2020 Africa

2020

Africa

Bill de Garis

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 Bill de Garis.

All rights reserved.

This edition published 2020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 Getting Out

Chapter 2 The Road South

Chapter 3 The Sahara

Chapter 4 Darkest Africa

Chapter 5 East Africa

Chapter 6 On the Road Again

Chapter 7 Landfall

Chapter 8 Blackhearts Revenge

Swahili

This is the third novel of the 2020 series

Book 1: 2020 After the End

Book 2: 2020 The Long Walk

Book 4: 2020 The Year 400

Book 5: 2020 The End

P

rologue.

(What happened in books 1 and 2).

There’s no need to read this prologue if you have read books 1 and 2. Just go straight to chapter one.

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In book 1 2020 After the End, PJ, Kacie, Mike, and Jeff travelled south to Baja, Mexico, as they tried to escape a coming ice-age winter in BC, Canada. A meteor had triggered not only giant waves and earthquakes all over the world but also a nuclear war. The combined effect was the collapse of civilisation and the lengthening of the year to two and a half times longer than it is now. It was a real mess. Death and destruction seemed absolute to those still alive. No one who survived could quite believe what had happened. But the greatest threat to survival was the lengthening of the seasons. The meteor’s size and gravitational tug on the earth changed the earth’s tilt and precession and even altered its orbit around the sun. So with the knowledge that the seasons were ten months instead of four the friends knew they had to go south if they wanted to live. They knew they wouldn’t survive the cold.

They had to fight their way past the dregs of humanity seeking to rob and pillage them. On the way they met up with several other people, old friends and new, who joined them. Amongst them was Dale the redneck farmer from Walla Walla near the border with Oregon, and the Boneman from Mount Shasta in northern California.

They all eventually make it to safety in Baja where the pleasant temperatures enabled them to grow food in the long northern winter. They survived stuff they never thought possible: big things like violent attacks, and everyday things like having no heat or electricity. They learned to find water and purify it, to chop wood for heat or to make shelters, to hunt for food, and to grow food from seeds. They all came from a generation that had had life way too easy… tv’s, phones, computers, hot and cold water from the tap, food in the grocery store, delivery, take out, and of course entertainment anytime they wanted it. This group proved they were tough enough to live through what the majority of civilization, after generations of being civilized, could not.

The winter they survived was a frozen wasteland in North America, all the way from the Arctic through to northern California on the west and Mississippi and Georgia on the east. In the centre it was frozen all the way down to central and parts of southern Arizona and New Mexico, and well south of the Texas Panhandle. There was five feet of snow in Amarillo that didn’t go away until the start of summer this year. Like the wildebeest in the Serengeti of East Africa, the few humans left have to migrate every year to stay alive. And just like the wildebeest having to cross the Mara river and falling prey to giant crocodiles, so too do our friends have serious dangers to overcome.

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In book 2 2020 The Long Walk we join the group in Baja as spring arrives and it is time to return to British Columbia to escape the extreme heat of the ten month long northern summer. Now everyone is on foot, no more motorcycles because they are out of gas.

On the way back they meet up with a whole bunch of characters who somehow survived the winter and who join them on their way to the cabin up north in BC.

When autumn comes along they all head south again and they meet up with several more people amidst more adventures.

By sheer luck they outwit the Wiremen who are intending to ambush them and wipe them out. Instead they practically wipe out the Wiremen but they lose a couple of people including Kacie’s husband Mike.

The group gets split up and the second group try to follow behind the others. They eventually are reunited and everyone ends up safely back in Baja after some more adventures.

Chapter 1, Getting Out.

There was at least one nuclear strike that hit London but the kids were far enough south in the countryside to miss out on the direct blast. The light flash, like a giant lightning strike, had hit the ground nearby and the huge boom and shockwave were scary as all get-out.

What’s that? said Sue.

Fighter jet? suggested John.

No way, that’s too loud, said Katie. Oh, look at that cloud rising into the sky, there, look, through the trees. Like a giant mushroom. She paused and said quietly as if she was in a dream. It’s a nuke, I’ve seen photos. Oh no, something terrible has happened. She snapped out of it. Come on we’d better get back to the house.

The kids had been out walking in the forest when the meteorite hit north of India and the terrorists started the nuclear missiles flying about the skies all over the world. They lived in the little village of Horsmonden which was near Tunbridge Wells, about 30 miles south of ground zero. Fortunately the wind was blowing from the west so the fallout went into the North Sea.

They had just about got to the garden gate when they heard the front door of the house open. Katie immediately knew something was wrong so she pulled the other two with her into the long grass in the field across the road. Sue was small enough that she could hide completely in the tunnels made by small animals while Katie and John crouched down and were close to invisible while they stayed still. Through the gate and across the road they saw two men and a woman come out of their house carrying a bunch of stuff: their portable stereo from the bedroom, their dad's laptop pc, and the small TV and game box from the play room. They were eating something too, stuffing it into their mouths. It looked like cake.

When the three intruders had disappeared down the road the kids ran quickly into the house―and found their Mum and Dad dead on the floor.

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Andrew had been visiting some friends and riding his trials motorcycle up in the Ramopo hills overlooking the famous New York skyline when the meteorite hit the earth and the balloon went up. His friends never did return home so he had to leave on his own. But he couldn’t get out of the New York area in his pickup because the roads were parking lots all the way from the superslabs to the tiny local roads which were blocked too, if they went anywhere into the countryside. So he had loaded his gas can on his trials bike with his pack on his back and dodged in and out of the parked vehicles and scared people milling about on the road until he ran out of gas completely. Then he dumped the bike and the gas can and started walking. Sometimes, when people asked him where he was going, he just shrugged his shoulders and said something like: Who knows, but it’s got to be better than this. He bartered some of his food for a bow and a quiver of arrows with a couple who had been out hunting and were, foolishly he thought, trying to get back to downtown NY. We don’t believe the rumours that the Big Apple has been nuked. We have family there. He wished them good luck and carried on walking north in the general direction of Canada. Then the earthquake hit, the big one, but he was far enough north of the epicentre by then for it not to cause him any trouble. Scary? Oh yes. The initial shockwave gave no warning―just WHAM, which threw him off his feet and when he picked himself up on to his hands and knees, the ground was moving up and down like it was waves on the high seas. He looked at it in amazement. Solid earth was acting like it was the Atlantic ocean. Son of a bitch, he said to himself. Wonder who got the worst of that?

He didn’t know it but all of the nuclear power plants in the vicinity of NY city were hit bad by the quake. One of them was even built on top of a fault line. This turned out to be a pretty dumb place to build something as potentially lethal as a nuclear generator. None of the triple fail-safes worked. Fast as the electronics were, they didn’t have time to activate the physical safety valves and insert the control rods. Just WHAM and the plants collapsed. The cores overheated a few seconds later, that’s all it took―a few seconds, then BOOM. They weren’t very big ‘booms’, as nuclear booms go, but they released huge amounts of deadly radioactive gases and radiation that almost instantly killed everything they came in contact with. It was really no different from someone actually dropping an atomic bomb, except the craters were smaller and there was very little blast damage. But there was a ton of earthquake damage everywhere so who cared about the actual cause. Pretty much everything was collapsed, same all―same all.

The New York skyline from the Ramopo hills

Andrew had already gone through the initial panic stage of ‘what do I do now?’ when the meteorite hit and the nukes started flying about. So he could think with reasonable clarity now he was safely north of all the nuclear nonsense and most of the millions of desperate people. In his mind he had a picture of one summer holiday many years ago when he had been at high school. His parents had rented a cabin up in the high country north of the Adirondacks up towards Vermont. The whole family had spent two glorious weeks there hiking and fishing and messing about in canoes. It was an idyllic time in his memory. So that was where he was going, back to his childhood. What else to do? Nothing seemed to make sense any more.

It took him about ten days but eventually he was in the high country and the thought of what he would find kept him walking hard and not resting except to hunt and forage for food in the houses he passed by, and sleep. The forest fires had started by now, mostly in the west but the smoke reached across the entire continent and the pall of smog that always hung over the land mass east of Chicago through to the Atlantic seaboard had been augmented by the smoke and made far worse. Now it wasn’t just visitors from the west who would notice the smog, everyone could see it because it cut down visibility to only a few miles in some cases. It was like a wall of dark grey and black mush, tinged with dirty orange, hanging in the air where the sun should be. Like a kid had mixed all the colours in the paintbox together in a tantrum and then chucked it away in disgust into the sky.

Then, there it was. A small lake down below him in a valley with a single cabin on the shore. But as he approached the cabin he could hear a noise, a slight banging like someone was working in a lacklustre way, making or fixing something. Perhaps repairing a piece of furniture. he thought to himself. He went round the back of the unpainted wooden building half expecting to find someone, so he was careful, but before he got into view of the back the noise stopped. His body stiffened and he lowered his pack gently to the ground and got his bow ready. Then he walked on slowly and carefully so as not to make a noise. As he rounded the corner of the building he scanned everywhere but there was nothing to be seen. An animal? No, animals don’t make noises like that. Then as he watched, the wind picked up and a piece of plywood making up part of the floor of the back porch started to flap in the wind. Tap, tap tap, tappity tap. Then a pause and more tapping. His lips drew tight across his mouth in a parody of a grin. He placed a piece of 2x4 on the plywood and the tapping stopped.

He stayed there all that long hot summer and right through the cool icy autumn. It was then that the smoke finally went away, replaced by the most beautiful clear sweet-tasting air he thought he had ever come across. He subsisted on food he found in abandoned houses in the neighbourhood and game that he killed. Before leaving to hunt he would pull the 2x4 off the plywood and listen for its welcoming noise when he returned with his kill.

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It was breakfast time in New Jersey several days after parts of New York had been destroyed by ‘The Big One’―a massive earthquake.