Mary Christmas 2: Christmas in July – Chapter 5
By: lostandwhatever

Continued from Chapter 4.

While everyone in the breakroom suffered from the treats Mary had left for them, she was keying in the code for the vault. “Open sesame,” she said as she finished. The heavy door clicked and clacked as it unlocked and then swung open slowly.

The dimly lit room beyond the door seemed to buzz with intensity. Inside it were shelves of boxes of various sizes, each carefully labed to describe its contents. All of the boxes radiated a gentle stream of magic, which Mary could sense after years of casting spells and enchanting objects herself. Mary walked past them all to a small pillar at the end of the vault room. On the pillar was a single little box kept separate from all the others. Mary approached it slowly and lifted it up gently. She felt a sense of warmth or a light breeze coming from it as if it were radiating more power than the box could hold. Its power was so much more intense than any other object in the room, like the difference between the sun and the moon. She flipped the box open carefully revealing that it was a ring box. Held in the white fabric inside was a single ring. It looked ordinary, even ugly. It seemed to be made out of some dull grey metal, possibly pewter. The metal was dented and scratched and seemingly worthless, but the real prize was the rough-hewn stone set in it. It was a strange opalescent purple and green color with some unnamable third color that existed between the other two that was not to be found in nature.

Mary pulled out the ring and reverently slipped it on her finger. It felt at home there, and immediately the power radiating from it seemed to dim. It did not go out, it only went mostly dormant, as if it were a pet that knew its master wanted it to be quiet for the moment.

Mary smiled.

She dropped the box. Then, she pulled poor little John out of her pocket and let him cower in her palm for a moment as she grinned down at him.

“I-Is it over?” he asked. “Did you get what you wanted?”

She nodded.

“C-can you give me back my body now?” he asked and then quickly added, “Please!”

Mary set John down on the pillar where the ring had been. Then, she turned and walked away.

“Wait!” John screamed. He wanted to chase her, but he did not dare get close to the edge of the pillar. “What about me? What about my body? I did everything you told me to do! We had a deal!”

Mary paused at the heavy door to the vault and spoke to him over her shoulder. “Your body is where you last had it: in your apartment on your bed. I never moved it.” Then, as she walked out of the vault, she waved at him behind her, and he caught a brief glimpse of the ring on her finger. When she was out of sight, the vault door began to slowly swing shut. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“No!” he said. “Don’t leave me in h-” But, his last word was cut off when the vault door shut with a low boom followed by a series of clicks and clacks as it locked John inside alone.

***

Mary was about to make her getaway when a room next to the vault caught her attention. It was unmarked, but there was a faint but noticeable magical charge coming from this room as well. The vault certainly outshined it, but she wondered what they might have hidden in this separate room. She used Martinez’s card to unlock this other door and peeked inside.

“Oh, my!” she said and smirked as she realized what they had stored in the room. “Would you look at that? Naughty, naughty.”

She took a souvenir from the room to examine later and shut the door.

***

Mary walked back through the office, past the empty desks and the commotion coming from the breakroom, past the bathroom with Angela trapped inside it, and through the security doors. She slipped carefully around little Private Jones as he knelt on the floor with poor little Corporal Miller laid over his lap to discipline her. The boy was so caught up in spanking the sobbing girl that he only noticed Mary as the elevator door was closing. He caught only the briefest of glances at the shape of her beautiful chest, and then the elevator doors shut, and he was left to deal with the consequences of his actions.

Mary emerged in the lobby. Again she avoided looking at the cutest object in the world that still entranced the guards. They had not moved or blinked since she had last seen them. Her companion stood up and joined her as they both exited the building through the same doors they had entered. They got in their van quietly.

Her companion drove the van back to the security gate, while she sat in the passenger seat and adjusted the settings on her raygun. As she had feared, the guard at the gate was on his walkie talkie, and he seemed agitated.

“Security, this is the gate, over. Please respond, over,” he said, but there was no reply. He saw the van approach and held out a hand to signal them to stop. “Wait right there,” he told them.

“Actually,” Mary said. “We need to be going now. Open the gate, please.”

“I said, ‘wait!’” the guard said as he tried to contact the building security again.

“Very well,” Mary said. “If you won’t listen…” She aimed her raygun at the guard. He only noticed the gun a second before it fired, but it was too late for him to do anything. He immediately felt his body contract down to the size of a baby, and then he fell to the ground, landing roughly on his ass. Mary had set her gun to full power this time. Unlike with the other guards, this change had been instantaneous.

Mary left the car and headed for the gate controls, stepping over the baby guard as he sat there dumbfounded in his oversized uniform. Before he could even comprehend what had happened to him, Mary had opened the gate, returned to the van, and been driven away.

No alarms sounded. No one followed them. They simply disappeared.

To be continued…