The gunfire went on and on.
Pop-pop-pop. Pop-pop.
A few moments of silence.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
A lull.
More shots. Then the sounds of sirens, and screams.
Shane McMillan heard the attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris close up, and saw its terrible aftermath.
McMillan, a photographer and filmmaker who was a photography intern at the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2008, was in a building right next to the concert hall.
Now living in Berlin, he manages a photo studio for his boss in Paris, and they were in her apartment Friday night when three men, heavily armed and wired with explosives, burst into the music venue and opened fire.
The first sounds reminded him of neighborhood kids in Berlin playing with firecrackers, McMillan said by phone from Paris on Saturday.
"After a couple of minutes it was clear that something was going very wrong," he said. The sporadic gunfire lasted for at least 45 minutes. They looked out the windows but couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from.
Finally, silence. They went down the courtyard between the rows of apartments as EMTs, police and emergency workers pushed through the gate from the street.
"They were beginning to bring people in who had been in the club. In the courtyards all along the street they were breaking the doors in and using [the apartments] as triage stations.
"Three people died right there in our courtyard," McMillan said.
He grabbed his camera and went out to the street where survivors wandered, some bleeding from shrapnel wounds, searching for partners and friends. A small restaurant nearby also had been shot up a group of gunmen.
McMillan gave his coat to a young woman with a shrapnel wound in her leg, helping her down the street. Despite what he called his "crappy" French, he understood as she told him what happened inside the Bataclan.
"When the gunmen walked in they started shooting. Everyone didn't know what it was at first and then they hit the ground. The shooters were really brutal. A lot of people died in there trying to escape."
He wandered for hours with his camera, reporting for Public Radio International. The carnage was stunning. News reports said 89 people in the packed hall died and many more were wounded.
"I've seen some terrible things over the years, but I had never been standing on a street where pretty much everybody but me and the emergency workers was covered in blood. There was a lot of blood."
McMillan said he didn't really feel in danger at night, when the streets were full of police, but was hyperconscious Saturday when he stood with the crowd of international press that flocked to cover France's worst attack since World War II.
"I kind of looked around - 'Here's a big group of people, too.' It makes you nervous."
McMillan said he wished Americans understood more about the social and cultural issues in Europe from which some terrorism flowers. Immigrants to France "face incredible structural and institutional racism," he said.
"We're quick to blame the perpetrators, right to blame them for individual actions, but there's a larger context we need to think about. We need to ask ourselves harder questions about how we get to a point where something like this can happen," he said.
French authorities have identified one of the dead attackers as a French national, according to news reports.
"We need to think about the kind of rage that it must have taken in order for a group of people to think that this was a fair thing to do," McMillan said.