Chapter 1

 

The sun shown down brightly on Brian, AJ, Kevin, Howie, and Nick, who sat out on the deck of Nick’s boat, a small cabin cruiser.  

 

It was a Saturday in early January, and all the Boys wanted to do was relax before the start of their 2001 tour, on January 23^rd in Fort Lauderdale.  When Nick had invited them to spend the weekend on his boat, on the Atlantic Ocean, they had all jumped at the chance, looking forward to a weekend of nothing but laying around in the sun.

 

Brian squinted in the sunlight and stretched back in his seat, in complete bliss. 

 

“Gosh, I’d forgotten how warm Florida can be in the winter,” he said.  “Back in Atlanta, it was in the thirties.”

 

Nick nodded.  “Yeah, and after last year, I can’t blame you for not wanting to be where it’s cold.”

 

Brian chuckled slightly and nodded.  “Exactly,” he said.  “I’ve grown to hate snow with a passion.”

 

“Oh, me too, man,” AJ said, laughing.  “Me too.”

 

“Yeah, really,” Howie commented.  “You were the one who got buried alive in the stuff.”

 

They all laughed light-heartedly, for now that they were all together, safe and healthy once again, they could joke about what had happened to them the year before.  But at the time that it happened, no one was laughing.

 

It had been a year since the plane crash that had threatened to take their lives, and since then, the five Backstreet Boys had been slowly recovering and moving on with their lives, leaving their pain and fear back at that hospital near Denver, Colorado, a place they never wanted to see again. 

 

They didn’t want to see it again, but they still had dreams about it all the time.  Not just dreams, but nightmares.   Brian couldn’t count how many times he had woken up in the dark, sweaty and panting, trembling from a nightmare, containing vivid scenes from their horrible experience.  Over and over again, he saw Nick go into convulsions.  He saw Jason’s dead body lying in the cockpit.  He saw Kevin lying unconscious in the plane.  And he saw himself throwing up blood in the white snow outside the plane.  

 

The dreams were horrible, and despite all his efforts, he couldn’t get rid of them.   He had thought it would just take time, but it had been a year, and they still haunted him.  When would it ever end?

 

The other four guys felt the same way.  Like Brian, they too suffered from nightmares of what had happened to them.   They had all been through it together, and they were reliving it together too.

 

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