Chapter 1

"I know what I'm talking about, Fred! Listen, son," Mike Montague harangued his only child, "you're seventeen. You should be doing more than keeping your nose stuffed into some dreary textbook. Go out and find some ass!

"I don't know that you aren't still a virgin. Are you?" Mike demanded of his son.

"Ah, Dad," complained Fred, "leave me alone. I'm getting by okay. Girls just don't interest me too much."

"Jesus H. Christ! What have I raised? You're not a faggot or anything like that, are you?"

"Dad! I am not gay. I'm ... just not interested in sex. Nothing too unusual in that."

"Nothing unusual! Goddamn, I...."

His reply was cut short by the sudden sight of a stopped truck in front of him. He had been flowing with the traffic on the freeway at 55 mph. The only explanation that flashed through his mind was one of the chain reaction collisions which caused California freeways to be infamous.

Mike Montague slammed on the brakes and laid rubber for two hundred feet. As if in slow motion, he saw the lowered tailgate of the moving van inch toward him. He blacked out before the actual collision which shattered the windshield and his chest.

Even though Mike's chest was crushed by the tailgate, he was far luckier than his son. A tiny splinter of glass from the windshield penetrated Fred's forehead like a vitreous bullet and exploded in his brain. He died instantly and, ironically, there was not a single scratch on the rest of his body.

It had been a busy day for accidents. Less than a quarter of a mile behind the Montague car was an ambulance carrying a drug-overdose case to the hospital. The white meatwagon skidded to a stop and surveyed the wreckage. Miraculously, the only serious injuries in the fifteen-car pile-up were the Montagues. The ambulance attendants loaded the two into the ambulance along side their OD case.

"God, Jerry, that's what I call bizarre! This guy is a fucking mess. His chest looks like a blob of silly putty and his legs have been crushed by something. And the son of a bitch is alive! The kid only has a tiny scratch on him and he's deader than a Scotch bottle at a New Year's party." The attendant finished sliding the stretcher into the ambulance.

His partner shrugged. "Some are luckier than others. Let's haul ass to the hospital now that we got three in the wagon." The white vehicle started its flashing red light and screaming siren and pulled out, around the wreckage, to head for the nearby hospital and its emergency room.