“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.”
“The sun?”
“There were others who had never been in the sun. How come they were bald? The senior Dr. Chao tried everything on us. Many died. So many. And for what?”
I could not imagine what their lives had been like.
“When I turned five, every month or so, they’d take us out, cut our hair until we were bald, then send us back in. That’s how I came to know there were others like me. Any who disobeyed or were troublesome disappeared in the next hair cycle and we’d never see them again.”
We had both grown up prisoners in our own homes, subjected to crueltie
s others could not possibly understand. In degrees, his was by far the more extreme, but it was a fury I empathized with.
“How did you get out?” I asked.
“We were eventually released,” Voltaire said.
“Someone had a change of heart?”
“You could say that.”
Voltaire led me out of the hall, down the corridor, up a flight of stairs, until we arrived at a huge space that could have been a warehouse. There were thousands of glass cages set up in rows as though it were an aquarium. But there weren’t fish within. There were scalps of heads, hair growing from them and swaying like plants underwater. Mechanical arms with clippers and harvesters covered the ceiling, wires and tracks giving the arms full mobility. I stepped closer to make sure I was seeing right.
“Dr. Chao never found out what exactly caused the Great Baldification. But he found a way to recreate hair in perpetuity. These are the heads of my brothers and sisters who sacrificed their lives so that Chao Toufa could produce the best wigs in the world,” Voltaire declared. “The doctor kept the skin producing hair even without the rest of the body attached by releasing timed doses of synthetic hormones into the preserving solution at freezing temperatures.”
“What happened to the bodi—?”
“Terminated,” Voltaire said to me. “After he discovered this new method, he had no need for us. So he sent us out into the world five years ago like sheep to be devoured by the wolves.”
“But that would risk exposing your secret.”
“He assumed our hair would fall out when we were back in the sun. But it didn’t. Still, it wasn’t a big preoccupation for him. He was dying of stomach cancer.”
“So what happened?”
“We slipped off his radar. As we had been sent out with nothing to fend for ourselves, we had to carve out our own paths,” Voltaire said. He furrowed his brows and stared at one of the heads in the tank. “Beauvoir, take him upstairs and wait for us.”
They were going to do something here. Destroy it? Obliterate it? Salvage the heads? Commemorate all those they’d lost? There were so many heads and so much hair. I tried to get it out of my mind that those scalps once belonged to people.
I followed Beauvoir out of the chamber.
“You grew up in one of these too?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I grimaced, thinking of her being stuffed into a compartment, tubes sticking out of her body, used for experimentation so they could provide wigs for strangers.
“You will help our cause?” she asked.
“I doubt there’s anything I can do.”
“You’re the owner of Chao Toufa.”
“In name only.”
“Names are important,” she said.
“Why are all of you named after authors?”
“I don’t know. One of the researchers gave us all our names. Maybe she loved literature. Do you like literature?”
“I usually watch the movie versions of famous books,” I admitted.
“Me too. Too bad there won’t be any new movies for a while.”
We entered the corridor with all the animal heads. Above, I saw the fresh body of Dr. Asahi hanging from a rope. Her feet were twitching and her eyes were crossed with blood. Had she been confused by the package because she had not known the group of them had been sent out to fend for themselves? Not that it mattered with her corpse hanging from above. I felt terribly sorry. Then I thought about those scalps underground and my pity dissipated into conflicted aversion.
“There’s something I want you to know about me,” Beauvoir said.
“What?”
“I did things. Things a proper man might not appreciate about a lady. I did it so we could survive,” she said.
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
It pained me to think of it. I knew she was much tougher than I was. Anyone who survived down here had to be. I was in no place to judge her for anything. “You forget what I endured during the cricket matches? You do what you have to do.”
“That’s what you did?”
“That’s what everyone does.”
She nodded. “You were married before.”
“Yeah.”
“Larry told Voltaire you hadn’t made love to a woman since your ex-wife.”
“He told him that?!” I exclaimed, embarrassed and incredulous.
She laughed. “It’s okay.”
I missed Larry, even his big mouth. Did you know about all of this? How had a wig factory become involved in these kind of horrors? What was your response when you found out? I really wish you were here, old buddy.
We entered the elevator and went upstairs.
I remembered Larry talking about making the Chao Toufa documentary, exposing everything. Was this what he had in mind? Was he going to reveal all the atrocities committed here?
Why did you leave everything to me? I still couldn’t understand him. What could I do? I’d seen how quickly Voltaire dispatched of those faceless guards. He had his army here. If I tried to resist and escape, they’d have me hanging from a rope. I was not only out of my league. I was in a world of pain that was beyond my orbital comprehension.
“If you were in our position, what would you do?” she asked.
It was tough to answer because I wasn’t in their position. I told her so.
“You don’t have to tell me the answer that won’t get you in trouble. You can tell me what you’re really thinking,” she said.
That was the problem though, wasn’t it? I had no idea what to think about any of this.
“Have you been to Kauai before?” she asked.
“The island republic?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t.”
“It’s beautiful there,” Beauvoir said. “The whole island seceded from America and they have an artificial barrier around the island that keeps the water fresh. You can swim there and snorkel without having to worry about radiation. The luaus are so much fun and those fire dancers are the most talented I’ve ever seen. There’s chickens everywhere and the waterfalls are amazing. It’s like being transported to another world.”
“I’ve heard. I never had the chance to go though. Too expensive.”
“We have a place there. Kauai has no extradition laws and Larry helped us buy a huge ranch in Poipu.”
“Really?”
“You could come and stay with us.”
As I was about to answer, Voltaire came up.
“We’re moving into the next phase of our operation,” he said.
“The next phase?”
“This is where you need to make your decision.”
“What’s the decision?” I asked.
“When Larry found out the truth, he was devastated. He swore he would correct it. And in a sense, he tried. But we weren’t interested in corrections. I gave him three options. Be part of our campaign, give up the entire company, or die in retribution for his father’s crimes.”
“Which did he choose?”
“He couldn’t. He dallied.”
“Is that why you killed him?” I asked Voltaire.
He did not flinch from my gaze. “Yes,” he replied. “He could not give up the factory, nor could he join us as he couldn’t bear having so much blood on his hands. In the end, he was his father’s son. Are you your brother’s keeper?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“You’re the owner of Chao Toufa. You understand what we were subjected to. Join our cause.”
“How?”
“Do you like my sister, Beauvoir?”
Beauvoir looked at me. “Of course,” I answered. “I owe her my life.”
“Marry her then. Join my family. Run Chao Toufa with her by your side,” Voltaire said.
“What? D-does she agree? I mean, she’s much younger than me. Shouldn’t she marry someone she loves?”
“She’s taken a liking to you,” Voltaire said.
I looked to Beauvoir who said,
“Come stay with us in Kauai. You’re going to love it there.”
“Do you object?” Voltaire asked.
“Of course I don’t object,” I answered.
“Then it’s settled.”
“Wait a second,” I stopped him. “I married once. And I failed. I think too highly of her to subject her to me.”
Voltaire laughed. “If she can deal with any of us, I’m sure she can deal with you. You two will live a life of comfort. Make no mistake as I want to be transparent in this. I will run the day-to-day business of Chao Toufa. But as long as that is amenable to you—”
“I don’t fear death, but you mentioned the middle option of giving up the company,” I said.
“Sell all the assets and give it to a charity of my designation.”
“Just to be clear, that charity will fund your future operations?”
“Exactly.”
Larry was given these exact same options, but he couldn’t choose. Voltaire was right. Larry could not abandon his father’s legacy, but he couldn’t accept it either. Who could in their right mind? But if he were to join Voltaire, he would have been part of more murder which would have been against who he was.
“When you came for Larry, did he fight you?” I asked Voltaire.
“No,” he said. “He accepted it.” I could see it in my head, a million thoughts warring inside him. All this time, I thought I knew Larry, but I hadn’t really known anything. “I warned him earlier.”
“With the bombings?”
Voltaire stared grimly at me. “It’s a cycle. Nobody ever leaves except through death.”
“The cycle can be broken,” I said.
“Nobody breaks it. No one can let go.”
I thought of Linda, our whole marriage poisoned by my past. Then I looked at Beauvoir. Living a life of decadent luxury seemed beyond a fantasy.
“Voltaire!” one of his brothers shouted. “Voltaire! The news!”
“What about it?”
“Turn it on.”
There was a television in the lobby. A woman in a bikini was saying, “—am one of the producers for the show and our network was hijacked by a cyber terrorist group during our broadcast of the GEAs that simulated the murders. We’re here to assure our fans that what you saw was just a fake. All the actors and actresses are still alive, though there were some explosives that went off. Fortunately, no one was harmed and the police were able to capture several of the perpetrators. In fact, we have Mr. James Leyton here with us to assure his fans.”
Bald New World Page 21
