“Emma?” The young man’s voice had more panic than fear in it now. Danica heard him scrambling in the darkness near her feet, pressing forward, still hampered by the narrow space. She drew her legs up, knees to her chest, got both feet against the girl—Emma, apparently—and heaved her toward the man. She heard him curse as the girl’s body knocked him back, and heard the gun clatter on the pavement. She didn’t wait to hear anything else. She twisted, got her feet under her, pushed against both vehicles and got upright, and a second later she was sprinting away across the parking lot.

She dismissed the store as a refuge almost at once. It would’ve worked fine at six in the evening, crawling with customers and staffed with two dozen employees. Right now it held fewer people than the young man’s gun held bullets.

The better option lay south of the broad parking lot: an undeveloped tract of woodland covering at least three acres. Danica had driven past it every time she shopped here; on the rare occasions she’d done so in daylight, she’d seen thick cedar bushes and ferns beneath the boughs of dense pines.

She looked back as she ran. Her car and the van were a hundred feet behind her, and in the darkness between the vehicles, the young man was still crouched over the girl, trying to rouse her. His fear-soaked voice carried across the asphalt, the words indiscernible but the meaning clear. The girl wasn’t responding.

Danica kept running. Another three hundred feet to the woods now. She drew her phone as she sprinted. She would punch three little digits, and then simply hide until an army of police cruisers descended on this place. She had just switched the phone on when she heard the roll and slam of the van’s door being shut, far behind her. She threw another look over her shoulder: neither the man nor the girl’s body were outside the vehicle anymore. Through the van’s windows, backlit by the glare of the parking lot, she saw the man’s silhouette as he clambered into the driver’s seat. An instant later the vehicle roared to life.

Danica faced forward again, still sprinting. For an ugly second she expected the van’s headlights to swing around and wash over her from behind, casting her shadow out ahead as the vehicle ran her down. That thought made the distance to the forest look like a mile; the van could reach her long before she got there.

She heard its tires bark on the wet blacktop. Heard the motor rev and the power steering whine.

Then nothing—just the sound of the van’s engine fading away fast, even as it accelerated.

Danica looked back again.