protection from bomb

The bomb might have been fifty feet away when it exploded.
Mab’s therapy had paid off. On raw instinct, I’d already begun to form a defensive shield in front of me when everything went boom. I hadn’t had time to build much of a shield, but what little I could do probably kept me conscious.
Explosions are unbelievably loud. If you haven’t been near one, there’s no way to convey the sheer violence of it. It doesn’t really register as a sound, the way a gunshot will. There’s just this single, terrible power in the air, a sudden hammer blow of disorienting pressure, as if you’ve been hit by a truck made of pillow-top mattresses.
Your hearing goes. There’s a familiar, high-pitched tone, only no one is telling you that this is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. There’s dust and smoke everywhere, and you can’t see. Your muscles don’t all work right. You tell them to move and it’s iffy. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. It’s hard to tell which way is down. Not that you don’t know it rationally, somewhere in your head—but your body just seems to forget its natural awareness of gravity.


Cold Days Chapter 12, Page 104-105