Chapter 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This chapter involves an illegal modification to a firearm. The details of this modification, as presented in the story, are completely fictitious and bear no resemblance to any actual method of illegally modifying a gun.

The classroom table had a different gun on it.

Shiloh sat down in the heels and the Gun Bunny and looked at the thing the way she had looked at Nash’s holster on television, except this one was longer, meaner, and already in her space. An AR-15. She knew the name from every packet she had ever handed a donor. Lang called it a carbine like that made it smaller. It didn’t look smaller. The metal was cold when he put it in her hands, a heavier cold than the .45, the kind that went up her forearms and announced itself in her shoulders.

“Stock in the pocket. Not on the bone. Front hand up here, not hanging off the end like you’re afraid of it.” His palms came over hers and moved them, dry and impatient. “You’re not posing for a ban. You’re holding a rifle.”

“I know what it is.”

“Then hold it like you do.”

The lights went down before she had a sentence for that. The screen came up on a title, FROM BELT TO SLING. A woman in a vest on a clean range switched from a handgun on her hip to the same long gun Shiloh was cradling, and the voiceover started selling competence the way the last tape had sold groceries.

It was propaganda. She could smell the budget. It was also a loop of hands doing the same work over and over, and her body had already learned what loops of hands did to her.

“Match her,” Lang said from the dark. “Every time she does it, you do it.”

On screen the woman brought the rifle up from low, stock finding the shoulder, cheek down, muzzle level. Shiloh copied it. The cold length of it changed her balance in the heels. Her calves tightened. The onesie pulled across her tits when she lifted her elbows, and the simple fact of the larger gun in her grip sent a low answering heat into her nipples and down between her legs, thicker than the .45 had ever been just for being held.

“You’re floating the stock. Dig it in. Again.”

She dug it in. The woman on screen dropped the rifle to a ready position across her chest, strap catching the weight, then brought it up again. Up. Down. Check the chamber. Seat the clip. Tug. The tape showed it four times, then five, catalog pretty, the same motions like a chorus. Shiloh’s arms started to shake from the weight and from the other thing, the one she was trying to breathe through so she could do the drill instead of thinking about her own cunt.

“Muzzle up. You’re cutting your own feet.” Lang’s hand lifted the barrel. “Better. Again.”

She went again. Criticize. Adjust. The woman on screen dropped to a knee in the heels and the vest and the tape did not treat that as a joke. Shiloh tried the knee. The chunk heel made it ugly. Lang’s boot nudged her back knee out.

“You look like a folding chair. Sit on the heel. Chest up. Good.”

The word landed and the surge came with it, a bright dirty roll across her nipples and her clit that made her jaw tighten. She stayed on the knee because standing up in the middle of it would have been a confession. The rifle’s weight pulled at her front hand. Handling it was its own problem. More metal. More of that cold becoming warm in her palms. Her pussy answered the length of it like length was the point.

“Up. Shoulder. Don’t crane.” He tapped the stock. “There. That’s a hold. Good.”

Praise again, and the pleasure spiked hard enough that she had to swallow. She dragged her attention back to the screen and made her hands do the next repetition, chamber check, clip, tug, up, down, as if competence could starve the rest of it out. It could not. The drill was the rest of it. Every clean mount made her wetter. Every time Lang said better, her clit throbbed against the seam. She stared at the woman’s hands on the screen and copied them like homework and felt her own breath go shallow anyway.

Near the end the tape cut to a range she recognized from the brochure. Nash Brennan walked into frame in a polo with a rifle hanging across his chest on a strap, sun on his shoulders, that same easy smile he had used on her across a pair of studio chairs.

“Handgun keeps a room,” he said to the camera. “This keeps a street. Learn both or you’re renting your safety from somebody who did.”

She hated him. The hate was intact. The surge that went through her when his face filled the screen was intact too, stronger than the praise, stupid and specific, a pulse in her cunt and a pinch in her nipples that made her want to set the rifle down and also made her grip it harder. She composed her face for the dark and waited the last thirty seconds out with her teeth together.

Lang brought the lights up. “You can put your mouth away,” he said. “I can see you thinking. Range.”

The outdoor carbine range line was louder than the covered bay. Dirt wall. Heat. Paper bodies at a distance that made the red ovals look like a dare. Lang gave her ear protection, a loaded clip, and the same rifle, warmer now from her hands.

“Single shots. Shoulder. Press. You are going to notice the kick. Notice it and stay in it.”

She mounted. She pressed.

The rifle hit her harder than the .45, a deeper shove through the shoulder and the chest, and the hole it left in the paper was bigger, uglier, a dark punch that did not look like a debate. The arousal that came with it was bigger too. It landed in her pussy like a hand and left her nipples scraped and tight under the panel. She made a sound into the first kick and called it breath and lined up the next one.

“Low. You’re letting it ride you. Again.”

Under Lang’s direction, she took single shots until the first paper was a mess of large holes and her shoulder had started to hum. Lang walked her closer to the oval with his hands on her elbows and the stock, nothing tender in it, and every time a shot broke clean the pleasure hit the same places, harder than the handgun days, hard enough that she had to wait a beat before she could see the sights again.

“Two now. Same chest. Don’t snatch the second because the first one felt good.”

She gave him two. Then three. Then a longer string that walked up the paper until he made her stop and start the group over. The kick stacked. The holes stacked. Her cunt stayed a low insistent ache through all of it, wet enough that the onesie had a temperature.

On a pause, muzzle on the dirt, she heard herself ask it.

“Can I try it on full automatic?”

Lang looked at her like she had asked for a cigarette in church. “This is the civilian one,” he said. “It doesn’t do that.”

“Yeah, but this is the one that’s easy to modify for full auto, right?”

“That would be illegal.” He said it without heat and without a brochure. “You don’t do it. You don’t talk about doing it. You shoot what I handed you. Load.”

She dropped it. Her pussy did not. The ache for more sat there anyway, greedy and embarrassed, as if the rifle had a higher gear she was being kept from on purpose. She loaded. She went back to the strings. The legal version was already enough to ruin her concentration. She got better because getting better was the only way to keep the gun in her hands. Vital-area hits started landing in clusters, big dark openings in the circled chests, and each one slammed through her nipples and her clit hard enough that her knees wanted to answer. She rode the heels and kept her mouth shut and let him say good when the group finally looked like a group.

When he took the rifle, she gave it up slower than she meant to. “Trainees don’t walk the property with these,” Lang said, already breaking it down into the state he wanted. “They stay on the line. You get your pistol back. You treat it like I never took it.”

The .45 felt small when he set the case in her hand. That was a problem she was going to have to live with.

The barracks were full again. Women on bunks, women laughing, a pair of them comparing groups with their phones held too close together. Shiloh stood in the doorway with the pistol case and a body that wanted a locked room, tense enough to snap, irritable in a way that had nowhere polite to go. She ground her teeth and went to the bathroom because the bathroom had at least been a theory of privacy once.

It was not privacy. Three women at the long mirror in the onesies and the heels, doing the evening work on their faces. Steam. Little bottles. The pretty brunette from the rifle line two sinks down, hair out of its ponytail, smoothing something along her jaw like she had all night.

Shiloh watched them longer than she had meant to. Her own face in the gap looked like a press conference that had run out of powder. She felt the dowdy thing again, the unfinished thing, and hated it, and then she walked up anyway because the other option was going back to the bunk to crawl out of her own skin.

“Hey.” Her voice came out too careful. “I forgot my bag when I got here. Skin care. Could I borrow some of what you’re using?”

The brunette turned like that was the most normal sentence on the property. She had a small neat spread on a towel: a white pump bottle, a tub, a short concealer, a mascara. “Oh my God, yes. I do this every night, don’t even worry. I’m Kenzie.” She pushed the pump forward. “Hydrating cleanser. Wet your face first or it pills. Two pumps. Circles. Get the hairline, everybody forgets the hairline. Rinse it all the way off or the moisturizer balls up.”

Shiloh did it because backing out now would have been worse than asking. The cleanser smelled like almost nothing. She worked it in the way she had been shown, rinsed, and Kenzie was already uncapping the tub.

“Moisturizing cream. This one. No, not the lotion, the tub. Pea size for your whole face or you look greasy under the lights. Press it. Don’t rub it off your cheeks like you’re mad at it. Wait a minute.”

Shiloh pressed. Her skin took it and went quieter, less raw around the nose and the mouth. Kenzie squinted at her, then handed over a little sponge on a stick and a Maybelline Instant Age Rewind in a shade that was close enough.

“Dots. Under the eyes, sides of the nose, that center line you get when you’ve been in the sun. Bounce it. If you drag it you look like you did your makeup in a car. Then this.” Lash Sensational, cheap pink tube. “Wiggle the base. One coat. Two if you want to look awake on the line tomorrow. I won’t tell Lang.”

Kenzie smiled when she said it. Not unkind. Shiloh put the mascara on with the slightly stunned care of a person following instructions she had not planned to need. When she looked back at the mirror the difference was not a transformation and it was not nothing. The redness had settled. The tired under her eyes had receded. Her lashes made the rest of her face look like it had decided something. Refined. Prettier in a way she could still pretend was hygiene.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Anytime. Seriously. I keep extras. You looked like you were about to file a complaint with your own forehead.”

Shiloh made a sound that could have passed for a laugh and got out before she could ask for a second coat.

The end bunk was still the end bunk. Her backpack was under it, laptop zipped in the sleeve she had told herself would hold the exposé. She sat with the machine in reach and did not take it out. There was no urge. The cursor in her head was already behind the rifle.

She thumbed the pistol case open instead and took the .45 into her lap because it was what she had been allowed to keep. Smaller. Lighter. Wrong, now, in a way that made her restless. Her mind went back to the cold longer gun, the stock in her shoulder, the deeper kick, the bigger holes, the way the weight had pulled on her front hand and made her pussy sit up and beg for a gear Lang would not give her. She stroked the grip of the handgun without meaning to, thumb tracing the same path she had learned on the other weapon, and a soft moan slipped out of her before she could call it a breath.

She sat there with the little gun in both hands and the larger one still in her palms in memory, staring at the fence, not writing, stroking the metal like it might turn into the rifle if she asked it nicely enough.

The bag was on the nightstand when she woke up.

Shiloh stared at it long enough to be angry at a piece of canvas. No note. No explanation. Just a zip pouch that had not been there at lights-out, packed with things she had not packed: a blush compact, a thin eyeliner, a lipstick in a shade that would have looked frivolous on a panel, a brow gel. She took it to the sinks because leaving it unopened felt like losing a smaller dare, and Kenzie was already there with her towel and her CeraVe and the expression of a woman who had been waiting to be useful.

“Oh, you got the kit,” Kenzie said, as if kits appeared on nightstands at Ridge Line every morning. “Come here. You’re going to look mean if you do the liner by yourself.”

Kenzie dotted Milani Baked Blush on the apples of Shiloh’s cheeks and showed her how to sweep it back toward the hairline so the sun would not turn her into a clown. She took Shiloh’s hand and ran the e.l.f. brow gel through the dark arches until they sat sharper over the concealer from two nights ago. The eyeliner was a cheap black felt tip. Kenzie made her look down and sketched a thin line tight to the lashes, no wing, just definition.

“Liner on the range is about the eyes reading at distance,” Kenzie said, like that was a tactical fact. “And this.” Maybelline SuperStay in a dusty rose. “Blot it. If you leave it wet you’ll eat it on the first string.”

Shiloh blotted. In the mirror the woman who looked back was still her and was not. Sharp jaw, dark hair pulled into a high ponytail that left her throat bare, lashes thick from last night’s tube plus this morning’s second coat, color sitting on her mouth like a decision. The Gun Bunny mapped her breasts and the high cut of her hips without commentary. The heels put her calves into a line that belonged on a different kind of poster. She looked, she thought with a flinch that was not entirely disgust, like someone who intended to be watched while she shot.

“There,” Kenzie said. “Don’t wipe it off because you get shy. That’s a waste of my morning.”

The field Lang took her to was not the covered lane and it was not the dirt-wall range from the first rifle day. It was a lot of pale grass and scattered barrels and plywood low walls, the kind of place that wanted you to pretend a street had fallen over in the country. Paper-bodied dummies stood in the gaps and behind the cover, three-quarter figures on stakes. Someone had printed them with skin a shade darker than the old beige silhouettes, broad noses, mouths set hard, hair suggested in tight curls or short fades. Hoodies on two of them. A vest on a third that was not a plate carrier, just the cheap urban kind her old graphics used when they wanted a viewer to think victim. The coding was not a caption. It was not nothing. Shiloh saw it in the first three seconds and felt her press-conference mouth try to form a sentence.