Bad Moon Rising
Oo000oo000oO
Chapter Seven.
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When you're ridin' sixteen hours
And there's nothin' much to do
And you don't feel much like ridin',
You just wish the trip was through
Turn the Page, by Bob Seeger.
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The tension in the van was so thick that you almost literally feel it. Shego was no stranger to the sensation, having been the cause of it on several occasions in the past, and was quite used to it. However, this particular bout of tension had started with Ron waking up in their shared bed in the Motel 6, had continued through breakfast, checkout, their resuming their little road trip, and a stop for gas, and Shego was quite tied of it, and resolved to do something about it.
"You know, for a guy on his first time in, you were pretty damn good." Shego said aloud.
There was the sound of movement in the passenger seat and out of the corner of her eye Shego could just see Ron's cringe.
"Do we have to talk about this now?" Ron asked in a very embarrassed voice.
"Yes." was Shego's response.
"Why?" asked Ron.
Shego shrugged. "Because I'll be dammed if I"m going to be sitting next to you in an awkward silence all the way to Colorado." she said. "Besides, you didn't seem to have a problem with it last night..."
"I was drunk!" protested Ron. "You took advantage of me!"
Shego thought that over for a second. "Yeah..." she admitted "But so was I. So I could make the case that you were taking advantage of me as well."
"I DID NOT-!" Ron started to protest, but Shego raised a finger and cut him off.
"Ah ah ah... you could have said no at any point." Shego countered. "And you were the one who took it to the next level when you slipped your hand inside my panties- and thank you for that by the way."
The compliment threw Ron for a bit of a loop. "What for?" he asked.
Shego couldn't help but smirk. "That first orgasm you gave me really helped me loosen up." she said. "Good thing too, considering some of the stuff we did later on."
Ron twitched when she said 'loosen up'. "You're enjoying working me up aren't you?" he asked.
Shego nodded. "Yeah." she said.
"Why?" he asked. "Why sleep with me and then tease me about it afterwards?"
Shego tapped her forefinger against the steering wheel for a few moments as she compiled her reply. "First, I'm not teasing you." she said. "Discovering and coming to terms with your sexuality is never easy, especially if you're an outcast. Trust me on this. I know from personal experince."
Ron was about to interrupt her, but remembered the conversations that they'd had about their respective pasts and kept his mouth shut.
"Second, like I said before, I'm doing this to get you talking. I hate riding along in silence, and I'd rather argue with you than ride along in a terse silence. And finally, third, I'm trying to figure you out."
"Figure me out?" Ron asked. "What's to figure out? I'm a weirdo goofball sidekick who needs rescuing most of the time and gets shoved into lockers on a regular basis."
"Who's still going after going through stuff that would make most people just curl up and die." Shego countered. "You stronger than you give yourself credit for, Ron."
"You're just saying that."Ron protested.
Shego merely shook her head. "No." she said. "I'm not. When the cheerlead- I mean Kim- died, you tried to take Drakken apart. Most people would have tired to run away or just shut down. That says a lot about you."
"Thanks." Ron said, his cheeks redding as his gaze dropped to the floorboards.
"You're welcome." Shego said.
Oo000oo000
Drakken watched as Sicarius led the new clones into the lab control room, and noted with some satisfaction that the improvements he'd added to the clone's mental files seemed to be working. He'd just decanted them an hour and a half before, and while they still had some awkwardness in their moments, it was nothing like what Sicarius'd had when she was fresh out of the tank.
In the hour and a half that had elapsed, Sicarius had managed to get them up, on their feet, bathed, clothed, and judging by the identical slick spots on their right forearms, numbered with minimal difficulty. Drakken made a note to add their experiences to the next batch of clones memories to improve things further, then shifted to the matter at hand.
"Good afternoon, ladies." Drakken greeted them. "And welcome to my mad little plan."
The four clones simply nodded slightly and stood there silently. Drakken winced. "Oooh, tough crowd." he said, half to himself.
"They're fresh out of the tank, Doctor." Sicarius pointed out. "Their memories are still settling into place."
"That's right." Drakken said with a snap of his fingers at Sicarius. "Thank you, I had forgotten about that."
"You're welcome Doctor." Sicarius said.
Drakken acknowledged Sicarius's thanks with a nod and shifted his attention to the clones. "So." he addressed them. "You girls know why you're here?"
"To serve you in any way you see fit." the four of them chorused in perfect unison, something that slightly unnerved Drakken and intrigued him at the same time.
"An apt description if I ever heard one." Drakken said. "But, in a nutshell, what I need fo your to do is knock over a bank. A very mundane thing for a mad scientist to do, but it's all part of my grand scheme."
Drakken levered himself out of his seat and began to pace in front of the clones. "But that's not relevant to your part of the plan." he said. "What you four need to be concerned about is the ban job. Now, it's a simple job, but, like all simple things, it's going to be hard to pull off, and most likely you will die in the attempt. But that's not an issue for you guys, is it?"
"No Doctor." the four clones answered, again in perfect unison.
"Excellent! Now, here's the basic gist of what you're going to be doing: All of you are going to walk into a bank that's in the middle of a major city in the Southeast, you're going to ob it, being as flashy and as noisy as possible, making sure everybody see's your faces, then you going to escape, and hopefully succeed." Drakken continued, his eyes glinting gleefully.
"And if you don't, well, the main objective of the plan is for what the four of your are going to be experiencing so the next set of clones I make will be better prepared. In short, this is going to a training mission.
Also, the fact that what looked like four versions of Kim Possible just committed a violent daylight bank robbery is gonna be icing on the cake."
The four clones nodded, again in sync, as Drakken spoke.
"I'm going to be doing most of the planning for this, and I'll be laying things out for you, showing what neds to be done, etc,. Sicarius-" He pointed at her, and the four clones all turned their heads briefly to look at her "is going to be going ovr your training and making sure we've got everything down pat. Any questions?" he asked.
"No Doctor." the four clones said.
"Well, don't hesitate to ask." Drakken said. "And now that we've gotten that settled, who's up for a late lunch?"
Oo000oo000
Yet another mile marker rolled by, and Ron wished for the hundredth time that the trip was over. It was his turn to drive, and they were currently working their north through New Mexico towards Colorado. The South (along with the incident , as Ron had privately termed he and Shego's sleeping together) were a couple of days behind them, and now he found himself staring at the desert rolling past him as he drove.
"Man, after a few days on the road, it gets kinda boring." he thought as Shego whimpered from where she was sleeping in the passenger seat.
Seeing no oncoming traffic -or any traffic at all- Ron glanced over at Shego, who was curled up in passenger seat, her arms twitching as she dreamed. He was about to say something to her when Shego gave a loud distressed whimper that transitioned into a shout as she woke up.
"NnnnnAAAAAAH!" she yelped as she sat bolt upright in her seat.
"You okay?" Ron asked from the drivers seat.
Shego took a moment to get hr bearings before responding. "Y-yeah." she said. "I-I was just having a bad dream."
"It must have been pretty bad." Ron commented as he turned his attention back to the road. "You sounded pretty scared."
"It was." Shego said, adjusting herself upright and brushing some hair out of her face. "It dates back from when I first started doing the superhero thing."
"What happened?" Ron asked.
Shego took a deep breath and slowly let it out before she responded. "There was a bomber running loose in Go City." she began. "He was one of those far left eco-whackos, that you get out in California. He'd been targeting car dealerships, construction sites, stuff like that."
"Okay..." Ron said. "I take it he decided to step it up a notch?"
Shego nodded. "Yeah." she said. "We'd just gotten called in by the police to help. He'd been mailing letters to the press, and in the latest one at the time, he'd threatened to blow up some of the UCGC Bio Sciences buildings. We were there, checking things out, when the bomb he'd planted went off."
Shego's eyes went unfocused, as her memories began to play back in her mind. "Only, it wasn't in the Bio Sciences building. It was in a trash can, in the plaza that was in front of the School of Economics. He'd made a claymore mine and it was aimed at the center of the plaza. It was supposed to have gone off during the lunch rush, but the idiot fucked up the timer.
It went of during classes, when one of the grounds crew was emptying the garbage."
"Oh,God..."Ron said, horror dawning on him.
"We happened to be the closest ones there, and when got there, we found him...he was... the grounds keeper was..." Shego trailed off for a moment, then made a coughing, choking noise.
"Are you all right?" Ron asked as Shegos eyes went to the size of dinner plates.
Shego didn't answer him, instead, she flailed around for a second before finding an empty McDonalds bag and explosively emptying hr stomach contents into it.
Ron winced as Shego retched for a few moments before finally settling down into the dry heaves.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry Shego, I didn't mean to-" Ron began to apologize as Shego rolled down her window and tossed the bag.
"It's okay Ron." she croaked as she rolled the window back up. "Every time I have that dream I end up doing that."
"Oh." Ron said. "Well, I'm sorry anyways."
Pale faced and sweaty, Shego nodded. "Thank you." she said.
Ron was silent for a few moments before he spoke again. "Did you get him?" he asked.
Shego shook her head. "No." she said. "That honor goes to the Go City Police Department. They pulled him over for a routine traffic stop, and he tried to pull a gun on them. He died from twenty four gunshot wounds to the chest from their issue Beretta's.
It's what he gets for trying to draw on the departments two IPSC champions."
Ron couldn't help but chuckle morbidly at that comment. "Now that's what I call justice." he said, then flexed his fingers around the steering wheel. "Of course, what I'm going to do to Drakken ain't going to be anywhere near as nice."
Shego happened to glance out of the corner of hr eye when Ron said that and felt a shiver go up her spine.
"Ohhh shit." she thought "He's fucking serious..."
And Shego knew, without a doubt in her mind, that somehow, Ron was going to do exactly what he said he was going to do.
Oo000oo000
Much to Drakken's surprise, the clones were able to get physically ready for the job over the course of a day and a half with no major holdups. In fact, they were running a day ahead of schedule.
Which made him a touch nervous, truth be told. Usually when his plans were going this good the cheerleader and her buffoon would come crashing in and completely ruin his day.
"Of course..." he reminded himself as he watched One and Three load their magazines "they're both currently suffering from a nasty case of death at the moment, so their breaking in to spoil things is rather remote..."
Drakken smirked at his thoughts then drifted over to Shego. "And my former minion is currently suffering from that malady as well, so I don't have to worry about her."
So, as far as he could tell, the only real threat to his plans was probably local law enforcement.
"Is there something on your mind?" Sicarius asked, jarring Drakken out of of his thoughts.
"No. Just musing over nothing important." Drakken said, sitting up in his chair and turning around to face her. "There something wrong?"
Sicarius shook her head. "No." she said. "I was just letting you know that One through Four are ready to go."
Drakken blinked, looked over at the clones loading magazines, then back to Sicarius. "So, why are they loading magazines?" he asked, jerking a thumb at the clones.
Sicarius spared a glance at the clones before responding. "they needed something to keep them busy, so I decided to put them to work." she said.
"Ah.' Drakken said with a nod. "What are Two and Four doing?"
"Right now they are cleaning the firing range." she answered.
"I see." Drakken said.
Oo000oo000
It was almost nine PM when they decided to stop for the night, pulling into a rest area almost halfway between Roswell and Tinnie. They would much rather have stayed in a motel for the night, but sfter having spent the last fourteen hours on the road they decided rather than try to push on to the next town and hope that that they had a motel, that they'd just stop for the night and sleep in the van.
"We'll probably hit the New Mexico- Colorado line sometime tomorrow afternoon." Shego commented as she untied her shoes.
"That's good." Ron said as he shrugged his shirt off. "I'm sick of being cooped up in this van all day." he added as he then bent down to untie his shoeslaces.
"You're not the only one." Shego said, then arched an eyebrow as Ron swore under his breath. "Having trouble?" she asked.
"Other than I can't see what I'm doing? No. not at all." Ron quipped as he fumbled around with his fingers in the dark.
"Here." Shego said, and held out her hand and activated her powers. Or tired to, anyways. "Awww, crap, of the fucking times..."
"What?" Ron asked, pausing what his was doing to look up where he could see Shego scowling at her hand through the rest stop lights filtering in through the windows.
""Of all the fucking times for me to start PMS'ing..." growled Shego.
"What's that got to do with your powers?" Ron asked, now somewhat confused.
"Sometimes, when I start PMS'ing, my powers get weird on me." Shego explained. "Something to do with my hormones..."
"Ohhh..." Ron said and nodded in understanding.
That took Shego by surprise. "You're not freaked out about this?" she asked.
Ron shrugged and twisted himself around to get to the steering column. "I've been best friends with a girl my whole life." he said. "It's sort of a fact of life."
"I see..." Shego said as Ron flipped the key over to the accessories position and then turned on the overhead light. "Why didn't you do that in the first place?" she asked, referring to the ignition lock.
"Because I didn't want to do the contortion act to reach it." Ron answered as he turned on a dome light. "Muuch better."
Shego then took advantage of the light to reach into the gym bag that she was keeping her clothes in and withdrew her Taurus. Checking the safety, she saw that it was on and that the loaded chamber indicator was sticking up out from the extractor, indicating that the pistol was Condition Two.
She then stuffed it under her pillow and when she turned back, she saw Ron looking at her with an arched eyebrow as he pulled his other shoe of. "Feeling paranoid?" he asked.
"Without my glow?" Shego asked. "Yeah. Just a little." she added, then scowled. "It's a real pain in the ass sometimes."
"So I see." Ron said.
"Of course, this isn't the worst part of it." Shego said as she pulled her arms into her shirt. "I'm really sensitive to medications."
"Really." Ron said.
There was a click and a twang of elastic as Shego undid her bra. "I can't take painkillers or cold medications."
"You can't?" Ron asked as Shego shrugged off her bra under her shirt.
"Nope." Shego said with a shake of her head.
"So all of those times you and KP fought..." Ron trailed off.
"I didn't take so much as an aspirin." Shego finished. "You ever wonder what it was like to go through having cracked ribs with out anything to dull the pain?"
"Not rally, no.' Ron said with a shake of his head.
"It's not fun." Shego said, sticking her arms back out of her shirt along with her bra.
"Sorry about that..." Ron said in an apologetic tone.
"Don't worry about it." Shego said as Ron put his shoes on his side of the van and turned off the overhead. "There's not much you can do about it, is there?" she asked.
"That's true." Ron said as he got to his feet in a hunched over position. "Look out, I'm gonna be crawling past you." he warned.
Shego leaned over to let him past, but as he got halfway past her his curse struck and his pants slipped past his waist to his knees.
"Aw, man..." he said.
"Just take them all the way off." Shego said as she undid the fly on her pants. "It'll be more comfortable that."
"But-" Ron started to protest but Shego cut him off.
"Ron, I've seen you get depantsed at least a dozen times that I can remember, so you in your boxers isn't a big deal, okay?" she pointed out.
"Oh, yeah, that's right." Ron said sheepishly and kicked his jeans the rest of the way off.
As he got the rest of the way into bed and under his blanket, Shego slid her jeans off and then crawled her way into bed.
"Night Ron." she said as she pulled her blanket over herself.
"Night Shego." Ron said with a yawn.
Oo000oo000
Sleep proved to be both elusive and fleeting for Ron that, as he found himself staring at the ceiling of the van at three something in the morning while Shego slumbered peacefully beside him. Putting his hands behind his head, he took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, trying to use the breathing exercises he'd been taught by the Yamanuchi in an attempt to calm his mind and perhaps get some sleep.
The thing that weighed so heavily on his mind and kept him from sleeping was home, or how he was going to be so close to it and yet so far away from it at the same time.
In their travels across the southern US, he and Shego had talked extensively about their "condition", and how it was a good idea that they stay as far away from civilization as possible. Which had meant that he was going to be staying at Shego's place for the time being, rather than the house that he had grown up in.
Shego had been surprisingly understanding about his distress over the situation; as she had put it:
"Look sidekick, you have no idea how much I would love to be at home right now with my Mama fussing over me, okay?"
He knew that his parents were going to be beside themselves with grief right now, and he knew that when he contacted them, they were going to want to protect him and keep him close. But if he did that, Ron knew he would be placing them in unimaginable danger.
And for the life of him, he couldn't figure out how he was going to tell them.
Beside him, Shego squirmed slightly in her sleep and mumbled in Spanish to her Papa that the grapes were the wrong shade of purple, so they should repaint them.
Oo000oo000
Ron awoke to road noise and the feeling that they were moving. Disoriented, Ron sat up and looked around in confusion for a few moments until he got his bearings.
"Afternoon, sleepyhead." Shego's voice got his attention.
Looking forward, ron saw Shego sitting in the drivers seat as they rolled down the highway.
"Afternoon." Ron said and rubbed his eyes. "Where are we?" he asked.
"We just crossed into Colorado a few minutes ago." Shego answered.
Ron grunted his acknowledgment and flipped the blanket off of him. "Where are my pants?" he asked.
"they're behind the passenger seat." Shego told him.
"Thanks." Ron grunted, and then scooted forward on the bed.
Pulling his pants on first, then after a bit of searching his shirt, and then finally his shoes. Dressed, he clambered into the passengers seat.
"Why didn't you wake me?" he asked.
"I tried." Shego answered. "You didn't want to wake up, so I left you."
"Oh." Ron said and ran a hand through his hair.
Shego smirked before she added the next part. "That, and you looked just so cute as lay there sleeping that I couldn't bear to wake you."
Ron gave Shego a hesitant look. "You...didn't do anything to me, did you?" he asked.
Shego shook her head slightly. "No." she answered. "Damn tempting though." she added under hear breath.
Deciding not to think about her last comment, Ron shook his head and decided to get back to the original subject.
"Thanks for letting me sleep." he said "I was up most of the night thinking of how I'm gonna break things to my mom and dad."
"Oh. You figure something out?" Shego asked.
"No." Ron answered morosely.
Shego shrugged at Ron's response. "Well, if it helps, I'm having trouble figuring out what I'm gonna say too." she said. "I mean, it's not like I can just call them up and say Hey, Mama, Papa, I'm a werewolf now. You mind if I come home for the weekend?"
"That's true." Ron said. "Of course, you mumbling in your sleep in Spanish all night didn't help."
"Yeah, I was dreaming about my Papa last night." Shego said.
Ron nodded and then looked around at the van. "Hey, there anything to eat in here?"
Oo000oo000oO
Sicarius 01 pulled the car into an empty spot, put it in park, and killed the engine.
"We're at the target." One said, tapping the earpiece she had on.
"Acknowledged, One." Sicarius said. "Proceed."
"Copy that."
With that, the clones in the backseat handed the ones in the front their rifles and then they got out of the car and started towards their target.
The employees and customers of the Middleton Savings and Loan were about to have a very bad day.
Oo000oo000oO
End.
Authors note: Aaaand cliffhanger! Heh heh heh heh...
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed it and don't forget to review!
-Zombie Boy.