I couldn't see an end to the hallway. Look for the beige door on the right, she'd said, but where the fuck was it? I trudged on, my outstretched finger tracing a line in the mortar crack down the cement block wall. White cement, because it was white everywhere in this place. White walls, white floor, white ceiling, flickering white fluorescent lights. Everything in Iceland was stark white, including the people. And their hair. And most of their clothes. I guess beige would be distinctive in comparison. I felt like I was in that 1970's Logan's Run movie, underground and all.
Wait, fluorescent lights? What the fuck. Iceland was supposed to be all about the environment. Why hadn't LED lighting made its way to this basement yet? Some incandescents would have at least given the place some warmth, both in color and temperature.
The air was cold down here and I was cold. Fucking cold. Stripped down to my skivvies and walking barefoot on the 1970's linoleum tile didn't help things much. It was at this point that I decided volunteering for this trip had not been such a fucking great idea after all.
Africa in January? That sounded great. Get me the hell away from Minneapolis and the Twin Cities' ice sheets. Let's go have an adventure and help some people out; people around the world without a lot of resources who had been hit hard by the virus. Maybe even save some lives. And even, what the fuck, have a fling or two with some cute Swedish volunteer nurse. Run my hands around her pair of bouncy round tits while she hangs her arms around my shoulders and giggles; it was a favorite fantasy of mine.
There was something unique about the mindset of volunteers far from home on these international charity trips, flirting with the fringes of the developing-world, patients' lives and deaths hanging in the balance. Maybe it was just the assumption of different rules. Inhibitions among the staff soften in the late hours. I'd seen it before—hell, I'd lived it before—and had a hope in the back of my mind that I could have some adventure like that again.
But Iceland in January? Not so fucking much. The World Health Organization in its infinite wisdom plopped the mandatory staging area here, of all places. Three days of orientation and training before all of us volunteers—gathered from medical schools and hospitals worldwide, twenty different countries the gray-beard on the plane had told me—were shipped out to destinations around the world to do our part. Morocco or Algeria was my hope for myself. Must have been from watching all that Casablanca on late-night TV as a kid. Play it again, Sam. Play one for me and my Swedish nurse while we cut the rug, my hand slipping down around her perky little ass as the tempo slows and she snuggles her tits against my chest.
It was a good vision.
But for now I was stuck in this fucking cold hallway. In my tighty whities. My much better looking boxers were packed in my checked bags, stuck going through customs somewhere upstairs in the labyrinth of this airport. I hoped I wouldn't meet anyone I knew from Minnesota or my other previous trips; there had been some cute staff on those trips and I wasn't dressed to impress at the moment. At least the rapid Covid tests let us get rid of the face masks. That was at least one small pleasant surprise. Taxiing into the jetway after the long flight covered up in PPE, I wouldn't have guessed that we would have gotten rid of all that shit so fast.
Where the hell was I anyway? The hallway was in Sub-Floor Two. Sub-Floor Two was in Annex Building L. Annex building L was in the Reykjavík airport, and the final link to this puzzle was that Reykjavík was in fucking Iceland. I didn't want to be in fucking Iceland. Especially when near naked and cold and trying to find a beige door in a sea of white.
But then there it was, on the right, indeed. I could have missed it, because besides the color camouflage, it was sunk into the wall in a clever fashion, recessed just an inch. This really was Logan's Run sci-fi shit. As I stood, wondering how to open it, it suddenly slid, horizontally, with a hiss, and disappeared into a crack that I hadn't seen. It was like I was in a fifty-year old space movie. Must have been some kind of neat Icelandic underground bunker design. A special Underground Annex Building L feature.
Before I could see what lay waiting for me inside, a large clean-cut man—the haircut and earnest no-nonsense demeanor cried out German to my eyes—stepped straight into my face, nodded curtly, then made his way around. He was as stripped down as I was, although not the least bit embarrassed about it. As he marched away, he left me standing alone at the threshold. A noticeable gust of warm air blew into me and banked against my chest. It was a welcome change from the cool of the hallway and I stalled for a moment before gathering my wits to step in.
The room was busy, to my surprise. Chock full of people—in contrast to the deserted hallway I had just left—with at least a couple dozen standing and sitting and waiting. There were chairs and desks and various medical apparatus jammed in every corner, and even what seemed like a few medical exam tables at the back. I squinted in the bright light; more fluorescent tubes.
I hadn't known what to expect, but if I'd given it any thought, there were a few hundred of us that had signed up for the trip, and we all needed a medical check before we could enter the dormitories, so everybody had to be staged somewhere. I just didn't expect a whole shitload of them to be stuffed together in the room that I had to get through before I could get myself into bed.
A more detailed survey of the room would have to wait because what grabbed my full attention was immediately to the right of the entrance where I was standing: an absolutely striking brunette, relatively young, slender, hair falling straight to shoulders with a slight outward flair there, sitting awkwardly in a chair. She was perpendicular to me, facing a middle-aged asian man sporting that classic doctor look: white suit, thick glasses, a little bit chubby, stethoscope in his ears.
She held her hands at her sides and I immediately took in the profile of her beautiful figure as she sat erect in the hard plastic chair, back straight, legs tucked under the seat gracefully, crossed, toes pointing to the floor. What was making her sit awkwardly was—and I am willing to go on the record on this one—the fact that she was naked from the waist up and the chubby asian doctor was leaning towards her eagerly with his hands reaching to her chest, about to press his stethoscope against her breast. I assumed that last part, because I could only see her side from where I was standing. And the doc was definitely looking with too much extracurricular excitement at his patient.
I watched in amazement, my mouth dropping dumbly open, as she obeyed the doctor's request—unhappily—to raise her arms above her head. The silhouette of her breast moved upwards with the motion and he reached towards her naked flesh. A small rotation of her torso let me glimpse a small, dark nipple as he closed in for the grab.
Fuck. This was something to behold. And not what I expected to greet me after the long trudge through that bleak hallway. She turned to me with a glare. Oops—my staring hadn't gone unnoticed. Her frown showed her displeasure at being caught naked in front of a stranger, unable to move to cover herself while the doctor grubbed at her. Her look was a plea for me not to take advantage of her situation. Ah, I thought to myself, it's a good thing that everybody's not a boring German! Flesh was just flesh, but I relished a cute girl who didn't want to be seen exposed and made seeing the flesh into something more.
This exchange took only a few seconds, and after my initial gawking, the surprise and the return look by the girl caused my brain to register the proper socially-acceptable behavior and avert my eyes. Down to the floor they went; and then of course my male brain immediately began, in a frantic panic, to try in vain to remember the curves of her cheek and neck and breast and hips and legs. And her eyes. Smoking eyes, maybe blue or green? With dark mascara and dark eyebrows matching her hair. I wanted to remember that.