CHRISTIANSBURG, Va.  Colin Goddard thought the gunman had run out of bullets. Or maybe he was hiding inside the classroom waiting to shoot it out with police. Only later, would the Virginia Tech student realize that he may have been Seung-Hui Cho's last victim before the deranged killer turned his gun on himself.

"Almost immediately after I got shot, there was no more," said Goddard in a bedside interview Saturday at Carilion New River Valley Medical Center here. "When he stopped shooting, that was the first time it got quiet."

So ended the worst shooting massacre in modern U.S. history. And of the 32 who died, more lost their lives inside 211 Norris Hall than any other location. Of the 18 people in that room, only one emerged unscathed. Twelve died, including French teacher Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. Five students, including Goddard, were wounded.

"It was terrifying," said Goddard, 21. Yet, oddly, being shot was nothing like he had ever imagined. "It didn't hurt as much as I thought it was going to," he said. "It felt like a big push of air and then a sting."

Surgeons Wednesday placed a rod in Goddard's left leg to support his fractured femur. He hopes doctors will release him Sunday and that with physical therapy he will be able to walk unaided in six weeks. That should give him enough time to be ready for an internship in Madagascar this summer that he hopes will help improve his French.

Yet if Goddard's physical wounds are expected to heal soon, the psychic toll of that day may take longer.

Late for French class

Goddard's alarm went off at 8:40 a.m. last Monday morning. He was late for his 9:05 a.m. French class. Goddard was taking the class as part of his international studies major.

The son of international aid workers who was born in Kenya and lived in Somalia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Egypt, where he graduated high school, and had spent just six years living in the United States, he chose Virginia Tech in part because it had so many foreign students. The other reason, said his mother, Anne Lynam Goddard, was because the school was in a small town and would be easier for him to maneuver in than Cairo.

After stopping to pick up his friend, Kristina Heeger, 20, of Vienna, Va., he walked into Madame Couture-Nowak's class five minute late. The students first learned something was amiss when a female classmate walked in at 9:30 a.m., saying she'd been detained because of a shooting at a dorm.

Fifteen minutes later they heard what Goddard described as "pop, pop, popping sounds." A former ROTC cadet who had fired M-16 rifles, he thought to himself that this sound was different. The teacher became worried.

"All semester we've heard loud noises and banging" from a nearby construction site, Goddard said. "When we heard it, we assured her it was just hammering."

But Couture-Nowak sensed this was something else. She went to the door, opened it and slammed it shut. "When she closed the door she was very terrified," Goddard says. "She told us to call 911, told us to get to the ground. That was the last time I saw her."

Goddard's desk was in a corner near the back of the room where the door was. From there, he dialed 911 but the dispatcher couldn't hear him and kept asking where he was located. It was then that the wooden door began to splinter in a hail of bullets. Within seconds, Cho pushed his way inside.

Goddard dropped the phone and tried to shush the dispatcher for fear her voice would draw the shooter's attention to him. Crouching beneath his desk, the 6' 3" student's legs and arms exposed, he saw a man wearing greenish pants, a white shirt, heavy boots and pistol harnesses on each arm. Goddard saw only as high as the man's shoulders, never looking in the eye the man who came to kill him.

Cho walked wordlessly from the door to the window and began walking up and down the rows of desks, firing execution-style as he went. When he came to Goddard, he shot a bullet that entered the student's knee and exited from his upper thigh. Then, as soon as he had burst into the room, Cho was gone.

Inside the room, the smell of gunpowder was thick. "Some people were whimpering," Goddard said. Another made a gurgling sound. Nobody moved.

Ten minutes later, the gunman was back. Again, he moved to the window and "made multiple passes around the room and shot multiple people multiple times…. He had been shooting very rapidly in succession and reloading quickly. He reloaded in our room a few times. He kept dropping clips and changing them out," said Goddard, who had his eyes open. "I was very alert and conscious throughout the whole thing."

That is, until Cho got near him, his boot nearly brushing Goddard's leg. Trying to play dead, the student closed his eyes as the gunman emptied two more bullets into him. One entered under his right armpit and exited his shoulder. Another went into his right buttock.

Goddard heard one or two more shots. Then, nothing. Silence. Minutes went by.

Turning to his friend Kristina, who had been shot in the back and was trying to get up, Goddard asked, "'Is he here? Do you see anybody?' She said, 'No, I don't see him.'"

The police were soon outside the room but couldn't get in because a body — Goddard still doesn't know if it was Cho's or one of his victims — was blocking the door. A classmate, the only one who wasn't shot, got up and moved it out of the way.

"As soon as the police entered the room they said, 'Shooter down! Shooter down!" That's when Goddard knew, "It was all over."

'Pain's getting less every day'

A police triage team tagged the occupants of Room 211. The shooter, and 12 others, were black tagged. Others in serious condition were red. Goddard was yellow, serious but not critical. "I knew I wasn't shot in anything vital and was going to live," says Goddard, who believes the desk protected his torso.

He and the other survivors were carried out and placed on the grass in a freezing, howling wind. Still, paramedics cut off his clothes in search of bullet entry and exit points. They found five before loading him in an ambulance and taking him to the hospital.

Five days later, wearing a white and blue hospital gown while surrounded by his parents, aunts and other relatives, Goddard said he was still tired but "The pain's getting less every day, getting more movement in all my joints and all my muscles. I feel myself improving everyday."

Enlarge By Sean Dougherty, USA TODAY Colin Goddard 21, lays in his hospital room at Carilion New River Valley Medical Center in Christianburg, Va., a few miles from Virginia Tech, where fellow student Cho Seung-Hui shot him three times Monday. His mother Anne, right, and Aunt Marie Glass stand nearby.