This depressed me to write. Enjoy.
TITLE: That Was A Minute Ago
AUTHOR: Indigo, aka indigoskynet
RATING: PG-13 to R for some yucky imagery.
FANDOM: Kim Possible [with a bunch of alterniverse cameos]
SUMMARY: Ron Stoppable's point of view on the dead earth situation, and his desperate reach for a way to stop it all before it stats.
DISCLAIMER: Disney/ABC is the owner of Kim Possible. This story is for entertainment purposes only, and no profit is being made from it. Please don't sue.
PAIRING: None, exactly, until the end.
SPOILERS: Seasons 1 and 2 Kim Possible and the Kim Possible movie
FEEDBACK: comments appreciated, constructive if you please.
ILLUSTRATION: Now with an image appearing in the story.
"I always said the day I got to meet you, it'd be legendary."
"I know, Ron, but I didn't expect it to be like this."
Ron Stoppable extended his right hand to the friend he'd only ever seen by vidphone until now. Wade returned the gesture solemnly, and the two young men shook.
Wade clasped Ron's shoulder and strode past him. "If there's a way, Ron, we'll find it. I'll still be there for Kim when she needs me."
"She needs you now," Ron said, trying to keep his voice even; it always cracked when he was excited or stressed, except for when he was on the football field as the Middleton Mad Dog. That hadn't happened in a whole month and there were signs that it likely would never happen again.
Ron simply watched Wade type frantically into his computer and let his mind fall back over the past few weeks.
The weather had gotten weird right around the time that junior year had started. Middleton, being in a fairly safe region in a valley between the desert and the mountains of California got to watch as the weirdness built. The news spoke of hurricanes and typhoons in weird locations, hailstones the size of grapefruits, and the like.
Wade and Kim had immediately assumed it was the weather machine. They'd seen this sort of thing before. Kim's old enemy Dr. Drakken had had one in the middle of her junior year. Kim had found him easily enough, and dragged him back to the think tank that had formed around her father.
"I, Doctor Drakken, have better things to do," he'd blustered, "Than try to destroy the world with a weather machine!"
"Plus," quipped his sidekick Shego, "He tried it once before and it worked, and ever since the World's Fair incident, my family has kept his family from repeating the same lame schticks. He has to come up with new ones."
"This was a trap!" Drakken had wailed, until Ron had walked in. "Oh, wait, the buffoon. Where's Possible?"
"Catching a power nap," explained Wade over the communicator. "Now that we know it's not your weather machine, she's heading west to see if Señor Senior Senior and his son Junior are trying to use it to take over the world."
"And you," added a new voice, "Are being asked to help us explain what's going wrong since none of our Kimmy's villains are behind this." Kim's father, Dr. Possible, looking haggard and tired entered. The boys locker room door closed behind him. Middleton High had been turned into the base of operations as Kim and her family had quickly come to the realization that the world was getting dangerously strange.
"What?" Drakken was dubious, and for good reason. Years before Kim was born, Drakken and Dr. Possible had been college buddies, until the hazing of his classmates had driven him mad and turned him into the mad scientist he was today. "You...you want me to work with you?" The man's blue skin had gone pale and then briefly violet as he vacillated between shock, rage, and an embarrassed sort of hope he tried in vain to disguise.
"Looks that way," Shego pointed out sardonically from the bleachers. "Way I figure it, if whatever's messing up the weather isn't stopped, there won't be a world for you to try to take over, badly."
"Funny you should mention that," Wade said from Ron's hand. "Because Kim's overtaxed. Bigtime. Bonnie and Monique would help, but they're not equipped for the level of extreme stress the world is putting on KP these days."
"The authorities will pardon you both if you agree to help," Ron pointed out at this point. His normal ebullience was dulled by the seriousness of the situation. It had started getting unseasonably cold about a week after Labor Day. His pet naked mole rat, Rufus, rarey emerged from Ron's breast pocket now, preferring to conserve body heat.
Shego had stared dubiously at Ron for a full minute, with apathetic-yet-malevolent green eyes before she'd given a resigned sigh, muttered something about it being Team Go Go Time, and agreed. It had only taken five minutes of arguing to convince Kim. The teen whose website proclaimed "I can do anything" was finding she could do anything except be in multiple places at one time.
And so it had begun. Drakken had resumed his normal name, Drew Lipsky, and set to work examining the increasingly bizarre weather patterns that were ocurring around the planet. Kim and Shego had started working together with the same chemistry customarily found in a super-violent buddy-cop movie.
And the earth had just started getting stranger and more dangerous. By mid month, the electrical storms had spread across the midwest and had come west. Then there were the tornadoes from further west coming east. The Possible think tank had called in the rest of Drew and Dr. Possible's college colleagues, the better to apply more minds to the subject at hand.
Though she grumbled and complained about it every step of the way, Shego had proven to be an exceptionally good good guy when she set her mind to it. "Why'd you quit?" Ron had asked, one night in the Rockies while they were fighting record blizzard conditions to get back to Boulder.
"Because it was boring," Shego had replied coolly. "Was. This heroic stuff, without the posing of my brother Hego is a lott less insipid." She'd tied back her green-tinted black hair and had thrown herself into the missions with the same gusto Kim did, though worryingly, Kim's morale was descending as fast as the temperature.
Kim's customary tradephrases, "So not the drama," and "No big," were growing less and less in evidence, much to Ron's dismay.
"Come on, KP, we have the best minds in the world working on this. You know we're gonna find a way to save the day, right? We always do. Okay, you and Wade always do. You always do. There's nothing you can't do!" Ron smiled hopefully at her. He had never said so, but her smiles were what helped him make it. Not just as her comedy sidekick, but in life. Her smiles had taken the sting out of a high school existence as a nonentity; they had eased the mortification of his pants constantly being torn from him. They had warmed him on the coldest mountains and in the darkest caves while they fought to recover mystic items from Monkey Fist. And the smiles were fading.
"Yeah," Kim had replied, without much genuine enthusiasm. "I don't know about that. Things are different now."
Even Shego hadn't had the heart to poke and jibe at Kim. Seeing the plucky redhead's morale sink had taken the joy out of giving her a hard time.
By mid-October, the stores were empty of winter clothing; and they were hard pressed to order in more. The temperature was descending with an alarming rapidity. And no one was coming up with any answers. The think tank and Wade were online and on the phone every waking hour. Even Kim's baby brothers, Jim and Tim were drafted to help. Things were growing dire; travel was getting harder, and they needed all the help they could get.
Late October, they had found the weather machine. It had been in the possession of the Bebes; a handful of gestalt robots created by one of Kim's other enemies. They had been trying, out of sheer self-preservation, to reverse the weather, but global meteorological disturbances were proving far bigger a task than the weather machine could cope with.
Halloween, it had -- Ron could find no other way to describe it, despite the terminology making him wince inwardly from knowing his mother's reaction -- gone all to hell. If you counted hell as a constantly unstable planet with skies that changed colors and people beaming in from vortices that randomly appeared worldwide. Traveling with Kim, he saw the strange guy in dark leathers who had told Kim in no uncertain terms that his city was his and that she was no more welcome in between the concrete buildings than someone he called Spoiler.
In Dakota City, Ron, Shego, and Kim had made certain a convoy of medical supplies and food had gotten to the poor and starving of the town, pursued by living shadows, acid clouds, and leaping Rastafarians. Help had turned up in the form of a boy who rode a flying circle sled, and his best friend on rocket rollerblades. "The name's Static," he said tiredly. "And thank you for the help." The electric boy had been given a Kimmunicator, and had promised his aid whenever it didn't detract from defending his own city from the Bang Babies. This, of course, turned out to be never.
In Westchester, Team Possible had rescued a bald professor in a wheelchair, only to find themselves rescued by a quartet of silver-haired, blue-eyed women who fought with tireless valiance to keep the weather at a manageable level. Ron could see that the constant use of their uncanny powers was eating them alive. They had not relinquished Xavier, but the old man had turned out to be a telepath, and had willingly joined the Think Tank at a vast distance, and promised other minds equal and greater than his in intelligence.
The earthquakes hit the day after Halloween. Shego had to blast them out of a rockslide with her Shego glow. And what they saw when they got to the surface again chilled Ron's blood even worse than the weather.
Something had gotten lose. Some manner of disease. The streets were full of cars in which people had died gasping and choking. And those who'd tried to make their way on foot had frozen. "Damn," he'd whispered, the last of his humor vanishing.
"Kim, come home, now! I'll meet you there!" That had been Wade's voice.
That had been a week ago.
The trip home had not been easy, even with the assistance volunteered by Illyana Rasputin. Limbo had been almost a vacation paradise in comparison for the ten minutes they'd remained while the Darkchylde rested before returning them to Middleton and departing again. She said that her powers spanned time as well as space, and perhaps the solution lay in preventing this rather than simply in coping with this.
"Good luck," Kim wished her, as they arrived back in the gym, to pandemonium. "What's going ON?"
"ZOMBIES!" cried Bonnie Rockwaller, uncharacteristically helping push cafeteria chairs against the gym doors.
"Zombies?" Ron repeated incredulously. "How in the name of bad B-Movies did there become Zombies?"
"As near as we can tell, something brought in from one of the dimensional portals mutated that virus that's been sweeping in from New York," came a voice Ron hadn't heard in a while.
"DNAmy?" Kim gasped, lunging for the woman, stopped by the arms of Ryan. The Oh Boyz had been in town when the last blizzard hit, trying to keep morale up, and become stranded. Kim managed a smile for Ryan, and Ron looked away.
"Just Amy," replied the woman over her glasses. "The battle lines, they're erased now. Even if Kim still is a big meanie, we have tow rok together now, to stop the two diseases from wiping out mankind."
"...what?" Ron, Shego, and Kim gaped in one voice.
"The first disease," explained Amy, "Is like the superflu. But once you die of it, you don't...you don't..." she shuddered and fell silent.
"You don't stay dead," Drakken finished for her, clasping Amy's shoulders in a gesture of comfort. "You get up and become a shambling, mindless cannibalistic abomination. Hence..." he gestured toward the gym doors, "Zombies."
The moaning and screaming was audible even over the conversation in the room and the singing of the Oh Boyz.
And as if all of this hadn't been disheartening enough for Ron Stoppable, Kim Possible's reaction was the last straw. She glanced back and forth between her former enemies, her classmates, and the cameras showing disaster after disaster sweeping across the globe. Without a word, she just walked over to the nearest unoccupied bleacher, put her face into her hands and began to cry.
"I've watched enough Zombie movies to know how to handle them," snapped Shego. "So. We get firearms. Chainsaws. And we kill them."
"My ...mother..." Bonnie whimpered, sinking to huddle beside the girls' locker room doors. "She's one of them."
"If that's so," Shego responded with what was, for Shego, surprising gentleness, "Then anything that made her your mother is long gone." She turned to the bleachers, and sneered. "Okay, Kimmy, it's your pity party and you'll cry if you want to, but we've got work to do, if we're going to keep the people in here alive long enough to get us all out of this."
"Why bother," Kim moaned.
"Because you can do anything," Ron reminded her gently. "Because you're Kim Possible."
That had been four days ago; and Ron was even now cursing himself for having said it. Kim had looked up with streaming eyes, then hardened her expression, and gone back to work. Outfitted with a pair of Mac-9s, she and Shego had set out for Middleton airport. Ron had made an off the cuff remark about perhaps Monkey Fist's ancient monkey magic being something they might be able to use.
The Monkey Fist had not wanted to drown in his own lungs. He'd shot himself in the head, and prevented himself from likewise returning as a Zombie. But his notes on a device called the Tempus Simia had stricken true. Illyana's words about time travel came back to them. The location they'd tracked it to with Wade's help and with Xavier's, they had found it in Brazil -- a small town some hundreds of miles out of Rio -- which was now covered in snow.
They had returned with the Tempus Simia, triumphant, when disaster had stricken.
Back to back, Team Possible, now consisting of the Oh Boyz' Dexter, Shego, Ron, Kim, and Shego's brother Hego, were fighting their way back to the Middleton think tank. The 'Go siblings needed no weapons. Shego's green destructive claws and her brother's blue superstrength tore through the zombies. Dexter cut through the ones they missed with a laser rifle. Ron fired his guns two-handed; the novelty of looking like a John Woo character had long since worn off...
...and then Kim Possible ran out of ammo.
...and then Kim's best friend Monique, with bites missing from her body, had bitten Kim.
"KIM!" Ron had never, in his life, not once, ever been the one who rescued anyone. He'd been the goofy one, who had maybe accidentalyl helped save the day. But his best friend needed him. The bites were contagious and pernicious, and Kim's already overtaxed strength failed quickly. "Team Possible, Kim's down!"
In the weeks since this had all started, they'd drawn close. Once, Shego would have simply shrugged and said "leave her," but now she and her brother moved as one. They called their other brother, Speego, the speedster, who carried Kim back to the safety of the high school.
That had been two days ago.
DNAmy had been the one to pass the bad news. Kim had the zombie virus. She was fortunate enough that she had not caught the highly contagious superflu and passed it to everyone, but she was still going to die. And once dead, she was going to become a flesh-eating zombie. And try as she might, Amy was having no luck finding a cure. Since Ron had seen her last, she was at least thirty pounds lighter, and was sporting the same circles under her eyes from lack of sleep as everyone else.
Kim had been told the bad news and then tied up and locked in the subterranean wrestling gym to wait out her fate.
That had been a day ago. The sight of her vivacious spirit draining out of her had been too much for her family. Even Team Possible couldn't stand to do more than pop their heads in to bring her meals.
Except Ron. He stayed faithfully at Kim's side every moment he wasn't needed; when he was, Rufus played video games to keep Kim company as her strength failed. Her skin grew grey. Her eyes took on an inhuman blue-white glow. "Kill me, Ron," she told him. "I can feel it happening. I don't want to come back and chow down on you like one of your Nacos."
"Not until I have no choice," Ron told her. "Amy could come up with a cure any moment."
But the hours ticked away, and Kim got worse. The minutes ticked away, and Kim grew weaker. Her breathing became more labored.
"KP?" Ron asked, reaching into his shirt. "Be...before you go? Something to show you."
"Yeah?" He could barely hear her voice now. It was a whisper with almost no breath in it.
Ron pulled a locket out of his shirt and let it spill into Kim's shaking hand.
Kim peered blearily down at it, taking a moment to recognize what it was. It was a charred piece of metal and silicon with flickering shimmers of iridescent metal glimmering in the low light. "I remember this," she wheezed, trying to find a smile for him. Then her fading eyes turned from her hand to his face. "You ...you kept it?"
"Yeah," Ron murmured, nodding without meeting her gaze. She handed it back and Ron examined it for a moment. The moodulator had been a device that influenced the mood of the wearer. For almost twelve hours, Kim Possible had been head over heels in love with him, before the device had blown out in a fight with Drakken and Shego. "It was the closest thing to -- y'know."
"You mean--?" Kim's voice was thinner.
"Yeah, well." Ron had to stop. The lump in his throat abruptly grew too big for him to speak around. Say it. You may never get another chance, Stoppable. "I love you, Kim. You're my best friend, but you're the greatest girl in the world. And I can't even imagine what the world will be like without you in it." He squeezed his eyes shut against the threatening tears, then opened them...
...in time to see Kim's expression of affectionate and regretful awe fade to a pained grimace, only to be replaced by blankness, and then mindless hunger in the passage of a few seconds.
"G'bye, Kim," Ron breathed, and pulled the trigger.
BLAM.
That had been an hour ago.
Ron had allowed himself exactly ten minutes to sob and bawl in the privacy of the room with her body. And then, steeling himself, he went upstairs to break the news.
For a little while, all was pandemonium. Former enemies paused to pay silent respect. The people Kim had saved sent condolences over the net, those who still were able. And Kim's family retreated into aggrieved seclusion.
That had been a minute ago.
"Are you sure this is gonna work, Stoppable?" Shego asked, making sure her hands were charged. Her brothers, flanking her, did the same.
"It's not like things will get any worse if we fail," Dexter pointed out, thumbing through Monkey Fist's notes.
"And he just might succeed," Drakken pointed out. "Prevent all this from ever happening."
"Let's do it then," Ron said gravely. He lifted the moodulator locket to his lips, kissed it briefly, and stepped into the Tempus Simia portal.
AUTHOR: Indigo, aka indigoskynet
RATING: PG-13 to R for some yucky imagery.
FANDOM: Kim Possible [with a bunch of alterniverse cameos]
SUMMARY: Ron Stoppable's point of view on the dead earth situation, and his desperate reach for a way to stop it all before it stats.
DISCLAIMER: Disney/ABC is the owner of Kim Possible. This story is for entertainment purposes only, and no profit is being made from it. Please don't sue.
PAIRING: None, exactly, until the end.
SPOILERS: Seasons 1 and 2 Kim Possible and the Kim Possible movie
FEEDBACK: comments appreciated, constructive if you please.
ILLUSTRATION: Now with an image appearing in the story.
"I always said the day I got to meet you, it'd be legendary."
"I know, Ron, but I didn't expect it to be like this."
Ron Stoppable extended his right hand to the friend he'd only ever seen by vidphone until now. Wade returned the gesture solemnly, and the two young men shook.
Wade clasped Ron's shoulder and strode past him. "If there's a way, Ron, we'll find it. I'll still be there for Kim when she needs me."
"She needs you now," Ron said, trying to keep his voice even; it always cracked when he was excited or stressed, except for when he was on the football field as the Middleton Mad Dog. That hadn't happened in a whole month and there were signs that it likely would never happen again.
Ron simply watched Wade type frantically into his computer and let his mind fall back over the past few weeks.
The weather had gotten weird right around the time that junior year had started. Middleton, being in a fairly safe region in a valley between the desert and the mountains of California got to watch as the weirdness built. The news spoke of hurricanes and typhoons in weird locations, hailstones the size of grapefruits, and the like.
Wade and Kim had immediately assumed it was the weather machine. They'd seen this sort of thing before. Kim's old enemy Dr. Drakken had had one in the middle of her junior year. Kim had found him easily enough, and dragged him back to the think tank that had formed around her father.
"I, Doctor Drakken, have better things to do," he'd blustered, "Than try to destroy the world with a weather machine!"
"Plus," quipped his sidekick Shego, "He tried it once before and it worked, and ever since the World's Fair incident, my family has kept his family from repeating the same lame schticks. He has to come up with new ones."
"This was a trap!" Drakken had wailed, until Ron had walked in. "Oh, wait, the buffoon. Where's Possible?"
"Catching a power nap," explained Wade over the communicator. "Now that we know it's not your weather machine, she's heading west to see if Señor Senior Senior and his son Junior are trying to use it to take over the world."
"And you," added a new voice, "Are being asked to help us explain what's going wrong since none of our Kimmy's villains are behind this." Kim's father, Dr. Possible, looking haggard and tired entered. The boys locker room door closed behind him. Middleton High had been turned into the base of operations as Kim and her family had quickly come to the realization that the world was getting dangerously strange.
"What?" Drakken was dubious, and for good reason. Years before Kim was born, Drakken and Dr. Possible had been college buddies, until the hazing of his classmates had driven him mad and turned him into the mad scientist he was today. "You...you want me to work with you?" The man's blue skin had gone pale and then briefly violet as he vacillated between shock, rage, and an embarrassed sort of hope he tried in vain to disguise.
"Looks that way," Shego pointed out sardonically from the bleachers. "Way I figure it, if whatever's messing up the weather isn't stopped, there won't be a world for you to try to take over, badly."
"Funny you should mention that," Wade said from Ron's hand. "Because Kim's overtaxed. Bigtime. Bonnie and Monique would help, but they're not equipped for the level of extreme stress the world is putting on KP these days."
"The authorities will pardon you both if you agree to help," Ron pointed out at this point. His normal ebullience was dulled by the seriousness of the situation. It had started getting unseasonably cold about a week after Labor Day. His pet naked mole rat, Rufus, rarey emerged from Ron's breast pocket now, preferring to conserve body heat.
Shego had stared dubiously at Ron for a full minute, with apathetic-yet-malevolent green eyes before she'd given a resigned sigh, muttered something about it being Team Go Go Time, and agreed. It had only taken five minutes of arguing to convince Kim. The teen whose website proclaimed "I can do anything" was finding she could do anything except be in multiple places at one time.
And so it had begun. Drakken had resumed his normal name, Drew Lipsky, and set to work examining the increasingly bizarre weather patterns that were ocurring around the planet. Kim and Shego had started working together with the same chemistry customarily found in a super-violent buddy-cop movie.
And the earth had just started getting stranger and more dangerous. By mid month, the electrical storms had spread across the midwest and had come west. Then there were the tornadoes from further west coming east. The Possible think tank had called in the rest of Drew and Dr. Possible's college colleagues, the better to apply more minds to the subject at hand.
Though she grumbled and complained about it every step of the way, Shego had proven to be an exceptionally good good guy when she set her mind to it. "Why'd you quit?" Ron had asked, one night in the Rockies while they were fighting record blizzard conditions to get back to Boulder.
"Because it was boring," Shego had replied coolly. "Was. This heroic stuff, without the posing of my brother Hego is a lott less insipid." She'd tied back her green-tinted black hair and had thrown herself into the missions with the same gusto Kim did, though worryingly, Kim's morale was descending as fast as the temperature.
Kim's customary tradephrases, "So not the drama," and "No big," were growing less and less in evidence, much to Ron's dismay.
"Come on, KP, we have the best minds in the world working on this. You know we're gonna find a way to save the day, right? We always do. Okay, you and Wade always do. You always do. There's nothing you can't do!" Ron smiled hopefully at her. He had never said so, but her smiles were what helped him make it. Not just as her comedy sidekick, but in life. Her smiles had taken the sting out of a high school existence as a nonentity; they had eased the mortification of his pants constantly being torn from him. They had warmed him on the coldest mountains and in the darkest caves while they fought to recover mystic items from Monkey Fist. And the smiles were fading.
"Yeah," Kim had replied, without much genuine enthusiasm. "I don't know about that. Things are different now."
Even Shego hadn't had the heart to poke and jibe at Kim. Seeing the plucky redhead's morale sink had taken the joy out of giving her a hard time.
By mid-October, the stores were empty of winter clothing; and they were hard pressed to order in more. The temperature was descending with an alarming rapidity. And no one was coming up with any answers. The think tank and Wade were online and on the phone every waking hour. Even Kim's baby brothers, Jim and Tim were drafted to help. Things were growing dire; travel was getting harder, and they needed all the help they could get.
Late October, they had found the weather machine. It had been in the possession of the Bebes; a handful of gestalt robots created by one of Kim's other enemies. They had been trying, out of sheer self-preservation, to reverse the weather, but global meteorological disturbances were proving far bigger a task than the weather machine could cope with.
Halloween, it had -- Ron could find no other way to describe it, despite the terminology making him wince inwardly from knowing his mother's reaction -- gone all to hell. If you counted hell as a constantly unstable planet with skies that changed colors and people beaming in from vortices that randomly appeared worldwide. Traveling with Kim, he saw the strange guy in dark leathers who had told Kim in no uncertain terms that his city was his and that she was no more welcome in between the concrete buildings than someone he called Spoiler.
In Dakota City, Ron, Shego, and Kim had made certain a convoy of medical supplies and food had gotten to the poor and starving of the town, pursued by living shadows, acid clouds, and leaping Rastafarians. Help had turned up in the form of a boy who rode a flying circle sled, and his best friend on rocket rollerblades. "The name's Static," he said tiredly. "And thank you for the help." The electric boy had been given a Kimmunicator, and had promised his aid whenever it didn't detract from defending his own city from the Bang Babies. This, of course, turned out to be never.
In Westchester, Team Possible had rescued a bald professor in a wheelchair, only to find themselves rescued by a quartet of silver-haired, blue-eyed women who fought with tireless valiance to keep the weather at a manageable level. Ron could see that the constant use of their uncanny powers was eating them alive. They had not relinquished Xavier, but the old man had turned out to be a telepath, and had willingly joined the Think Tank at a vast distance, and promised other minds equal and greater than his in intelligence.
The earthquakes hit the day after Halloween. Shego had to blast them out of a rockslide with her Shego glow. And what they saw when they got to the surface again chilled Ron's blood even worse than the weather.
Something had gotten lose. Some manner of disease. The streets were full of cars in which people had died gasping and choking. And those who'd tried to make their way on foot had frozen. "Damn," he'd whispered, the last of his humor vanishing.
"Kim, come home, now! I'll meet you there!" That had been Wade's voice.
That had been a week ago.
The trip home had not been easy, even with the assistance volunteered by Illyana Rasputin. Limbo had been almost a vacation paradise in comparison for the ten minutes they'd remained while the Darkchylde rested before returning them to Middleton and departing again. She said that her powers spanned time as well as space, and perhaps the solution lay in preventing this rather than simply in coping with this.
"Good luck," Kim wished her, as they arrived back in the gym, to pandemonium. "What's going ON?"
"ZOMBIES!" cried Bonnie Rockwaller, uncharacteristically helping push cafeteria chairs against the gym doors.
"Zombies?" Ron repeated incredulously. "How in the name of bad B-Movies did there become Zombies?"
"As near as we can tell, something brought in from one of the dimensional portals mutated that virus that's been sweeping in from New York," came a voice Ron hadn't heard in a while.
"DNAmy?" Kim gasped, lunging for the woman, stopped by the arms of Ryan. The Oh Boyz had been in town when the last blizzard hit, trying to keep morale up, and become stranded. Kim managed a smile for Ryan, and Ron looked away.
"Just Amy," replied the woman over her glasses. "The battle lines, they're erased now. Even if Kim still is a big meanie, we have tow rok together now, to stop the two diseases from wiping out mankind."
"...what?" Ron, Shego, and Kim gaped in one voice.
"The first disease," explained Amy, "Is like the superflu. But once you die of it, you don't...you don't..." she shuddered and fell silent.
"You don't stay dead," Drakken finished for her, clasping Amy's shoulders in a gesture of comfort. "You get up and become a shambling, mindless cannibalistic abomination. Hence..." he gestured toward the gym doors, "Zombies."
The moaning and screaming was audible even over the conversation in the room and the singing of the Oh Boyz.
And as if all of this hadn't been disheartening enough for Ron Stoppable, Kim Possible's reaction was the last straw. She glanced back and forth between her former enemies, her classmates, and the cameras showing disaster after disaster sweeping across the globe. Without a word, she just walked over to the nearest unoccupied bleacher, put her face into her hands and began to cry.
"I've watched enough Zombie movies to know how to handle them," snapped Shego. "So. We get firearms. Chainsaws. And we kill them."
"My ...mother..." Bonnie whimpered, sinking to huddle beside the girls' locker room doors. "She's one of them."
"If that's so," Shego responded with what was, for Shego, surprising gentleness, "Then anything that made her your mother is long gone." She turned to the bleachers, and sneered. "Okay, Kimmy, it's your pity party and you'll cry if you want to, but we've got work to do, if we're going to keep the people in here alive long enough to get us all out of this."
"Why bother," Kim moaned.
"Because you can do anything," Ron reminded her gently. "Because you're Kim Possible."
That had been four days ago; and Ron was even now cursing himself for having said it. Kim had looked up with streaming eyes, then hardened her expression, and gone back to work. Outfitted with a pair of Mac-9s, she and Shego had set out for Middleton airport. Ron had made an off the cuff remark about perhaps Monkey Fist's ancient monkey magic being something they might be able to use.
The Monkey Fist had not wanted to drown in his own lungs. He'd shot himself in the head, and prevented himself from likewise returning as a Zombie. But his notes on a device called the Tempus Simia had stricken true. Illyana's words about time travel came back to them. The location they'd tracked it to with Wade's help and with Xavier's, they had found it in Brazil -- a small town some hundreds of miles out of Rio -- which was now covered in snow.
They had returned with the Tempus Simia, triumphant, when disaster had stricken.
Back to back, Team Possible, now consisting of the Oh Boyz' Dexter, Shego, Ron, Kim, and Shego's brother Hego, were fighting their way back to the Middleton think tank. The 'Go siblings needed no weapons. Shego's green destructive claws and her brother's blue superstrength tore through the zombies. Dexter cut through the ones they missed with a laser rifle. Ron fired his guns two-handed; the novelty of looking like a John Woo character had long since worn off...
...and then Kim Possible ran out of ammo.
...and then Kim's best friend Monique, with bites missing from her body, had bitten Kim.
"KIM!" Ron had never, in his life, not once, ever been the one who rescued anyone. He'd been the goofy one, who had maybe accidentalyl helped save the day. But his best friend needed him. The bites were contagious and pernicious, and Kim's already overtaxed strength failed quickly. "Team Possible, Kim's down!"
In the weeks since this had all started, they'd drawn close. Once, Shego would have simply shrugged and said "leave her," but now she and her brother moved as one. They called their other brother, Speego, the speedster, who carried Kim back to the safety of the high school.
That had been two days ago.
DNAmy had been the one to pass the bad news. Kim had the zombie virus. She was fortunate enough that she had not caught the highly contagious superflu and passed it to everyone, but she was still going to die. And once dead, she was going to become a flesh-eating zombie. And try as she might, Amy was having no luck finding a cure. Since Ron had seen her last, she was at least thirty pounds lighter, and was sporting the same circles under her eyes from lack of sleep as everyone else.
Kim had been told the bad news and then tied up and locked in the subterranean wrestling gym to wait out her fate.
That had been a day ago. The sight of her vivacious spirit draining out of her had been too much for her family. Even Team Possible couldn't stand to do more than pop their heads in to bring her meals.
Except Ron. He stayed faithfully at Kim's side every moment he wasn't needed; when he was, Rufus played video games to keep Kim company as her strength failed. Her skin grew grey. Her eyes took on an inhuman blue-white glow. "Kill me, Ron," she told him. "I can feel it happening. I don't want to come back and chow down on you like one of your Nacos."
"Not until I have no choice," Ron told her. "Amy could come up with a cure any moment."
But the hours ticked away, and Kim got worse. The minutes ticked away, and Kim grew weaker. Her breathing became more labored.
"KP?" Ron asked, reaching into his shirt. "Be...before you go? Something to show you."
"Yeah?" He could barely hear her voice now. It was a whisper with almost no breath in it.
Ron pulled a locket out of his shirt and let it spill into Kim's shaking hand.
Kim peered blearily down at it, taking a moment to recognize what it was. It was a charred piece of metal and silicon with flickering shimmers of iridescent metal glimmering in the low light. "I remember this," she wheezed, trying to find a smile for him. Then her fading eyes turned from her hand to his face. "You ...you kept it?"
"Yeah," Ron murmured, nodding without meeting her gaze. She handed it back and Ron examined it for a moment. The moodulator had been a device that influenced the mood of the wearer. For almost twelve hours, Kim Possible had been head over heels in love with him, before the device had blown out in a fight with Drakken and Shego. "It was the closest thing to -- y'know."
"You mean--?" Kim's voice was thinner.
"Yeah, well." Ron had to stop. The lump in his throat abruptly grew too big for him to speak around. Say it. You may never get another chance, Stoppable. "I love you, Kim. You're my best friend, but you're the greatest girl in the world. And I can't even imagine what the world will be like without you in it." He squeezed his eyes shut against the threatening tears, then opened them...
...in time to see Kim's expression of affectionate and regretful awe fade to a pained grimace, only to be replaced by blankness, and then mindless hunger in the passage of a few seconds.
"G'bye, Kim," Ron breathed, and pulled the trigger.
BLAM.
That had been an hour ago.
Ron had allowed himself exactly ten minutes to sob and bawl in the privacy of the room with her body. And then, steeling himself, he went upstairs to break the news.
For a little while, all was pandemonium. Former enemies paused to pay silent respect. The people Kim had saved sent condolences over the net, those who still were able. And Kim's family retreated into aggrieved seclusion.
That had been a minute ago.
"Are you sure this is gonna work, Stoppable?" Shego asked, making sure her hands were charged. Her brothers, flanking her, did the same.
"It's not like things will get any worse if we fail," Dexter pointed out, thumbing through Monkey Fist's notes.
"And he just might succeed," Drakken pointed out. "Prevent all this from ever happening."
"Let's do it then," Ron said gravely. He lifted the moodulator locket to his lips, kissed it briefly, and stepped into the Tempus Simia portal.