I would love to know whether y'all find this satisfactory.

15. I Just Got Kicked in the Head

In the cargo bay, Wash sat up and pressed both hands to his bandaged head. When the dizziness passed, he looked around. He was so disoriented that it took him longer than it should have to comprehend where he was: Serenity’s cargo bay.

In a coffin.

“Great,” he muttered. “I’ve gone from waking up in hospital beds to waking up in coffins. This is just not a good direction to be going in.” He looked around, wondering vaguely how he’d managed to get home at last. Alive. Surely he was alive. Did dead people still feel pain? Wash was pretty certain that most people believed you left your pain behind when you died, and he seemed to have all of his right with him, throbbing through every nerve ending in his body. Dead people were supposed to get all disconnected from their nerve endings; hence the no pain. And this was definitely Serenity; the mule hung from its chains above him, and it looked as though it had been badly wrecked. Surely in heaven, your mule wouldn’t be wrecked. Although, in hell maybe . . .

Wash had just enough warning to lean over the side of the casket before he vomited. That settled the alive-or-dead question for him. Wash had seen dead people move – pretty unnerving, when that happened -- but he was absolutely certain that he had never, ever, seen a dead guy vomit. He figured he’d retched up everything he’d eaten in the past six months, and then suffered several bouts of dry heaves, before the nausea subsided.

“Where is everybody?” he wondered aloud. The ship was under way; he could feel it. So somebody was aboard.

But they weren’t in here with him, he realized, because they thought he was dead. Why else would they leave him in a coffin in the cargo bay?

He supposed he ought to find them, and tell them he wasn’t. Or maybe just puke on them, and then they’d know, and he wouldn’t have to go to the effort of talking.

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