Running behind with Arturo 8 – but here is the cover

The whites in South Africa had nearly been exterminated following the war. As he looked and sounded the part, he was able to pass himself off as Indian. He managed to eke out a living there for several years until he could get a job on a ship heading for Indonesia. The Indonesian archipelago had not been as severely damaged by the nuclear war as more important island groups but lacked the industrial infrastructure to maintain civilization.

Fortunately, there was little racial discrimination in Indonesia. He was able to find work on first one island until his lack of visible aging became a problem and then another. Andrew wasn’t sure how long he spent in Indonesia, but it was several centuries, apparently. He married at least three times and had several children who were still there, Andrew assumed.

Eventually, as civilization recovered, it became harder for him to hide his existence, and he moved on. He moved first to Tonga, which, while virtually untouched by the war, had suffered from the breakdown of modern civilization. This was followed by Caledonia and then Nuzeeland, at first on the North Island, and then later he moved to the South Island.

Finally, he was forced to move again and headed for Ostraya. Now he was truly starting to age. He settled in Ballina and met Isabel McHenry, whom he genuinely fell in love with as far as the accounts that were handed down seemed to think. Unfortunately, they only managed to have one child, Andrew’s mother, Cheryl. Andrew still had vague memories of his grandfather from when he was young, but they were only faint.

What it meant was that Andrew had full-blown tellies on both sides of his ancestry. Exactly what that meant for him, he wasn’t sure, but he was pretty certain he could set off fires in his near vicinity when he got angry. He’d managed to avoid losing his temper when being bullied on several occasions, but when he was alone in hiding down the back of the park, he had caused several fires to start simply from the anger he felt. Fortunately, he’d managed to put them all out before they became a serious threat or anyone noticed them, but it had scared the hell out of even the first time he’d done it.

With practice, he found he could cause a bunch of dry leaves to burst into flame with a bit of concentration. Next, he had worked on getting twigs to catch alight as well, and these days could make a big lump of firewood catch alight without too much effort. He found that by thinking hard and pushing out his arm in a stop motion, he could project a force in the direction his arm pointed. He’d discovered this by accident when a large dog had rushed at him three months ago. His action of self-preservation had pushed the dog back about three meters and scared it so much it had run away.

late again – sorry people – got really busy.
Anyway – here is this weeks.

Most people seemed satisfied with that. He kept moving south along the coast, although at one stage, he had to detour to a considerable distance inland to avoid the radioactive ruins of a large city. He had a run-in with a small group of armed refugees, or thugs, or survivors. They’d tried to shake him down for whatever he possessed, which at the time wasn’t much, but he took exception to it. Unfortunately for the six thugs, most of them allowed themselves to get too close to him, so when he moved at his genetically enhanced speed, they died quickly and without being able to injure him. One man did manage to get a couple of shots off, but they went wide in the confusion of the fight.

The little battle presented him with weapons, useful supplies, and some useless money, as the economy had collapsed completely by that point. He did gain some half-decent clothes to replace the rags he had been walking around in for months. His other problem was that his combat boots were getting pretty ragged, but he had to keep them as none of the other men’s boots fitted. In the end, he only took three guns. He took two of the assault rifles the men had been armed with, with nearly all the available ammunition for those weapons, and a small pistol he didn’t recognize, but the man had clips for it, so he found a pocket on his uniform to fit them in and kept the gun.

One of the men had a usable backpack which he added to his ensemble and left all the other bits and pieces where the men lay. And the bodies. He felt no need to waste time and energy burying them. After that, it took him months but eventually, he reached the port of Karwar, which had somehow not been nuked. Although it was so damaged, it looked like a bomb had hit the city. He had to detour inland to finally get across the Kali River as the bridge had been destroyed at some point. As had the dam further up the river, which had caused a lot of destruction in the city, he guessed.

He spent some considerable time at Karwar, passing as a native from the north with his yokel accent. Eventually, his lack of apparent aging led to him taking a job on a ship as a deckhand. The ship mostly traveled the western Indian Ocean, calling at ports that hadn’t been bombed during the war. The trading wasn’t brilliant, and the lack of a suitable port where the ship could be dry-docked and the hull maintained would eventually result in the ship sinking.

Andrew wasn’t sure how long Mikail spent on the first ship, but at some point, he swapped vessels to one that traded between Southern Africa and South America. The ship was attacked by pirates in the South Atlantic some years later. Mikail was instrumental in driving them off but having shown his martial abilities to the crew, he thought it best to disappear and he jumped ship in South Africa.

–

Sorry people- real life got in the way. (I.e. I was busy and forgot)

His own father had lived for so long that he had been forced to do the fake death trick as well. In fact, both his father and grandmother had supposedly died in a boat tragedy off Nowra many years before Andrew was born. His grandmother had aged badly over the last forty years and died for real thirteen years ago. His father had not had any children before his first death, and it had taken him ten years into his new life here in Tweededs before he had found and married Cheryl Harkness.

His father had been fifty at the time but looked and passed for twenty-five. Andrew was their second child. Allison had been stillborn four years before Andrew had been conceived, and he was approaching his sixteenth birthday in two months. Which meant his father was at least seventy but still looked to be in his thirties. His younger sister Caroline was now ten, and he was worried about how she would go when she got to puberty.

But that wasn’t the end of the strange antecedents in his family. His mother was at least fifty and possibly older as she was careful never to give any clues as to her real age. She was the daughter of Arthur Harkness and Miranda Anderton. Except her surname was really Andropov. One of the events that led to the nuclear war was the assault on a train in the subcontinent by a group of Russians who were genetically engineered super soldiers who had managed to get free of their handlers and then immediately run amok.

While all the rest of his fellow soldiers grabbed women and then fled into the rough terrain, Michail Andropov had found a culvert and followed that to a stream where he had hidden for two days surviving on muddy water. The area had been searched thoroughly by allied forces, yet they somehow missed him despite troops passing close by several times. Over the next week, mostly moving at night, he kept up a southerly march until nearly a month after the train assault, he reached the coast in what had been Pakistan, and because there had been a nuclear explosion to his west, he headed east-southeast along the coast.

He stayed in the more sparsely settled farm areas, although there were plenty of refugees to hide amongst as the nuclear war lashed the world. He gradually picked up the local language or languages along the way, although at first, he presented himself as a casualty of the war. He had found a discarded robe or something that had been splashed with blood, now dried, which he ripped up and turned into a turban of sorts. He got around his lack of the local language by miming holding and firing a gun, then a shell dropping to produce a big explosion, and he point his blood-soaked, cloth-wrapped head and then wave his hands as if he couldn’t hear.

Andrew knew he was probably a Tallie as well, amongst other things. His paternal grandmother had been one of the very few full-on engineered people to escape North America. Perhaps the only one. She had been in the local town’s hospital when multiple nuclear missiles had hit the main genetic engineering site. Although severely burned, she had somehow survived radiation poisoning and slowly made her way south over the course of the next decade until she reached a part of Central America that had not been targeted.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-engineered prejudice in the area, so when a ship called planning to sail to southern Africa, she went for the ride. Southern Africa was not as badly hit as the northern hemisphere. All the big cities were glowing ruins, but there hadn’t been the saturation bombing that had occurred in most of the northern hemisphere countries. On the other hand, most whites had been in the cities, so she felt out of place and was treated like a second-class person because of her skin color.

A couple of years there, and when a rickety boat came through heading for India, she went with it. She arrived just in time for a war to break out between two rival successor states in the country’s southern half. As was the case elsewhere, most of the major cities had been bombed here as well as many of the military sites. There was also serious devastation along the border with Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, the border with China. The local warlord commandeered the ship she had traveled on to help transport a part of his army to land in the rear of his enemies. Which had left his grandmother high and dry in the port she had arrived in rather than where she had been headed.

Sixth months later, after the warlord’s overly ambitious campaign plan had led to his separated forces being defeated in detail, the victorious enemy army had swept into the city. His grandmother had become friendly with a young fellow at one of the few foreign-embassies still extant, the Ostrayan one, and found refuge with the young office worker. When he was transferred back to Ostraya, they had a quick marriage ceremony, and as his wife, she was allowed to come home with him.

Gilong was the largest city not to be bombed and had become the capital of Ostraya in the years following the war. It had taken ten years and a marauding mass of invaders from the islands to the north before both Kimberley and Pilbra had re-joined the Commonwealth. Through careful investments and judicious use of carefully made underworld contacts, she had periodically appeared to die, each time leaving her estate to a distant relative who was clearly several decades younger than her. Andrew didn’t know how many times she had managed this trick, but it had to have been several. She had finally started to age after his father’s birth, who was only the third child she had carried to term. Most of her somewhat frequent pregnancies ended in a miscarriage.