Chapter 7: Ulciscor - Vengeance

Martine had trained me by explaining things, waiting patiently through my questions, giving examples, showing me, and then if necessary, touching my mind to actually demonstrate. Loris was not like Martine. Loris didn't teach, per-se. One survived Loris, or didn't.

On the 20^th, Martine returned to town, and Marco and I were alone for the first time with Loris. Martine hadn't raised any fuss at all about Loris, my training, his motivations, nothing. I knew that she'd been enthralled by him. His power was nothing short of incredible.

He didn't say much that day. He set me some exercises to do, getting prairie dogs or whatever they were, to come up out of their holes, send Marco to them, have Marco pick them up by the scruff of the neck, bring them to me unharmed, and then release them.

It was tedious, and I had to deal with more than one mind at once. By late afternoon I was exhausted and frustrated. I turned to go back into the trailer, to tell Loris I was done with this, when he attacked.

Blinding, killing pain bloomed behind my eyes, my vision went white, and I could feel myself hit the ground.

"I'm not stopping this until you're dead, so you had better make it stop." he said directly into my mind. There was no malevolence there, but he wasn't harboring any regrets either. The pain was overwhelming, I had no time to think, to plan, to do anything. I could feel my power flailing around blindly, seeking for something to attack. There was nothing there. His power was invisible.

Down inside I was screaming, and part of me somewhere was already ready to give up. Just as I was getting hopeless about it, Loris increased the level of pain geometrically. I lost all sense of the external world. The only think that lived for me was this crushing white snake of blinding, killing power that had me in its grip. Every moment was an eternity of torment. I lost all sense of trying to do anything with my power at all, and tried to just survive it.

"Not good enough," he said, and the pain amplified again. There was nothing left now, nothing left but the pain. It tore through me like sheet lightning. It was so horrible, so overwhelming, it became all that there was.

And, miraculously, once the pain became all that there was in the universe, once I had embraced it as the natural order of existence, it just faded away.

"Good start, lean into it," he said to me.

I looked around. I was laying on my back in Loris's front patch of dirt. I was soiled from rolling around in the dirt, and I'd wet myself. Marco stood over me, barking and snapping, trying to find something to kill.

From the looks of it, only moments had passed. I got cleaned up, and Loris made scrambled calf brains and eggs on toast for dinner. He ate, not looking at me. The only thing he said that evening to me was this.

"Move, Jeopardy is coming on next."

The next day wasn't pain, it was anger. One moment I was trying to get three of the squirrel things to walk one after another, working on controlling all three at once, and the next, this overwhelming rage tore through me. I started screaming incoherently at Marco for not staying far away enough from the squirrels, and began looking for a stick to beat him with. Part of me knew I was breaking my promise to him, and that made me madder yet. It was that damned dog's fault in the first place for making me feel sorry for it.

"Fool."

The rage amped up again, anger pouring through me like fire. I began pounding my hands into the side of the trailer, trying to get to Loris. I wanted to tear the skin off his face, hit him again and again, endlessly.

"Idiot, learn from this. You'll go into cardiac arrest soon."

The rage became vastly stronger, tearing through me. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, the blood rushing in my ears. Then somehow I knew that I had to embrace this rage, make it mine like I had the pain.

I saw the front of my mother's home blowing outward in a rain of beige stucco, chicken wire, twisted stumps of wood and flying, burning insulation. Inside I saw the fire caress the flesh I had loved, all in slow motion. I saw my family burn and die.

The rage washed through me, I owned it, made it mine, tucked it away in a corner of my heart for future use. I stood up and looked around, I needed to apologize to Marco.

And so it went. I learned to deflect emotions. That was his lesson. And it was my first lesson. He took me through pain, rage, sadness, guilt, embarrassment, the whole range of emotions that could be used to cripple me, stop me. I learned to own them, let them pass through me without eating my soul or mind.

The next lesson was equally fun. One day, when I was working on training nine prairie dogs to stand on their hind legs and wave at me, Loris walked out of the trailer. He carried a two by two piece of pine board in his hand.

"I'm gonna hit you with this. Your job is to focus on keeping your sense of perception inside that dog of yours. If you lose concentration for even a moment, I'll knock you the fuck out."

I looked at him in bewilderment. He threw his left elbow out to the side and that hunk of wood slammed up against my head so hard I went to my knees.

I knew that if I went after him, he'd kill me, so I tried to reach out for Marco. Loris never said what I could do with Marco though. So, once I was in Marco's head, we went for Loris full bore. Marco ran across the yard in full attack, and...

Wham across my back ... I was laying in the yard, rolling to my feet, going for Marco's mind, getting in, turning the dog toward Loris, speeding up for the...

WHAM across my shins ... face down in the dirt, throwing myself headlong into Marco's mind, making a huge leap into his canine flesh, as WHAM I turned to Loris and WHAM leapt for his throat as WHAM I jumped over the body of my master and my jaw opened and WHAM Loris jumped to the side and

I pulled myself out of Marco and got up and looked at Loris. Marco was at his feet panting, then running to me, licking my hands. Loris looked at me.

"You're good with animals. Use that," he turned and walked inside.

First, days went by, then weeks. From time to time I'd spend a day in Reno with the women, but mostly I worked with Loris and trained with him. I knew I was making progress.

Loris trained me to fight. He trained me to fight dirty, to fight to win, and to use people's weaknesses. He trained me to survive. I hated him almost as much as I hated anyone, but at least I knew I was getting something I wanted from him.

By late August, I was able to control multiple minds at once, I was able to ignore physical damage or sensation, my mind was vastly stronger than before, and I was able to manifest other, lesser telepathic talents to a minor degree. I guess I had started to feel cocky.

There was a sound of thunder. Pain shot through me. Loris stood over me.

"You're getting good. I just shot you in the guts with this gun of yours. It's a nice gun ... I'll leave it here for you. You've got a couple of hours before you die. Heal yourself. When you're done, get in the jeep and find me. By the way ... you need to learn to sleep with a ward set." He laughed at me. Moments later I heard the sounds of a car pulling out, the radio blasting out 'Mexican Radio' by Wall of Voodoo.

He left me to die in the trailer. But it was way too late for that. Loris may have been brutally effective in teaching someone to fight, but Martine was a master at training me in technique.

Sure, I bled in the trailer. Sure, I could have died, but I knew I wouldn't. I closed my eyes, reached into my gut shot abdomen with my right hand, ignoring the pain completely, and fished around for the bullet. I was relieved when I realized that it had gone completely through me.

One kidney was a ruined mess, and my stomach was a wreck, but it could have been worse, he could have made me repair my spine. Maybe he didn't know I could do that.

For the next hour I patiently coaxed my body to heal itself, accelerating healing here, coaxing growth there, sending new life into tissue over there.

Sometime around midnight I was able to roll off the bunk and crash to the floor near the door. By twelve thirty, I was crawling out the door and falling down the steps. By twelve forty five, I was on my feet and tenderly making my way to Loris's old beat up Jeep.

I could sense Reno alive around me like a million points of light and pleasure, winking and dancing like fireflies as I drove into town. Loris was there.

I found Loris by looking for where he wasn't, finding the void of his power. It didn't take that long. I wondered how I ever could have missed someone so powerful before. It seemed stupid. He could have tried harder to hide, but he wanted me to find him, so I did.

The night lived around me, throbbing with power, as I pulled into the gravel paved lot in front of an nasty looking dive bar. A motley assortment of modified motorcycles were lined up out front, and Iron Maiden, of all the trite possibilities, came blasting out of the recently repaired door and frame.

I must have been a sight as I walked into that bar, cause conversation stopped. Around me were probably thirty or forty mostly drunk looking hard cases. The environment seemed to call forth wall to wall beards, dirty leather vests, torn Levis' and bad teeth.

At the far end of the bar, in a battered looking booth sat Loris, Natalie, and Martine, drinking and talking. I walked up. Around me conversation hesitantly restarted, and the bartender yelled over to ask if I needed an ambulance. I looked down to see myself covered in crusty, drying blood over sweat pants and nothing else. People laughed when I replied.

"The only thing I need is a beer." I'd just won some points.

Loris looked up as I approached.

"Well, Carter, here we are. Make or break time. You can survive Vincent now, you can almost certainly destroy his lesser minions. You can cast your mind out, you can survive a beating, even being wounded."

"Your point?" I asked.

"My point is that you have no power of your own."

I didn't know what he meant, and I said so. He looked at me. "Carter, You're great on technique, but you never really followed Martine's instincts and instructions, did you?"

"What do you mean, old man?"

"She told you to harness your sexual talent, didn't she?"