I knew Aubrey would want to stay with me overnight. The idea of it was appealing; her amazing body alone was enough to stir more than my interest, but I didn’t want to open a potentially messy can of worms. I’d face that debacle when the time came. She was gorgeous and incredibly talented, but I didn’t want to get entangled in any sort of romance with someone else in Hollywood. I knew how the tabloids worked. I had more reason than that to stay away from her, though; she was also incredibly vain. The idol worship she had gotten from the media in the past year or so had gone to her head. She hid it well for the cameras but it came out in full force behind closed doors. She was slowly turning into a bitchy little diva. God knew what she'd be like in a few years.
We exited our aisle and headed up through the theater, walking arm in arm. The cameras started snapping and reporters started asking questions right away. I did my best to answer them as well as I could. I also tried to make myself appear as if I was in a hurry rather than just being tired and annoyed. I was sure that the evening’s festivities would lead to less than positive headlines tomorrow, but I didn’t care.
I signed a few autographs and answered generic questions in a rapid response fashion. The New York City night was cool and pleasant on the other side of the crowd and I couldn’t wait to enjoy it. Actually, enjoy it wasn't the appropriate word. Perhaps escape into it. I felt something escalating, almost like a tension headache, only it was overtaking my entire body. I’d never had a panic attack, but wondered if this was what one felt like.
I could see the street ahead of us, the area where the red velvet ropes ended, corralling the reporter, photographers and other jumbled faces. I couldn’t get there fast enough. I saw the street as a refuge where the limo was waiting for us. The limo would pull us away from this madness and back to safety, back to—
I froze. Refuge. Safety.
Less than a foot to my right, the bright flare of a camera went off. I narrowed my eyes against it, shutting them completely. When I opened them, the camera was not there, nor was Aubrey. They were all gone and the rumble of the excited voices behind the velvet ropes were gone, replaced with—
—the deafening rhythmic roar of helicopter blades. I’m lying on my back, the entire right side of my body drenched in blood. But the blood is not mine, well, not all mine. I wear the blood of another solider, one that I almost pulled out of the ambush alive. I'm tired. The stabbing pain of my gun shot wounds fading to a dull ache. Dry Afghan dust swirls up around me as the helicopter descends and when I look up to the vehicle that has been sent to rescue my team, I can see the blazing sun behind it, as bright as a million flashbulbs, beaming down with such ferocious heat that it seems as if it is trying to finish the job that the team of enemy soldiers could not.
My hands are still trembling with the gun’s recoil, my finger still curled into that fractured U-shape of pulling a trigger. I stare into the sun and hold the body of the only soldier I’d been able to pull from the battle. I knew the soldier was dead but still held on to his body as if it were gold. Even when the helicopter landed and the medics tried to take his body, I clung to it with everything I had.
In the end, they had taken the soldier and helped me to my feet. I’d vaguely felt the helicopter rising into the air, only aware that I was off of the ground when I looked down and saw a bird’s eye view of the town I had narrowly escaped from; it was mostly in ruins, nothing but smoke, flames, and debris along its western region.
The helicopter blades droned on and a soldier, that was doing his best to not cry, was telling me that I was the sole survivor of Serpent Team—that twelve other soldiers were dead and I was the only one, besides the school children we'd been sent to rescue, that had made it out of that hell on