The boy walked beneath the star as it fell. He was forced to take some detours as it passed over the city, but as it reached the outskirts he was able to stay mostly directly below it. As it dropped towards the ground and he was able to judge where it would be landing, the boy walked ahead of the star. Between the high school and the college, the boy stopped and turned, looking unblinkingly into the blinding light. He let the star come within feet of the ground, and then it stopped. Everything just… stopped.
He hated having to ask a favor of Saze, especially since it was unlikely the other boy would ever allow himself to be indebted to him again, but if what Aryan said was true, it was worth the price. The boy called in his favor, and the blinding white light surrounding the meteor was extinguished as if blown out like a candle. Where there should have been a core of rock or ice there was not. Instead, there was a person, a young man. He looked as old as those who people who were looking out the windows of the buildings, their faces frozen as they squinted to look out at the light.
Looking at the person, frozen with the rest of the world, curled up in a ball and completely naked, the boy was reminded of the strange world of white. The person could have come from there, his skin was so pale and his hair so white. The boy reached out to grab the person, hesitant at first in case Saze had not bothered eliminating all of the forces acting on the fallen person, and then more surely as he felt no resistance. The person was light, though still a heavy burden for the boy to carry.
The boy left his charge where he was, suspended in the air a few feet above the ground, returning a while later pushing a wheelbarrow taken from a store in town. He’d even bothered finding clothes for the person to wear. Not paying attention to what others wore, the boy had simply gotten the exact clothes he had seen someone close to the fallen person’s size wearing inside the clothing store. He didn’t want to put more effort into it than needed, but the boy also knew that how one looked was important. He wouldn’t force the young man to introduce himself to others naked.
It was easier after that. The boy pushed the person in the wheelbarrow towards the center of the city, sometimes on the sidewalk and sometimes in the road, depending on how easy it was to navigate between the frozen cars and pedestrians. In some places the boy was forced to stop and move people slightly out of his way. No doubt they would simply think that they had tripped. Once through the city, he continued onwards towards the East, all the way out of town and civilization. He was forced to abandon the wheelbarrow and just carry the person much of the remaining way. Finally though, he made it to where he was going. The boy set the young man, looking like any other boy his age now that he was dressed the part, down on the grass in the middle of a small clearing deep in the woods.
And then the boy turned around and walked back to where he had just come from to make the trip all over again, and twenty-thee more times after that. He worked his way slowly through the buildings, making sure not to miss anyone. He found the first in the elementary school, a young boy frozen in the act of filling in the letter A red. The boy didn’t bother with the wheelbarrow; instead he just picked the boy up and carried him all the way, setting him down on his back on the still-damp grass. He picked the crayon from the boy’s frozen grasp and made sure to return it back to the room. He searched the rest of the building, but that boy was the only one.
He moved to the middle school, and like the elementary school, he found only one there. The boy probably could have carried this one as well, but he hated to put more effort into things that necessary. The wheelbarrow moved the boy most of the way there, and it would be used for all of the others after that. The high school was more fruitful, which also meant more work. Two girls, one boy, and a teacher of all people, were picked up by the boy and placed in the wheelbarrow and pushed miles away from the city to be deposited on the grass in the small clearing in the middle of the forest. He was not going to carry people that weighed more than him, so the boy build a road all the way from the edge of the city to the clearing with planks of wood. The boy was puzzled as he pushed the teacher into the wheelbarrow. Some of the quicker students had started funneling into bunkers beneath the school. How idiotic. No more so than hiding under a desk from a nuclear bomb. If the falling person had made impact, with his size and at the speed he had been falling, there would be no survivors for miles and miles. The teacher was still a pain to move though, and the boy found himself exhausted by the time he laid the man on the grass.
The boy allowed himself a short rest in clearing beside his unaware guests, waking what felt like hours later to resume his task. The boy almost walked right past one of them, a man standing by himself between the high school and the college, but only almost. Inside the college itself he only found two young men. Two more trips. In the dorm building he found one more, a young woman in the bathroom. The boy couldn’t have cared less if she had been on the toilet, he’d lost any care for modesty long ago, but he was glad at least that she was dressed. He didn’t want to have to dress another person. He set her down in the clearing with the rest. Was that all of them?
The boy went through each of the buildings once more, and this time found someone he had missed; a girl hiding inside the locker room. After brining her to the others, the boy carefully checked every inch of the four schools and their grounds, searching all of the buildings within a half a mile of where the meteor had landed for good measure but finding nothing more.
The boy returned what he had borrowed to where he had taken it from, the road of planks taking many hours to replace into their pile behind the hardware store and then the wheelbarrow, it looking only slightly worse for wear. The boy made his final trip to the clearing slowly, partially because he was tired and partially because he was picking the blades of grass up from where the boards had pressed it down. He was finally done when he made it back to the clearing where a dozen faces lay frozen staring up at the leaves. The boy considered unstopping time then, but he was tired. It could wait until he had slept. It was impossible to tell how long he had been asleep when time failed to exist, but he felt it was longer than he had slept before. The boy stretched out his muscles, took his place in the center of the clearing, and set the Earth turning once more.
The first thing the people in the clearing would see would be the underside of leaves, the branches of the trees covering all but the center of the round clearing. They would probably see each other next. He would stand silently, a boy not possibly yet in his teens, body and face covered mostly by a deep green cloak with its hood up over his head, unmoving in the center of the ring of people, and watch their faces as their minds rush to explain away reality.