I’m leaning against the bus stop’s graffiti-covered plexiglass. I prefer to stand, so long as it’s not actually raining, which it isn’t. In fact, it’s a gorgeous, clear day. A good day, so far. I bought myself a fancy coffee and a croissant for breakfast, a real splurge for me, and now the bus is on time. It pulls around the corner, two blocks up, and I fish my transit card out of my wallet. The bus travels a block, then explodes.
Everybody does something: stare in shock, run away, dive for cover. I realize that I’ve crouched behind the bus stop shelter, hands clapped over my ears, when a severed human arm splats onto the piece of sidewalk I’m staring at. It takes a heartbeat, then another, for me to understand what I’m looking at. Then I just think, “No.”
I’ve only used my power twice before, and never in public. I stand up and focus on the center of the event., the bus. I see the explosion in my mind’s eye, bursting outwards from the bus like a flower blooming, but I don’t see the things. I see the Time. The event. It balloons outward. I mentally race the explosion until I’m outside the blast radius, then I push back. I encircle it in a band of resistance and start slowing its progress, slowing, stopping, then reversing. I see people who just fled running backwards. Metal plates, body parts, lift themselves from their impact points and move back towards the center of the event. I cannot speak . I cannot move, not even a finger. I can do nothing but focus my power. I think I might be mouthing the word hurry like a litany.
Two of the people in the chaos are aware. A woman near me looks around as she’s yanked the wrong way through the time stream. Then a man, across the street, breaks free. He steps out of time, like me. He looks around, sees me, figures it out. He bolts towards the bus, knocking people out of his way, leaps onboard, and drops to his hands and knees. I see passengers getting knocked out of his way, even as they’re being forced back into their seats by my time compression., which I can’t keep up much longer. Then he leaps out of the back of the bus with the bomb in his hands. He doesn’t look my way. He’s like me. He knows if I lose focus the bomb’s going to go off on his hands. He leaps a fence into a construction site and hurls the bomb into the pit being dug out for the building’s foundation. I have time moving as slowly as I can make it. I can’t stop it completely. He dives behind the cover of a backhoe as I reach the beginning of the event. The bomb explodes, again, this time in an empty pit. I feel a savage pain as my head collides with the pavement.
May be used for any purpose, without attribution.