Semblance

by Chris E. Saros

  Adam broke through the circle, gun limp at his side, his other hand held up, telling the men to stand down. They only half complied, weapons still at the ready.

  Drake’s shallow breaths became even shallower as Adam cautiously approached. He was banged up from the car crash earlier, but Drake was relieved to see him, to know that he was okay.

  Drake lowered his gun as Adam came forward. Keeping the weapon at his side, he achingly got his feet under him. The men anticipating action brought their guns up, following his sluggish movements.

  Swallowing a lump in his throat, Drake drank in the magnificent view of Adam, all power and glory, commanding the troops around him, his golden hair and light eyes a welcome contrast to all the violence and the men in black.

  Adam stopped about five feet from Drake, one hand held up like he was trying to calm a spooked animal. His gaze wandered quickly over Drake’s body, probably assessing all his wounds, sizing up his physical and mental state as he did so. Drake wondered what he saw when his eyes widened in alarm—most likely the currents of blood flowing out of him.

  “Hi,” Drake said, uncaring about the armed and alarmed men enveloping him.

  Adam’s lips tried to turn up into a smile but failed. “Hi,” he said instead, his voice breathy, but whether from fear or relief Drake couldn’t tell.

  “I’m tired,” Drake said with a shrug. The left side of his body protested loudly, but he ignored it.

  Adam nodded, creeping a little closer, arms still upraised. “I know. I know you are, Drake.” He moved his hand in a placating gesture, his gun still not pointed at him. “Put the gun down and you can get some rest.”

  A smile sneaked its way onto Drake’s lips. It was the second time he had gotten to see Adam in full cop mode, and damn, he was cute. He wished he had gotten to see him in action more often. Maybe in a different life, they could have had time together.

  “You’re a good cop, Adam. You know when the fight is over.”

  A light dimmed in Adam’s eyes as Drake’s words sunk in. There was a moment where Drake was sure Adam was going rush him, fling his body over his, cover him, and will them away to a faraway land, but instead he swallowed, pursed his lips, and followed his procedures and his training.

  “Put down the gun, Drake. The fight is over. We won.”

  Drake’s wan smile faded even more. They hadn’t won, not really. Maybe they could claim victory to a battle, but the war was far from over. This was a crusade that would only end once the head of the serpent was eradicated, and that couldn’t happen until Boredega was good and dead. No, all they had succeeded in was poking the beast. Boredega had a long reach. No prison or protection program would keep him from finding Drake.

  Drake gripped the gun, his fingers tightening. The men around him grew anxious and twitchy. Adam’s palms shot up, keeping the men from reacting, trying to keep Drake from making a move.

  “Okay, okay, look, I’m putting up my weapon.” Adam slid the gun into his holster and held up both empty hands. “Stop this, Drake. It’s over.”

  “Don’t put your gun away, Adam. You’re going to need it.”

  Adam’s eyes closed briefly, his lips twisted in helpless grief. The uniforms, already twitchy, edged closer, some already pointing their weapons at him after his softly spoken threat. Adam’s gaze returned to Drake’s face, and that light that had gone from his eyes now glowed bright with determination.

  “We can make this work!” His voice was firm. “There has to be a way.”

  Drake shook his head, dropping his gaze. He couldn’t stand to see the hope alive and desperate on Adam’s face. No matter what happened from this point on, Drake was a dead man. At least this way it was on his terms.

  “I’m so tired, Adam.”

  “I don’t care!” Anger now. “You don’t get to take the easy way out of this!”

  Drake smirked. He thought this was easy? “I’m sorry.”

  Furious, Adam took a step forward, his hands outstretched like he was going to grab Drake. But as the man moved, Drake raised his arm with the gun. Even though it was raised, he couldn’t bring himself to point it at Adam, but it was up nevertheless.

  Within seconds, the uniforms were in combat mode, weapons up and shouting for Drake to put his gun down. The only thing that stopped Drake from getting pumped full of lead was Adam’s crisp tone demanding that they hold fire.

  “Don’t come any closer.” Drake said it softly. He wanted nothing more than to be in Adam’s arms, far away from all of this but… that was all. But.

  Adam stopped his edging forward, but his once-determined face was pinched. “Please, Drake.” Drake had to close his eyes against the plea, shaking off the desperation.

  Not wanting his last conversation with Adam to be one filled with yelling and hate, Drake let his gun drop back to his side.

  “He knows about you,” Drake said, meeting Adam’s gaze and holding it. “Natasha said they knew who you were the moment you walked into the club. She knew your real name.”

  “Okay.” Adam nodded his understanding.

  “Don’t you get it? There is no surprising them. There is no getting in to take them out from the inside. They know everything. They are everywhere.”

  “They didn’t know about you.”

  Drake huffed, “Yeah, well, look where that got me.”

  “Please,” Adam whimpered. “Please, don’t do this.”

  “Adam,” Drake whispered. He wasn’t sure if it was loud enough for Adam to hear, but he said it anyway. “I killed people today.”

  Pain filled eyes met his. Adam nodded swallowing hard. “I know.”

  “I’ve never done that before.”

  “I know.”

  Drake’s eyes closed as a wave of exhaustion trembled through him. He tried to breathe through it. He forced his eyes open. “I passed the point of no return. Nothing can save me now.”

  Shaking his head vehemently, Adam took another hesitant step forward. “No.” He had his hands out again, both reaching for Drake while also showing his surrender. “That’s not true. I can. Let me help you.”

  Piercing hope tore through Drake at Adam’s words, but it wasn’t enough to quell the incapacitating defeat. He wished he could let Adam help. He wished they’d had more time together. He wished that he’d had the courage and trust to listen to Scotty when he’d begged him to go to the police the first time. But of course, he didn’t, they couldn’t, and he wouldn’t.

  There was no place left to run. He’d hit the end of the road. Taking one last deep breath of fresh air, Drake let the cool oxygen fill his lungs. He wished Adam’s scent would travel on the breeze. What he wouldn’t give for just another breath of musky cologne.

  “There is no help for me.”

  There was the briefest of pauses before suddenly, everything happened at once. Adam cringed at the words, shouting a desperate plea, and with desolate abandon, reached for Drake. Drake’s arm, almost too heavy to lift another time, struggled up, taking aim. And the uniforms surrounding them no longer took heed of Adam’s commands. Their weapons up and ready, and as Drake’s weapon came to a stop, not quite pointing at Adam, the air filled with a deafening roar.

  None of it took longer than a few seconds, but to Drake it felt as if time had stopped. The gunshots and the yelling melted into one long continuous rumble. After what felt like eternity, Drake realized he was flat on his back staring at the dark sky.

  He wanted to laugh at his luck. He had been shot again, he didn’t have a clue how many times, and he was still breathing. He didn’t know how many shots a man could take before he called it quits. And now his body was so filled with pain or completely void of pain, because all he was aware of was a fuzzy white feeling swimming around his vision. That and cold.

  His breath hitched and liquid spit from his lips. He tried to take a moment to think of how water had gotten into his mouth when the suddenly overwhelming coppery flavor registered. Blood, yes, that made sense.

  Rough ha
nds grabbed Drake, turning him to the side. The white fuzz flared to life in deep red, searing his body in agony. The pooled blood spilled from his lips in a dark puddle.

  “You are such an asshole.” The anguished words were whispered into his ear before Adam raised his voice to shout for an ambulance.

  Using the last of his strength, Drake shifted so he could make out the hunched form above him. His body started a fine tremble and he gasped, clutching at Adam’s arms, trying to steady himself.

  “Can’t… help… it,” Drake managed through clattering teeth. He had never felt so cold in his life.

  Adam made a sound between a gasp and a sob. “No, you never could.”

  “Back… pocket,” Drake tried to speak, but his words were hardly louder than a breath. “Keep it safe?”

  His body was shifted slightly again while the contents of his back pocket were removed. The sound of folded paper being flattened filled his ears, and he could breathe a little easier knowing that his family was in safe hands.

  A new wetness dripped onto Drake’s cheeks, and he marveled at their warmth. Adam, the picture delicately held between two fingers, dropped his head onto Drake’s chest. “Don’t do this. Please, please, don’t leave me.”

  “Sorry,” Drake breathed. He tried to lift a hand to sweep his fingers through Adam’s light hair one last time, but the act was too much.

  “I love you,” Adam sobbed, sitting back so he could peer down at Drake. “I need you to know that. I never lied about that. You hear me?” His voice cracked. “I love you.” Adam’s tears flowed fast and steady, dripping off his cheeks, the flashing lights in the background catching a tear here and there and brightening it with a spectral show of illuminations, creating a halo around Adam and encasing him in an ethereal glow. Drake thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  He wanted to put a hand to those sparkling morsels, but his body just didn’t have anything left. Not even the gratification of touching Adam one last time could force his limbs into motion. Instead, he sighed out a shallow breath, his last confession, and hoped that it reached Adam’s ears.

  “Love….” His word tapered off with his fading breath.

  Adam’s lip trembled slightly, before he willed a soothing look onto his face, his lips twisting into a semblance of a smile. Putting a hand to Drake’s cheek, he caressed his fingers along Drake’s cold skin, and to Drake’s amazement, he could feel the warmth of Adam. Relaxing into that touch with words of love surrounding him, he let the threatening darkness envelop him. His senses still mostly aware, filled with Adam, he sank slowly deeper and deeper into the abyss.

  Epilogue

  THE HOT stove crackled and popped with the overheating fat as Adam flipped the oversized burgers. Sweat beaded on his brow as he worked, moving the finished burgers to waiting buns while the others continued to cook. His body ached from being on his feet for the last eight hours, rarely moving from his place in the bustling kitchen.

  Finishing the plates, adding the small flourish that helped him get through the day, a sprig of parsley here, a decorative splash of ketchup there, he placed the plates on their warming tray for the servers to deliver.

  Getting a moment of reprieve, he stepped back from the hot stove feeling wet sweat sitting on his skin. Running a hand across his forehead, he wiped away the stagnant liquid. He was washing his hands in the sink when Debbie, his favorite manager in the small downtown diner, perched her elbow on the ledge of the warming rack.

  “Josh, honey, you’ve been here longer than your shift. You should take off.” Her Southern twang was complete with the smacking of her gum.

  Adam smiled at her as he washed his hands. “Yeah, I just have a couple more things to prep, and then I’m out of here.”

  Debbie raised a mom eyebrow at him, then smiled. “As long as you’re back there, if you could whip up some of those banana pancakes for Mrs. Dorty. She says she can’t eat them unless you make them.”

  Adam smiled. He liked Mrs. Dorty, the old woman who lived down the street from the diner. Her old age made her a force to be reckoned with, always willing to speak her mind. As soon as he had arrived in town, he had taken a liking to her and her to him after he had made her a plate of homemade banana nut pancakes.

  “Sure thing.”

  The quiet town that he now was beginning to think of as home was slowly growing on him. It was definitely a change from his old life, but its slow pace and hardly ever changing atmosphere made it the perfect place for him to hole up. The people, all natives of the small town, were leery of the newcomer at first, but after a while, especially after he took the job as a cook in the local diner, they had started to accept him as one of their own.

  Because their town was small and because there wasn’t any major traffic coming or going, it was the perfect place for Adam to hole up while he waited for the Boredega cartel to be officially dismembered. Unsure of whether it would happen in his lifetime, he was glad that he had found a place where at least the people were friendly.

  He had spent so much of his life pretending to be other people that it seemed fitting that he would spend the remainder of it as someone else. Out of all his aliases, the one he had most wished to remain was Scotty Harden, the quirky bartender. But that was impossible. Just as remaining Special Agent Adam Graft had become a death sentence.

  No one knew who was and who was not on the Boredega payroll, and to keep breathing, Adam had agreed to enter WitSec. There were only three people in the world who knew he was in witness protection, and of those three, only two of them knew where.

  The short stack of pancakes, the last task of his day, was finally finished and sent on its way to the little old woman waiting patiently in her usual booth. Adam slipped out of his apron. Saying his goodbyes to the other cooks in the kitchen and waving to Debbie and Kristy, the other server working the floor, he stepped out through the back door.

  The chilly air created goose bumps on his flesh, and he hugged his arms around himself as he made the long trek back to his small two-bedroom home. He always took a varying path back to his home and never traveled the same pattern. It was his way of making sure that everything remained the same, that there were no new cars or unfamiliar faces.

  It was during these walks, where there was nothing for Adam to truly think about, that he fell back into thoughts of his past. Thoughts of Drake.

  After the gurney had disappeared down the hospital corridor, Adam had never seen the man again. He’d waited at the hospital for hours, his time split between pacing the halls outside the intensive care unit Drake had been rushed into and the private room Craig was quickly recuperating in from his earlier injuries. Craig had tried to distract him, tried to help him think of the best and be logical about the outcome, but he’d only been able to imagine the worst.

  Even though he had been expecting it, dreading it, coming to terms with it, the news that Drake had been pronounced dead six hours after he was taken through those double doors knocked the wind out of Adam. It had taken him another couple of hours to scrounge up the will to move.

  As the days had passed and Adam’s life was turned upside down and inside out, he tried to conjure all the possibilities in his mind. He held fast to the idea that Drake hadn’t died that night, and instead he’d been whisked away by federal marshals who had already changed his identity. After all, death was a standard procedure for entering witness protection. People didn’t usually waste their time actively hunting for the deceased. Adam refused to believe that Drake was gone. He knew that if Drake died, he would feel it in his bones. Their relationship hadn’t been long, but it had been powerful, and he had to believe that somewhere out there, Drake was confessing his own sorrows to a bottle of scotch, lamenting the love he’d lost.

  The picture of Drake’s family, the only possession Adam had had of Drake’s—the real Drake—had been taken from him unceremoniously during his debriefing. You could appeal to get evidence back, but no matter how many times he asked, how man
y forms he filled out, the picture had never been returned to him. It had been boxed up with all the other photos and clippings that had been taken from Drake’s condo and put on a shelf. Or so he was told.

  The absence of the photo that Drake had specifically asked him to care for hurt. Not only because it was the last request Drake had ever asked of him, but also because it was the only thing Adam had as a real memento of Drake, of his real life and his real self. The man behind the curtain.

  But no one could grieve forever, and before Adam knew it, his name had changed, his belongings were boxed up, and he was shifted to a quiet corner of the American South.

  Adam rounded the corner of his block as the sun began its descent below the horizon. The glittery twilight was a beautiful thing in the quiet town, and nightfall even more spectacular with the thousands of twinkling stars lighting up the dark sky.

  The silhouette of a man stood at the edge of Adam’s front porch, and Adam’s pace faltered at the unexpected sight. His mind whirred, quickly shuffling through his options. Did he continue to walk past his house as if it wasn’t his, assuming who was waiting didn’t know what he looked like? Did he turn around now and go back to the diner? Or did he just continue to his house and see who and what was waiting for him?

  He missed the days when a shadow from the corner of his eye didn’t have him checking over his shoulder. But he knew what he was getting into when he’d signed on. His job was dangerous and could have deadly consequences.

  Pushing his flash of panic aside, he continued to walk steadily toward his house. The man standing at his porch didn’t move, but as Adam strode closer, the man’s bulky physique became more apparent. Adam felt a meager burst of something resembling happiness flit through his system. It had been a long time since he’d seen a familiar face; he hadn’t been sure he would get to see one this familiar so soon.

  Craig stood tall, his elbow resting leisurely on the railing edge. Adam smiled, quickening his pace. Their hands met in a tight shake that Craig pulled into a hug.