Spilling Guts

Part 11 - Talks over Lunch

Cartons of pad thai and spicy red curry dotted the small coffee table in Cetz's office. The scent could stain walls and Rachel breathed it in with a smile.

"Expanding your palate?" she asked, breaking apart her chopsticks.

Cetz dug into golden fried noodles, slurping and huffing to cool a hot mouthful. "No, our usual place is closed for renovations."

Rachel nodded, taking a few bites before getting to business. Because it was always business with lunch.

"Update on Megan and Teegan?"

"They're running down a loose thread with one of the pictures they found in Retten's collection," said Cetz. "But after tomorrow I'm having them move on. They've spent over two months working on leads from those photos; I'm beginning to wonder if it was a waste of time."

"We know more about Retten's obsession and reach." Rachel smooshed the chunky red chicken curry into the rice, mixing it until it was a harsh pink. "If that's all we learned then it's something."

Cetz considered the tiny wax bag of lemon slices that came with the meal. "How's Louis?"

"His arm? Getting there. Another week and I'd say he's physically fit to go back into the field. Mentally? No idea."

"That is why we have Balcuwitz." Cetz folded the innards of a lemon slice around his fork before twining noodles around it. His face lit up at the taste. "Any progress on Retten's notes?"

Rachel nodded around her mouthful of rice, stealing a slice of lemon. Over the last couple weeks, since she had been without Retten's monster of a machine, she had dug through his haphazard notes from the Freewill compound. The insight into Retten's process was invaluable to understanding how the mad scientist had managed to make Louis shrink down to less than three inches.

But the notes were incomplete and the chances of reversing Louis' condition near nonexistent. For now. Rachel had hope that science and logic would reveal what was missing. That or an interrogation of Retten involving a rusty egg beater.

"From what I gathered, Retten dosed his previous subjects, willing and not, with some sort of serum to chemically alter and mutate parts of their DNA." Rachel put her carton down and picked up the notepad next to her on the couch. "The doses had to be regular and over a long period of time, anywhere between four to six months. There are no notes on its chemical design, amount, or how it was administered. It could have been injected, inhaled, radiated, or ingested."

"Did the machine do anything to subjects if they hadn't been dosed with the serum?"

"There are no obvious records of such, but I'm guessing no."

"So, somehow Retten was able to get this serum into Louis' system for at least four months." Cetz thought back to the video tour of the Freewill compound Agents Megan and Teegan had showed him. And rows of bodies in a makeshift morgue with their torsos stitched up. Despite the beads of sweat on his brow due to the spicy lunch, he felt a chill. "And all the previous subjects dosed with the serum died?"

"No, just the unlucky ones." Rachel eyed the next page of notes parsed from Retten's diary; the page described in detail how viscera had ripped as a tiny person inside a host had grown back to full size, and how other similarly shrunken people seemed to simply die and melt away into the host flesh. Other notes had been taken from Doctor Devi during autopsies. It was disconcerting to see his familiar scrawl describe such violent things.

The red curry wasn't appetizing anymore.

"Some subjects that survived being inside another person were then used as hosts. When they survived being hosts Retten made sure they were put in a better position in Freewill while working mostly for him."