WHAT IF?
With your friendliest smile, you walked up to the stranded motorist and said, “Hello sir, can I give you a hand?” From the headlights of your own vehicle, you could see him well enough in the darkness. His expression seemed to be one of relief. He pumped your handshake hard and offered his prolific thanks for your help. Instinctively, you profiled the stranger and checked your surroundings. He wasn’t dressed like a country boy (even though you were in a rural area), and you could see numerous tattoos peeking out from his shirt collar and sleeves. A few spider webs and skulls ran across the man’s visible skin. No big deal, you reasoned to yourself. Plenty of people have tattoos these days, you thought. But little red flags kept popping up.
His urban clothing style just didn’t match with the pastoral area you were traveling through. So what if his apparel seems odd, you rationalized, maybe that’s just the new style. As you considered the whole scene again, you realized that there wasn’t a rear license plate on the car either, and the other stranded motorist accompanying this man was a rather rough-looking young woman sitting in the disabled car. Still focused on your good deed and with your spouse waiting in your car, you took a gander under the hood as the young woman got out of the distressed vehicle to “stretch her legs.”
After some amicable chitchat with the man, you decided to try jumper cables. As you turned back to your vehicle for your tool kit, the man’s demeanor changed abruptly. He blocked your path and gave you a sharp shove backward. That’s when you spotted the rough woman near the front of your car — and in the bright headlights, the flash of shiny metal called your attention to her hand. As soon as you realized that the object she held was a knife, your skin started to crawl, and you felt sick to your stomach. Before you could take another step toward the knife-wielding woman and your unsuspecting spouse, the man drew a small revolver and aimed it at your face. His thumb pulled the hammer back, and a malevolent grin spread from ear to ear. He had you and your spouse right where he wanted.
In this chapter of RECOIL OFFGRID’s “What If?” column, we see that the most ordinary situation can flip on its head and become a deadly set of circumstances. To challenge our judgment, the editors have played against our natural instinct to help other stranded motorists and taken us down a dark road where no good deed goes unpunished. We’ll look at some of situational awareness skills and safety strategies you’d need when dealing with potential predators on the roadside. And maybe we’ll all think twice about stopping
