Forcibly United
A Weekend With Eda
Chapter 6
oOo
Despite the plans she'd put into the work she'd done in the last few days, despite the fact she'd had to trust others with the location of her score, Eda found herself staring into the gaping hole as Ranma handed up bar after bar of gold. Having picked up one herself, she knew that each was roughly a kilogram.
Ranma and Ryouga continued to hand them up. When they were done, five hundred bars of gold stood on the surface of the ground. Beside the blond, their prisoner found herself staring at the small fortune in front of them as well.
Which is why she was caught off guard when Eda hauled her to her feet by the chains binding her hands behind her back.
"So... You're a vampire, right?" Eda wondered, guiding her to the hole that Ranma and Ryouga had recently vacated. She topped, rubbing her jaw. "Does that mean you have trouble with large bodies of moving water?"
Giving her a suspicious glance, the spectacled girl answered, "Yes, why do you ask?"
"That's all I needed to know," the American informed her with a grin, placing a foot on her and shoving her towards the whole. With a wordless shriek of surprise, the dark-haired vampire fell into the pit and landed on the ground below. "Still alive down there?"
"I'm going to kill you!" Her voice called back up, angrily.
"Excellent! Your friends will be along soon to gather you, I promise!" Eda replied, turning to the two shocked teenagers. After a moment, she shrugged. "Look, you heard her. We can't exactly take her with us once we get to the ocean."
"What about her friends coming to get her? They don't know where we are," Ryouga pointed out.
"Well boys, it's simple. We're going to ditch our equipment and you two are going to load yourselves up with gold while I set the charges for this bomb, far enough away from the bunker not to hurt the poor dear down there, of course," Eda promised upon their widened eyes at the word 'bomb'. "An hour after we leave, the bomb goes off, which they're sure to investigate. And by the time they get here and find the gold is already gone, we're on our little boat and heading towards a life of luxury. Sound good?"
"...Works for me," Ranma concluded with a shrug, beginning to empty one of the packs. He stopped for a moment, looking at it. "You do realize that these packs are going to tear if we put more than a hundred bars in 'em, right?"
Eda raised one eyebrow delicately in response.
"You really think I came so ill-prepared? I'm insulted, Ranma. Each of those packs are kevlar sewn together with braided steel. They can withstand whatever you two can fit in them," the blond noted, adding, "Conveniently, that should be more than enough room for the gold and whatever expensive tools we can fit in."
It was the work of minutes for Eda to pack some explosives around a large rock fifty feet away from the hole. Not wanting to risk collapsing the bunker in deference to her compatriots, she formed a shaped charge which would direct most of the force up and away from the hole and the location of the bunker. It'd still create quite the loud bang, more than enough to draw the attention of the search parties no doubt combing the island.
However, it still wouldn't be enough. No matter how loud the bang, a single explosion wouldn't draw their enemies to the site unless there was something visual for them to pinpoint.
Remembering her time in the girl scouts, she grabbed bunch of wet leaves and green branches from the jungle surrounding them, setting them up in a neat pile far from the explosion's site. A bit of twine bound them into a tight cone almost the size of a tee-pee and secured it to the ground, a heavy wire net thrown overtop to keep it from being overturned by the explosion.
At the center of it all, inside the cone, she set a fire amidst a large pyramid of some dry, slow-burning wood. By her estimation, the wood would begin to heat the greenery around it in twenty minutes or so... More than enough time for the fire to start burning in half an hour.
The end result would be a loud bang and an equally large plume of smoke to guide their pursuers in to the location they'd long ago left.
Noting the boys had finished packing the gold and were waiting for her, Eda started the timer for the explosives and led them off into the jungle.
oOo
Staring at the bright light shining down into the bunker, Rip cursed her poor fortune as she considered the dilemma in front of her. She tried wiggling free of her chains, and after only moments knew that the attempt would be fruitless. Whatever other faults the pigtailed youth who'd recaptured her might have, he did know how to secure her so she couldn't wiggle free.
However, the German vampire refused to quit. Noticing the chairs and tables to the side of the bunker, she had an idea. The chairs and tables were all lightweight, and should be easy enough for her to move around even with her arms bound behind her back. And the cieling, afterall, was only nine feet up.
She could get out. It would be hard, but relying on that American cow to have set up the explosives properly didn't seem like a good idea to the sniper.
Rip glared at the free space under the hole. It'd take a pyramid of chairs and tables to get up. She'd figure out how to climb up the pit leading to the bunker when she got there.
The first two tables were easy. All the dark-haired vampire had to do was grab the ends of the tables and lift slightly, dragging them underneath the pillar of light cast by the hole above. A few bumps with her hips shoved the two tables more or less parallel, leaving her with a base on which to rest the next table. After that, it'd just be chairs.
The third table was far more troublesome, and Rip knew she'd have to work to get it into place. Crouching underneath the table, she carefully balanced the load on her shoulders and lifted, using her hands to steady it as she extended her legs. Noticing that she was still a foot short on one end, she wiggled the table forward a bit and used her head to lift one end up, barely getting both legs on the table. With that part done, it was simple enough to set the other two legs on the tables. From there, it was a simple matter of using her bound hands to centre the table above on the two tables below.
Rip was honestly surprised by how quickly she'd done it. It'd felt like only a couple minutes since the pyramid was started, and here it was, almost completed already. All it needed was the chairs. With grim determination, the dark-haired girl set to work, dragging a pair of chairs over.
The first was easy. All she had to do was set it next to the table, wiggling it into place with her thighs. The next required her to get up on the first two tables, which became a stumbling point. No matter how much she twisted her ankles, the chair refused to come up, slipping off the toe of her boot before she could get it above the level of the tabletop.
After the third failure, she dropped into a seat on the floor, propping her booted foot on knee as she attacked the knotted laces with her teeth. Her left boot loosened quickly, and she kicked it off with a casual motion, bare foot recoiling slightly as it touched the rubble-strewn ground. Ignoring the alien sensation, she similarly removed her right boot before climbing back on the table.
This time, raising the seat was easy. Shoving one end of the table over precariously, she made room for the metal folding chair on the second level. A similar technique allowed her to work a third chair on top of the highest folding table. For one brief moment as she ascended the pyramid she felt the construction beneath her shake, and her heart leapt to her throat: If it fell now, she wouldn't have time to escape before the blond cow's bomb went off.
Perched on top of the last chair, the ceiling of the bunker nestled just above her hips as she lightly pressed her back into it, Rip knew that she'd only have one shot at her escape attempt. If she did this right, she could jump with her back pressed to the one wall of the pit as a pivot point, which would allow her to brace herself across the hole with her legs.
Doing so would no doubt knock the chair underneath her to the bunker floor, and if she fell, she had no doubt that the fragile pyramid of furniture would be knocked off balance and fall to pieces as well. Despite the fact she didn't really need to do so, the dark-tressed vampire took a deep breath to steady herself as she mentally willed herself to action.
The chair slid on surface of the table underneath her as she pressed her back firmly against the concrete and dirt behind her, before kicking out from underneath her as she braced herself and threw her feet at the surface opposite her.
Her right foot caught firmly in the dirt above the bunker, but the other only briefly scraped concrete before slipping back into the bunker. Her left shoulder scraped along the concrete behind her as her weight shifted, and Rip straightened the line of her body from right toe to her shoulders as she panicked, fearing a fall to the bunker below.
After a brief pause, determining that she wasn't about to fall into the darkness below, Rip grinned. Wiggling her shoulders up the wall behind her as much as she dared, the vampire then twisted her hips and brought her other bare foot up, the toes on her delicate foot sinking into the deliciously cool dirt underneath as they struck the opposite wall.
Although the pit wasn't perfectly level as it rose, the vampire grinned as she made her way to the top. She would make her way out. She would escape. Even as the pit widened toward the top and she was forced to straighten her legs and torso simply to maintain her position, she was happy. Her legs trembling as her strength waned in the sun, Rip finally twisted her body onto the cool grass above, escaping the confines of the bunker.
She'd managed to force herself to her knees when her eyes found the counter of the explosives the blond cow had placed. Despite the decades she'd lived, the moments following the instant she noticed the 00:00:38 were the longest four seconds of her life.
The blast felt like it caught her in the sternum, despite the fact Rip knew if the explosion hadn't been controlled it would have ripped her apart like wet paper in the wind. Instead, it merely threw her back five feet.
Of course, this left her perched on her knees above the pit the two unnatural boys had dug, slowly tipping forward into the darkness. Despite digging her toes into the turf behind her, the vampire's balance inexorably tilted forward and she plunged into the darkness.
As the tables crashed underneath her and spilled her, scraped but otherwise uninjured, back onto the floor of the bunker, one thought invaded Rip's mind: 'At least the blond bitch placed the explosives correctly.'
Of course, this was when the ceiling groaned ominously.
oOo
Author's Note:
I seriously did not set out to make Rip quite this big of a butt-monkey, but I guess it came with the territory of making her an anti-climax villain. Ah well. C'est La Vie. I promise the next villain I import from some other series for the purpose of a throw-away villain will be treated more seriously.
Then again, how could I treat them LESS seriously?
As for Ranma and Ryouga carrying all the bars, well... 1 litre of gold weighs 19.3 kg. By volume, the 500 kg of gold they found would equal 25.9 litres. Most travel backpacks can hold between 15 to 25 litres. Multiply that by two, and the boys can fit the volume in easily.