AFTER THE MASSACRE
Over the roar of the guitar, the gunfire erupted. At first the country-music fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas thought the loudspeakers were malfunctioning or that the pyrotechnics had gone awry. But as the bodies crumpled, the crowd began to grasp the horror that was unfolding.
The rapid pop pop pop exploded around Doris Huser, 29. She and her 8-year-old daughter had been in the bathroom, but when the shooting began, they pushed back into the crowd, toward the sound of the bullets, in search of Huser’s 5-year-old son and her developmentally disabled sister. They could feel the bullets pinging off the concession stands, ricocheting off the pavement around them. About 50 yards away, Tyler Reeve, a 36-year-old country artist and songwriter, dove into a production trailer with five friends and lay on the floor as hundreds of rounds rang out. “It was like a war zone,” he says. Piles of bodies were everywhere. Blood collected in pools. Everyone was screaming. Melissa Bayer, who had just left a nearby Hooters, witnessed the mayhem from a hundred yards away. This a mass shooting, she thought. This is what it looks like.
If their initial reaction to the opening salvos at 10:08 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 1 had been confusion, the 22,000 concertgoers spent the next nine to 11 minutes of protracted gunfire trapped in a nightmare that, for so many Americans, has somehow become grimly familiar: the shaky cell-phone footage of carnage, the photographs of innocent victims in the newspaper, the profiles of horror and heroism. There was the 48-year-old woman who heard her husband, a father of four, collapse on the asphalt next to her, and the young man who sprinted alongside his eight-months’-pregnant wife, running for their lives. There was the 30-year-old woman
