Chapter Twenty-Three – Fighting on All Fronts
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fighting on All Fronts
W e bury ourselves in arrest logs, overdose charts, and flagged intel for the rest of the afternoon.
At five, we’re back in our truck, but before heading home, we stop to get supplies to start the Special Ops diet.
It’s going to be a big change: protein powder, piles of fruits and vegetables, some of which I’d never even heard of.
It is a lot. But Jay looks at her like she’s being unreasonable. “Of course it can.”
She laughs. “So, what do you think, start the new diet tonight, or do we throw ourselves a proper Last Supper with grease and guilt?”
I was determined to start it tonight, and I’m sure Jay and Shane were too, but when Jo mentioned craving pizza, we change plans.
We’re eating a delicious five-cheese pizza, Jay almost reverent like he’s already mourning the loss of it, when Jo brings up the hospital again. “So… are we going to talk about it or not?” Her voice is light, but I can see the nerves on her face.
The mood shifts. Everyone goes quiet.
I chew slowly, trying to buy time. Unfortunately, my brothers have the same idea. Even Jay slows down, so I still end up finishing first.
I decide it’s better to be straight and get it over with. “You know people didn’t change in these last weeks, right? You’ll be dealing with the same shit.”
“I know they didn’t change,” she answers quickly. “But I did. A month ago, I had no idea who I was, or who I could be. But after meeting my family, seeing my grandma, my aunt, my cousin… I have a reference now. I feel different.”
Jay looks at her, his expression dead serious. “What if you can’t handle it? Are you going to talk to us and face it together, or are you going to shut us out again?”
Jo sighs and looks down at her food. “I know you don’t trust me right now,” she says softly. “And that’s okay; only time will fix that. But I won’t leave you again, Jay. Let me prove it to you.”
We all go quiet again. Then Shane finally speaks. “I’ll hold you to that.”
I’m still scared; we all are. But Jo’s right: only time can fix this. There’s nothing we can do but wait and see .
Jay must be thinking the same thing, because he changes the subject. “Babe, huh?”
Jo glances between us, her expression a little shy. “I’m experimenting. You don’t like nicknames?”
She’s even blushing a bit. It’s adorable. We all chuckle.
Shane leans toward her and kisses her temple. “I love it.”
The next morning we pull up to the garrison’s gate a few minutes before six.
From a distance, the gate looks exactly like it did yesterday, but now that we’ve read the instructions in our T1P folders, we know where to look. Just left of the steel hinge column, tucked behind a narrow panel flush with the surface, there’s a tiny access slot.
Jay rolls down the window, slides his badge into the slot, and waits. A second later, a green light flickers deep behind the panel and the gate groans open.
This time, when we arrive at the garrison, only the Solomon pack is there.
According to our schedule, mornings are for physical training, and sensory work comes in the afternoon.
David Solomon gives us a tour of the gym and walks us through the exercises, but we already know most of it. We had done our homework and studied every set on the detailed protocol in our files.
The training is brutal, but oddly satisfying.
After a lifetime of restraint, I finally get to let go.
No need to hold back, just full strength, all-out effort.
It surprises even me how much weight I can lift.
On the incline treadmill during the endurance push, I surrender completely. No pacing, just burn it all.
By the end of the morning, we’re soaked in sweat, lungs burning, but smiling like idiots. It feels really fucking good.
After lunch, sensory training is the opposite, though. The setup reminds me too much of the Strays Program: same sterile lighting, same quiet tension. But there’s no pain involved this time, and for that, I’m genuinely grateful.
The drills are all laid out in the T1P folder, but reading it doesn’t prepare you for how clinical it feels.
The first is called buried scent recovery. Josh meets us at the entrance of the chamber with a steel tray holding three sealed scent capsules: clear plastic tubes, each containing a swab of fabric.
“These are trace samples pulled from clean environments. You’ll train your ability to isolate them under interference,” he says.
We each take a tube and uncap it. The scent inside is faint but distinct. Mine has a human skin smell mingled with sweat and a hint of something like deodorant.
We enter the padded chamber. Its soft flooring is filled with dozens of buried scent pouches: engine oil, sterile cloth, different human traces meant to throw us off. Somewhere in the mix there’s a match for each of our targets.
It takes more than an hour for me to find mine. Shane’s a little faster, and Jay’s the last one to finish. But Josh says it’s solid work for a first try.
Next is the Acoustic Threat Detection Drill. We go in one at a time.
The room is circular, walled in with acoustic paneling and matte black mesh. I can’t see the speakers, but I know they’re everywhere: inside the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Before the sound begins, the lights cut out, and the room goes pitch black.
The sound doesn’t just play; it moves. It’s everywhere. A disorienting cacophony: street noise, wind, footsteps, background chatter, at least three kinds of music layered across one another. Some sounds are close; others are distant.
And in the middle of it, barely audible, I catch my first target: metal sliding. It’s a pistol being cocked.
“Left side. Close,” I call out.
A ping confirms I got it right.
Later, I catch another: a muffled cry.
“Help. Front. Far end.”
I call out ten different noises before the lights come back on, signaling that the drill is complete.
The last one is a micro-expression drill.
It’s simple. We sit in front of a black screen, and a face flickers onto it, so fast it barely lasts a full second, then disappears again.
The goal is to log the emotion displayed, whether it was genuine or masked.
But the flashes are so quick, I miss the first few entirely.
I wait for them to replay and try again, but is still too fast for us. Eventually, we start picking them out. The first emotion we get takes eighteen tries. After that, we’re more focused, but it’s still a stretch. We’re nowhere near the goal: instant recognition.
By the time we finish sensory training, I feel like I’ve been peeled open and rewired. And way more exhausted than I was after the physical session.
It’s after five when we finally head home.
The Solomons weren’t exaggerating when they said the training would hit hard.
For the first time, I’m out cold before Jo even finishes her shower.
The next morning, I find out Shane was the only one still awake when she climbed into the nest: while Jay and I wake up disoriented and in our shorts; he wakes up naked, smelling like sex and in a good mood.
The rest of the week doesn’t get any easier. Between training at the garrison, digging through file after file on the new drug at the DEA office, and trying to hit our daily intake targets for food and water, it feels like every minute of the day is spoken for.
The good part is that I can already see progress.
Thursday is only our second full day of training, and I’m lifting more weight on every piece of equipment. I run faster too. During our first session, I managed nine miles in an hour. The second time, I nearly hit ten.
There’s a slight improvement in sensory training, and we manage to finish the full sequence a little before five this time.
Friday afternoon, we wrap up our review of every report we could get our hands on about the new drug, not just from the Bridgeport office, but from the closest DEA hubs as well: New York and New Jersey.
Still no name for the drug, no form and no confirmed samples.
What we saw on those reports is that overdose deaths have been rising steadily across southern Connecticut for the past six months, but in the last eight weeks, the rate has more than tripled.
Two hundred and fifty-two confirmed deaths, all within a 40-mile radius: Bridgeport, Great Sky, Stamford, Norwalk.
Victims range from chronic users to first-timers.
Some young. One just fourteen. A few looked like suicides, but most didn’t.
The one thing they all have in common is that the tox screens come back clean. No fentanyl, no heroin. Just dead bodies with central nervous system depression, pulmonary arrest and no explanation. Whatever this drug is, it’s burning through people fast and leaving no trail behind.
Toxicology isn't the only dead end. Since there's no recovered product, no one knows even the form, whether it’s a powder, a pill or whatever, and every dealer swept so far has come up clean.
At home, it’s been a week of adjustments. Jo’s back at the hospital, and we’re working crazy hours, somehow even crazier than her schedule as a medical resident. On top of that, our diets are nothing like hers now, which makes cooking a whole new challenge.
Before, we used to make dinner together. Now, by the time we get home, Jo’s already halfway through prepping separate meals: one normal dinner for her, and then a second round that looks like it’s meant to feed a platoon.
We jump in to help, but it’s a lot. We’re eating more than ever, which means more planning, more groceries, more prepping the next day’s meals before we even sit down to eat the current one. Every night turns into a two-hour rotation of chopping, cooking, portioning and packing.