And again, fucking nada. The car's jetted ahead, darting between other cars so fast the deer's dead ass waves its tail back and forth in my face.

Chasing him, I forget I have a bum arm and leg. I forget that half my face can't smile. Chasing him, I'm not an orphan or a girl. I'm not a Nighttimer with a crummy apartment. The deer's ass dodges through traffic, and that's all I see.

Up ahead, a light turns red. The piss-yellow car, its brake lights flare red as it slows to turn right. For a blink, the deer's gone, until I follow it around the curve. And there, on a quiet side street, without bystanders or police, I shut my eyes and…kah-blam.

The sound, that sound's still recorded in my head. It's time frozen solid. My only wish is that I'd out-corded the chase and attack, but I'll still never forget it.

My front end is buried so deep in his trunk that the dead deer's swung loose. The ropes broke, and the deer's busted open. At about the belly, the carcass has torn into two pieces. And inside, instead of blood and guts, the deer is—white. Solid white.

The driver throws his door open and climbs out, bearded. His camouflage jacket quilted and huge. The ear flaps of his hat flapping with every step toward me.

I say, "Your fucking deer…" I say, "It's fake."

And the guy says, "Of course it's fake."

I say, "It's…Styrofoam?"

The deer, turns out it's a life-size deer target for bow hunters to shoot at.

And the hunter, he goes, "Where's your damned flag?" Walking around to the back of my car, looking at my license plate, he says, "You better believe I'm calling fouls on you—no flag, way too much impact—multiple fouls."

Canada Mercer: We never did get around to experimenting with bondage and police uniforms. For Christmas, we asked Echo what she wanted Santa Claus to bring her, and she told us a "fisting dildo." Instead, we chipped in with the Tyson-Neals and a few other couples and bought her a car. It would seem she's a terrible driver.

Echo Lawrence: Those fucking blond highlights, I couldn't wait for those to grow out.

Sarah Mercer: To this day, I still have no appetite whatsoever for tartar sauce.

22–A History

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): For myself, personally, my reason for participating in Party Crash events is quite simple: I hold my life as precious. I adore my friends and family. I treasure my health and the myriad capabilities of my aged yet healthy body and mind.

I consider myself to be enormously gifted with good fortune, but accidents do happen. Annually in this nation, approximately sixteen thousand people are murdered. During the same period of time, approximately forty-three thousand die in motor-vehicle accidents.

Every time I operate a motor vehicle, all of what I treasure can be taken. Stolen in an instant without due process. When you're aboard a motor vehicle, death passes within a finger's length every few moments. Anytime a vehicle passes mine in the oncoming lanes, I could be subjected to torture more violent and painful than anything the world's dictators would ever stoop to inflict. Perhaps another driver has eaten nothing except hamburgers for his entire life, and as his car approaches mine on the freeway, his clogged heart fails. Blind with pain, he clutches his seizing chest. His automobile veers to one side, colliding with mine, and forcing me into another car, a gasoline tanker truck, a guardrail, over a cliff.

Despite my lifetime of declining rich desserts, my evenings spent jogging, regardless of all my careful moderation and self-discipline—I'm trapped, wadded inside a shell of steel and aluminum. My body, violated in countless places by fragments of broken glass. My low-cholesterol blood rushes to abandon me in hot, leaping spurts.

Despite all my care, the heart-attack victim and I will both be just as dead.

Accidents do happen.

Echo Lawrence came to Party Crashing to help resolve her personal history. Mr. Dunyun, to experience an actual event after his life spent boosting other people's recorded adventures. And I'd speculate that Rant Casey simply enjoys being among other human beings. I came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact.

Irene Casey (Rant's Mother): I recollect, come about this time we got a letter from Buddy. Tucked in the same envelope was a snapshot of him kissing some strange boy. I didn't know what to think of that. In one photo, Buddy looked dressed up in a shirt and tie for a friend's wedding, so Chester said there was still hope. Buddy wrote us that he was working for a bug exterminator, and he had his own apartment. He wrote about going to a dentist. A girl he met was teaching him yoga. A girl, thank God.

We wrote back to say Cammy Elliot had asked after him at church. She'd just got her last round of rabies shots. In case he got hungry with his new friends, I sent him a batch of fudge. The kind he likes best. With plenty of chopped walnuts and thumbtacks.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Prior to the inception of the Infrastructure Effective and Efficient Use Act—the I-SEE-U Act, as people refer to it—when transportation engineers endeavored to make the system carry more vehicles, their first tactic was to study the ways traffic flow fails. What was the chain reaction that starts with a sideswipe and backs up vehicles to the horizon in every direction? Much of this you'll have to swallow on faith. No Freedom of Information paperwork is going to confirm something this confidential. There exists no official mention of the mercenary Contractor Cars. On paper, the government refers to the project as "Incidence Event Prompting."

Irene Casey: Some of the other snapshots Buddy sent, they showed his new best friends. Another snapshot showed a girl who didn't look healthy. Her one arm was, oh my, like a skinny praying-mantis arm. Just a itty-bitty arm, with the hand pulled up to her chest. The little fingers held one end of this pink baseball bat, so long that the top of the bat rested on her shoulder. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, and her other, regular hand looked to be rubbing the baseball bat with a square of sandpaper. In other photos, the girl is rubbing smudges of shoe polish on her pink baseball bat. That girl wouldn't be doing messy work like that, not on my carpet.

From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Incidence Event Prompting boiled down to trans-staff engineers requisitioning old, unmarked pool cars and intentionally colliding with each other on busy arterials during peak traffic times in order to study the effect. The project killed two birds with one stone: First, obsolete four-door sedans went to the scrap heap to better serve humanity. That, and the traffic engineers accumulated video documenting how drivers react to an accident in their immediate presence.

None of the engineers impacted with enough velocity to hurt their comrades, and none of the events was worse than paint scratches and sheetmetal body damage. Still, on video you see traffic immediately slow to a voyeuristic crawl. The infamous and bothersome rubberneck effect.

Brannan Benworth, D.M.D. (Dentist): According to our files, Buster Casey made a single visit to our office. I have one hygienist who still talks about his teeth. The worst stains she's ever seen. Mr. Casey was referred by a longtime patient, a favorite among the office staff, a young man named Karl Waxman.