Ron's Worst Nightmares
Meltdown in the Land of Wine and Cheese
By Pat Squared
For the first time in history since the rebuilding of Paris under the reign of Napoleon the Third, Paris, and by extension France, was being held hostage by rioters.
The old order failed when the acting president panicked and ordered the French police and armed forces to enforce order by any means necessary. Now not only were the rioters destroying the city, but police units and military units were fighting it out among themselves as individual units decided whether or not to obey the order to kill their own countrymen.
Everyday France was replaying a revolution that occurred two hundred twenty years ago. Instead of the blade of the guillotine cleanly slicing off the heads of royalty, the mob would pick out a victim and the rioters would beat the unfortunate soul to death with fist, clubs, picks, bricks, or whatever implement could be found.
Sheena Grossinger was in England, laying on a lumpy motel bed, watching her handiwork play out on the 24 hour cable news channels. Despite a lifetime in crime, she had never killed a person. Today she was a mass murderer. It did not matter if it was her fire, her fits, or the mob setting upon a random victim, she set up the dominos and let them fall. The random killing of innocents – It would forever stay in her mind.
Shego had long lost count of how many times she witnessed innocents dying on the screen of her television after President Gaël's punitive order. However, Fox News, Duesche Welt, BBC, and CNN all were citing causality estimates in the high tens of thousands.
The French labor unions, especially the warehouse employees and truck drivers, were ensuring that France was spiraling out of control by withholding most of the deliveries of food and other necessary supplies. Everyone else in the cities was fighting it out amidst a stream of refugees. The only things that being delivered were the materials necessary to keep the pot boiling and to provide the discontented masses raw materials for explosives.
In a nation of sixty million, the only people working were the media covering the event, the technicians at France's nuclear reactors ensuring that the media had enough electricity to keep the cameras rolling, the employees at the petrol-chemical and fertilizers plants to keep turning the ammonium-rich merde and diesel bombs for the rioters to use, and isolated units of the French security services making the situation worse in trying to quell the unrest.
And yes, one can not forget the six henchmen needed to keep Drakken out of her hair.
All the plans were made, everything that Shego could do to ignite this social-economic collapse was done, and now all she could do was watch helplessly until some other events played out.
On the new, the talking heads on the BBC were talking about various EU units mobilizing, but she had trumped them. France did have a nuclear weapons program since she blasted the Bikini Atoll with an atom bomb in the early fifties. It was the blast that gave the new two piece swimsuit its name – the bikini.
When the French armed forces imploded, Shego made sure that one of her factions made off with enough tactical nukes to back up a semi-bluff. She then leaked the information to the German media that some of the rioting military units had tactical nukes and would use them if the European Union stepped on the Sacred Soil of le grand dame France. The bluff worked, for now.
She did not intend for things to go that far. However, she did not have actual custody of the bombs either. If the faction decides to start sprouting out mushroom clouds, she could not stop them.
Shego knew that in the quest to win an ongoing battle between her and Team Possible, she went far beyond the unwritten rules that governed all their past meetings. She wanted to win. She wanted Kim to know that she won and that Kim did not stop her. She wanted to see...
What she wanted to see would never happen. Ron Stoppable was dead. After years of facing the red head, her respect went for the buffoon. Despite being on different sides of the fight, Shego and Ron Stoppable were kindred spirits. Despite the worst, both she and Ron would support their bosses in taking over/saving the world.
Not today. Unless it was the second coming of Christ, the dead will not walk from their graves.
He would not come in and activate the self-destruction switch. There was no switch to stop this. Shego could not stop things, only speed things up so that the fire burnt itself out before consuming everything.
However, the fire had long burnt out Shego's claim to being human. Hitler once ordered one of his generals, Choltitz to burn the city. Now Choltitzact of defiancewent for not because Paris was, in essence, a third world nation in the midst of Western Europe.
Events moved now of the own accord until the moment that a new government will come in, reunite the people, pay off Shego's supporters, and Drakken will have a nation to run.
Personally, she figured that his life expectancy would be measured in minutes once she bowed out and retire to a vineyard in the Czech Republic. Shego would disappear in the chaos and become Sheena Hoffman, woman entrepreneur and maybe someday, have the life that was denied her by fate. However, it would be a lifetime spent in fear.