A World Turned Twisted: Fear is Forever!

CHAPTER TWO

Like a fistful of light sand swiftly falling through the fingers of clenched hands, time would be rapidly sinking, as time had felt like sand so seamlessly and so effortlessly sifting through hands, delicately falling to the ground in cascading streams in fine tiny strands of soft golden-light sand, as it gracefully slipped through a closed fist, steadily falling before hitting the ground. As the remaining days, weeks and months withered and fell off the calendar, the numbers on the Countdown clock to doomsday kept dropping steadily.

In the beginning, mere moments thereafter the initial discovery of the 'Vendetta' meteorite on that fateful day, that cold and frigid morning in February is when Astronomers at the Observatory and Scientists at NASA started crunching the numbers together and eventually the two groups came to an agreement and determined the meteors' proposed arrival. They concluded that doomsday, the precise day of the Impact Event or what they'd come to call or some had customarily referred to as 'Day Zero' would take approximately, give or take a few hours was....

3 Years, 2 Months, 10 Weeks and 18 Days precisely!

And as the days swiftly passed, the numbers on the Countdown clock continued to drop, days turned into weeks then months....

2 Years, 6 Months, 3 Weeks and 9 Days!

Time was fleeting....

1 Year, 7 Months, 5 Weeks and 4 Days!

People had begun to succumbed to fear and paranoia. While others had started to question their trust in their own religion, they were hastily losing a grip on the very foundations of their faith as so many had confided, confessed or even pleaded for some kind of solace. To many, no matter the faith they've chose, there was no comfort as it felt like countless prayers went unanswered....

1 Year, 3 Months, 7 Weeks and 2 Days!

The governments of the world had secretly and suddenly dismantled, then mysteriously dissolved unknowingly as they quietly closed shop.... and in their absence, our everyday infrastructure of a working, running, law-abiding city and society slowly crumbled....

8 Months, 11 Weeks and 5 Days!

Distrust and suspicion grew then evolved into hate and anger. Chaos followed whereupon endless waves of crime and murder spilled into the streets and invaded homes, it'd transformed into a twisted dystopian where anarchy ruled supreme....

3 Months, 2 Weeks and 3 Days!

The 'Vendetta' could now be witnessed by the naked eye, if one were to gaze up at the sky, they'd see in the distance with their very own eyes as the approaching meteor grew in size as it ripped through space, traveling at such speed so fierce, time was desperately slipping away. The meteor remained on course and its path-line still had it set hurtling fast towards Earth.

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A large department of key Scientists and Astronomers at NASA were rounded up and assigned to a team that were immediately put to task, their sole job as a group was to keep a constantly resilient, stern and ever watchful eye on the massive-sized meteorite with dedicated 24-hour, around-the-clock surveillance. The surveillance team were split into two groups, taking daily turns as they traded off a schedule of long and demanding 12-hour shifts where they were keeping tabs on every single detail of every passing minute that dealt with the 'Vendetta'. The entire operation of the team's findings would be handled covertly, as directed by orders from the White House.

They'd send countless reports on the meteorite's proposed trajectory, its constant fluctuations in surface temperatures, drawing up new estimates that calculated its overall size and density, factored in the blistering speeds at which it traveled through space and took note of numerous other behaviors on a nearly minute-by-minute basis. NASA would then take haste transmitting these reports, one after the other, sending them back out in radio frequencies to the orbiting G-1 space shuttle where the astronauts aboard, the brave men and women that were carefully selected and consisted of 'Team H.O.P.E.', would mull over each report and if needed be, readjust their plans for attack accordingly as the team made its way to their proposed destination in hopes to successfully intercept and destroy the meteor.