Location: "Defunct" Naval Air Station; Hangar "45"
The hours are lame, and the pay is terrible, but at least the benefits suck.
Mackenzie "Mac" Kruegel stared out across his personal hell: A warehouse—a converted airplane hangar—full of forgotten and worthless crap.
But it beats unemployment,
he thought.
Mac moved his rolling ladder to the next stop in the warehouse.
Mac had the thankless job of identifying and categorizing
every single
item in the building. In a perfect world, everything would already be categorized, but this was no perfect world.
During the 1950s, hangars four and five served as storage units for random pieces of flotsam collected by flight crews, shuffled and buried in obscurity. They also wound up being receptacles for the personal effects of dead airmen who had no families. As the decades passed, more and more junk was loaded into wooden crates and stored. In 2007, a fire broken out in hangar five. Fire crews managed to salvage most of the inventory, but the structure was damaged, and so hangar four was filled beyond capacity with all the materiel from the fire-damaged facility.
And so, Monday through Friday, from 6am to 2:30pm, Mac opened crates and boxes, identified if the contents were of value to the U.S. Government, and then resecured the crates and boxes.
The Craigslist ad was so fucking convincing,
he thought.
As a civilian contractor, Mac was moderately well-compensated, but bored stiff. Granted, he had come across some interesting things in his endeavors. One crate had contained thousands of old Playboy Magazines. When his boss had told him to get rid of them, he made a pretty good amount of money selling them on e-bay. Similarly, he'd made a mint on a crate filled with Silver-Age comic books. (The ones he didn't use to bolster his collection, that is.)
He pulled out his Galaxy 3 and activated the sound recorder. He didn't need to record
"Aisle seventeen, Rack twelve, Shelf Four, Position two," he said. "Class three wooden crate, approximately 84 inches by 30 inches by 36 inches."
Wooden crates had no official "class," but as a connoisseur of wooden crates, Mac had developed his own personal classification system.
Mac put on his reading glasses and pulled a can of compressed air from his leather supply belt. A quick spritz of air kicked up several decades'-worth of dust, causing Mac to quickly put on a dust mask and pulled the small crowbar from his belt.
"Crate has markings on northwest side, "X-ray Charles X-ray David Xray Henry," he said, using the Police (instead of military) Phonetic Alphabet. "Three-two John Union Lincoln seven-nine-nine.
"Opening the Crate."
Mac forced the crowbar into the seam between the lid of the crate and the base. Using a small rubber mallet, he drove the claw deeper.
As he lifted on the crowbar, he heard aged nails groan in protest, slowly lifting the lid. In less than a minute, he had the surprisingly heavy lid lifted and moved on top of the last crate he'd opened yesterday.
The box was filled with wood shavings, or "excelsior," a word whose definition Mac only knew because he'd read comics as a kid. He never understood why Stan Lee signed off with a word that meant "sawdust," but to each his own.
The crate had a smell that was a mixture of musty and musky. He used a small handbroom to sweep away some of the shavings, to reveal...
...a
coffin?
"Initial discovery suggests a glossy black funeral casket inside the crate," Mac told his phone. "It has a white skull stenciled on the surface. This is intriguing."
What the fuck? A fucking coffin?
"Opening the casket," he said. "If this contains a body... in fact, I'm going to switch to video. Just in case..."
Should I notify authorities?
He wondered.
Nah. That'll take another five hours.
He began to pry open the crate. Based upon the "32 JUL" it was entirely likely that this crate had been sealed for more than eight decades. If it actually contained a corpse, it likely would be rotted to skeletal remains.
He held his breath as he lifted the lid, to reveal...
...a
perfectly preserved
semi-naked female body.
"AAAAGGGHHHH!!!"
Mac involuntarily took a step backwards, realizing at the last split second that he was on a mobile stairwell. He quickly grabbed the hand rail as his body swung wildly, nearly falling twelve feet to the concrete floor.
Regaining his composure, Mac prepared to dial 9-1-1 on his phone.
He peeked again.
That's no body,
he thought.
It's a wax statue or something.
The skin of the body seemed to have a waxy pallor to it. His examination of the ...
sculpture
... became a sort of scientific curiosity. Whomever had created this wax statue had put a considerable effort into it.
The woman was in her mid-twenties and had large, firm breasts. The flesh of the woman was milky white. Her face was adorned with colorful eye makeup and deep, ruby-red lips. Her face was beautiful, but oddly contorted in something that looked like a cross between pleasure and agony. Her eyes were wide open, showing a color between hazel and brown... almost a hazy crimson in color. She had dark brown hair.
The most disturbing part of the scene was her chest. Between her beautiful breasts, halfway, directly between two beautiful, thick nipples, there was a wooden stake driven into the flesh of her breastbone.
Goddamned vandals!
Mac thought, imagining that this wax statue had been part of an artful display at some erotic wax museum in the 1930s, until some well-meaning-but-misguided religious nut decided to destroy this work of art.
Maybe... or maybe this statue was supposed to be a...
He looked inside her mouth... she had pronounced incisors.
He laughed at the surprise. This was a wax statue of a vampiress.
He ran a finger over her lips, gently touching the fangs. But holy cow, they felt real. He traced a line down her chin, sliding gently down her neck, past an ornate medallion necklace that was draped over her cleavage. Her chest was covered in painted blood.
His fingers slowed down in their journey over her chest, gently caressing her large nipples. He traced further, gently feathering the bottom of the large right breast before traveling down her taut belly.
He imagined she was a real woman... a real vampiress. His fingers traveled toward her close-cropped pubic hair, gently rubbing her pussy lips before moving down her legs.
Somebody put a shit-ton of work into this
, he thought.
Shame to see it rotting in a crate.
He wondered if he could include this statue into his rather elaborate collection of fantasy and science fiction memorabilia.
I don't have to log
everything
, do I?
He wondered. His fingers began to probe the soft folds of the statue's vagina.
Suddenly he felt disturbingly nasty.
He looked back to the statue's surprisingly expressive crimson-hued eyes.
In an instant, he made a decision. He was going to keep this statue, come hell or high water. His eyes fell to the wooden stake.
That had to go. It defiled an otherwise perfectly beautiful sculpture.
With considerable effort, he dislodged the stake from the breastbone of the statue and set it on the shelf. Slowly, he began massaging the gaping hole that had been left by the stake, gently molding the waxy substance back together, trying to seal the opening. He was most of the way done when the phone rang at his desk.
Mac sighed and climbed down the metallic mobile stairwell.
He got to the phone on the ninth ring. He was slightly winded having jogged part of the way, realizing his slightly overweight frame wasn't what it used to be.
"Hangar 45," he puffed. "Mac speaking."
"Hey baby," purred the voice on the other end.
It was Chandra, his on-again, off-again girlfriend of almost two years. Chandra was a stripper by trade, half of a fetish team that would do a nightly hardcore sex romp, each using an ice-dildo on each other. Some nights her pussy would still be ice-cold, which was incredibly intense.
"Hi, hon," he said.
"We're doing two shows tonight at Glamor Puss," Chandra said. "I get to be the vampire in the first one, and the victim in the second."
Just the mention of the word vampire got Mac instantly aroused. The thought of his perky girlfriend with an ice dildo merged with the busty statue he had just uncrated. His head began to spin.
"If you're too tired to see me, I'll understand," he said.
"Nonsense," Chandra pouted. "I've always got time... and room... for you."
"I'll try to stop by tonight," he said.
"OK," Chandra said. "Luvs ya."
She made a kissing sound. He mimicked it.
He hung up the phone, trying to get his slowly thickening erection to subside.
Suddenly his vision was blocked by two cool hands.
"Guess who, lover," a husky voice whispered in his ear.
"Baby, how'd you get..."
"Hush... guess who lover," the female voice purred.
"Chandra, I..."
"No, lover, not Chandra," the voice cooed. "Call me Alana."
Mac felt dizzy. That musky smell from the crate was filling the room. He felt his cock getting thicker and harder.
Was this a put-on?
Did Chandra put somebody up to this?
He tried to remember what Chandra's fetish-partner sounded like. Was this Jeannine?
"You want me to call you Alana," he said. "Is that a... stage n-name?"
He felt dizzier.
The hands remained clamped over his eyes.
"I don't
want
you to call me Alana," she cooed. "You will call me Alana."
He felt his cockiness start to wane.
I will call you Alana.
