My Delicate Destruction: Book One of the Wolfegang Series (9 page)

I kept my head down as I walked, but the street signs caught my eye. I stopped to get a closer look, and my mind couldn’t quite process what I was seeing. All the street signs, business signs, and ads were in Japanese.

The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. A sleek black car rolled past, slow and smooth. I watched it out of the corner of my eye as it turned down the next street. It made me nervous. I couldn’t tell if it was watching me or not. Was I bringing a lot of attention to myself? I ducked my head and kept walking, letting my hair fall to cover my face. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

As I got further into the city, I realized that all the cars were exactly the same. There was no variety at all. Everyone owned the same car. It was mind-blowing. The dirty, gritty city that I was so familiar with no longer existed. The dark edge to the city where crime lurked was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t relate this city to the same one I had grown up in.

There were more people toward the center of the city, and oddly
enough, what they were wearing wasn’t too far from what I had on. Of course, there were different patterns, cuts, and designs, but they all used the same material. There were emblems on some, I guessed to identify businesses or military and the like.

I looked around as I crossed a bridge that went over a large fountain. From what I could remember, I should be exactly where Sunset Boulevard used to be. I needed to find a library or maybe an internet cafe, somewhere I could find information on what had happened without bringing too much attention to myself. I didn’t know what was going on, but being obviously different was never a good way to start off when I didn’t know the rules of the game.

I picked up my pace and headed west. I started asking directions, telling them I was a tourist. They usually paid me no mind. My Japanese was still great, but they had a different accent. I smiled in response to the directions I was given, and walked into the masses of people, blending in. I picked up on their mannerisms and tried to portray them as best as I could.

A few hours later, I found the library. A vagabond I’d come across actually gave me good directions. I was tired and thirsty, but I forgot about it as soon as I walked through the doors into the air-conditioned building.

I took a deep breath. I noticed a security guard sipping his coffee and reading a tablet. I ran my fingers through my hair and let it fall to cover the side of my face. I continued walking through to the back. All the signs were in Japanese here too, but I could hear people speaking English.

I stepped into the older part of the library, into the hushed quiet. It seemed as if nothing had changed. The smell of old books and paper was in the air, along with the hum of the computers and the sound of people turning pages. There was an odd comfort in it.

I went to the closest empty computer and stopped when I noticed all the keys were in Japanese. I looked over my shoulder and saw the librarian staring at me. She looked like the typical, shrewish librarian. It made me smile on the inside. I turned back to the computer and typed ‘newspaper articles’ into the search margin.

I was glad Grandfather had persuaded me to study Japanese. I spoke it almost as well as I did English. The keyboard was actually a touch-screen interface. It was a little different but I managed, and same with the computer. It wasn’t the large differences that got me but the small ones.

The most recent
L.A. Times
issue popped up. It was in Japanese too; only a few articles were in English. The paper had the results of the latest presidential election… of The Federation of Worlds? Worlds, as in plural. I checked the date. February 12th, 2518.

I’d been asleep for over five hundred years.

I couldn’t breathe. This was a bad joke. There was no way this could be happening to me. It was physically impossible. I should have died almost four hundred and fifty years ago. I should have, right?

Fire ran through my veins, and my skin burned hot. I was pissed. No, I was more than pissed. I was so angry I wanted to rip the computer off the desk and throw it at the person next to me.

I took a deep, slow breath. My entire body quivered with rage. I was determined to find out what happened to the people I loved. I typed in the date I was admitted to the hospital and then scrolled through from there to later and later dates.

It was weird reading what had happened, what had gone on while I was asleep. Like the end of the war in Iraq, who became the next president, and Man landing on Mars. I was asleep for all of it.

On October 18th, 2016, there was an earthquake. More than a million dead, the article said. My mouth fell open in horror as I read. The UCLA Medical Center had collapsed in on itself. That explained the state it was in when I woke up. Everyone I knew probably thought my twin and I had died in that quake. I read everything I could about it, but the article didn’t give details on who survived or died.

I went and searched through the city obituaries to find my parents. My dad had died in the quake in ’16. My mom died thirty years later of a heart attack. They were both buried in a Catholic Church cemetery in Santa Monica. It was the same place that Grandfather was buried. I wrote down the address. It was different from what I remembered.

I opened another tab and googled Victoria. I got five million hits. I clicked the link with her biography. It was definitely her. I recognized her from the picture. After the quake, she became a supermodel. She started out with an ad campaign for Ralph Lauren and then later created her own clothing line. She married Trent at twenty seven and they had three kids: Katerina, Julia, and Larry. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I always thought I would be there for her wedding, the birth of her first child, and same with Trent. I kept clicking, there were hundreds of pictures. I printed out one of the family. There was a date of death at the bottom of the page. It said she died of old age in 2091, Trent passed only a few months after her.

I then searched for Kevin A. Reed. He came up only three times. Once in the courts for a marriage license in 2021 to a woman I didn’t know. At least he waited. He really had waited for me. I let that sink in for moment before I continued reading.

Her name was Mary Johnson. Then ten years later there was a divorce to the same woman. A gut clenching sadness came over me; it washed over the anger, cooling it with tears.

It was stupid of me to think he would wait his whole life away. And I wasn’t sure that was the real reason I was so upset. I had lost so much. Just slept away the centuries. I would never get that time back with him; we would never have our happily ever after.

Tears streamed silently down my face, and people were starting to stare. But I couldn’t stop. He died a few years after his divorce in a car crash. He was racing in NASCAR at Daytona. I felt so proud of him for going legit. I wish I could have been there to see it.

My vision narrowed, and I felt lightheaded. Grief crashed over me, wave after wave. I felt my heart crack and bleed. I lost myself in that grief, so lost that the tears stopped, and my body went cold. I couldn’t deal with it, and I knew I didn’t have the time to. I had to close that part off. Maybe I would never be able to deal with those feelings. The only thing I could do was pretend that they weren’t there.

I closed the door to my emotions, and let action, logic, rationality, and strategies fill my mind instead. The logic that replaced the sea of grief was almost a relief, but I could feel it in the back of my mind, waiting.

I didn’t have time for grief, not when I could be in danger. Maybe I could wallow in that pain later, but right now, I needed to move. I was starting to bring attention to myself, and I didn’t care to explain the blood on my hands or face. I would have to find out what happened to Kris later.

I printed out the articles about my friends and one-time love, my heart breaking further as I saw my entire life rendered to a few pages. I quickly shoved those pieces behind that closed door in my mind.

I needed to find the only living family member I had now. I got up slowly and walked silently at a normal pace to the exit. I slipped out the front doors and then quickly turned the corner so I was out of sight.

I needed a car and a way to find Kris. I would go to a different library. I slipped into the garage of the first house I found and saw they had two of the uniform Lexus cars. There were no keyholes on the doors, so I tried the handle. The first car was unlocked, but I didn’t have the ignition key, and there was no panel to pull off to hotwire the car.

I looked around the garage and found a small knife. If these cars were like the old ones, I could slam the knife
into the ignition, and the metal would work as a conduit and turn it on. The only problem was I had to leave the knife in to turn the car on ever again. You couldn’t sell cars like that without having to replace the whole steering console.

I took the knife and rammed it as hard as I could into the ignition. The lights on the interior of the car turned on. I was incredibly lucky. I turned the knife, and the car started. I pressed the garage opener and backed out, peeling out of the driveway as fast as I could before the owner became aware of the theft. There had to be something to tell them, to track me. I needed to move quickly.

I didn’t have the tools or the time to find the tracker and remove it. I would just have to make it quick.

I had the car search for a library. There were three other hits aside from the one I had already gone to. I drove there as fast as I could without being noticed.

I parked and went in, looking around to make sure no one was watching me suspiciously, and then sat at one of the computers.

I needed to find something, anything really, on my brother. Then, I needed a way to find him and figure out how to access some money.

It was weird to me how so many things were the same, yet at the same time, so drastically different. There was still Google, but everything was in Japanese. While everyone still spoke English, I heard some people speaking Japanese earlier. Maybe they spoke both equally well. I was sure there was something else out there, waiting to knock me on my ass with shock. Like aliens. Was there an alien encounter? How about discoveries in space? Or maybe there was a huge war going on that I didn’t know about.

I guess I had to study up on five hundred years of
their
history and
my
future. I snapped out of it and typed in methods of travel and destinations.

There were a lot more places than I remembered. I took a closer look and saw names I didn’t recognize. I typed one into the search engine and clicked on the first listing. The article went into an in-depth explanation on the location of the planet and the native inhabitant species. I took a deep breath once I realized I wasn’t breathing. Well… I guess there was life on other planets. I stashed that one away to freak out about later.

I sat there in the chair, spinning around and thinking, letting my eyes lose focus. I had no idea where to start. I felt so lost, so completely alone in that moment. My brother was out there somewhere, I had no idea where, and now I had a lot more ground to cover than I ever could have anticipated.

So I Googled Kristopher Anderson.

There were a lot of articles from 2016, but nothing that could help me. I scrolled down some more. I waded through all of the other Andersons and kept an eye out for any travel records, maybe an enlistment or an arrest.

There were a few that were close, but there was nothing specific enough to tell whether they were talking about my twin or not.

I sighed and leaned back in the chair. This was taking too long. I searched for a Kristopher Connor Anderson. It brought up an arrest and a travel record.

He’d been arrested for a bar fight and questioning. Then they released him three days later.

The passport records brought up three itineraries and photos. His was the second one. I clicked on it and found his destination. The records were six months old, and there had been no travel since. I found a report on him in relation with the planet. Apparently, he had led a revolution on Anarkia. I shook my head. How the hell did he get into that mess? There was probably a girl involved.

I copied and pasted the destination as Anarkia and searched for current flights. It came up with only a few…
spaceships
? I shook it off and stored that for later as well. There was the
Stardust,
but it had over a hundred passengers already on board, plus crew. I didn’t want to bring attention to myself, and my differences were going to be far more obvious in a large group rather than a small one. I scrolled further down, looking for small numbers.

There was a freighter that took only a few passengers, if any. Time of travel would be four months before it reached Anarkia. The website listed all the ports where the ship would stop and a brief description of the crew and purpose of the ship. It mostly transported cargo. That would be perfect. I clicked on the details. The name of the ship was the
Wolfegang
; it would be leaving in less than a week from the East Harbor. It only allowed booking in person, and payment was due on signing. The site also gave the address and times they booked. I wrote down all the information. I would be seeing the Captain, a Chase Wolfe.

I would have to be careful. I had to find Kris
on my own, and I couldn’t ask for help. I was technically dead after all. If they asked for any identification, I had nothing to give them, nothing that wouldn’t incriminate me or put me into a mental hospital. Too much was different, and I had no idea what to expect.