Part 14

He was wasted after our tryst, but that wasn’t odd. He was young and strong, but he’d been worn out when we started. Making his ‘shield’ had used up a lot of energy. I got up and went to the latrine, where I sat, hoping that most of two young, virile loads of semen would drain out of me, instead of soaking into my very fertile womb. It had crossed my mind, as I pulled him into me, that this was the first bareback sex I would be having since I was a foolish sixteen-year-old. Passion knows no age, though, and sixteen-year-old me told older me to shut the fuck up and enjoy it, like she had, back then.

I did, too.

But, when my head cleared, my twenty-four-year-old self tried to mitigate the potential for a swollen belly.

I didn’t have a calendar to plot things like my period on. I’d had some since going on the lam, but hadn’t paid attention to them because I had more important things to think about. It was that way in the Army, too, so I was used to it. Also, since I had always avoided having unprotected sex, that didn’t factor into thinking about my menses. So I wasn’t real clear about when my last period had ended. It had been starting a period, in fact, that had gotten us caught. Actually, it had been me being unprepared to have one that had gotten us caught. I knew better than to use that card, but I was out in public at the time and didn’t want to draw attention with bloody jeans, either. I was lucky that PMS didn’t plague my moods. I was unlucky that it also gave me no warning.

In any case, there wasn’t anything that could be done about it now. I stood up and reached to pull my panties up when, almost instantly, I was right back in bed with him and he was fucking the stuffings out of me. This dream was so strong and so real that I ended up sitting back down on the commode. The prohibition of “making” me cum wasn’t there in his dream, and I had an impossibly long, rapid fire machine gun event that left me lying on the floor beside the potty, curled up in a fetal position. The orgasms might be artificial, but my body couldn’t tell the difference and I fought to get air into my lungs. If I’d been in bed beside him I would have clobbered him.

But I was twenty feet away and, if this continued, I wouldn’t be able to move five feet, much less ten or twenty.

I yelled, “Stop!“ in my mind, and everything did just that. It was like going from a raging forest fire through a door into a soundproofed room where the floor, ceiling and walls were painted white, and the table and chairs in it were also white.

I pushed myself up off the floor, making a decision to buy a mop and start using it in there, and staggered back to the bedroom. I felt like I’d run a marathon. I’m not kidding when I say his dream produced twenty or more orgasms in my mind in a three or four minute session. Or maybe it was a four minute long orgasm. I don’t know.

He was lying there, innocently, one leg cocked, looking beautifully naked.

I woke him up.

“You can’t have dreams like that anymore,” I panted.

“Was I dreaming?” he muttered.

“And how,” I said.

“We fornicated,” he said. There was no judgment in his use of the term.

“We did,” I said.

“I liked it,” he sighed. He grinned.

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “And try not to dream.”

“Okay,” he breathed.

He was asleep before I got to the doorway.

There were no more dreams. I sat at the table and unpacked the BB pistol. It was the CO2 kind, and it came with one cartridge. We had used both these and Airsoft guns in training, and my hands felt familiar as I got it ready to shoot. I fired it at one wall and it penetrated the drywall. I looked on the other side of the wall and there was an exit hole. I found the BB stuck in the drywall on the other side of the room.

I worried for a minute about how much it would ‘cost’ him to build a shield that would stop a BB, but then decided it was worth it. And, if things went as usual with Bobby Wilson, he’d get better and stronger with practice.

This was a skill he needed to have down pat.

I had lunch ready when he woke up. This was something else that was familiar from my Army days. He woke up at 1430 and we had “lunch” because it was the first meal since breakfast. Time of day didn’t matter all that much to us.

When he’d finished, we worked on him learning what a sniper’s mind looked like as he, or in this case, she, sniped. I had never used a pistol to snipe anyone, but the principles were the same. I set up a can on the far side of the kitchen and used the table as a bench rest. I tried to settle my mind into what I called ‘wait and shoot’ mode. What that meant was emptying my mind of everything except waiting and watching, combined with aiming. I waited for what my internal clock said was five minutes, during which I examined the logo on the can, choosing exactly where to plant the round ... BB ... and then I squeezed off the shot.

The trigger pulled like a St. Bernard on a leash, but the snap of the gun going off was familiar. The can wobbled and sat there. I’d hit it, but it was a good inch and a half from the “R” I’d been aiming at. So the sights were trash, too. I put the gun down in disgust.

“Do it again,” ordered Bobby.

This time I played a game of defeating the substandard trigger, and aiming with “Kentucky windage”. I wanted a hole in that R. As I thought about that later, I think that’s why Bobby did learn what a sniper’s mind looks like. The game I played put me in the right mindset. Snipers do that all the time. They stare through a scope and imagine the shot, thinking about the wind, or glass, or anything else that might affect the trajectory of the round. The fact that I was shooting at a tin can across the room with a crappy air pistol didn’t matter, because I was able to sink back into that familiar place where all that existed was me, the target, and the round I was sending its way.

We spent an hour doing that before he said, “I think I have it.”

Then he told me the color in my brain resembled what he’d seen one time when a cat was stalking something in the grass at St. [redacted].

I waited until after supper to have him try stopping a BB.

I felt a chill run down my spine when, the first time I shot it, intending for it to miss him by six inches, the BB stopped cold right beside him. It looked like the little copper sphere just popped into existence, hovering beside him. He reached and plucked it out of the air.

That’s how fast Bobby Wilson could improve, when he was motivated to improve.

That night, when we went to bed, I enforced the foot of empty space between us. I didn’t want to, but I did. I also told him what he’d done to me earlier and asked him to try not doing that anymore, because it made me helpless. I didn’t want to be helpless if somebody came through the door on us.

I spent a few days wishing Bobby could see a real sniper in action in a real-world situation, but the only way that was going to happen was if we heard about a hostage situation somewhere, or some other crime that involved SWAT and a sniper. Then we’d have to get there and get into position to see the sniper. Even then, the overwhelming majority of those situations get resolved without the sniper actually firing a shot.

Then I had an idea. It was a crazy idea, an insane idea. It would require us to travel across the country, to either Fort Benning, where the Army’s sniper school is, or to Fort Bragg, where I was stationed when I was in Delta Force. It was an ambitious plan, maybe even a stupid one, but I felt strongly that Bobby would never be safe unless he could detect someone aiming at him through a scope.

It was probably time for us to move, anyway.

For the first time we committed a crime. We had to have a car and it had to be good enough to get us two thousand miles without breaking down. I didn’t have enough to buy such a vehicle, and I didn’t want to ask the nuns for more.

So, we waited until it was dark and went to an ATM. The first thing Bobby did was examine the camera and move things inside it that turned it off. Then he fooled around with the innards of the machine and it started spitting out twenties. I had to tell him to stop it because it wanted to keep going. When we left, I had a little more than eight grand in my hands, and we were both felons.

I wasn’t too worried about it. The bank had insurance, and I didn’t like insurance companies. I had a claim one time about something that happened while I was deployed, and the insurance company refused to cover it, saying I hadn’t notified them I’d be gone, and that the risk would therefore rise. Why the risk rose when I was gone, they didn’t explain.

We went to a used car lot of the independent kind, meaning it wasn’t a dealership that also sold new cars. A guy named Fred was only too eager to sell us a 2008 Subaru Forester. I talked him down from $6,000 to $5,210. If that sounds pretty specific, it was. He looked at the clipboard he had in his hand and said he couldn’t take five thousand for it because that’s what he had in it. He was satisfied with two hundred and ten dollars of profit and we had ourselves a car.

We just walked away from the store, abandoning almost everything in it.

Because of what had happened at the ATM I didn’t worry too much about cash. We could get more if we needed it. Then, as I drove and Bobby napped, I worried that there might be a central database where things like unexplained ATM shortages got reported. I didn’t want to establish a pattern that some bright boy (or computer) at the NSA might perk up at and track us with. So I was frugal with the cash we had left. We stayed mostly in chain motels, where the clerk paid no attention to us and our car fit right in. It still had a 90 day paper tag on it, but by the time that was up I could either register it wherever we were or just abandon it.

It was possible that, in 90 days, Bobby would be public again and our needs would be met in other ways.

I chose Benning, because my idea was to see if Bobby could meet someone - an old buddy of mine - and then monitor him from afar. The buddy I had in mind was Eric Rokk, who I served with on multiple deployments, and who was a professional sniper. All of us in Delta Force got sniper training, but that was his specialty and that’s what he did on most missions. Eric, or “Gator” as he was called, was an instructor at the sniper school, now.

I couldn’t just go on post and say, “Hi, Gator! What’s shakin’?” First of all, since 9-11 every installation required a military ID or civilian personnel ID or contractor pass to get on post. Casual visitors were no longer allowed. Second, I didn’t want to meet him publicly, because I was going to have to tell him things I didn’t think he was going to like.

I figured out where to “bump into” him by the simple expedient of running surveillance on him. If he’d still been stationed with Delta Force it wouldn’t have worked, because active operators were very, very situationally aware, whether we were on deployment or going to the PX at Ft. Bragg. But he’d been out of that world for at least two years. He’d been on his way to that assignment when I got out of the Army.

I had been to Benning before, so I knew the layout. I bought a pair of binoculars at a pawn shop and we parked across and down the street from the gate I figured he’d use to get on and off of post each day. That required that I sit there for hours, staring through binoculars, just to identify him and his car. That kind of thing can generate attention, around a military installation, so I solved that problem by building a hide in the back seat of the Subaru. It was simple. It was a cardboard box with a hole in the side. I sat inside it while Bobby parked the car, got out, and walked away. I had to teach him to drive, first, which was terrifying, but he got it, finally. The first day I got nothing, either in the morning, or afternoon.

I had gotten us a room at the Motel 6, a room with one queen bed in it, and we slept together. To continue his training, I asked him if he could keep his dreams about me inside his wall. The first night I slept without waking.

The next day I saw nothing in the morning. We hung out in the room for most of the day. We practiced with the BB gun some more and eventually I had enough faith in his abilities that I aimed at a button on his shirt. The BB actually bounced off his shield. Then I made up a game where he faced away from me, and I shot. I didn’t aim it at him, but at a chair beyond him. I sat there with the gun in my hand and then, without saying anything, I raised it and shot. The BB disappeared into the innards of the chair.

“Again,” he said.

I put two more BBs in the chair before he adapted to doing it all without seeing me with his eyes. We already knew he could sense me without looking, so it was just a matter of trial and error. What we still didn’t know was whether or not he could sense somebody else.

The next BB hit a shield and dropped to the floor.

“This is harder,” he said, without looking at me. “Again.”

Ten BB’s later I was out of gas in the pistol and he was out of gas physically. He lay down on the bed to rest.

“You don’t have to guard your dreams during this nap,” I said. I wondered what would happen.

I waited until he was asleep before I lay down beside him.

Ten minutes later I would have sworn his naked body was on top of mine. He was rocking in my favorite way and I was having orgasms. This dream was less fragmented and more real. What I mean is there were no abrupt scene changes, and things happened at normal speed. In the midst of it I rolled to see if he was actually asleep. I half expected him to be leaning on one elbow, smiling as he rocked my world.

He was snoring softly, though. I realized he was getting better and better at controlling himself. Even in his sleep.

At least with me.

I nailed Gator at going home time on the third day, and identified his car. The next day I watched him go on post and, no longer using the hide, followed him to his apartment after he got off work. He stayed there until I gave up at midnight.

It took two more days before Eric went someplace other than straight home after work. It didn’t help us, though, because all he did was shop for groceries.

Friday night we hit pay dirt. He went home and then, around seven, he drove to a place with a half-lit neon sign that said, “The Lizard Lounge”. I didn’t stick around. I went back there the next day, wearing a wig from a used clothing store, and dark glasses. It turned out to be a dark place with scarred tables and stained floors. I recognized it as the kind of place Delta Force operators would have claimed as their own. The trendy crowd wouldn’t come in there and regulars left each other alone. There was a pool table and a small stage where, a faded sign proclaimed, they had Karaoke on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I acted like I’d come into the wrong place and left.

Naturally, I had pointed Gator out to Bobby, but all he had to work with was a man driving home and a man buying lettuce and bread, or whatever. He could see Eric’s colors, of course, but he said they looked pretty normal to him thus far. He did not see what he now called “sniper colors” when he looked at Eric.

I moved us to a different motel and we spent the next week sightseeing. I had already pushed the envelope, parking the Subaru in the same general place for three days in a row, looking at things with binoculars. Granted, I’d been in a box, but binos can glint without you knowing it and in any case, sooner or later somebody would notice the car and might wonder why the kid getting out of it walked down the street and disappeared, instead of going into one of the stores nearby. Maybe I was paranoid. Anyway, if Eric had relaxed, after getting out of Delta Force, he might have become habitual in his actions. We’d go back to the Lizard Lounge the next Friday night and see what happened. And if push came to shove, I’d just knock on his door.

It wasn’t all fun and games as we looked at local attractions. I had him examine people and try to tell me what they were thinking. He still couldn’t read minds. That’s still the case today. But the emotions and sections of their brains being used was useful in guessing what was going on. He could easily recognize anger, frustration, and emotions on the down side of things. He’d spent his youth seeing those in the shelter. Of course his guesses were just that - guesses. We couldn’t go up to people and ask them what was on their minds, to find out if his conjecture was correct or not.

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