One minute, an office holiday party was in full swing.
The next minute, the doors of the county Health Services Department at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino were flung open.
Two people strode inside — dressed all in black, wearing black face masks and carrying “big ol’ guns,” one witness recalled — and started firing.
“Everyone dropped to the floor,” Denise Peraza, 27, told relatives in a phone call from her hospital bed, the Los Angeles Times reported. “It was during a holiday party.
“The guys opened fire for 30 seconds, randomly, then paused to reload and began firing again.”
Peraza scurried for cover under a desk, but was still shot once in the lower back.
There were five minutes, she guessed, of silence before the doors swung open again.
It was law-enforcement officers this time — a crowd of them.
“Anyone who can move, leave immediately, and find cover behind vehicles,” the cops told the frightened group.
The survivors were then helped into the beds of pickup trucks and driven to safety.
Shock waves of confusion and fear would ripple for hours from the tense mass-shooting scene, where 14 died and 17 were wounded.
Even the motive and number of shooters was initially unclear.
Parents, spouses and neighbors waited in fear as the center was swarmed by ambulances and police cars, and nearby buildings and schools were locked down.
Cellphones became a vital lifeline between victims and their worried family members.
A text from Tom Carrillo’s daughter chilled his heart.
Someone was shooting, the terrified woman texted from inside her office in the Inland Regional Center.
“Dad shooting at my work. Shot people,” his daughter Holly typed.
“In office waiting for cops to catch him. Pray for us.”
The frantic dad responded, “Hide now. “Cops on the way?” he asked.
“I am,” Holly texted back. “But we are locked in an office.”
Shot in his leg and shoulder, Kevin Ortiz, a county environmental inspector, still managed to call both his father and his new bride of only two weeks, telling them, “I love you.”
“I’ve been shot three times. I’m in pain. Don’t worry there’s a policeman with me,” he told his wife, Dyana Ortiz, 23 — before the line went dead.
“He said, ‘I love you,’ ” Dyana Ortiz told the Los Angeles Times.
“And I said, ‘I love you.’ ”
Kevin Ortiz and other survivors had hidden behind locked doors and barricades so strong that police needed battering rams to get into some of the hiding spots.
It would take four hours for officials to kill two of the suspects in a shootout two miles east of the incident and detain a third person.
Meanwhile, desperate relatives gathered outside hospitals, awaiting word.
“She’s alive, that’s all I know,” Peraza’s sister, Kathy Hotetz, 37, said as she waited outside the Arrowhead Regional Medical Center for word on her condition.
For Carrillo, the eventual, precious good news on his daughter was worth the wait.
“My friend’s daughter and my daughter both work there. It’s just heartbreaking,” he told The Sun of San Bernardino.
“My daughter is OK,” he said. “My friend’s daughter is OK.”
Police interviewed hundreds of witnesses, including Melinda Rivas, a social worker who worked one flight up from where the attack took place.
“They yelled down the floor, ‘There is shooting downstairs!’ Rivas said. She and her co-workers barricaded their door, then, “We had to lay down on the floor.”
With Post Wire Services