Screams echoed down the concrete hallway, the sounds of human suffering, pulling me rudely back to consciousness.

The smell of gunpowder and blood produced a heady mixture in my nostrils.

I pushed myself up from a prone position on the floor with wobbly arms and spit blood onto the tile between my hands.

My rifle lay in two pieces nearby, broken in half before I was knocked unconscious.

I should be dead, I thought. It didn't make any sense that I wasn't.

Gunshots joined the screams from somewhere down the corridor.

An explosion shook the building.

Getting to my feet, produced a shooting pain in my abdomen.

I looked down to see a nasty stab wound next to my belly button.

Groaning, I pressed my right hand on it to slow the bleeding.

Then I started toward the sounds of violence.

Bodies littered the hallway.

I passed a dead junior researcher named Fong, whose head had been

sliced in half down the middle. I passed one of my security officers, who I had watched, die before

I was attacked, and momentarily neutralized. His name was Lorenzo, and he had three kids at home

who were now fatherless. Feelings were bubbling inside, the rage, despair, and dismay.

But I kept them from erupting, because I couldn't let them get in the way of what I had to do.

As I tottered down the hallway, light-headed with pain and blood loss,

I saw more of my security officers, stripped of their dignity and death, turned into only meat.

Discounting the discarded assault rifles that lay among the bodies was easy.

They were little more than BB guns to this skip.

I needed something bigger, like a 50-Cal.

...