One Calgarian's harrowing tale of heroism, injury and survival in Vegas

With bullets hailing down around them, SteveArrudaand his wife, Elaine, had two escape options: either runtowardthe gunfire or join the stampede of people fleeing toward the Las Vegas stage and the two fences that separated them from safer ground.

All around them, people were getting trampled, Arruda told CBC's The Calgary Eyeopener.

The Calgary man was standing roughly 12 metres from the main stage at the Route 91 music festival on Sunday when Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock began to unleash round after round ofgunfire. Paddock killed58 people,including four Canadians, and injured more than 500 others.

• 4th Canadian in Las Vegas mass shooting confirmed dead

Arrudaand his wife dashed toward the pair offences, where he hoisted her over.

'Just run'

The gunfire seemed to have stopped, and as Arruda paused to look behind him, he saw what he described as dozens of people, pinned against the fence asa throng of concert-goers scrambled to scale it.

"This one woman's face was just pure terror. She's like, 'You have to help me. You have to help me,'" Arruda recounted.

He turned to his wife. "Just go. Just run," he told her, as he planted his feet.

Arrudastayed by the fences and began grabbing people underneath their armpits, hoisting several of them over the fence, one at a time. Thenthe unmistakable sound of gunfire cut through the air again.

"It just started even worse. It was a continuous flow of gunshots, and I'm like, "I gotta get outta here, because this is a life-or-death situation right now."

As he was sprinting across the field, he suddenly felt what he described as an "incredible pain and numbness" in his foot.

"Every time I took a step, my ankle would just bend like it was dead."

A 'sitting duck'

Unable to run, he fell to the ground and crawled his way toward the stage risers, where he says roughly 40 other people were huddled, protecting themselves.

But Arrudathought the active shooter was on the premises, and he believedhe would be killed if he didn't keep moving.

"I was like a sitting duck,"Arruda remembers thinking.

He had no way of knowing that the gunman, Paddock, was shootingfrom a room on the 32nd floor of theMandalay BayResort, blocks away.

Arruda spotted a wheelbarrow nearbyand attempted to prop himself up against it to make his escape. But the handles were too low, and he couldn't balance. He then turned to a plastic recycling bin, hoping to use it as a crutch to relieve the pressure on his bleeding leg. He fell again.

Roughly six metres from where he laystooda police officer with his gun drawn. The officeryelled toArruda:"You have to get to the medic tent! The medic tent!"

The officer pointed to a structure roughly 100 metres away.

"At first, I didn't think I was gonna make it because I was hit. Just to get to the medic tent, we had to cross probably the most open area of the festival grounds," Arrudaexplained.

"I ended up hobbling over there on one foot, essentially falling into the medic tent."

'Glad to be home'

Inside, Arruda saw roughly 20 other gunshot victims, some of whom were already dead.

A man in plain clothes, clearly not a festival medic, approached Arrudato find out where he'dbeen hurt. Arruda gestured to his leg.

"Then he ripped half my shorts off ... and he turned it into a tourniquet and basically wrapped it and told me to keep pressure on it.

"This was a guy who was just in plain clothes, trying to help anybody that he could," Arruda said.

On Tuesday night, Arruda was evacuated from Las Vegas and airlifted to Calgary.

The bullet struckArrudain the back side of his leg and left fragments in the upper portion, which are causing some swelling and disrupting a nerve, causing numbness in his foot. But Arruda isn't complaining.

"My foot's numb, but hey, I'm glad to be home. That's for sure."

With files from The Calgary Eyeopener