Road Less Traveled (27 page)

Now there was a rusty old pickup truck chugging along down the street, right where they would have been if she hadn't shifted her car out of the way.

“That was close,” Fargo breathed after a second.

“Too close,” Jo agreed. She hadn't pulled over, but her hands were gripping the wheel tightly, and she took the next turn to put some distance between her and the truck.

“Do you recognize that truck?” Fargo asked, more to take both their minds off the near miss than because he was curious about who had nearly flattened them.

She nodded. “It's Big Ed's.”

“Really?” Fargo twisted around to stare back the way they had come. “That was Big Ed?” “Big Ed” Fowler was a biochemist at GD. He was also the local bowling league's star player, and he'd been Fargo's secret weapon in the grudge match against their bowling rivals from Area 51. Big Ed was a former PBA champion, and the best bowler in town.

Or at least he had been, until he wound up dead. Devoured by an organism he had created to cleanly dispose of radiation by consuming it.

Now here he was, trundling down the street in his old truck, alive and well.

But in the wrong Eureka.

“Should we do something about him?” Fargo asked.

“Like what, Fargo?” Jo braked hard at a stop sign and turned to glare at him. “What would you like me to do? Write him a ticket for being in the wrong reality? Warn him to look both ways before he slips from one world to the next? Or maybe just invite him to your next bowling night, seeing as how the version of him from here got killed a little while back and now there's a vacancy!”

“Okay, okay!” Fargo raised both hands to protect his face—Jo's hands hadn't left the steering wheel yet, but he knew how fast she could move when she wanted. “I just figured we'd been reporting everyone else who showed up, and bringing them all back to GD, so shouldn't we take him there, too?”

She sighed. “I'm sorry,” she admitted after a second. She removed the band holding her ponytail in place, shook her long dark hair loose, and then bound it back up again. “I'm just on edge, that's all. The worlds are drawing closer together, we still don't have any leads on the Thunderbird, and we almost got crushed by a dead man whose truck tried to materialize on top of us! None of which is your fault.”

Fargo let out his breath. “That's okay. I'm pretty freaked, too.” He thought about the almost-accident, and his brow furrowed. “And that was the first time we've seen anything as big as a truck come through. That means the worlds are really close together now.”

Jo thought about that. “We could have other vehicles wandering across, couldn't we?” He nodded. “I'd better put out an alert, then,” she decided. “Let everyone know to stay off the streets until we give the all-clear.”

“
If
we give the all-clear,” he muttered as she hit the gas and took off again, this time heading for the sheriff's office. If Zane and the two Russells couldn't sort out their equations in time, the worlds would overlap and a traffic jam would become the least of their problems. But he didn't say that part out loud.

It wasn't like he had to.

“We'll have to put the Thunderbird investigation on hold a little bit longer,” Jo told him apologetically as she floored it and her car leaped forward. “Right now having cars and trucks appearing on the road is the more immediate threat.”

He nodded. Having almost been the victim of one such appearance, how could he not agree? Privately, he just hoped whoever had stolen the Thunderbird egg was taking good care of it for now. The last thing they needed was for it to hatch right when the others were trying to separate the two worlds, and have all that energy throw off their efforts.

There would be time enough to go after the Thunderbird thief later.

If they survived that long.

 

This wasn't his Eureka, that much was clear. He'd been heading to Café Diem to get some lunch when everything around him had gone hazy, like he'd been wrapped in a sudden fog bank.

Which, in this town, wasn't impossible. Or even all that unusual.

When the world around him had cleared, Henry had noticed at once that it was different than it had been.

The most noticeable change was the lack of Café Diem. There was a small coffee shop in its place.

He remembered Jack telling him about that—it was what had first made him realize that Dr. Russell had succeeded in her attempt to visualize another reality, rather than just somehow showing their own downtown by mistake. Which meant he was now in that other world himself.

But what he should do now, and how he would get back, he hadn't a clue.

It actually felt a bit strange, and oddly humbling, Henry admitted to himself, not being in the know. He was usually the one Jack called upon to help him solve a problem. But in this case, it wasn't Jack's call. And while Allison had made use of his expertise many times over the years, with a problem of this nature Zane was just as well versed, if not better. Plus, it was Dr. Russell's own project, so naturally she was the first one they'd turn to for how to fix it.

He didn't blame them at all. Too many cooks could spoil the soup. With both Russell and Zane involved, they didn't really need him, and one more person might have wound up getting in the way.

But that didn't mean it didn't sting a little.

Plus, it meant that he didn't know exactly what was going on. He wasn't sure how close they were to finding a solution. And he'd heard that they were corralling the people who'd wandered across to his Eureka, keeping them all in one of GD's conference rooms so they wouldn't get into trouble.

But what was happening with the people who wound up over here instead?

Only one way to find out, he decided. He'd just have to ask.

Looking around, Henry smiled. There was Aaron Finn, crossing the street a dozen paces away. Tall and slim, the boyish-looking Finn was an astronomer. He'd won the high school science fair award at Tesla High, back in the day, and had been helpful a year or so ago when one of Tesla's current students had bitten off more than she could chew and endangered the entire town with her own project. Henry had always liked Finn. He was quiet, and unassuming, and very organized. He also worked at GD, like most of the town. He'd have heard what they were doing for their own otherworldly visitors.

“Aaron!” Henry called out. He headed toward the other man. “Hey, Aaron! Hold on a sec!”

Aaron Finn turned, scanning the area to see who had called him. But when his eyes hit upon Henry, he didn't react as expected. Instead he stopped dead, eyes going wide, face turning pale. Then he started backing up. Quickly.

“Aaron, slow down! I just had a quick question!” Henry sped up. What was going on here?

“Stay away from me!” Finn shouted, flailing. He turned and began running away in earnest. “You stay away!”

Henry chased after him for a step or two before giving up. What was going on? Why was Aaron Finn, of all people, running from him? And why did the mild-mannered astronomer looked so horrified?

Henry turned away, and spotted Bill Fielding. “Hey, Bill!” Fielding was a gravitation expert. He'd designed a zero-gravity birthing chamber for Lexi Carter when she'd still been in town and pregnant. Of course, it had turned out that Fielding had gotten some unorthodox help with his research—from Carter's sentient house S.A.R.A.H., of all things—and had almost destroyed them all, but that was par for the course around here. Henry had never had any problems with Fielding, and they'd always gotten along fine.

Which made Fielding's reaction all the more surprising.

“Ah!” The curly-haired researcher shouted when he recognized Henry. “No! What are you doing here? They locked you up!” Then Fielding took to his heels and ran like a startled rabbit.

“What is going on around here?” Henry asked out loud. He turned in a slow circle, arms held out. “Why won't anybody talk to me?”

Something shifted off to one side, and he caught the motion from the corner of his eye. But before he could turn to see what it was, something small and solid slammed into him right below the arms, and Henry was thrown off his feet.

He landed with a solid thud, fortunately on the stretch of grass beside the sidewalk, and let out an
oof!
as the air was knocked out of him. He groaned a second time as whatever had hit him landed on top of him, twisting him onto his stomach and shoving him down into the grass and dirt.

“What the hell?” he managed to gasp, spitting out bits of lawn.

“That's what I'd like to know,” a familiar, rage-filled voice snapped just behind his ear. Henry started to relax a little at the sound, but that was hard to do when his arms were wrenched back behind him.

And even harder when he felt the cold steel of handcuffs clamping down on first one and then the other wrist.

“Jo?” he asked, trying to turn his head to look at her. But a firm hand shoved his face back into the dirt before he was finally hauled back to his feet. “Jo, what are you doing? It's me!”

“I know who it is, thank you very much,” Deputy Jo Lupo replied sharply, glaring at him as she yanked him down the street toward the sheriff's office. “And I don't know how you escaped prison, but it was stupid of you to come back here. You're going right back there as soon as I can arrange transport.”

“Prison?” Then Henry groaned. Of course! He'd heard from Jack that, in this world, Kevin hadn't survived. The Artifact had killed him. In their own world, he'd saved Kevin's life, but only by faking an emergency that forced GD's total evacuation and tricked Allison into using the executive director's emergency bunker. He'd needed her and Kevin down there so he could send Kevin through the Subatomic Reconstructive Transport, or SRT, and have the teleportation device reconstruct the boy, atom by atom. That way it would strip away the Artifact's influence, and sever the link that was killing Kevin.

Except that he hadn't accounted for all the changes the Artifact had wrought in Kevin during the past few months. If Carter and Stark hadn't forced their way past all of GD's security measures to reach the bunker in time to warn him, he would have doomed Kevin just as surely.

Afterward, General Mansfield had had Henry arrested for creating a false panic and risking people's lives just to save one young boy. Eva Thorne had pardoned him a month or two later, after he'd helped them solve another crisis.

Clearly, in this world, that last bit had never happened.

No wonder everyone had recoiled from him! They thought he was an escaped convict!

“That's not me, Jo,” he told her as she dragged him down the street. “That's the other Henry Deacon. I'm from the parallel Eureka.”

“Sure you are,” she grated between her teeth. “And why should I believe that?”

“Which is more likely?” he asked her, letting her guide him toward the sheriff's office. No sense struggling—he knew Jo well enough to know she'd have no qualms about knocking him out and carrying him back that way, if she had to. “That I escaped a maximum-security federal prison and made my way back to Eureka without you hearing anything about it, or that I slipped over from another reality where I'm a free man?”

She frowned but didn't stop moving. “Maybe,” she admitted after a second. “But that doesn't change the fact that I need to lock you up.” The grin she gave him was as sharp as a knife. “If you're telling the truth, you'll fade back to your own world soon enough, no harm done. If you're lying, though, you'll be safe in jail until MPs can come to retrieve you.”

Henry sighed. He couldn't fault her logic, really. But he didn't relish spending time in a jail cell for any reason.

And he really hated the idea of missing out on still more of the action.

He just hoped his friends were having better luck—and a better day—than he was.

 

Her heart hammered in her chest, and she could hear her own pulse thundering in her ears. Her fingers and toes tingled, and she felt lightheaded. Her eyes were beginning to blur, and not just from the tears—her vision narrowed, going dark at the edges, and her throat ached and burned.

Then she gasped.

The sudden burst of air shot through her like a lightning bolt, crackling with clarity. She could feel everything again, and her senses cleared. But still her mind focused on one thing, and one thing only.

Kevin.

How could she not have realized? She'd seen the look her other self had given her, heard the catch in her voice when she'd asked about him. And she knew how hard it had been for her to see Nathan again, alive and well and forever out of reach. How much worse would that have been if it had been Kevin instead? He was her son, and her world revolved around him. She'd thought before about how, in a way, she had been the luckier of the two of them, her and the other Allison. She could find love again—one stubborn part, buried deep, suggested that perhaps she already had—but she could never have another firstborn son. Even if she had another child after Jenna, and it was a boy, it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be Kevin.

So of course her other self had lost control when she'd learned Kevin was still alive on this side. And of course she'd decided that she must get him back.

Allison understood. In the same situation, she would have done the same thing.

After all, she already had.

But now she risked losing him. And if that happened, she wasn't sure she could survive.