He tumbled behind me, gradually losing seconds from his clumsy pursuit. He didn’t know which rocks were steady enough to jump from and which would tumble into the water at the slightest touch. He didn’t know which piles of leaves masked solid ground and which concealed slime and sharp sticks. Not like I did.

Bang.

I was moving roughly in the direction of home. Going about it the long way, of course—no sense in bolting for the main road where he’d have an open shot at a straight-moving target. Home. It wasn’t far. I could make it. I could make it with room to spare.

But what if I wasn’t enough ahead of him? My lead was growing, but behind me he was still staggering doggedly through the forest. What if he caught up before Lulu had time to get a gun? What if he came inside? What if he hurt my Lulu? The thought nearly paralyzed me. I stumbled, but recovered. A new plan, then. One that wouldn’t bring him so close to my aunt. I shifted my course.

My legs were tiring, but my resolve was fresh. I would draw him away from my beloved goddess. I would shake him on my own. I believed in Lulu, she was unstoppable and unbreakable, but if he caught her by surprise—and if he got off a bullet or two before she had time to know what was happening . . . I couldn’t stand the thought of it. So I kept running farther from her, away and up the mountain, farther from help.

I did this even though I didn’t know the area farther up the mountain behind the house.

The rule of thumb in my neighborhood was always, “go down, not up.” The playground was down; the safest woods were down. The convenience stores and gas stations were down. The roads that went up headed to either the government parks or to undeveloped real estate.

Naturally, childhood apocrypha had turned the hinterlands into a realm pocked with monsters and malevolent Civil War ghosts; but regardless of what the uncharted lands held in store, I was less afraid of those possibilities than of the skinny man with the gun who would certainly kill me if he caught me. And he might even kill Lulu if he caught her, too, so I had to keep my two-pronged goal in sight: I had to keep him away from home, and keep him away from me.

Bang.