By Mihir Mathur
[Prompt] Your grandfather had always been spry and healthy for an old man. One day, he gives you a sack with 9 coins. He says he’s used about 40 now and the last 9 are yours. The next he passes away. Few years go by, and your plane crashes. You wake up in your room, sack of coins next to you. 8 left.
I remember the plane going down. The cataclysmic sounds of alarms, the screaming of the tortured metal. A SAM, they said. Wrong place at the wrong time. There was nothing that the massive plane could have done.
What came next is still vague, like a half-remembered dream. I saw a coin, spinning in front of me. Perhaps it was a fevered dream, of a mind inside a body that was doomed. It looked exactly like one of the coins that my grandfather gave me, with the number “41” embossed on it. I clearly remember my own thoughts too, juxtaposed by their absence moments later. I remember being in denial. The plane was not exploding around me, that this was a bad dream, that I was going back home after this.
I was willing to believe that the blackness that followed was eternity. I was expecting the fires of Hell, or the softness of Heaven, but I was fine with nothingness too. What I did not expect was my eyes to open, and finding myself in a dark hospital room, an electronic beep keeping pace with my heart, and Ashley curled up on a single seat couch nearby. She looked like she had cried a lot recently, and that she had defiantly tried to hide that fact.
I don’t know what woke her up, but she instantly sprang to her feet, as if she was just pretending to sleep, and ran over to me, burying herself in my embrace. It took quite a while for the doctors to pry her from me, for neither of us would let go.
“It is a miracle,” the doctor told me, as Kelly showed me hew latest drawings, “that you are alive. Those injuries would have killed anyone else.” I nodded, as Kelly ran back to her bag to fish out her latest creation for art class.
“No other survivors, they all died before the plane hit the ground.” I felt a sickening heaviness, like a lead weight dropping in my stomach. They should not have died. The course of the plane had my tacit approval, on a route that should have been safe.
Between the physical therapy sessions and the limited visiting hours, I had a lot of time to myself to think. Cheating death certainly gave you a new perspective, but I was not feeling the euphoria I was told it brings. My mind kept going back to that coin, my grandfather’s coin. I remembered him telling me about his life when he was young, the various battles he fought across Europe, and how many lives he saved. I remember him showing me the coins, telling me how he used them to save his own life, and the lives of others. He told me that they would be mine one day, and to use them well. I did not understand what he meant then, and I was still just as clueless when he died, bequeathing me those coins.
I got them back a few weeks later, recovered from the crash. Coin number “41” was gone, probably obliterated in the crash. I had a different idea of where it went.
Mckinzie came by, with the others, talking about his sister’s wedding, and how pissed he would have been if I had found an excuse to not show up, and that I better bring a tasteful gift for the couple. He was joking, of course. He does what he could to lift our spirits, even though Ashley found these attempts to be a bit crass.
A lot happened in the next three months. Kelly celebrated her eighth birthday, Ashley was given a raise at work, and I made full recovery. The doctors, my subordinates, even my CO cheered for me for beating the odds and surviving, and welcomed me back to active duty. I was convinced by then that it was the coins that got me through that, somehow. It turns out, that plane crash was just the beginning of a long and bloody war.
Now, I won’t pretend to understand what was going on up in the chain of command. I don’t get the logic behind their decisions, or the operations that they ordered. I wasn’t supposed to understand or question my orders, just carry them out. I wasn’t supposed to know why the dilapidated little town in the middle of nowhere was tactically important, I was just supposed to head in there with my squad and free it from the enemy. I wasn’t supposed to know exactly what beef they had with my country, I was supposed to shoot back. Or, rather, in my case, get blown up by an IED as a prelude to an ambush.
See, I didn’t think like that when I boarded that ill-fated plane five months ago. But, like I said, cheating death gives you a new perspective.
So here I am, slumped against what little cover this bit of broken wall can provide, with Mckinzie doing his best to hold back the enemies from advancing. Daniels, Carrigan, Jacks, Martin and Gould were badly injured in the blast. Our lone medic, Johnson, was doing his best to keep them alive, but was dealing with multiple bullet wounds of his own. Micheals went down, courtesy of a hand grenade, and was on her last legs, and would not survive if she wasn’t evacuated right now. They were all taking cover in a tiny house, waiting for evac.
I could have been of more use, but I was largely preoccupied with applying pressure on the wound on my waist. Probably shrapnel or a stray bullet. My eyes were watering from the smoke from the burnt husk of the Humvees, but I still managed to fire blindly over the cover. I could barely hear the pilot of the incoming gunship announce his ETA of 3 minutes over the gunfire.
Three minutes. We could make it. I looked at the house, where my squad was. We could make it, they might not even have to use those coins I slipped them as I dragged them to safety. Maybe I could even save my last coin…
“Contact right!” Mckinzie shouted, and dove on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. I heard gunfire open up on our right flank, as I managed to extricate my sidearm and shoot back. It took me half the magazine to finally get him.
Mckinzie was not moving. I gently pushed him off and checked for injuries. He still had a pulse, but three rounds, meant for me, on his lower back would soon change that. I quickly gave him an adrenaline shot to stop him from going into shock. It was only hours ago that he was talking about the flower arrangements at his sister’s wedding, even though we made fun of him for it.
I laid down on my back, feeling the drowsiness from the blood loss setting in. “Three minutes!” the pilot announced again over the comms. I didn’t have that long.
I thought about my grandfather, and remembered his stories of his youth spent in the war, and how he saved many lives, and how the coins were related somehow. Given the man he was, I was sure where much of those forty coins went.
I smiled faintly, as I closed Mckinzie’s fingers over the last coin, knowing that I had picked the perfect gift for his sister’s wedding.
By Mihir Mathur