He couldn’t run. So they covered him instead.

Ryan Palattao woke up Wednesday with a knot in his stomach. The 13-year-old couldn’t explain it — just a gnawing gut feeling that something bad was coming.

Still, he got dressed for his third day of seventh grade, ate a quick breakfast, and rolled in his wheelchair into Annunciation Catholic School, where his class was headed to morning Mass.

Seven minutes into the service, the sanctuary’s stillness was shattered.

“One bang,” Ryan said. “Everybody kind of just froze. Everybody thought it was just like a firework or something. And then it kept going. They kept getting faster.”

The sound ricocheted off stone walls. Smoke drifted through the pews. Screams rose as students and teachers dove for cover.

For most, survival meant flattening themselves on the floor. But Ryan couldn’t move. When he was six months old, doctors diagnosed him with transverse myelitis, a rare neurological disorder that paralyzed him from the mid-chest down.

“I had a teacher behind me, and she grabbed me and pulled me under the pew and got on top of me,” Ryan recalled.

When the shooting finally stopped, teacher Dominique Junes lifted Ryan back into his wheelchair and pushed him toward the exit.

“I had seen some people on the ground, and I looked behind me, and I saw a kid with a sock on his arm being used as a tourniquet,” Ryan said quietly.

By the time the shooter stopped, Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, were dead and 19 more people were wounded. Several of Ryan’s classmates were carried out on stretchers, some in critical condition. The church where he had been praying minutes earlier was left scarred by bullet holes and blood.

Outside, Ryan’s personal care attendant wheeled him into the gym, where parents and students huddled in disbelief. She handed him her phone. On the line, his mother heard nothing but sobs.

“He just said, ‘There was a shooting at church,’” Angie Palattao said. “There are no words. It’s a nightmare. We’re grateful we got a phone call from our kid.”

“You see it from past experiences in other places,” Greg said. “But you never anticipate that that’s what you’re going to enter.”

For Patrick, the horror was personal. He had spent nine years at Annunciation and knew many of the children caught in the spray of bullets. A friend’s little sister had been shot; she had endured one brain surgery and now faced another.

“I knew Fletcher, so it’s hard to just know that his innocent life was taken,” Patrick said. “And walking around the church — where I went every Sunday — it was hard to see all the bullet marks and the windows being boarded up.”

Angie brought both boys back to Annunciation on Friday. They needed to see the church, to put a shape to the nightmare. But the visit gutted them.

“It’s just been replaying in my mind,” Ryan said. “It feels so surreal, and it keeps replaying. I still feel sick to my stomach.”

“You can’t be prepared for something like this,” Greg said. “There’s no training for that environment. But you saw the way they’ve taught those kids — the buddy system, the way older kids protect the younger. That atmosphere saved lives.”