“Thank you.” I stared at my Pinlighter. “The only thing I’ve ever been good at is taking pictures and shooting movies. I can’t believe I just shot a murder.”
“I like your movies.”
“You’ve seen them?”
She nodded. “After you left, Voltaire asked me to learn as much about you as I could.”
“Why?” I asked, surprised by the revelation.
Right when she was about to answer, Voltaire came up from behind her. “Beauvoir, Tolstoy needs to talk to you. Call him.”
Beauvoir nodded and slipped away.
“How many dead?” I asked.
“The death of every celebrity is worth 10,000 corpses,” Voltaire replied and it was sad to admit that people felt closer to the stars than their own family and friends. “We’ve almost arrived. Get yourself ready.”
“For what?”
“You have a choice to make. But I need to present all the parameters for you to be able to make an informed decision.”
What was he talking about?
“You want an extra suit of armor? Never know when stray bullets might come your way in Los Angeles,” Voltaire said.
II.
I felt like I was in the middle of a funeral procession. Five black limousines took us to the Institute. All the billboards, advertisements, and personal TVs were focused on the pogrom on television. There’d never been anything like it, not live, not without editing the way I used to do for everything broadcasted from the African Wars. People got to see brains and guts spilling without FX artists to filter everything with dramatic poise.
All the channels had multiple layers of commentary. Everyone wanted to know, who was doing this? All fingers seemed to point at the Colonel and Zhang Zhang.
Freeway traffic was at a surprising minimum and I soon recognized the hills to the side of me as those near the Absalom Hair Institute. I didn’t know what Voltaire had in store for me, but I would find out soon enough. He had on crimson armor that resembled a space suit, hexagons and octagonal plates turning him into a blocky warrior. It seemed an eternity ago when Larry first asked me to come to the Institute so I could pick up that hair sample and meet Rebecca. Those seemed like bloody simple times in comparison.
III.
When we arrived, dozens of his white-haired brothers and sisters were already there, attired in battle suits. There were similar facial features between all of them, highlighted by the hair, though there was enough variance to emphasize their differences. They warmly greeted Voltaire as he arrived, pumping their fists, thrilled by the arrival of their brother and leader.
“Any casualties here?” Voltaire asked.
“None,” one of his brothers replied. “The Institute members offered little resistance.”
“Their drones?”
“We infected their systems with the help of the traitor.”
Traitor? Who were they talking about?
“The bombs?” Voltaire queried.
“We’ll have them ready within the hour.”
“Excellent work, Hawthorne,” Voltaire said. “Gather your group and dissipate. We will meet at Destination Zero in three days.”
I had no idea what Destination Zero was, but Hawthorne and his buddies sprinted into place.
“They all know what this place represents,” Voltaire said to me. “Even Larry to a certain extent had an idea of what they did here. But you. You’ll get to see with virgin eyes.”
I remembered Plath telling me she’d been raised in Los Angeles. “You lived here?”
“This used to be Chao Research Facility Number 07,” he answered. “This is a homecoming for many of us.”
We walked through the lobby where I’d first seen Rebecca. Dead bodies were splayed against the walls. Many researchers had their necks slit open.
“Why do you have to kill all of them?” I asked.
“The name on the outside has changed, but the people inside haven’t. There are others who must still be hunted down, those who were lucky to be absent.” I was reminded of Rebecca. “Do you know how many they’ve killed?”
“Can you explain what the hell is going on?”
“Wait five minutes and I will show you,” Voltaire said.
We arrived at a huge elevator. Twelve others came aboard including Beauvoir who was staring at her feet, curling her hair behind her ear several times. She wore thin black armor that cleaved to her body and reminded me of a Kevlar corset. The elevator descended. Voltaire spoke to them in a foreign language I didn’t understand. They laughed heartily. Some made odd gesticulations my way. There was more laughter.
When we reached the bottom floor, Dr. Asahi approached, saw me, and demanded, “What’s he doing here? He can’t see me!”
She was the traitor. But why had she betrayed her fellow researchers? What could Voltaire have offered her?
“Dr. Asahi. I assure you, you have nothing to be afraid of. Nick here will not expose your involvement.”
“How can I be sure of that?”
Voltaire eyed two of his brothers. They grabbed her and dragged her away.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking me?!” she shrieked. “You can’t do this to me! I played it straight with you! I always did my best to help you!”
“When it was convenient,” Voltaire murmured. “Just like you conveniently betrayed your colleagues when it was inconvenient to be on their side.”
“What are you doing to her?” I asked, knowing full well that her fate was sealed. I thought about the package she’d analyzed for Larry and wondered why she’d been stumped by it as she worked here.
The hallways, aside from the bodies, were like something from the gallery of a rich taxidermist. There was the severed head of a panda on the wall as well as a horse suspended in liquid, hair flowing in swirling fractals. There were creatures I didn’t recognize, ones that had gone extinct like the chimpanzee, buffalo, and yeti. Voltaire’s hands were folded behind his back, his armor giving him the bearing of a general surveying the battle scene. Eight researchers were hung in a hallway. Fifteen corpses were piled on top of one another. Everywhere, his family greeted him with a reverence that verged on worship. His authority was unquestioned.
“Why are you keeping me alive?” I asked.
“I told you, we have a lot in common.” He turned to me. “If I was going to kill you, I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of saving your life.”
One hallway led into another and another. The corridors went on seemingly forever. There were computer terminals at every corner, glass walls with laboratories where they presumably studied hair. Several of the machines resembled the telescopes they pointed at space, only in reverse, examining strands of hair. We came to a very dark hall filled with tiny compartments that could have been lockers. There were approximately a hundred on either side. The doors had latches and slits as windows. It looked like a space where they kept monkeys and bigger rodents.
“This is where I grew up,” Voltaire stated. “I spent the first eight years of my life in locker number 15.”
He opened it. If I rolled up into a ball, it would barely fit me. I couldn’t imagine being inside there for ten minutes, much less eight years.
“They stuck you in there?”
“With masks,” he added, smiling. “To make sure we breathed pure air. They fed us intravenously, cleaned us with a spray inside the unit.” He reached his hand inside and felt for a module that had tube ports and a sprinkler on it.
“Why’d they do this?” I asked.
“To track down the cause of the Great Baldification. They had to know the culprit. Was it solar spikes, pollution, or junk food?” Voltaire posed, a caustic edge to his questioning. “They had to study it and more importantly, recreate it. Twenty years ago, Larry’s father, the senior Dr. Chao found out our father grew hair when no one else did. He wanted to know why. So he had my father impregnate hundreds of women who gave birth and had their babies taken away so they could be raised in this blind hell. I would have preferred brimstone and fire to being stuck in a black void. Our deceased father had a skin condition that prevented him from going out in the sun. He’d spent all of his life away from it. But whenever he went outside, his hair would start falling out.”