"Deal," I replied, kissing her forehead. "You're a lot cuter than any butler anyway. Although I'd love to see you in a French maid's outfit sometime."
"Maybe for Halloween," Sophie teased before growing serious again. "Rule two. You're going to train me. I damn near broke my wrists shooting that pistol in the club, and I'm not going into a situation so defenseless again. So you're going to train me how to shoot, and we'll work on how to fight."
"That's fine. I also was thinking you are going to want to continue your medical training as well. I'm good, but I'm not invincible. You're probably going to have to patch one or both of us up if you really want us to fight."
Sophie leaned up and kissed me, smiling. "Good. One final rule."
"What's that?" I asked, feeling my cock twitch and start to rise again.
Sophie opened her mouth to say something, then felt my cock poking against her thigh. She glanced down and smiled, wrapping her fingers around it and starting to pump. "I think you don't have to worry about rule three. You seem to be doing a very good job of that without any guidance from me."
Reaching up and cupping her breast, I smiled. "Well, I never went to college, but I do have a knack for learning."
Chapter 19
Sophie
The target was blurry in my sights, so I took a deep breath and readjusted. Pulling my head away, I realigned myself along the stock of the rifle, looking for that spot Mark had taught me was called the 'cheek weld.' It's supposed to be a perfect alignment, where your eye is just far enough from your scope that you can see perfectly, and your cheekbone rests lightly on the stock, reducing your need for muscular tension. Reminding myself of how it felt, I laid my cheek back along the cool hard line of the rifle, and sighted.
My target was almost totally stationary, tiny even in the magnification of my scope. Letting out half my breath, I slid my finger inside the trigger guard, resting the tip of my finger on the smooth curve inside. I stopped then, waiting for that magic moment when the heart would calm and everything would fall into place. At first it rarely, if ever, came but over the past month it had come much more often.
When everything clicked into place, I didn't even notice when my finger contracted the quarter inch needed. The rifle kicked in my hands, the scope going blurry as recoil jerked the rifle a bit. I quickly re-found my target, but a second shot was unneeded. The bottle dangled at the end of its string, swinging back and forth with red colored water shooting out of a hole in the middle, like it was pissing blood or something.
"Good hit!" I put my rifle on safe and set it on the bench in front of me, turning to smile as Mark nodded. "That's five for five today. Great work."
I gave him a quick hug, then we went down the short fifty meters to the target. Mark had hung a half liter bottle that used to contain Pepsi from a frame, letting the bottle swing back and forth in the breeze and with a bit of assistance from him. At the base of the frame were another four similar bottles, each with holes in them. While it wasn't exactly United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper level, for a girl who'd only fired her first real gun three months prior, I thought I was doing a pretty good job. "Still, it's only fifty meters, and I'm shooting bottles."
Mark considered the hole in my bottle and nodded. "Yeah, but the fact is that this bottle, when you consider the scale and the distance, won't be that much different. At three hundred meters, a six-foot man is the same as this bottle at fifty meters. Sure windage, elevation and things like that take a toll, but considering you're also shooting a tiny little .22 round right now, that'll be compensated too."
"And if I have to shoot longer than that?" I asked, untying the bottle and putting up a new one. We'd brought ten that day to use after I had fired another hundred rounds into stationary paper targets. My best so far in the exercise was five out of ten. I was hoping to get seven.
"Then we're in trouble," Mark replied with a grim smile. "Remember, we're going to be living in the city. If we have to start playing long range sniper with someone, either we're no longer in the city, or things have gone to hell. Either way, that's more of a time to run than a time to shoot."
"You forgot one other possibility," I said as we rigged the "wiggle string" that Mark used to make the bottle sway. He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes and squinted. I couldn't resist my smile any longer. "Zombie apocalypse. You can never forget the zombie apocalypse."