Chapter 15: Gold is thicker than Blood

As Eddie and I walked around trying to find Lily, the little boy seemed less sad than he was before and kept talking about his pornography collection. I nodded and pretended to be interested with what he had to say.

We arrived at a stone door with the word BANK engraved above the door in big letters. The place sparked our curiousity. After Eddie and I entered, we realized the bank was different to other rooms because the walls, ceilings, and floors were made of steel. The room looked like it was divided into two. On one half Eddie and I could freely walk. The other half, however, was filled with gleaming safes, deposit boxes, piles of gold, and bags presumably filled with cash. Neither Eddie nor I could move to this half of the room because it was protected by vertical metal bars.

On the right was a door that led into another room. I opened the door to find a room about the size of a normal bedroom. It was filled with weapons.

"Wow!" said Eddie as he walked in.

Attached to the walls neatly were many rows of Uzis, semi-automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenades, shotguns, machine guns, and chain guns. On the floor were boxes of ammunition, holsters, gas masks, knives, nylon rope, handcuffs, and grenades.

Eddie went inside the weapons room to grab an AK-47. The little boy underestimated the rifle's weight and had difficulty carrying it. The weapon was almost as big as the kid.

When I walked into the weapons room, I grabbed a grenade from a box and looked at the green metal object in my hands. It was rather heavy and the metal shell felt icy cold against my palm. I looked at the grenade, amazed that what I held in my hands--a lump of heavy metal--could be so lethal. All I had to do was remove the pin and I could die.

"If we want to save Lily," said Eddie, "we should bring some guns." He lifted up a bolt-action rifle.

I suppressed a smile. Eddie sounded like he was in a movie or at least he tried to sound like he was in a movie.

There was no way Eddie was going conceal a huge rifle under his clothes, so I gave him a small revolver. Eddie certainly hadn't used a gun before, so I was worried. I had never fired a gun either, so I didn't know what to expect. I have, however, played many video games before, games like Counterstrike and Quake, so I regarded myself well educated in firearms.

I grabbed a Colt-45 automatic pistol and concealed it underneath my white robe.

Eddie pointed to the vertical metal bars that separated us from the gold. "You know, if we blow up this place maybe we can take all that money."

The thought of making lots of money quickly temporarily excited me, but then I thought more carefully.

"Ella works here," I said. "Maybe her money's in there."

Eddie shrugged. "Who cares?"

"If we blow up this place, everyone will hear the explosion. They'll all come for us before we have a chance to get all the money out."

"Hey, what about that key you found in your pocket? Give it a try!"

I remember finding keys in the pockets of my white robe. After taking out the set of keys, I tried each one on the lock. Luckily the second-last key I tried worked and now we had access to a pile of gold and cash.

"Oh, man!" said Eddie. "We can sneak out of here with all that money." The little boy walked inside and grabbed two bars of gold. "These are heavy!"

I picked a bar up to see for myself how heavy they were. Each bar was about the same weight as a desktop printer, so at the most Eddie could carry two at once while I could probably carry three at once.

"I know the way out!" said Eddie. "We'll take all we can carry now, go out, hide 'em in the garden or something, and then come back here to get more."

I looked at all the piles of gold and bags of cash. "If we together can only carry five bars at once, it's going to take a long time to get all this out of here. The longer we stay the more likely someone will catch us."

Eddie nodded in agreement. "Okay, we won't take it all then. We'll just take enough to make us rich."

"How much is each gold bar worth?"

Eddie thought for a moment. "I don't know."

Eddie and I had a great idea. I took off my white robe and used it as a sack. I filled the robe up with about seven bars of gold before lifting it up over my shoulder. I felt like Santa Clause holding up a sack of toys, although these bars of gold were worth much more than your average toys. Eddie too took off his top till he wore only his t-shirt. He was able to carry four bars of gold.

Since Eddie carried fewer bars of gold, he walked ahead of me. The gold was much heavier than I anticipated. Since I was using the white robe as a sack, I no longer had a disguise, so it would be a disaster if someone saw me. It was a risk I was willing to take though because I was going to be rich.

As I walked I saw stone doors to my left and on each of these stone doors there was a large peephole. I remember looking into these holes before and seeing people having sex.

Behind the next stone door I walked by was a little girl sitting on a wooden chair. She was naked except for a skirt. Even though she was topless she was too little to have breasts. She was tied to the chair. Her eyes were blindfolded with cloth; her mouth gagged with masking tape. I noticed straight away from the child's flowing brown hair that she was Lily Jenkins.

"Eddie!" I said. "Come here."

Eddie walked back "What is it?"

I nodded at the stone door. "Lily's in there."

The little boy looked through the hole. "What should I do?"

"We'll get her out of here."

"What about the gold?"

"We'll untie her first. Then maybe she can help us carry more gold."

Eddie nodded. "Okay but be quick! You get the girl and I will carry this gold back."

"Do you want to carry my gold?" I offered him my sack of gold.

"I can't carry all that."

I softly dropped the sack of gold on the rock floor. "I'll leave it out here. I'm going in now. Wait for me out there. If I don't come out in fifteen minutes, call the police, okay?"

After saying goodbye to me, the little boy walked off.

The stone door opened easily. The room Lily was in was strange because it was empty except for the little girl, the chair, and a hole in the ground around two feet in radius. You could fit a human in this hole. I walked inside, making sure I closed the door behind me as I entered. Lily could sense someone entering her cell because she moved her head towards the sound. I've heard on TV that one should rip off band-aids quickly in one go to minimize pain. The same, I thought, must apply to masking tape on mouths. I kneeled down and faced the little girl. With my left hand I grabbed the top of her head. She seemed to resist, probably because she was blindfolded and didn't know it was me. With my right hand I started peeling away the tape. With the tape over her mouth, her screams underneath sounded like faint humming. I pulled the tape harder. The glue was strong. It felt like I was twisting the girl's head, like I was ripping her head into two. I got worried when I saw tears trickling down her cheeks.

I gave the masking tape a quick, hard tug and it came off finally. At first I thought the tape might have ripped some skin off the child's lips because her mouth was bright red, but it was more likely her lips were bright red because she had been biting them. When the tape came off, the little girl started dribbling from her mouth uncontrollably. She tried to clean herself up with her tongue, licking her lips and sucking up some of the saliva that oozed down. I still had my left hand on the little girl's head, and with fingers on my right hand I helped her clean the mess, wiping away the mixture of dribble and shiny mucus on her face. My fingers glided over her skin, my touch almost tender. Lily, however, interpreted my touches differently and moved her head away from my fingers.

"Don't hurt me," she softly moaned.

I took off her blindfold. I should have done it earlier but was too busy with the masking tape. Lily was astonished to see me.

"Keith."

"What happened?" I asked her, taking my hand off her head to give her more freedom to move.

"I don't know," she said.

I had to jog her memory. "This lunch, at school, when I went back to the canteen, what did you do when I didn't come back? Did you try to find me?"