Chimpanzees

The Crutchfield cousins were packed into their grandmother's house in Nashville, Arkansas. What's more, they had all brought their pets, and dogs and cats were everywhere. Nita Nichols asked Rock if would go to the kitchen and get a bag of dog food for her. He agreed, but as he walked from the back porch into Pop's old bedroom, he heard a loud chirp from the darkness. He turned on the overhead light to see a chimpanzee on the cast-iron twin bed.
There were baby chimps all over the room. Rock was afraid he might have harmed one when he opened the door.
"Nita," Rock said. "Where did all these monkeys come from?"

A connection

There was a connection between the television in Rock's den, his laptop computer, and his cat Jo. They had combined to instruct him to let Jo out and dress for company on the way. Rock wasn't sure where to go for his next signal, but there was something on television about something he needed to find in order to figure all of this out.
He wondered if he should just go back to bed.

An intruder

Rock awoke to see a man standing beside his bed. His immediate reaction was to swing his pillow, perhaps in an attempt to swat the intruder away. "Take anything you want!" he screamed.
Fully awake, he checked his house to make sure he was the only person inside. He left a hallway light turned on.

Sebastian Coe

A seven-year-old gelding named Sebastian Coe was set to become the star of the Oaklawn Park season. Rock had to explain to others in the press box that the horse was named after the English miler who won gold medals at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.
Oaklawn director of racing Jason Miller was among those unaware of the name's background.
"It didn't mean anything to me," Miller said.

Indifference

There was a block-long fair underway in Tuckerman, Arkansas, right on Main Street where downtown once stood. Rock was headed south toward Levy, about a hundred miles away, an easy drive he had made close to fifty times over the course of his life, but this fair confused him. Tuckerman was too tiny for back routes. His only choice was to drive directly through town and the festivities. The problem was, booths on opposite sides of the street were no more than twenty feet apart, and hundreds of people were packed between them.
It soon became clear that no one wanted to move out of his way. Rock was halfway through the crowd and stuck amid indignity and indifference.

Chain reaction

Heavy traffic way out west on Asher Avenue seemed odd to Rock, particularly on a weekday night. He was there with a group of friends from the paper to eat at a Mexican restaurant he remembered from his childhood. As they stood in the parking lot, their attention was drawn to two cars headed west at high speed, apparently in a race up the gradual incline of Asher en route to businesses packed around the intersection of I-430 and Colonel Glenn Road.
One of the cars tried to pass through traffic on the eastbound lanes, but it was clear to Rock and his cohorts that the attempt would likely lead to disaster, which it did. They watched the car smash head-on into a city bus to start a chain reaction of collisions and destruction unimaginable in its violence and noise.
Though Rock stood at least a hundred feet from Asher, it soon became apparent to him that he and his friends were in jeopardy as the jumble of demolished vehicles began to spread in their direction.

The injury

Rock's left arm was so severely broken that the world-wide-web was inundated by reports of the injury. No one had ever seen anything like it.