Barry Rutherford

For all who run toward danger and evil, and the physical and mental price they pay for doing so.

I could hear the gunfire in the distance. At first it sounded like firecrackers somewhere behind the Mandalay Bay. But I knew from the radio traffic and from the other drivers' voices crackling around me that it was something else.

I felt myself being pulled back. The nights in Kabul. The sound of shooting in the dark. And I knew it wouldn't just go away.

I had a limited number of choices: run, help, or ignore what was going on around me. Ignoring it and running away weren't real options. Not for me. Not now. I'd spent five years trying to ignore things, and it had nearly killed me. If I walked away from this, I'd just be drowning in a different kind of guilt. I couldn't let that happen.

So I knew I had to help.

What I didn't know was what I could actually do. In reality, there was only one thing I was trained for. The medical side. That was my direction, if I had one at all.

The traffic was already turning catastrophic. I was close enough to hear the shots. Close enough to see people running. But I needed to find a way in — into the area where people were falling, bleeding, dying.

The crackling grew more intense the closer I got. I was sobering up fast — adrenaline and fear doing what coffee never could. I knew there was a back way around to the concert grounds, and a chain-link fence was probably the only thing between me and the field.

I drove up on the curb, came across the open ground, and hit the fence at about twenty miles an hour. My cab was a lot stronger than that fence. I pulled through a whole section of it. People were running in every direction. Some were falling — stumbling over each other, being pushed, panicking.

I turned off my lights. I spun the cab so the engine block faced toward where I thought the shots were coming from.

Whatever caliber it was, it couldn't penetrate the engine block.

That much I still knew how to do.