This was an attack. This wasn’t an accident. This man was trying to shoot me.
I froze for longer than I care to admit. I always imagined that in a situation like this a thousand thoughts would race through my mind—some emotional, some practical, some an inventory of my life—but I was mentally blank. I eventually spun around and clumsily fled down the nearest slope.
I only had one viable thought in my head, not a very impressive one: to duck behind a bush.
My laughable instinct was quickly vetoed by my legs anyway, because my legs said run.
So I ran.
Movement became autonomous. I sprinted down the slope, creating a flurry of dust behind me. Crack, he fired another shot through the air at my back. Was this his third or fourth? Maybe his tenth, for all I knew. I’d never been shot at before. I felt irrationally insulted.
“You’re shooting at me!” I yelled, turning.
Is that all I can come up with?
“Stop!” I added.
I was crouching down again, my back to the dirt slope, taking cover, trying to figure out what to do. I wasn’t in charge of my voice.
The man with the gun said nothing but kept coming. He stormed across the patches of loose shale, relentlessly focused.
I knew I had to keep moving, but I couldn’t see anywhere to go. I looked back and yelled again. “My name is Miranda Cooper! I’m not whoever you think I am! I don’t even know you!”
If I had to identify him in a police sketch I’d say: bearded, fat, ugly. But I could add: mean, with hate in his eyes. Was this guy actually trying to ram us off the road? He seemed absolutely oblivious to what I was saying now.
Was he trying to ram my husband off the road?
Crack, another shot. Another miss.
Was he himself a husband? A jealous one? Did Aaron sleep with somebody? An affair?
Where were we headed in our minivan? To hide? In the midst of mortal peril, my crazed brain was now conjuring up all the grotesque situations that my husband could’ve entangled himself in. I was picturing a hotel in something like Atlanta or St. Louis. A nice one. Two hundred dollars a night. The hotel bartender announcing last call and Aaron looking at his voluptuous business partner, whoever she was, someone with a sexy neck, while they both giggled about whose room to go up to.
No.
It’s not possible. Not Aaron. He was taking us on a trip to meet a new friend he’d met on the job. Some guy named Jed. My husband doesn’t cheat.
And I know every wife thinks the “not him” thing, that hers is the one prince in the world who wouldn’t roam; but infidelity is beneath Aaron.
The man was now close enough that I could hear his breathing and grunting over his footsteps. He was closing the gap between us, scuffling himself down the hillside across the shale.
I looked around for places to hide or for a covered path to run along. He had a rifle with a scope. I started wishing I knew enough about guns to discern if his was a hunting rifle or a cop rifle. Useless speculation.
Something else occurred to me. My first possibly non-useless idea. Go back uphill.
If he’s silly enough to choose the shale-side of a hill over the limestone-side of a hill once, he might be silly enough to choose it a second time. A choice with consequences. Because when a rockslide happens, even if it’s just a small area that collapses—you’re going to go down, hard.
The trick would be to get him to chase me up the south face. I’d be unprotected if I baited him. I looked up at the potential routes, searching for safety zones. Nope. It was all exposed.
I didn’t have much longer to stew on it. I just needed to gather enough confidence to traverse the steepest part of the slope. From where I was standing, it looked incredibly intimidating. Make a decision, Miranda. If I took a curved path, the shape of a question mark.…
Crack, another shot sailed over my crouched position. I looked down. I wasn’t in the best shoes: some cross-trainers I bought for the Hip Hop Cardio class I never took.
They were going to have to outperform their mission statement, though. They needed to give me traction up the only road out of hell.