David Moran was all set to go out that Saturday night. He thought he might hit Parliament House, Orlando's oldest gay nightclub, or maybe make it over to Pulse, another mainstay. But after he and a friend ended their shift at the restaurant where they both worked, car trouble kept them marooned in the parking lot for an hour. So Moran went home and fell asleep watching Bob's Burgers on Netflix instead.

He was awakened just before 5 am by the sound of his phone buzzing next to him on his bed. He fished it out from between the covers and found a text message asking if he had heard the news about Pulse. "Mass shooting," said the message that arrived next. Now wide awake, Moran instinctively thumbed his way to Facebook.

December 2016. Subscribe to WIRED.Dan Winters

His feed was already lit up with a barrage of messages and updates. He found frantic notes asking if he was OK. And like nearly everyone else who was up at that hour trying to make sense of what was happening at Pulse, he found the eight terrifying words that the nightclub had posted to its own Facebook page at 2:09 am: "Everyone get out of pulse and keep running."