When The Dust Came

It was a light summer day around 28 degrees celsius in late June. Jack and Julee were laying in the grass, smelling the fresh air. Roses and lilacs are the flowers of the nation their lived in and that was the smell they grew up in.

Suddenly the sky got darker behind them... They turned and saw the black sky coming faster towards them.

“Run!!!” Jack was screaming. “And cover your mouth with your sweater! Don’t breath in the ash!”

They started running towards the village down the hill. The other people in the village already got alerted and were running around, packing everything away, closing and sealing windows, doors, and any airway they could find.

The village knew about this already a couple weeks ago and started preparing for the day. Just Julee and Jack never thought it actually happened so they didn't take part in the preparations.

6 weeks earlier, in the meteorological center of Ahascragh

“Mr. De Graf! This is a major concern for the entire population. We need to address that immediately to NATO!” a nervous Scientist was screaming while running through the lab.

Prof. Dr. Michael De Graf answered in a deep and calm voice: “James, let’s make some more calculations to be sure that this is not a scenario that is as likely as a cat winning in the lottery.”

Dr. Jack Manson was the Lead Meteorological Scientist for Catastrophic Calculations and Simulations and worked for Mr. De Graf, who was a Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology and Chemistry and the owner and Head of the Center Of Natural And Supernatural Events (short: CONASE), never liked to be addressed as Prof. Dr. because he didn’t care about the status of the words. He founded the CONASE about 6 months ago when he found the first evidence that all major events in the past might be connected to each other.

Cooperating in the past with the NATO, he knew Dr. Manson, who previously worked at a NATO lab before joining the CONASE.

Beside the members of CONASE and the responsible employees of NATO no-one knew that there was a small lab of fifteen scientiests in a small village called Ahascragh. With almost 3000 people in the village, everyone knew everyone but the other inhabitants had no idea De Graf was a Nobel Prize laureate and that there were fourteen more scientist analyzing the end of the world just in the middle of them.

Mr. De Graf took Jack aside and started to whisper: “Jack, everyone here knows there is a possibility this will happen in 6 weeks but for the sake of everyone in here and the entire human kind out there we need to be sure if this is what we think it is.”

“I know Michael, but I ran the tests since six months and with every step, we’re getting closer to the root and a possible solution of this there is something else popping up in our simulations. The details might change but the end result is always the same. And you know Michael, that two months ago we thought this happens in A YEAR. With current calculations, we have SIX WEEKS left and we haven’t even started with any preparations.”

Michael nodded. “I know, Jack. Please, go to the team, run it a couple of times more and we inform NATO tomorrow morning first thing."