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.