Day 71
"...And the World Health Organization has officially declared the virus to be a pandemic, as the death toll has risen above 4,000," the newscaster on the TV said.
Shego and Drakken were sitting up side-by-side in his bed, she with her head leaned back on the headboard and barely paying attention while he watched the TV with interest.
"About time..." Drakken muttered.
Shego merely grimaced as she held her stomach, the nausea having returned with a vengeance the day prior and not showing any signs of improvement. In contrast, Drakken's fever had lowered significantly and he was able to sit awake for several hours at time. She had even noticed him get up and walk to the bathroom without looking like he was going to fall over.
The news briefing ended and a familiar commercial appeared on the TV. Both Shego and Drakken groaned at the sight of a teary-eyed Camille Leon holding her hairless cat.
"Not again..." Shego complained.
"This is for anyone who is listening. I hardly need an introduction, but I am Camille Leon, and I am pleading with you on behalf of my father, Brooks Leon who is lost and out of contact in..."
Shego closed her eyes and tuned out the annoying voice of the heiress. She had already seen the commercial too many times. Apparently her father had been on a trip to the country where the virus had originated before it was worldwide knowledge. But he never came back, and she had yet to hear from him. Not even when the country shipped all of its foreigners back to their homelands. The cat food tycoon had simply vanished without a trace.
Shego ignored the emotional voice on the TV and rolled away from Drakken as the nausea intensified.
"I'm going to the restroom," she murmured as she stumbled off of the bed. Throwing up on him would absolutely not help either of their situations.
"We're out of toilet paper," he called after her through a cough.
"Figures..."
Day 74
"The henchmen are getting restless," Shego said as she paced the room.
Drakken watched her calculatingly from behind the laptop.
"Tell them they can leave at their own risk. I'm paying them anyway."
"What?" Shego said, stopping and turning on him with hands on her hips.
"I'm still paying you too," Drakken said with a frown.
Shego's brow rose. "Oh..."
She suddenly felt an odd twist in her stomach that had nothing to do with morning sickness. They were lovers, and he was still paying her as his side-kick... Something about it didn't feel right.
She shook her head. "Okay. I'll tell them."
"They still can't come up here, though. Phone calls only."
"Right..." Shego said, pacing again and looking around for her phone. She saw it on the floor next to the bed, apparently having fallen. When she picked it up she discovered the battery had died. With a grimace she plugged it in and placed it on the chair by the bed. When she sat with Drakken, she mostly sat on the bed with him now.
"...has ordered the closures of all restaurants, bars, and gyms across the country..."
"Grr..." Drakken growled at the newscast, gripping his blanket between his hands and twisting it. The laptop slid off his lap onto the mattress.
"What?" Shego asked.
He suddenly looked nervous as she stared at him, and his twisting of the blanket increased. Shego glanced at the TV.
"Why does that matter?"
Drakken seemed to go back and forth in his head, getting more frustrated by the moment until he threw his hands up with a huge outburst of, "Fine!"
Shego stepped to the foot of the bed to face him.
Drakken frowned and grumbled something as he yanked at the blanket.
"Dr. D.?" She set her hands on her hips.
He gave her a sideways glance. "I was going to take over the world with...toys in kids' meals that transformed into destructive robots, all right? But if the fast food restaurants are closed...I'll have to wait a year or two... Rrgh, I wanted to rule the world by the end of this year..."
Shego's brow rose as she looked at his disgusted frown and then laughter started bubbling up in her throat. His eyes widened upon hearing her and he turned to her with a scowl as she burst into loud laughter.
"Shego!" he said reprimandingly.
"I'm sorry, it's just..." she broke off as her belly shook with chuckles, "that's the dumbest plan I've ever heard!"
"Nyeh...ngh...it will work! Just as soon as I've stolen the technology from Japan, and from the Middleton Space Center..."
Shego lay down on the bed as her laughter continued, the action unfortunately adding to her nausea. But she realized very quickly...it was really nice to laugh again.
"Does it have something to do with that secret subterranean expansion to the lair you've been working on?" she asked after a moment.
Drakken recoiled in surprise. "How do you know about that?"
Shego rolled over onto her stomach and smirked at him, kicking her feet playfully. "I open your mail, doy."
Drakken's jaw fell open in shock. "You read my mail!? Shego!"
She lay down again as he yelled at her, relishing in the familiar strength of his voice and laughing until her sides ached.
Day 79
Shego was preparing for another hunt across the various islands' stores early that morning, hoping to find something useful before everything got picked over. Drakken's fever had risen again, though thankfully not to nightmarish levels. He was watching her through tired eyes as she put her boots on at the vanity across the moat.
"Have you seen my cell phone?" she asked after her boot was zipped up, and she checked the security of her braided hair once more.
"You forgot to charge it again," Drakken croaked and pointed next to her laptop on the chair by the bed. It was also plugged in and charging, with the phone right next to it.
"Oh. Thanks," she said as she unplugged the phone and checked it. Only one bar of battery. She flipped it closed and put it in her purse. "I'll be back soon."
"Don't call me every ten minutes," Drakken said in annoyance just before coughing into his pillow.
"Fine..." she said, rolling her eyes as she left the room and headed for the hover-car.
It was true, he was definitely getting better. His fever hadn't risen again to the terrifying level of that horrible first week nor had he struggled to breathe since coming down from that height. She just wished his fever would stay down permanently. Her own hadn't returned.
She still planned on wearing the respirator and gloves while in public, however. She grudgingly knew it was the responsible thing to do. And accidentally killing off the world's population wasn't the same as deliberately threatening people with a bio-weapon.
Sadly it seemed, taking over the world was going to be put on hold for quite some time.
After a very boring hover-car ride, Shego found herself back at Smarty Mart. The line was still long, and the carts were still coming out over-stuffed. While she waited she saw many people exiting with giant packages of toilet paper and paper towels and was hopeful there would be some left by the time she made it inside. The store had only been open for thirty minutes.
When she finally got inside she made a beeline for the section she knew held the paper products. People were pushing carts past her in the opposite direction, their own carts full of the telltale packaging. When Shego reached the aisle she maneuvered her cart past the slower-moving customers until she reached the stack of paper towels guarded by three orange vest-wearing employees.
"Paper towels?" one of the women asked her.
"...Sure," Shego answered from behind her respirator as the woman put the oversized package into her cart. "Um, is there any toilet paper left?"
"No I'm sorry, we're out."
Shego glanced at the carts of customers who had arrived earlier that held the desired product. She looked back at the paper towels.
"Are people allowed more than one?"
"Of this brand, yes," the woman said. "Would you like another?"
"Yes please," Shego said, trying to make her eyes smile. But inside she was starting to consider knocking out one of the other customers and taking their toilet paper... It was less that she was worried about actually getting some—first world problem, she had scolded Drakken when he whined about it—and more that the panic-buying was frustrating her. If people would only buy products like usual, there wouldn't be shortages of anything!
With the second giant package of paper towels in her cart, she pushed her way out of the aisle and started heading towards the frozen foods section. Even though Drakken enjoyed cooking, he did have a favorite microwavable pot pie. It was nostalgic from his childhood, he had told her when she questioned its presence on the shopping list; something his mother used to give him when he was sick. Frozen foods were usually for her.
She pushed the cart up and down the aisles briskly, passing those who were loitering and staring at the meager offerings. His pot pie wasn't there. Her own preferred meals weren't there. The only products left were the cheap ones that nobody wanted on their best or worst day. Except...
The refrigerator still had milk! She left the cart and moved through the crowd around the fridge to pull out two jugs, and then scowled as she saw the 'Limit of One' sign. It was cheap milk too, not the kind Drakken preferred for his...cocoa-moo. But she took one jug anyway and brought it back to her cart.
She pushed the cart out to the perimeter of the massive warehouse-store to avoid the crowds and hurried her way to the front to check out. She didn't feel like even looking for anything else on the list... She knew it wouldn't be there.
As she passed the fully-stocked vitamin aisle she paused. There was a small woman in the aisle who had toilet paper in her cart, and she was alone. Shego considered... Was it worth it?
At that moment, a clattering sound reached her ears just as she felt the ground beneath her feet begin to shift.
'Earthquake!?' she realized in a split second as vitamin bottles started falling from the shelves and rolling across the floor. It was only a moment before she heard screams and saw people running out of the aisles and toward the safety of the wide-open center of the store. The woman she had been sizing up grabbed the toilet paper out of her cart and hugged it to her before she ran as well.
"Oh for crying out loud!" Shego exclaimed as she pushed her cart after everyone else with a frown. The ground had stopped shaking already, and she figured the quake had lasted all of three seconds if that. But the screams were getting louder.
"It's the end of the world!" a man's voice shouted above the anxious chatter that had filled the store, and Shego watched as a tired and scruffy-looking man with wild eyes ran through the crowd with his hands in the air and headed for the door.
Shego rolled her eyes and shook her head at the display and looked through the crowd for the woman with the toilet paper. The earthquake was a good distraction for a little petty theft...
She spotted the slight woman who had run up to a taller man and set her over-sized toilet paper package in his cart. Shego left her own cart and started toward them at a brisk pace.
"Joel, where are the kids!?" the woman said frantically. Shego stopped short.
"I let them go down the candy aisle," the man said, pointing away behind him with wide eyes. The woman ran past him and he followed a second later, leaving the cart behind.
"Callie!" Shego heard the man call.
Shego started forward again as the couple disappeared, and then she felt a wave of nausea hit her. She set a hand low on her stomach and looked down, her brow slowly furrowing. After a long moment she grit her teeth and growled.
"Troublemaker!" she addressed her abdomen and strode forward next to the full shopping cart with the toilet paper prize sitting on top. She sighed as she resigned herself to guarding it all until the family returned, frowning all the while as she thought about the tiny life growing inside her and how she wouldn't want anyone stealing from it.
A few short minutes later a familiar voice gasped a startled "Oh!" from behind her. She turned around to see the man and woman with a little girl of about ten and a boy of maybe five holding their hands.
Shego pushed herself up from where she'd leaned on the full cart.
"I was guarding it for you. Toilet paper, you know?" she said mirthlessly.
"Oh...thank you," the man said, exchanging a skeptical look with his wife.
"Yeah, well..." Shego was too annoyed with herself to come up with anything else and just shrugged as she turned to walk away. The sudden moral debate her heart was waging was far more irritating than anything else she had dealt with that morning.
The yelling and chatter about the earthquake had died down, she realized, as she picked her way through the maze of toppled bottles and a few spills back to where she had left her cart. None of it had been warranted, in her opinion. Just like the panic-buying.
When she lifted her eyes from the messy floor to her cart her jaw fell open. It was empty, her paper towels and milk having been pilfered while she was away doing a good deed.
"Rrrghh!" she snarled, yanking off her sterile gloves as her hands flared brightly in her anger. As she was deciding whether or not to cause some destruction worthy of real panic, a strong wave of nausea hit her. She let her glow die out as she set one hand on her abdomen and the other over her eyes that she found were beginning to prickle with a hint of tears.
"I just want to wake up," she said into the darkness she had created. "Please tell me it's just a long nightmare and I can wake up now."
She brought her hand down to her turning stomach and blinked in the fluorescent light of the store. All that was before her were the burned gloves in the empty cart.
Shego left the Smarty Mart empty-handed and strode bitterly toward where she had parked the hover-car, out in the open this time. She figured no one cared anymore at this point. She didn't either. What did toilet paper matter in the grand scheme of things anyway...
She set her hand on her stomach again as it rolled, and she slowed her pace. She stopped suddenly as she caught sight of a small crowd—not obeying the 'social distancing' order, she thought with an ironic smirk—gathered around the exact spot where she had parked. And then she noticed the white steam rising from behind them.
She broke into a run and then saw...another car had crashed into the hover-car. The crumpled hood of the SUV was the source of the steam.
"Hey!" she shouted, and the crowd parted for her. She yanked her respirator off and dropped it as she stared at the wreck in fury. There was no way the hover-car would fly... The SUV must have hit it at a really high speed.
During the earthquake, she wondered?
Just then the SUV door opened and a man staggered out. Shego's brow shot up. It was the scruffy man who had run out of the store screaming about the end of the world.
"No..." was all that fell from Shego's lips as she felt herself starting toward him. She was aware of her hands igniting but she hadn't realized she'd shot at the man until she heard him yelp and saw the green hit his chest and then fizzle away.
"You idiot!" she shouted as she shot at him again, this time with focus.
The crowd scattered, now screaming for a real reason, she thought, as she steadfastly pursued the man. He had run past the steaming wreckage and was darting through parked cars, glancing over his shoulder in terror every few seconds. Shego broke into a jog as she went after him, saving her fury for when she could get a good, clean shot. She didn't want to kill him, but she wanted him to remember what real fear of 'the end' felt like.
A sudden loud blast from a siren stopped her advance, and she whirled around in the direction of the sound. A police car was pulling up to the scene of the wreck, and an officer wearing a respirator had just gotten out of the car and had drawn his gun and was aiming it towards her. Shego looked at her glowing hands and let the flame die out.
"Since when are they so efficient..." she grumbled as she darted away, still pursuing the fleeing man but with much more purpose since she might need to suddenly dodge bullets.
She heard the shout of the officer behind her but ignored him as she closed in on her prey. When she was only three car-lengths away from him she shot at him with both hands. He cried out and fell against the hood of a nearby car.
Before he could scramble to his feet, Shego was upon him and had picked him up by his shirt front.
"You want to know what the end of the world really feels like?" she snarled.
The man gasped incoherently with his hands waving in front of his face as he stared at her with wide-eyes. And then he suddenly broke into a loud coughing fit and brought his elbow up to cover his mouth.
Shego's own eyes went wide and she dropped him, backing away until she bumped into the car behind her.
"I'm not sick!" the man declared insistently through his coughs.
Shego suddenly felt a dark pain surround her heart. She had just breathed in the man's face...
He continued to cough, and Shego bolted away as her heart began to race. She couldn't go back to Smarty Mart...but she needed another respirator. She furrowed her brow and started thinking of what other store on the island might have them when she stopped short with a sick realization.
The hover-car was damaged. She couldn't get to another store.
Or back to the lair.
She fumbled with the zipper of her purse until she got her fingers inside and grabbed at her cell phone. She pulled it out and flipped it open.
The battery was dead.