Lucilla--NaNoWriMo2014

Chapter Six

Mark woke up Lucilla the next morning.

"You didn't lie with me last night, did you, Mark?"  She rolled over and looked up holding her head.  "And to think that I got drunk for noting at all."

"Lucy, you didn't get laid, but got a hangover for all your trouble."

"Can I just rest now?"

"No, I have just weeks to prepare you for our mission.  Today you will saturate yourself in modern technology.  You will be provided things on which to practice as well."

"Don't I know what I need to know already."

"Well, for one thing you need to know how to kill."

"Kill? I must confess that I already have done that."

"How?"

"Poison, we Roman women for ages have used it to get rid of unsuspecting enemies."

"Besides your brother, what enemy did you have?"

"The partrician who first had sex with me.  Rather, he raped me."  Lucilla looked away.  "But with time he mellowed.  They found him dead in the streets, and they thought he had some rare attack of his nervous system.  In a way he did," Lucilla said holding up an imaginary bottle of poison.

"Well, your weapons today will not come in a bottle."  He handed her men's military clothes. "Put these on."

"Will you help me?" she said with another lustful look.

"I still love the memory of my wife Lucy.  Your sexual escapades are what you did in your dead past.  I would have to love you before lying with you like you want."

Once dressed and her hair stuffed under a military cap, she stood before Mark looking baggy.  "What do we do today?"

"We will learn to ride a bicycle.  Our mission calls for us to travel by one of many means through the West Coast of Italy."

It took half a day for Lucilla to get used to a bicycle.  At length she enjoyed the ride.  After two days she got good at it, and they traveled to a firing range scratched out in the desert.  There was a sergeant in charge waiting for them.

To Lucilla's surprise there was a laminated, recurved bow and hunting arrows.  She well understood the concept and hit several stuffed targets after a while.

Then the sergeant moved to rifles and pistols.  All the pistols and rifles were captured from the Germans and Italians in North Africa.  Soldiers trained with them so that they woud know how to use enemy weapons if that was all that they could find on the battle field.

"Try the German Mauser, Lucy."

"You mean Germans are capable of making something with these precision parts?"

"That and more."

Within hours, Lucilla was firing rifles and pistols with the accuracy of an advanced beginner.  Lucilla did not enjoy the practice, but she did not mind it.

"You say that we will not have weapons when we go on our mission?"  Lucilla then asked, "Then why learn to shoot these weapons at all?"

"Lucy, we never know when we will be in need of such knowledge."

They rode their bicycles back to Algiers and back out to the ranges the next day.  That day they introduced Lucilla to automatic weapons.  Small machine guns and sub machine guns.

After half a day Lucilla fired the weapons as if she was born on a farm in America and grew up hunting.

Without warning another German Messerschmidt was strafing trucks and troops at random when he discovered the firing range.   Soon he was diving on the range and his bullets began to march in Lucilla's direction.  She had no time to run without being cut to pieces.  So she stood there and took aim straight at the pilot who was beginning to rake the ground around her.

Due to the wing span of the fighter plane, the bullets tore up dirt on both sides of Lucilla as she began to rake the planes cockpit.  Her bullets shattered his plexiglass and he fell over against his control stick and the plane plunged headlong into the scrub desert.  A fireball rose above the plane's point of impact.