The nations of Africa battle the decline of vegetation. The desert creeps closer, threatening the major cities. People flee across the seas in a mass exodus not seen since biblical times. Hunger and greed consume those who remain. Yet hope is not lost. Some who remain vow to do all they can to halt the wicked machinations of corrupt governments and too-big corporations.
Thandiwe and her Bangaphandle use their hacking skills to turn those same corporations getting rich off the helpless to share their profits with her beloved Africa. Imbued by her initial success, Thandiwe becomes distracted by the enigmatic Ali. He holds a strange power within and confides in her a terrible secret that threatens all of humanity.
Detective Dakarai spends his days combating the city’s meth problem. When he stumbles upon Thandiwe and Ali he quickly realizes a more sinister plot is at work, one with demonic implications. Dakarai knows what he must do, even if he is terrified to do it.
A boy whose blood will save mankind from the clutches of annihilation
A girl whose mind could hold any computer on earth to ransom
A man with an immoral thirst for power and control
The nations of Africa battle the decline of vegetation. The desert creeps closer, threatening the major cities. People flee across the seas in a mass exodus not seen since biblical times. Hunger and greed consume those who remain. Yet hope is not lost. Some who remain vow to do all they can to halt the wicked machinations of corrupt governments and too-big corporations.
Thandiwe and her Bangaphandle use their hacking skills to turn those same corporations getting rich off the helpless to share their profits with her beloved Africa. Imbued by her initial success, Thandiwe becomes distracted by the enigmatic Ali. He holds a strange power within and confides in her a terrible secret that threatens all of humanity.
Detective Dakarai spends his days combating the city’s meth problem. When he stumbles upon Thandiwe and Ali he quickly realizes a more sinister plot is at work, one with demonic implications. Dakarai knows what he must do, even if he is terrified to do it.
A boy whose blood will save mankind from the clutches of annihilation
A girl whose mind could hold any computer on earth to ransom
A man with an immoral thirst for power and control
In the Sand
Namey, Niger, Eight Years Ago.
2 a.m.
An unsettling darkness wrapped the plains outside the city in a shawl of dust that lasted for about ten minutes in a freeze, like a soldier on attention; after which, as though on order, the powdery brown air crumbled in a surrender to earth.
On earth, dunes of sand, ancient and unforgiving, posed, charged for attack, lilting in the looking eyes of the pale moon.
Where the cavalry stopped, the little town of Diffa began. Diffa was a spread of ramshackle homes made of corrugated walls with square windows cut in them. The corrugated sheets also served as roofs; on the roofs, a battalion of sand settled on them in a salty camouflage.
The night stilled by the metaphor of war was disrupted by the hurrying figure of a man wearing khaki shorts and carrying a leather brown bag, slung over his left shoulder, its contents jingling in a metallic frenzy. His right hand held itself out for balance, paddling the night. He had no shirt on over the shorts, except the drape of darkness, and his feet—boots and steps—wallowed noiselessly in the bellies of night and sand.
He coursed the shanty town until he happened before one of the shacks that had a foot mat made out of threadbare motor tires lying by its door.
The man looked behind him, his eyes revealed by the faint glow of the moon to be wide, searched the shadows. He fetched, with the curve of his right index, the sweat that harbored on his permanently furrowed forehead, and swung it into the shadows. Then, he placed the hand on the door and it caved in surrender, creaking at the hinges.
"Papa, is that you?" a child whispered.
"Shush—"
It was pitch black in the house, but the man's eyes knew the darkness well enough. He entered the house and puts his back to the door.
"Damou, Ali," the man called.
A match struck to light a candle, and the imposing darkness scurried into hiding. Damou and Ali were two boys with identical features. Like the man, their father, who had come in, they had large eyes, thick greasy kinky hair that formed a fine hairline around their forehead and round the ears.
Unlike their father, both boys wore brown khaki shirts and shorts, and black imitation Crocs. Their dark skins shiny, as though just burnished and glistened by the sweat from the heat in the room.
"It is time," the man said.
Minutes after, the trio, father and sons, were plodding through sand, away from Diffa, casting no lingering look behind, unlike Lot’s wife in their escape from the biblical city of
Sodom.
Their breaths were weaved with the dune in a gust of ecstasy as they clambered away from the night of Diffa.
The man looked at his boys, one on either side of him. They were grinning. He smiled too. He was going to give his boys a future, one that's been snatched from him. My boys will have a better life, not this one, he thought. Eventually, they reached a tarred road that split in agreement with equal darkness to the right and to the left. He told himself maybe he too, like these roads, could get another chance to finish life dignified.
A rickety bus was waiting somewhere around these roads. Someone stood beside the bus. This someone was smoking. The man coming down the dunes with his sons chuckled when he saw the tiny red glow of the lit cigarette.
What he'd give for a smoke now. He hadn't smoked in almost two decades, he couldn't afford one, and even if he could, the country lost cigarettes along with many other pleasures of life in the last civil war. He recalled that war with so much bitterness he could taste it even now. He fought in it, almost died in it, he lost part of him in it.
—
After their papers were confirmed by the driver, the journey began. The bus crawled in senescence along the road, heading eastward toward the border, toward freedom.
Sani, the man addressed himself, you are going to make it, you really are.
The bus packed full of dreams in somatic forms stank with the smell of the driver's cigarette, but the people didn't mind. The dreams were larger than the smell of cigarettes. It was dark in the bus, and the smell of cigarette unified with body odor. These people had not bathed in weeks.
It was not new. In Diffa, water was like a precious metal, immensely expensive. There was only enough for drinking—
The bus slowed down. The man instinctively grabbed both his sons closer. It was dark outside the bus, so he couldn't see why the driver was stopping. And he couldn't ask because this arrangement required utter silence.
The driver was sitting there; gray smoke wafted around his head.
Folks started murmuring, heads turned, eyes searching through the oil-stained glass of the windows.
Ali whispered, "Papa, qu'est-ce qui se passe?" Papa, what's happening?
"Shush, Ali."
The kids couldn't see out the window, so they looked at each other, their eyes mirroring the fear in their father’s own. The man's eyes peeled for movement outside the bus, but all he heard was the rising howl of the wind rustling the sand, dunes and dunes of it.
There used to be forests all along this route, but now—
"Bon sang! Bon sang!" the man sitting beside the driver in the front began yelling. Oh God, oh God.
Sani pulled his sons even closer. There were people out there, they were in the sand, on the sand, lurking in the milky morass of grains, seeking; eyes, teeth. There was death too; he could smell it, foul and beckoning like the stories described it. He had done this with his kids because it was better to take this risk than rot in Diffa where the sand was sure to take over the little civilization remaining.
The man beside the driver was blubbering like an infant learning to speak.
"Oh God," he yelled, his eyes popping out of his face, thick lips drawn over brown tobacco teeth, big nose flaring.
The driver wasn't moving.
Sani frowned.
The others on the bus began fumbling for the door; women, men and children, eighteen souls if you didn't count the driver.
Sani transferred his boys to the side of the window. He scrambled past two women with babies crying. Wind and sand pelted his face, and he squinted at the sand across the road.
It looked desolate, no one in sight.
Sani ran around the back of the bus. As he went, sand hit his back and he realized he had forgotten to put on a shirt.
He crept along the side of the bus and stopped at the driver's window. What he saw made his blood turn cold under his skin.
The driver's head leaned against the window, the cigarette butt burned from the corner of his lips, and from his left eye protruded a twelve-inch dart.
That was when Sani heard the ruffling in the sand. The breeze brought it to him. The purring engine of the stalled bus had drowned the sound of people far away in the sand.
His heart was beating madly in his chest. He saw the shadows approaching.
"Les chasseurs," he breathed. The Hunters.
Sani pulled the door open and pulled the dead driver out onto the road. He got in and stepped on the gas; the engines protested at first, as though it preferred the middle of the road to what lay out there.
The man in the passenger seat stopped blubbering and now stared wide eyed past Sani at the creeping shadows on the sand about a hundred feet away.
The bus jumped forward and the two darts hit the bus, one went in and came out on the other side, missing the man beside Sani by less than an inch.
The other dart hit Sani in the shoulder. He winced at the exquisite pain. Smuggler buses
didn't have headlights so he was driving blind, trying to keep the wheels straight.
It's not supposed to be like this, not like this. It was supposed to be clear. What happened?
Women cried and prayed behind him. More darts hit the bus; a window shattered as bullets riddled the bus.
Sani screamed, "Damou! Ali!"
"Papa!"
Sani dared to turn his head. The voice of the boys impelled him forward. They were alright. It wasn't over yet until it was—
A loud bang cut the night in half. The bus shook and lifted. It was airborne for a moment and when it seemed that Sani was in control, it held the bus up in antagonism then slammed it mindlessly on the tar. The bus swiveled like a mad dog with the tires making boiling noises as the rubber shredded.
Glass shattered at the back of the bus, and Dani ducked. The windshield shattered in front of him, collapsing in agitated agony; a large slash of jagged glass flew toward the throat of the man in the front seat and ate his head off, splurging itself with palpitating gush of blood.
Sani gritted his teeth and stuck to righting the bus. Beside him, the head of the lifeless man bobbed loosely with the sways spluttering blood everywhere in the front of the bus, yet the body ensconced within the seatbelt unaware of the death.
The bus righted but spun out of the road and hit the sand. Sani grabbed the wheels, standing fully on the gas now, willing the bus along, as far along as the border.
But the border was still five miles out, in the other direction.
His eyes stung with tears, not for himself but for his sons. His clenched knuckles hard around the wheels, he decided he could die tonight, but not his sons.
He called their names again, they answered; he sighed.
"You will make it tonight," he called. "Both of you. Damou, you take your brother and run when this bus stops, okay?"
"Don't leave us, papa—"
"You listen!" Sani barked. "When this bus stops, Damou, you take your brother and you flee from here! You hide if you need to, burrow into the sand! When it's clear, run, stay low, stay strong!"
Through the voice of the crying people on the bus Sani heard his sons say they will do what he asked.
Damou, the eldest, took his brother Ali's hand in the dark corner of the bus and waited.
The sand tugged and caught the tires. Everywhere ahead of them, it looked level so Sani only missed hitting the dunes by sheer luck.
Then another gunshot rang; it hit the back of the old bus rocking it to the side. Sani gained control of it quickly again and began to entertain the thought that he might live through this night, not just his sons or the others.
The tires tore the top of the sand, and ahead he saw what looked like trees to the left. He started to turn the bus in that direction. Sani thought to check if their pursuers followed them still, but the bus had no side mirrors.
He stuck his head out to look; he saw horses and men riding them, but that was the last thing Sani did.
The bullet that hit him in the temple was handmade from scrap metal in the outlands.
Running wild and blind, the bus hit the next dune. Its rear was thrown up, the nose buried momentarily in the sand, compact sand crunched the metal fender, glass broke, people screamed.
The bus fell on its side. The engine continued to purr while the tires spun.
The bus was now a dark lump bearing stunned and dead people in its bowel. Only one soul remained clear eyed.
Ali stared at the dark bodies bundled together. Oddly, he was sitting on something soft, another passenger. His young mind didn't question this softness except that his brother was quiet, his hand tight around his.
"Damou?"
No response.
Ali tugged at his brother's hand. "Damou," he called softly.
About two hundred feet away, horsemen were approaching.
"Damou, let's go. Damou."
Damou refused to move, but he didn’t let go of his hand either. With his other hand, Ali probed the dark bottom of that place where his brother was.
"Damou, are you okay?"
He found the familiar forehead of his brother, his thick hair. He caressed it. Then Ali started sobbing because even though his young mind didn't have the vocabulary to tell himself that his brother was dead, he knew it the way a person knew they were hungry or thirsty.
Ali continued to feel around his brother's head, down to his neck, and there he found his own slice of the horror the night was offering.
Damou's neck was broken.
Ali pried Damou's fingers out of his hand and started scrambling up the bus that was lying on its side. As he clawed his way out, other semi-conscious people roused. Ali's small head poked out of the window in the gliding door. He looked left and saw the cloud of dust. The
boy knew he had little time, that cloud of dust carried certain death.
He climbed down and crouched around the side of the bus. He had to see his father's face first.
He couldn't, and it was just as well. The bus had fallen on the driver's side. His father's body was now trapped in the sand there.
His eyes hurting with hot tears, Ali started off, keeping his back low, just like his father said he and his brother should. Though the instruction was to his elder brother Damou, he had heard every single word. He had learnt a code this night; keep your back low, burrow in the sand, stay alive, stay strong.
Ali vanished long before the horsemen surrounded the crash site. Ali burrowed into a dune twenty yards away and watched and listened to the voices speaking a language different from his own French.
From his place in the sand, he searched the faces of the mehemehenn, memorizing the deep-set eyes of bleached faces, for these men weren't as dark-skinned as his own townspeople.
They wore white robes; some wore more khaki of different colors. They carried guns. Men unmounted and started pulling the living out of the bus.
One man didn't get off his horse.
He has an aloofness about him, the same deep-set eyes, then a square jaw and a tuft of goatee stranded on his chin.
Ali told himself to remember that square jaw before he fell asleep in the sand.
—
Dan Padbury's book, 2032, is a reflection of a world we all know, fear, and in some ways, are living in each day. The onslaught of climate change juxtaposed with corporate greed, the omnipresent divide between the haves and have-nots, remains a recurrent theme. The propaganda and paranoia fed by news channels, the desire of a group of tech-savvy teenagers to change the world, and the remnants of hope even in a disintegrating social and environmental fabric, bring together a story from the dunes and the stumbling cities of Africa. "Like the trees, everyone existed quietly, until they didn't."
Wrapped in a thriller, this is a story of survival and hope against the odds. It is the hope of youth in the face of a threadbare society that is embracing corruption to eke out a living. The author draws sketches of the dystopian harshness amidst disease, drug addiction, sweat, grime, thievery, wild rituals, and an entire network of corporate wish-wash that tries to keep up the pretenses of normality. "It's a terrible mistake to have ideals in a world that's turning upside down."
One can feel the unease of the people, the mosquito-and-germs-infested pathos in a sweltering continent, with loss and despondency, wondering if a better life lies across the border. The characters are well-developed and the writer has expressed their emotions well. 2032 is the timeless tale of human struggle and power dynamics, crimes brushed under the carpet, or the innocent held at ransom, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
The narration is exciting but the writing is not without fault. The starting is impressive but the metaphors and the descriptions come out as convoluted. The effort to create an impressive introduction is worth appreciating but tight editing could have done more justice to the piece. Grammatical and spelling errors continue to occur throughout the book. Pronouns are often mixed up. If one can look past these, this post-apocalyptic tale is engaging and quite a page-turner. The story has the potential to become a script and be adapted for the screen. It is a good one-time read, giving voice and imagery to the African land and its people.