Chapter 6. Oooo That Smell, Can't You Smell That Smell
A slightly built woman sat alone at the top of the tower, her legs dangling off the edge. She looked out over the water at the city, wondering about the normal lives being led there. The moon was high in the sky, casting it's reflection on the lake, silhouetting her form. She was singing softly, tonelessly, half remembering the lyrics of the song.
"Sixteen candles down the drain…" She kicked slightly as she sang, her voice wandering between melancholy and mirth.
"You know that's song's about a redhead, not a brunette." The voice drifted up from the gravel covered rooftop. A head covered in unruly brown hair popped up at the top of the ladder, its owner clambering over the ledge to sit with the young woman.
"Hey, you!" She leaned over toward him and kissed him they way young people did when they greeted a loved one. "I'm not going to ask you how you got in here."
He slid a little closer to her, his rump touching hers. "Maybe I'm developing my own powers and the security system decided it was time to let me in on my own."
"Bull crap, Neil. The authorities hauled off the remains of the meteor long before you got here. Fortunately you're just a plain old human. Now how did you get in here?"
"Who says I got in. Last time I looked, we were on the roof of the Go Tower. I just hopped a tourist helicopter and parachuted in right behind you. Anything for my 'Sweet Sixteen!'" he produced a small wrapped package. The card was marked "To Sherry, Love, Neil."
She kissed him again, then locked eyes with him. "If you'd pulled a stunt like that all sorts of alarms would have gone off and you'd have Hego making a human pretzel out of you again."
"Heh. He's just being protective of his little sister."
"No, Neil, he doesn't like you. Maybe if you got a haircut you'd hear some of these things through all that mop on your head. He doesn't trust GJ, he doesn't trust their liaison and he just plain doesn't like you." Sherry said, pushing a lock of her shoulder length black hair out of her eyes.
"He'll come around, eventually. Now are you going to open that or are we going to just make out until he wanders up here and tried to tie me in knots?"
"Neither, until you tell me how you got in here?" She grinned at him.
"Okay, smartass. One of the twins let me in. Satisfied?" Indeed she was. Her oldest brother barely tolerated Neil but the twins seemed to worship the ground he walked on. They saw the tall, skinny Southerner as a sort of surrogate older brother. In fact, he spent almost as much time with them as he did Sherry. Hego hated him. Mego tolerated him. Both Wegos adored him.
Sherry, who more and more went by her code name Shego, loved him.
"Okay, I fessed up, now make with the ripping and tearing." He pointed at the small box again.
"This better not be what I think it is." She mock leered at him.
"What, me? Let's see, two months salary of zero is, um, zero, so I don't think that is in the cards…yet."
She stuck her tongue out at him and started peeling the wrapping off the box. Inside, sitting on soft white pillows of cotton was a large ovoid piece of perfectly green jade. It was very slightly darker green than her Team Go uniform.
"It's beautiful, Neil!"
"Here, it's made for your collar." He affixed it to the green layer, centered on her throat. "Happy birthday… Shego."
She put an arm around him and put her head on his shoulder. "Now you're going to rub it in that I couldn't see you on your sixteenth birthday last month!"
"Nah, saving Go City from Aviarius takes precedence over the man you've expressed your undying devotion to."
"Okay, now who's bein' a smart-ass?"
"Okay, we're here why?" Ron was doing his best not to show his disdain for the shabby warehouse Shego led them to. He wasn't doing a very good job.
Using the extra strength that came with the active use of her power, Shego shoved a large crate out of the way, revealing a smaller roll-up door. That in turn led to the outside storage yard. The warehouse itself might have been in disuse, but the yard was almost full of shipping containers, stacked over ten high in some places. The sun was dipping as afternoon slipped into evening. She led the trio along the wall, heading for an obviously more dilapidated stack of containers.
"C'mere and give me a boost, Slappable."
"My name, for the last time, is Stoppable!" he glared at her, his index finger outthrust.
"Would you rather I just called you Buffoon?"
He continued to glare at her, but interlocked his fingers and stooped so she could plant a foot there. He lifted quite a bit harder than she needed to reach the second level of containers but she simply executed a double flip in the air, landing perfectly on the ledge created by having a smaller container atop a larger one.
Kim followed second, alighting beside Shego.
"Um, ladies? What about me?"
Kim and Shego looked at each other, then leaned over the side to grab Ron by his shoulders and haul him up.
The container was secured with a large padlock. Instead of producing a key, Shego simply opened the side of the lock and tapped a code into the pad revealed inside. The hasp opened with a faint snap. She pulled the release and the door swung open silently. Apparently it had been treated so it wouldn't squeak like so many other steel containers.
"Oh, gross!" the three of them said in unison as a wave of sun-heated effluvia wafted out of the storage unit.
"What crawled in here and died?" Kim said, not willing to take her hand off her face.
"There shouldn't be anything in here dead." Shego said, also holding her nose. "Oh, man, that's just…ug!" She peered around, her eyes finally coming to rest on what must have once been a bag of some kind. "Oh crap."
"Not crap, definitely much worse than crap!" Ron exclaimed.
Shego's hands flared to life. Instead of throwing a ball of energy she focused it into a stream of green plasma. She got behind the offending bag and blasted it out into the dim twilight. It landed on the ground below with a resounding wet slap.
"Ohhh, I and didn't think it could get worse!" Kim was suddenly quite happy they hadn't had anything to eat besides the bag of Bueno Nacho Naco To Go that was in the Cruiser.
"You'd think it was too early for flaming bags of poo! I thought that was for Halloween?" Ron complained. His cheeks bulged out as he held his own stomach contents barely in check.
Shego kept her blasting up, burning away the remnants of the bag. Satisfied, she disappeared into the darkness of the container, returning with a large spray can. She sprayed the whole area with the disinfectant, which helped tremendously with the odor. "Sorry, guys, guess I left a bag of burritos when I locked up the last time."
"Tell me that wasn't Bueno Nacho. For the love of all that's holy, please tell me that's not what happens to an uneaten Chimirito?" Ron begged.
"Amp down there, Snackable. It was probably from Chihuahua Taco. They're more popular here than your usual dump."
"It's going to be a long time before I can set foot in any kind of Tex-Mex restaurant." Kim said, still feeling as green as Shego looked. "So, what are we doing here?"
Shego pulled the door shut, trapping the oppressive heat inside once more. She touched a hidden switch and a series of fluorescent lights sprang to life in hidden cornices. Somewhere, concealed ductwork started bringing cool air into the space.
There wasn't much room inside a forty foot long container, but it did provide the space for a cot and a trunk. It wasn't much, but it was clear this was a hideout of some sort.
"So much for trusting Neil, I see." Kim said flatly.
"Do you think I'm stupid, Princess? I show up on his doorstep after almost six years and I'm supposed to blindly trust him? What if he up and decided to turn me over to GJ instead of helping me? Was he supposed to up and forgive me for crippling him?"
"Crippling? The limp he used to have?"
"Yeah, I did that. I put him in the hospital. I had a choice of killing him or taking him out of the fight and I guess I was soft. He spent months in the hospital and over a year just being able to walk unassisted. It tore me up inside seeing him like that and not being able to go to him and ask for forgiveness. Then when you brought him with you to capture Drakken and me, I…" She stopped, a look of hopelessness crossing her features, erasing the smugness that was usually there.
"What is the deal with you two anyway?" Kim asked.
Shego sat heavily on the sparsely made bed. "I met him when GJ set him up in Go City High when we were both fourteen. That was before I became what I am now. Pretty soon we were going steady. I thought he was the love of my life. Then it happened."
"The meteorite?"
"Yeah. We had some stupid fight and he stormed out. I went to hide in our treehouse to have a good cry, but the twins were already there. One of them went to get Herman and Mervin came tagging along. So, there we were, the five of us just sitting there nice and pretty, ready to have our lives ruined."
"But, after we got out of the hospital and our powers started developing, Neil still stuck by me. We were together through thick and thin. He even stood up to Hego, even though they hated each other, almost as much as we hate each other." She cast her eyes on Kim before looking down again. "What I did…I should have been ashamed, but I wasn't. I reveled in what I'd done, it made me feel alive. More alive than anything else I had done since I became Shego. I finally understood what it was to have power and to use it."
"So, Neil and the remains of Team Go had to come after me. It was Neil that got the drop on me and he almost got me, except he made one little mistake that gave me the upper hand and I took full advantage of it. I made some calls while he was recovering but I never saw him again until last year."
Ron and Kim both stood there silently. Neither of them could ever recall seeing Shego openly weep.
Michael watched as another van full of armed FBI agents pulled up in front of the Space Center. His worry was rapidly turning to anger. "This is how we lay low?"
"Chill out, Space Boy. This might not have anything to do with Max and Liz." Maria pleaded. "There's something on the news about some local girl, some kind of celebrity who's in some big trouble. They mentioned something in the report about her Daddy working in there."
"It's Max. I can feel it." Michael said.
"So what are we going to do, just march up there and start blasting our way through all those armed men?" Isabel asked.
"If that's our last option." Michael replied.
"Guys, guys." Kyle stepped between them. "One thing, if they had Max or Liz they'd have brought one of them out by now. Two, Max isn't exactly mister helpless. If they had him cornered I think we'd have seen some fireworks by now."
"Maxwell doesn't exactly have the most firepower. His powers are mostly defensive."
"He can still kill."
"Michael, he won't do that. You know him."
"Well, I would. I have. If it's them or us, I pick us." He glowered at his girlfriend.
Inside the building, the young couple in question risked a peek out of their hiding place. Max could make out a trio of large men in suits conferring at the far end of the hallway. He couldn't tell if they were FBI or simply part of the government issued security force the center employed, but he could not risk it.
"What happened, Max." Liz was scared. No matter how many scrapes they had been in, when things spiraled out of control you could see it on her face. That didn't mean she lacked the courage to do anything, it simply meant she was unable to hide her emotions.
That made Max want to hold, her, to protect her from the world. He would die for her if it meant protecting her. She was a hero to him and he had cast aside his destiny as the rightful ruler of his world to have her by his side. His hand went automatically to his ring finger, twisting the tiny gold hoop there. It wasn't much as wedding rings went, but it stood for the bond they had finally made official. Liz was his wife now, his always and forever. She was the life he had chosen over another that had been placed before him.
He checked the hallway once more. "We're clear"
Hesitantly they stepped out. They were deep inside the main building now. Their intention was to find a back way out, something perhaps that opened onto the assorted launch pads. There among the parked rocket ships they hoped to find a way to escape.
Soft voices warned them of the approach of others. They ducked into the first door they could find.
The lab was large, its interior rounded, windows opening to a yard where several rockets in various states of assembly stood, some of them ready to be towed to the launching pad. All of them had a dull metallic look, as if paint were an unnecessary extravagance. The two looked wistfully at the assembled launch vehicles. Max had come here, hoping to find evidence of a real space ship, not just these clumsy rockets. His mind had an image of saucers, utilizing energies as yet unknown to this planet to traverse the stars. All he saw were a collection of vehicles barely able to reach orbit, let alone span the gulf between planets. Take for instance that odd looking one, with the elongated ovoid hull and the two engines in the back. They looked even too small for the poor thing to break orbit. True, it was much larger than the craft that first brought their maturation pods to Earth, but it looked, well, primitive. His hopes faded.
Any hope at all was dashed away as the door burst open, admitting the large, suited men. Max's hand went up, his mind willing his force screen into being, but it was too late. Two metal spikes plunged into his chest, shooting enough voltage to freeze every muscle in his body. He went down, his last sight that of Liz ducking out of site under the control console of the lab.
Neil kept his gaze fixed to the white coated man as he entered the cell. Two assistants flanked the man, followed by two guards wearing body armor, each carrying boxy P90 rifles. They kept their distance, knowing from before what their captive was capable of. He entertained no illusions what they would do if he threatened the so-called doctor.
"You are a very interesting subject, Mr. Argus." The man began. "We hit you with enough methohexadrexine to drop five men. You should either be out like a light or stoned out of your gourd right now. But you know what, I'm willing to bet if we took a blood sample right now we wouldn't find anything in there except traces. Now, I wonder why that could be." He pulled Neil's right arm and turned it palm up. "Be a good boy and make a fist for me. I'm not shooting you up with anything else, I'm just taking some blood, like I was talking about."
Neil obeyed, more out of respect for the close-quarters weapons the guards had leveled on him than a desire to make the physician's job easier.
"Set him up." The doctor ordered his two aides. They obliged by taping sensor to his chest and some odd device attached to a ring. They withdrew once they finished. "Now, don't be pulling any of these wires off. If you do, we'll have to exercise more persuasive means of keeping them on you. Things like full restraints. I know the shackles aren't comfortable, but being strapped down to a table is somewhat worse, I promise you."
The doctor leaned close, inspecting the connections, then, surprisingly, whispered "You have progressed farther than I expected. Much farther. Now we shall see what else you are capable of, James Neil Argus."
They left him, electrodes dangling from his body and hand. Moments later the current started, causing his muscles to twitch. The power increased until he felt no more.