Part 1: Accident.

The car swerved to avoid the oncoming traffic, but the slippery asphalt careened it out of control, rolling it over once, and smashed against a telephone line.

David, almost unconscious, unbuckled his safety belt and mustered as much as he could to release himself from the mangled steel. He looked over to his left; Nate was surely blacked out, his forehead marred with a long cut, bleeding.

A small crowd had begun to gather around the scene, everyone on their cellphones calling emergency paramedics. The traffic on the once-desolate stretch of Interstate began to agglutinize, slowly but surely growing, a mass of headlights and taillights trying to figure out what had happened to cause the silver Lexus to crash against the enormous telephone pole.

David tried to survey the scene. For a moment, his heart sank for fear that Nate was dead; and all of a sudden, a rush of adrenaline propelled him to try to see if Nate was alive.

He stepped forward, and the world turned black. He was minutely awake -- he could still feel the raindrops dotting his face, and hear the chatter of bystanders -- but as he tried to take another step, he felt the weight of his own body drag him to the ground.

He heard everyone gasp as he felt himself fall.

-----

Nate blinked, once, twice, and looked up. He saw flashing blue and red lights, white cars and black cars, people wearing funny hats and shiny badges. He felt a dull sting across his forehead, and could smell petroleum and blood in the air. He couldn't move his right arm, nor could he feel his right foot... and everything began to spin.

He saw that the passenger door was opened, and David wasn't in the car.

Spinning, spinning, even though he was stationary, the scene looked more and more grotesque as four people approached him, using what appeared to him as giant pinking shears to open his door. It had finally stopped raining, noticeable only from the headlights' lack of pitter-patter shadows.

The sound was unbearable, and the steering wheel kept on moving as he tried to balance himself sitting down.

His door was finally removed, and he was relieved to feel a cool burst of air sweep across his face. But relief soon turned into vertigo when he uncontollably vomited, panicking the paramedics, making them rush to his side.

He heard medical mumbo-jumbo that he had only heard on "ER" before. Trying to concentrate as much as he could, he tried to stop his gag from inducing any more ejecta from coming out of his mouth, to no avail.

"Well, this one's still alive," he heard one of them say.

-----

Gabriel sat in his lounge chair, remote in hand, flipping nonchalantly through twelve channels of HBO. Evelyn, his wife, was reading through something on the kitchen counter, mumbling to herself as he chuckled every once in a while.

The phone rang.

"Hello?" answered Evelyn, still reading through her catalogue. "Yeah, he's right here. One second."

She handed the phone over to Gabriel, who was still engrossed on a documentary about the Masa'i in Kenya. "It's Mike."

Gabriel gladly took the phone from her hands, smiling at her as he did. "Hey! What's up, Mike?"

"I just got word from Leah that Nate and David got in an accident," Mike said, sullenly. Gabriel was stunned.

"Jesus Christ, what happened?" asked Gabriel, the urgency in his voice rising steadily.

"I don't exactly know. From what Leah told me, they had just come from her house, on their way home or something, and all of a sudden they crashed on a telephone pole trying to avoid a truck or something. It just started raining, the road was slippery..."

"Jesus."

"The worst thing is, David might be dead," continued Mike.

Gabriel was speechless.

"They're at County General right now. I'm supposed to meet Leah and Joseph there -- did you want to come along?" asked Mike.

Taking a few moments to collect his thoughts and catch his breath, Gabriel nodded and faintly agreed.

None of them knew what was going to greet them once they passed the thresholds of County General.