallen; a whole generation has been lost. And we're the ones better off.
"Japan no longer exists, the northern parts of Europeare unable to support their survivors due to barren soil. We're still at war, and only if we are extremely lucky will this war end with Cartman's death."
"It's easy to put the blame on a single man. Don't get me wrong, I hate Cartman just as much as the next man, probably more, but what we must remember is that nothing is ever the fault of a single man. We are all to blame for letting him advance as he did, for letting him fool us the way he did. Something like this cannot be allowed to happen again. It's an easy thing to say, but harder to pull through; at the end of the second world war, the general consensus was that it would be the last and only time for such an inhuman affair, but at the same time people wondered how it could happen in the first place."
A guilty silence rested over the living room as the grins of victory slowly withered and died.
"To prevent that anything like this would reoccur, we need to understand where we went wrong, how we managed to get ourselves into this mess. All we, my companions and I who fought in the final battle, wish for as a refund for your freedom is that you think over your previous actions. What could you have done but didn't do, what did you do that you shouldn't have done? Think about this long and hard, then pass this understanding down to your children. It's the only way."
"I'm begging you to take these words seriously; without you all, our goal is impossible. But for tonight, you are free from the burden of thought. Tonight, we celebrate, tomorrow, we rebuild. To contact us, please turn to your local military base. Further information will be released as soon as we have it, but at the moment, this is all we've got. This message will be repeated on this station until further notice. I thank you for listening; this is Wendy Testaburger, currently positioned at former President Cartman's base in Colorado. We wish you all a nice evening. God bless America."
The transmission ended, before taking it from the very beginning, cursing and all.
There's this little competition I'd like to announce, if you even can call it that. You see, the review of a specific number (that's already chosen and I will give you a motivation on my page) can request a one-shot. Pairing, setting and plot is up to the winner to decide, just know that I'm not writing porn or erotica. It's not that I have anything against it; I just haven't written it before and wouldn't like to end up with something that sounds like the 40 year-old virgin.
The number is very close to the number I already have (41) as I'm not doing this just to get reviews, but rather as a mean to that all my dear readers.