Chapter 4: Chapter 4
The infirmary smelled like industrial cleaner and despair. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, bleaching the color out of everything. A bored-looking medic with a shaved head cleaned the puncture on Bode’s arm with an alcohol swab that stung like a hornet.
“Lymph node’s a little swollen,” the medic muttered, palpating Bode’s armpit with cold, clinical fingers. “You’re sure you didn’t see who did it?”
“I told you,” Bode said, his voice scraped raw from vomiting. “I was on my bunk. Felt a sharp prick. Then everything got fuzzy.” He leaned into the story, willing himself to believe it. The details Manny had given him felt like borrowed clothes, ill-fitting but necessary.
The medic grunted, making a note on a clipboard. “Dirty needle’s a hell of a thing. Hep C. HIV. You’ll need a blood panel. And the standard tox screen.” He fixed Bode with a flat stare. “Which you know is coming anyway.”
The door to the small medical room opened, and Gibbs stepped in, followed by Vince.
Bode’s stomach, already hollowed out, turned to ice. His father’s presence here, in this sterile box, was worse than any interrogation. Vince filled the space, his turnout coat still dusty from a call, his face a mask of controlled fury. He looked at the medic, then at Gibbs, avoiding Bode’s eyes entirely.
“Captain,” Gibbs said, a note of deference in his voice. “Didn’t expect you.”
“Deputy,” Vince nodded, his voice tight. “Camp commander called the station. Said there was an incident involving one of my crew. Wanted to know if he was still fit for duty.” Finally, his gaze landed on Bode. It wasn’t concern Bode saw there; it was a cold, professional assessment. Like he was evaluating a cracked helmet. “What happened?”
Gibbs cleared his throat. “Inmate alleges an assault with a needle. Possible unauthorized substance administration.”
Vince’s eyes didn’t waver from Bode. “Alleges.”
The word hung in the air. Bode felt the fragile scaffolding of his lie begin to tremble.
“He’s got the mark,” Gibbs said, pointing with his pen.
Vince moved closer. He took Bode’s arm, his grip firm but not rough, turning it to see the small, red dot. His fingers were calloused, warm. It was the first time his father had touched him in years. Bode fought a bizarre, shameful urge to lean into it.
“You didn’t see anyone?” Vince asked, his eyes searching Bode’s face.
“No, sir.”
“Hear anything? A struggle?”
“It was fast.”
Vince let go of his arm as if it had burned him. He turned to Gibbs. “Has he been tested?”
“Medic’s drawing blood now for the panel. Mandatory UA is tomorrow at 0600.”
“I want him tested tonight,” Vince said, the words leaving no room for argument. “Right now. If he’s been compromised, I need to know before he steps foot in my firehouse again.”
The medic glanced at Gibbs, who shrugged. “Protocol says tomorrow, Captain, but… we can do a cup test now. Results are preliminary.”
“Do it.”
The next few minutes passed in a blur of humiliation. Bode was made to provide a urine sample in a sterile cup under the watchful eye of the medic. The process was degrading, a stark reminder of the zero-trust ecosystem he lived in. He handed over the warm cup, his face burning.
The medic took it to a small counter, produced a wrapped test strip, and dipped it. The three of them stood in silence, watching the little windows on the strip. Bode’s heart hammered against his ribs. He thought of the cold flood entering his vein, Carver’s promise, the syrupy fog. It had to be out of his system. It had to be.
The medic watched the clock on the wall. One minute. Two. He picked up the strip, squinted at it under the bright light.
He showed it to Gibbs first. Gibbs’s face revealed nothing. Then the medic turned it toward Vince.
Vince leaned in, his brow furrowed. He stared at the strip for a long five seconds. Then, he straightened up, his shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch Bode wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t spent a lifetime studying the man’s rigid posture. It was the barest hint of relief.
“Negative,” the medic announced. “For amphetamines, opiates, cocaine, THC.”
The air rushed out of Bode’s lungs. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.
“It was a low dose, probably,” the medic continued, addressing Vince. “Or something synthetic a standard panel doesn’t catch. But based on this, he’s clean.”
Vince gave a single, sharp nod. His eyes met Bode’s again. The cold assessment was still there, but now it was mixed with something else—confusion, maybe. A flicker of the unasked question: Was he telling the truth?
“Lockdown until further notice,” Vince stated, his command voice returning. “No duty. No visitors. You eat in your bunk. You’re a liability until we know what, if anything, was in your system and who put it there.” He turned to leave, then paused at the door. He didn’t look back. “You get a pass this time, Bode. Don’t make me regret it.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
Gibbs let out a long sigh. “You heard the captain. Bunkhouse. Now. I’ll have someone bring you a tray.” He shook his head. “A damn needle. This camp is going to the dogs.”
Bode walked back to Bunkhouse Three under escort, the evening sky a deep purple bruise. The other inmates glanced at him as he passed, their eyes calculating. The story would be all over camp by now. He was either a victim or a problem. Maybe both.
Manny was sitting on his own bunk, sharpening a spoon handle against the concrete floor with slow, rhythmic strokes. He didn’t look up as Bode entered and the guard locked the door behind him. The metallic shhh-shhh of the spoon on concrete was the only sound.
Bode sank onto his cot. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a deep, trembling emptiness. “Test was negative.”
Manny stopped sharpening. He held the spoon up, examined its new, crude point. “Good.”
“Vince was there.”
That made Manny look over. “And?”
“He believed it. I think.”
Manny grunted, going back to his work. “He wanted to.”
Silence stretched between them, filled with the things they couldn’t say. Bode lay back, staring at the familiar knot in the wood. The chemical ghost of the high was gone, but the craving it had awakened was very real. It sat in his chest, a hollow, yawning thing. He could still feel the phantom warmth of the rush, the silencing of all noise. He understood Carver’s move now with chilling clarity. It wasn’t just about the violation. It was about reopening the wound. Reminding him what he missed. Turning his own body against him.
“He’ll try again,” Bode said to the ceiling.
“Yep.”
“I can’t stay locked in this bunkhouse forever.”
“Nope.”
Bode turned his head. “Why’d you help me?”
Manny stopped his sharpening again. He wiped the metal on his pant leg, his movements slow and deliberate. “Told you. My brother.”
“That’s not it.”
For a long moment, Manny was silent. Then, he set the spoon down carefully on his blanket. “Back in Florence, I was in the hole for three months. Solitary. You lose time in there. You talk to the bugs. One day, a new CO slid my food tray. There was a book in it. ‘East of Eden.’ No note. Just the book.” He looked directly at Bode. “Thing saved my damn life. Gave my mind something to chew on besides the walls.”
Bode felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening air. He slowly reached under his cot, his fingers finding the worn spine. He pulled it out.
Manny’s gaze softened, just for a second. “Someone did that for me. A small thing. A choice.” He nodded at the book in Bode’s hands. “Maybe you’re my small thing.”
Before Bode could respond, the exterior light of the bunkhouse sliced through the high window, painting bars of shadow across the floor. A vehicle had pulled up outside. Doors slammed. Voices, one of them Vince’s, low and urgent.
Bode and Manny exchanged a glance. Manny stood, moving silently to the window, peering out through the grime.
“It’s your old man,” Manny murmured. “And the deputy. They’re… they’re talking to Carver.”
Bode was on his feet in an instant, joining Manny at the window. Outside, under a harsh security light, Vince stood toe-to-toe with Carver. Gibbs was a step behind, his hand resting on his baton.
They were too far to hear the words, but the postures were clear. Vince was leaning forward, his finger jabbing the air toward Carver’s chest. Carver stood with his hands raised, palms out, the picture of innocent confusion, but his smile was a thin, cold slash in the electric light.
Vince turned, said something sharp to Gibbs, and then strode toward his truck. He didn’t look back at the bunkhouse. He just got in and drove away, his tires spitting gravel.
Gibbs remained, talking to Carver for another minute. Carver shrugged, shook his head, then turned and walked casually back toward Bunkhouse Two. As he passed under the light, he glanced directly at their window. He couldn’t possibly see them in the dark, but he raised his hand. Again, that slow, deliberate scratch at the side of his nose. Then he disappeared into the shadows.
Gibbs stared after him for a long moment, then rubbed his face with his hands, a gesture of pure frustration. He trudged back to his patrol car.
Manny stepped back from the window. “Your dad’s playing with fire.”
Bode’s mind raced. Vince had confronted Carver. Directly. Why? To warn him off? To assert authority? It was a stupid, dangerous move. Carver didn’t respect authority; he saw it as a system to exploit. Now Bode wasn’t just Carver’s problem; he was Vince Donovan’s son, a personal challenge.
The lock on the bunkhouse door clanked. The door opened, and a trustee shoved two dinner trays inside before slamming it shut again.
Neither man moved toward the food. The air in the bunkhouse felt charged, brittle.
“He made it worse,” Bode said, his voice hollow.
Manny picked up his sharpened spoon. He tested the point against his thumb. “He made it his.”
Later, in the deep quiet of lights-out, Bode lay awake. The craving had settled into a dull ache. He listened to the sounds of the camp—the distant murmur of a radio, the rustle of someone turning in their bunk, the low whistle of the wind through the pines.
He thought of Vince standing up to Carver under that blinding light. It wasn’t protection. It was a territorial claim. An announcement. This is mine to handle.
He thought of his mother’s tear-streaked face in the station bathroom. Of Jake’s broken voice on the phone. Of Riley laughing in a stolen hoodie.
He thought of timshel. Thou mayest.
The choices felt like weights, not possibilities. Stay and fight a war he couldn’t win on ground that wasn’t his. Run and become a ghost again, to everyone, including himself.
A new sound cut through the night, so faint he almost missed it. A soft, grating scrape against the outside wall of the bunkhouse, near the window.
Then, a whisper, thin and papery, slipped through the cracked glass.
“Golden boy…”
Bode froze, his blood turning to slush in his veins.
“…can’t hide forever.”
The scrape came again, like metal on wood. A blade? A piece of glass?
Bode didn’t breathe. He stared at the dark rectangle of the window, waiting for a face to appear, for a hand to reach in.
Nothing.
Only the whisper, floating on the cold air. “See you at the fire.”
Then, silence.
Bode lay perfectly still for an hour, maybe more, until the first gray light of dawn began to seep into the room. The words echoed in the stillness, a promise threaded with smoke. See you at the fire.
It wasn’t a threat of a setting. It was a prediction.
It was a prediction that turned the following days into a cage of gritted teeth and crawling skin. The lockdown wasn’t confinement; it was an exposed nerve, a raw stretch of time where the only thing to do was feel the absence. The chemical ghost Carver had planted in him became a living, shrieking thing.
Bode didn’t care about the walls. The real prison was the chasm ripped open inside him. It screamed, a constant, low-frequency hum that built into jagged, unbearable peaks. It was for the specific silky warmth that used to flood his veins, the exact chemical cocktail that had been his old escape hatch. How Carver had known, how he’d sourced it, was a dark, terrifying magic. This was the backup plan: to hollow Bode out from the inside, to make him his own worst enemy.
He spent hours curled on his side, fists clenched, sweating through his sheets. His muscles twitched with a phantom ache. The craving was a physical suction, pulling at his sternum.
“It’s just a feeling, kid,” Manny’s voice would cut through the fog, a low, steady anchor from the next bunk. “It’s a lie your blood is telling you. It passes. It always passes.”
Sometimes Bode could nod, grinding his molars until his jaw pulsed. Other times, in the dead of night, it would crest into a frantic, desperate pain. Tears of sheer want would leak from his clenched eyes, hot and shameful. “Just one,” he’d beg into the pillow, the words slurred and childish. “Just to make it stop. I can’t—I can’t think.”
Manny would be there, not touching him, just a solid presence in the dark. “You can. You are. This is you thinking. This is you fighting. That other shit? That’s not thinking. That’s switching off.” His voice was a gravelly road map out of the panic. “Breathe. Name five things you can smell.”
It was pathetic. It was the only thing that worked. “Dust. Pine from the window. My own sweat. The bleach on the floor. Your fucking feet.”
A low chuckle. “See? You’re still here.”
When Gibbs finally came to lift the restrictions three days later, Bode felt thinner, scraped raw. The world outside the bunkhouse door was too bright, too loud. He moved like a man made of glass. Manny shadowed him everywhere, from the mess hall line to the transport bus. His presence wasn’t just a guard against Carver; it was a tether, a leash for the part of Bode that wanted to bolt into the woods and find a way, any way, to quiet the screaming inside.
Walking back into Station 32 felt like stepping onto a stage. The crew’s eyes were heavy on him—a mix of curiosity, pity, and outright distrust. He was the infected limb, the problem child. Jake was at the sink, scrubbing his hands with a ferocity that spoke of nerves. He looked up, his face tightening when he saw Bode, but said nothing.
The morning was brutal, punishing labor. He was put on outer gear cleaning, hauling heavy, reeking turnouts to a wash bay and blasting them with a high-pressure hose. The physical drain was a welcome torture. It muffled the craving under a layer of pure muscle burn. Manny worked beside him, handling the dirty hoses, his eyes scanning the bay every few minutes.
It was after lunch, hauling a heavy coil of dry supply line, that the wave hit. It wasn’t a thought; it was a sudden, visceral hunger, a tidal pull so strong it shortened his breath. The glossy red of the hose looked like the pull-tab of a can, the diesel smell of the engine bay turned metallic and promising. His palms slicked with sweat. He could feel the phantom rush in his temples, a sweet, false promise of peace.
His eyes darted toward the open bay door, the freedom of the street beyond.Just walk. Disappear. Find it. His muscles coiled.
A calloused hand closed around his upper arm, not hard, but absolute. Manny leaned in, pretending to adjust the hose on his shoulder. “Breathe, brother,” he muttered, his voice a private current under the station’s noise. “Look at the floor. Count the cracks from here to the engine. Right now.”
Bode’s chest heaved. He focused on the stained concrete, tracing a jagged line with his eyes.One. Two.Three.
“What’s his problem?” a voice said, too loud, too close.
Jake stood there, hands on his hips, his brow furrowed. He was looking at Manny’s grip on Bode’s arm, at the sweat on Bode’s face, at the sheer, animal panic he must have seen in his eyes.
Manny didn’t let go. “We’re working. You need something?”
“I need to talk to him,” Jake said, his gaze fixed on Bode. “Alone.”
“Not a good time,” Manny said, his tone flat.
“It’s never a good time!” Jake’s voice cracked, drawing glances from across the bay. He took a step closer, his earnestness like a spotlight. “Bode, please. Five minutes. We have to—”
The craving twisted, melding with the stress, morphing into a sudden, white-hot rage. It was too much. The need, the scrutiny, Jake’s damn wounded eyes, the memory of the riverbank his voice always brought back.
“We have to nothing!” Bode snarled, wrenching his arm from Manny’s grasp. He took a sharp step toward Jake, who flinched back. “What’s your plan, Jake?Huh? You wanna have a little heart-to-heart? Compare grief notes? You think that fixes this?” He gestured wildly at himself, at the uniform, at the space between them. The words poured out, hot and poisonous. “You get to stand there in your clean clothes with your clean record and feel bad. I get to smell piss and diesel and want to crawl out of my own skin because some psychopath reminded me how much I liked it! So take your ‘we have to talk’ and get the hell away from me!”
The bay had gone quiet. Everyone was pretending not to stare. Jake’s face was pale, his mouth slightly open. The raw need in Bode’s voice, the specific, ugly truth of it, had stripped any pretense away.
Manny moved then, inserting his body between them. He gave Jake a look that promised violence if he took another step. “Walk away, firefighter. Now.”
Jake looked from Manny to Bode, his eyes wide with a new, horrifying understanding. He didn’t speak. He just turned and walked stiffly toward the locker room.
Bode’s rage evaporated as fast as it came, leaving behind a hollow, shaking void. He was back to square one, raw and trembling. Manny turned him gently but firmly back toward the hose. “Keep moving,” he said, his voice low. “One crack at a time.”
Before Bode could lift the hose, the station’s alarm blared to life, a wall of sound that wiped every other thought clean.Lights strobed. The intercom crackled. “Engine 32, Ladder 12, Battalion 5. Structure fire reported at 1887 Juniper Lane. Reported occupant trapped. Time out 14:23.”
For a second, Bode just stood there, the sound vibrating in his teeth. Juniper Lane. That was in town. Older houses, close together.
Then, chaos snapped into focused motion. Boots pounded the concrete. Men slid down the pole. The engine roared to life. Captain Donovan’s voice, a command blade, cut through it all. “Move! Lopez, Donovan—you’re on the rig. Now!”
He was included. He was going. The fire was real.
Manny shoved him toward the passenger side of the engine. “Stay behind me. Do what you’re told. Nothing else.” His eyes were intense. “You hear me? Nothing else.”
Bode scrambled into the jump seat, fumbling with his seat harness. Across from him, Jake avoided his eyes, pulling on his helmet. The engine bay door rattled up, revealing the blinding afternoon street. Vince climbed into the officer’s seat up front and slammed his door.
As the engine lurched forward, sirens screaming, Bode caught sight of Carver through the window. He was outside the fence across the street, leaning against a work truck, doing road crew detail.
He wasn’t smiling. He was just watching.
And he gave that slow, familiar, one-fingered scratch at his nose. See you at the fire.