36. Maybe you shouldn't put your picture on the bottles.
Drakken squirms inside the cramped cut-out window of the letter R, his arms pinched tightly to his sides. If he'd had them raised the way most of the audience did, the letter would have slipped right over him, kept him free to make an escape, but Kim Possible had just landed on his head, and he was a bit - just a bit, mind you - winded from the experience. So now he wriggles around, a goldfish caught in the tank filter, listening to the buffoon finish up the rap he's performing about his pet hairless vermin - a "naked mole rat," he called it in the song, probably because nothing really rhymes with "vermin." (Well, there is "merman," but how you work that into a song, even Drakken can't guess.)
The buffoon. Not even a contestant. Not even on the ballot.
Kim Possible stands over Drakken, eyeballing him with fixed casualness. (Is that the right word? Because casualty feels very much like the wrong one. . .) Drakken searches for the telltale invisible shine on her upper lip, an indicator that she at least broke a sweat bringing him down. Nope, nothing but perky red lipstick. He wishes he could scribble a mustache across it like he did during his brilliant performance.
The judge breaks away from the crowd eating the buffoon up with a spork or whatever the saying is, crosses over to them, stands over Drakken, and smiles. It's the same smarmy, charming smile he gives all the contestants, win or lose,so - it's not over yet!
Drakken slathers on his own most appealing grin, trying to restrain the natural pout in his lower jaw. "So - do I win?" he says.
"Actually, you're disqualified."
The judge's voice is so indifferent that it takes Drakken a moment to realize the man is lowering the boom on him. When he does, heat zings through Drakken's bloodstream, right down to the spot where his wrists are crunched against his hips, the spot where he is sure his circulation has been cut off completely.
"Says who?" Drakken says. His throat pulses and strains, keeping his voice low, menacing, and very, very deep. In his own way, he is lowering the boom, too.
"The police," the judge says, and the word is a laser, searing through Drakken. "I don't know what this means, but they've 'confiscated your warehouse' and they're 'coming to get you.'"
He twitches his hands in the air. Finger quotes. Because he's cool.
Only - I'm cool too! I'm off the heezy! I studied everything! I did the research! I learned how to be cool! Which means I should win!
Why am I not winning?
"Shego!" Drakken hollers. "Shego!"
She can't be far away, and she must hear him, even over the ecstatic crowd. But she doesn't come, and she still isn't coming, and he is all alone with the entire human race compressed into these two people whose stares shun him.
"Shego!" Drakken cries again.
"Oh - that reminds me," Kim Possible says. She stands up and flips back the curtain to reveal Drakken's sidekick in the backstage shadows. Any second now, she will roll her eyes and chide him for making a scene, and everything will be all right.
Yet as she steps into the spotlights, her face isn't as pineapple-prickly as usual. It's blank, a computer monitor with the screen turned on but no programs running, and her movements, as seamlessly choreographed as ever, nonetheless are stiff and tactical. It's like watching a strong, pretty, graceful robot.
Such as the Bebes. And the last time Drakken saw them move, they were creeping in to destroy him.
"Shego!" Drakken yips one last time.
Kim Possible tilts her head. "She might have gotten a spray of Brainwashing Shampoo during the fight," she says, glancing at the judge as if they are co-conspirators.
Shego gazes ahead at Drakken, her eyes wide and compliant. It was a wondrous sight to behold when she was under her Neuro-Compliance Chip, but seeing her now and knowing it's not his doing chills into him in a way even the trendy red sweatsuit he so carefully chose for his performance can't block.
All right. All right. It's not the end of the world. The Brainwashing Shampoo wears off. . . right? How long did it take Lutz to stop running around the lair pretending to be a chicken? Or did he ever? When Drakken looks back now, he thinks he might recall Lutz pecking for seed right as Drakken raced out the door tonight.
Face it, Drakken. You lost again.
But he doesn't want to face it. No, more than that. He can't face it, he can't.
Drakken tries to aim a kick at the underside of the letter that imprisons him. It would, too. Letters have always been tricky little devils, with their innumerable phonics rules and their covert gatherings where they break all those rules. But he never dreamed the arrangement of his own name would turn against him.
There is only one thing to do. Drakken continues to bawl Shego's name until the police arrive. The judge wanders off, probably to give the buffoon a record contract. (If anyone even releases records anymore.) Kim Possible spends the time shaking her head, and Drakken hopes that at some point she will mistime it and flog herself with her own hair, but of course she never does.
An officer clips Shego's hands into cuffs. Drakken can't tell from this distance if they're being gentle with her or not, which is not something that typically crosses his mind, but never before has she been put in a position of being unable to protest.
On his way back to his dressing room, the judge stops and nods at the police. "Get this scum out of here," he says. Drakken immediately forgets about Shego.
A second officer lifts the R, and Drakken would bolt for the exit, except he has no feeling whatsoever in his limbs anymore. The next thing he knows, his own arms are pushed behind him, the base of his own neck caught in a harsh grip. The cop's burly chest barely moves as it drones his Miranda rights. A shove on his back, and Drakken stumbles forward, staggering beside his captor. Even within his ultra-hip white size-six sneakers, his toes are like clumps of slush.
Drakken's last glimpse of the studio depicts the buffoon with people clawing at his clothes and asking for his autograph.
It doesn't matter. Rap is stupid. The whole thing is stupid. He wishes he had never bothered with any of it.
But they were so close. So close to having mind-controlled the entire hair-washing population of the worl -
Oh, no. The door opens, and Drakken turns away from the frigid early-winter winds that lunge forward to slap him in the face with this new revelation. What about bald people? They wouldn't be under the shampoo's power, because they would never shampoo. A resistance will be formed.
Admittedly, a resistance consisting of old men and cancer patients doesn't sound very troublesome, until Drakken remembers that some of Eddy's biker friends back in high school used to shave their heads, and he gulps.
Still - still - he can work around that, Drakken decides as he is loaded into the back of a squad car and buckled in. All he'd have to do is use the same formula to create a type of - of - scalp-polish and market it alongside the shampoo!
And he wouldn't put his picture on the bottle this time, just in case Shego was right about the reason for his low sales. Struck him as a rather unkind thing to say, especially considering it wasn't really his picture. Oh, it started out a snapshot of him, but editing software can perform many miracles. Drakken kept the curl to his nose but hooked it forward into an evil beak of sorts, stretched the smile to demonic proportions, made use of the reverse-red-eye tool to create crimson beads that loomed underneath heavy, sullen hoods.
Drakken sits up a little straighter and then collapses against the window-without-a-handle. According to that judge with the attitude problem, the police have already confiscated his warehouse. Imagine - his beautiful chemical creations in the hands of a bunch of loutish officers.
Though perhaps, if there is any justice in the world, the police will be stupid enough to pour it all down the drains. Then he would at least have an army of sewer rats and phytoplankton and maybe even some of those alligators that Eddy used to swear up and down lurked beneath the Middleton manholes.
Better than nothing. Especially the alligators. But the police are never stupid when they need to be.
Drakken fumes over the unfairness of the whole thing all the way to the station, scooted as far away on the seat as he can get from a silent, spacey Shego. Only when the squad car comes to a halt and an armed policeman unlocks the door from the outside does Drakken remember where he is headed, and his spirit is shredded.
Prison. The rectangular gray government building that is kept fresh and sanitary, yet somehow always manages to smell of filth and health code violations. Food made from vulcanized rubber. Jumpsuits the color of humiliation. Cots constructed of ninety-eight percent needle-springs and zero percent lumbar support.
A policeman goads Drakken down the hallway, using his fingertip as easily as he would a blunt club. As Drakken steps forward, he realizes his hands are shaking, rattling the cuffs together. Judging from the shrill sounds of his tennis shoes on the tiles, his feet are in a similar state. Even his mouth trembles, even as Drakken rolls it inward so no one can see it.
This is strange. He's been defeated and arrested more times than he cares to recall, and, yes, he's spent plenty of time afterward with the shakes of anger and fear - but seldom has he known the type of seismic activity quaking beneath his flesh right now. When Drakken drops onto a bench at the end of the hallway, his leg bounces and bucks as if his femur has been replaced with a shoddy electrical wire.
Prison.
Last time he was in prison, he went through the lunchline and ladled himself a tray-full of lukewarm macaroni and cheese, one of their less inedible dishes. On his way across the cafeteria, Monkey Fist stuck out a monkey-foot and tripped him. Drakken went flying - he managed to keep a hold of the trail but not the food. The mac-and-cheese spattered all over the front of an enormous guy. Drakken stood there gaping at the man, frozen by his traitorous and counterproductive adrenaline, trying to determine whether the man was wearing brass knuckles or if those were really his.
It didn't matter once he'd buried them in Drakken's collarbone. His other hand encircled Drakken's wrist and pulled it to the side in ripping, clockwise increments. If Drakken's bloodthirsty cries for revenge - okay, maybe he was shrieking for his life - hadn't alerted the three guards it took to peel Knuckles off him, Drakken had no doubt the man would have kept going until he'd broken Drakken's wrist, possibly even until his hand fell right off.
Drakken presses against the wall and listens to the talk of processing and phone calls and rap sheets until it all becomes a beehive in his head - it would lull him to sleep except that everyone, everywhere also has a stinger. He turns to look at Shego, who keeps her glazed eyes fastened straight ahead of her. He has promised the both of them never to mind-control her again, but this time he cannot help himself. He issues a shaking command - "Shego. Tell me everything's going to be all right."
"Everything's going to be all right, Dr. Drakken," Shego repeats.
Monotone where it should be sharp. Like taking a swig of soda only to find it's some stale off-brand that doesn't even fizz or bubble.
A female officer appears after several minutes, takes hold of Shego's elbow, leads her around a corner. Shego follows, hapless and helpless, and Drakken's guts pitch inside him. This is the greatest fright he's ever known. This feeling, this worry, this - this - pulling on his hopes and dreams until the strings cinch and he can't move without the approval of the enemies who hold his wires on the other end.
He wants to harness it, make it tangible, use it as a weapon against Kim Possible. It is more frightful than anything he could build, outsource, or concoct in his lab.
Drakken presses his shaking self back to the wall once more, arms in a fold that the police should interpret as stubborn rather than. . . whatever this is. This is what he gets for playing nice, for brainwashing the judge and letting him think he invited Drakken onto the show of his own free will. Shego is always telling him to go for a more subtle approach with his schemes, and he gave it a whirl, and this happened. It wore off.
So it does wear off. Phew.
He should have just charged onto the set, held a doom ray to the judge's temple, and taken the whole crew hostage to get his song out on the airwaves.
Drakken pauses his thoughts for a moment as something creeps into place beneath the shivers. His soul has turned inside-out again, and this time he can see the pattern of its underside. It's a beast of both ferocity and subtlety.
If only he knew what to do with it.
