"Run!" Tobias howled, shoving her back. "Run!"

Everyone's eyes were on him, as if he were nuts, but even though they all seemed to step back a distance, nobody ran. Nobody listened. They hesitated, so he did, too. There wasn't time to think. There was no perfect solution yet.

Tobias reached into his hoodie and held his hand there, clenching his fist as if he truly held something volatile. "I have a bomb!" he screamed. He reeled around on his crutch to give his wildest, angriest look at every man, woman, and child. "You have thirty seconds to get as far from this block as possible, or I'll blow you all to kingdom come! RUN!"

A few people started to turn, and Tobias lunged at the others and howled.

"RUN! RUN!"

They ran, fearful. Their eyes quivered with terror, their hands reached for their loved ones, and everyone on the block began to scatter. There was no time for doubt.

Tobias didn't stop there. "TWENTY SECONDS!" he yelled. "Get out! Get far!" He grabbed Viola Mae by the shoulders and pointed to the sky. "Get everyone out of the buildings. It'll be here—" He cut himself off with a horrified gasp to vault down the block, shouting and shouting at the top of his lungs. "I HAVE A BOMB! RUN! Get out of the square! Get out of the shops!"

People dodged cars and bikes and other people and dove into hiding places only to be flushed out by storms of pounding heels. Tobias could barely hear his own screaming over the top of theirs as he climbed onto the roof of a car and waved his closed fist around as if he held their doom. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Viola Mae dashing from door to door crying for people to get out and the shoppers and shopkeepers fled into the flood of anarchic foot traffic.

"Tob—TONY!" Viola Mae had tears in her eyes. "What is going on?"

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He pointed again to the sky, but this time. there was something there. A black speck had appeared in the distance, and it was growing larger. "Get everyone out!"

The crowd was thinning, emptying the street like and overfilled cup, surface tension broken and liquid bursting to escape.

Viola Mae's jaw dropped. "Is that—?"

"From Neville!" Tobias cried. He kept waving his fist in desperation. "Please, run!"

She stared at him for a moment longer, then pursed her lips, turned, and ran. Her hands fell against the backs of two elderly citizens and she drove them forward with her.

Only once Tobias was alone and thirty seconds had passed and the sound of the approaching nuke was deafening over the car alarms and distant screams and sirens, he slid down from the abandoned car and started to hobble away from the square, too. As fast as his crutch could swing him, he swung onwards because his life depended on it, and so did someone else's.

The nuke roared behind him and his breath staggered in in gasps of fiery fumes as he lunged down the street where one child was left, too frightened to even cry. Tobias could see her blown to pieces. Tobias could see her concussed. Tobias could see her safe, if he could only reach her quickly, quickly, quickly.

"Come out," he pleaded, getting down on his knees beside the hot dog cart.

She shook her head, tears streaming down her bright red cheeks and snot bubbling around her little nose. He glanced back and up, then threw the hot dog cart aside. It rolled down the sidewalk, exposing the girl.

She screamed and ran away from him, and away from the blast radius.

Tobias laughed happily, crying out as he gave chase, one swing at a time. They would both make it, they would both make it—and just as he sensed his vision would go white, then black, he lunged forward and landed hard with the small girl trapped in his arms, skin scraping painfully on the cement as his whole body skidded. The ground quaked with an earsplitting blast and the cement rattled underneath Tobias, sending a violent wave like a shaken-out rug which threw him sky-high as it rippled. A tremendous pressure in the air propelled him outwards from the square, like a ragdoll thrown, and he plummeted towards the cracked cement again. He braced himself and protectively curled around the child until his spine erupted with impact and the white came with loud wails that he couldn't make out as his own or hers or both. Then, everything, as predicted, went black.