He watched her throw off her body armour and her helmet and start to walk towards the little girl with the suicide vest under her clothes as he started screaming at her to stop and to come back, but no matter how loudly he shouted or how hard he tried he couldn't make her hear him, he couldn't make her take any notice of him. It seemed as if there was no sound at all coming out of his mouth, as she waved her hand at him and told him that he was scaring the little girl and to let her deal with it. He watched, impotent, powerless to do anything to stop it as the bomb disposal guy walked in slow motion towards them and the suicide bomb detonated causing a huge explosion that red-misted both her and the little girl, and he woke up and shot bolt upright in bed, his heart hammering and his naked body bathed in the cold sweat of terror as he fumbled for the bedside lamp, desperately needing to reassure himself that it had, once again, been just a dream.
There was enough light from the lamp on the bedside table to let him check around the room and reassure himself that he wasn't in some hot and dusty, tension filled market square in Afghan, that he hadn't just watched the girl he'd loved get blown to bits, he was in an anonymous airport hotel. He rubbed his hands over his face and fought against his compulsion to get out of bed and put all the main lights on, not only to chase away the rest of the nightmare but to stop any possibility of him dropping off to sleep again which would allow the nightmare to return as so often happened when he had one of these dream filled nights.
Small noises and movements made it impossible for him to any longer ignore the fact that he wasn't alone in the bed, so he took a deep breath and turned to look at the girl asleep with her head on the pillow next to him and felt the oh so familiar rush of guilt and shame as he tried unsuccessfully to remember her name, Lola or Zoe or something like that, if that was even her real name, he neither knew nor cared at that moment, he just wished that she wasn't there with him, and that he wasn't there either. He couldn't believe that he had broken his promise to himself and done it again, but his early flight the next morning for a holiday he didn't want to go on had meant that he had spent the evening before in the hotel bar drinking far too much, knowing, even as he did it, that it wouldn't do anything to help him sleep peacefully without the night terrors, if anything it made them worse. He then almost stood back and watched himself as he picked up some willing stranger and looked for comfort in her arms and warm body, knowing that in the long run that would do nothing to chase away his loneliness and fear.
Slowly his heart rate and breathing returned to normal and the sweat dried on his body leaving him feeling chilly but calmer as he turned off the light, and covered himself with the bed clothes to settle down, allowing his eyes to close and letting him drift back to sleep as he sang Elton John on a makeshift stage in the FOB with a very beautiful girl who was wearing a skimpy black vest and combats as she sang to him, a huge smile on her face as he winked at her, her shiny dark hair swinging around her shoulders as she sang the words, very badly. The squaddies in the audience cheered and whistled and stamped their feet in appreciation and he leaned forward to kiss her cheek as the song came to an end and they marched across a bridge to the back of a truck held at the far checkpoint, 2 section marching alongside him as they went. There was a farmer and his goat standing still and watching them with interest from the other side of the river bed, and there was Smurf waving his weapon around and shouting at him about Geraint and being let down in some way, his face twisted with hatred. He turned away from Smurf and started to scream her name repeatedly and soundlessly as he ran towards her in a horror filled panic, but he couldn't make her hear him and he couldn't run fast enough to get to her in time as Badrai stood up in the back of the truck and opened fire, blowing her off her feet into the air and killing her instantly as he woke up again in the same hotel bed, the tears streaming down his cheeks. He shot bolt upright again, then swung his legs out of the bed and sat on the side for a few seconds before he got up and put the main lights on, the bedside lamp wasn't going to work this time in chasing away the shadows in the corners of the room which were still filled with horrors.
He found his boxers on the floor and pulled them on, then his jeans and 'T' shirt, he had no intention of getting back into the bed, and he certainly had no wish to be naked in a bed or even a bedroom with Lola or whatever her bloody name was, so he turned the main light off and went into the bathroom. Shutting the door and putting the light on he splashed his face with cold water to make sure he was fully awake, if he went back to sleep now previous experience told him that he'd have the last in the trilogy of nightmares where she was dangling under a MERT when the sniper's bullet found it's mark, so he put down the toilet seat and sat on it and shivered with his head in his hands and thought about her. He had the residual low ache in his stomach that always followed these dream filled nights, the legacy of the injury he had suffered on that bridge, although his leg was now pain-free, the exercise of thrashing around in his sleep probably proving to be beneficial.
These dreams had started just over six months ago and he had initially expected them to fade away and stop, given time, but now had to accept that that was not going to happen, the dreams were getting worse and more frequent so that he often found himself reluctant to close his eyes and he had no idea what to do about them, how to go about sorting himself out. He couldn't forget the last time he'd seen her, how they'd screamed abuse at each other, how she'd accused him of letting his bad shit ruin her life and he'd yelled "ditto" so that she'd slammed out and he couldn't even remember now what had triggered their row, apart from the surfeit of emotion that they'd both been suffering from the day after Smurf's funeral. He'd expected her to calm down and come back, and to maybe even apologise to him, but she hadn't and he had gone into a stubborn sulk and then told himself it was probably for the best.
When the nightmares had first started he had decided to look for her, afraid in some deep, dark recess of his mind that something bad had happened to her, that his dreams were telling him something, but she'd vanished, disappeared off the face of the earth, had left the army and no-one knew where she was or what had happened to her. There would be no peace until he knew.