Road Less Traveled (29 page)

Where he wouldn't be able to see it coming.

Carter sighed. This was going to be an extremely stressful drive.

 

After what seemed like an eternity, Carter pulled up
to Allison's house. Her sleek sedan was missing from the driveway, but there was a stylish hybrid station wagon in its place. Which made sense. He suspected Allison would have switched to driving something like that herself, if not for her duties at GD.

Which, of course, wasn't a problem for the other Allison.

As he got out of his Jeep and walked along the drive to the front door, Carter studied the place. He knew Allison's house well, better than almost any other dwelling in Eureka beyond his own. The exterior looked the same as he remembered it, a split-level ranch made of redwood and stone with a sloping roof and large windows. The yard was more trees than grass, and the house blended in among the trunks and foliage nicely, giving it a welcoming, rustic look.

He skirted the station wagon, and one hand brushed up against it. That made him stop for a second, and he rapped his knuckles against the car's side panel. The high-tech plastic produced a dull echo.

So he was in the other Eureka now, his whole body in one reality. Swell.

He trekked up the steps and along the winding path to the front door, and let himself in. This was Eureka—most people didn't bother to lock their doors. They had other ways of keeping people out.

A security panel beeped as he stepped into the entryway, but as Carter watched, the blinking red light wavered, then turned a steady green. Strange. Allison had programmed him into her security system, of course, but that was back in his Eureka. On this side he didn't even exist, so why would he have been granted access?

Carefully he shut the door behind him and edged his way down the hall. The walls were lined with pictures: Allison and Stark, Kevin, Jenna, both adults with one kid and then with the other. The story those images told tore at his heart. There weren't any pictures of Allison and Stark with both Kevin and Jenna, because Kevin had died before Jenna was born.

And in his world, it was Stark who'd died before he could ever meet his little girl.

“Hello?” Carter called out as he walked. He didn't want to startle Allison if she was here. And he was guessing she was. It was her haven, her safe place, her sanctuary.

Plus, her car was outside, and it had still been warm when he'd felt it.

He peeked into rooms as he passed. The family room was empty. So were the dining room and the kitchen. Carter sighed. That meant they had to be upstairs.

He started to climb the steps, then stopped and looked around again. His eyes narrowed, and he rubbed a hand across his head.

Okay, that was weird.

When he had first moved to Eureka, Allison's kitchen had been more modern, with sleek appliances of brushed steel, counters of smooth granite, and a backsplash of a mottled, bump-textured blue metal. She'd remodeled a year or two back, changing the kitchen to suit the rest of the house better, replacing the steel and granite and blue with light wood grains and sandstone and creamy tile. It was a warmer, earthier kitchen, filled with browns and reds, very comforting.

The kitchen counter matched what he remembered, right down to the high-backed barstools set along it and the slightly wilted plant balanced precariously near the counter's edge.

But just beyond that, next to the stove, the counter was still sleek gray granite, and the wall behind it was a rich, mottled blue.

Carter shook his head. “Oh, this can't be good.”

He headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time. If he were in his own world, he knew that Kevin's room would be the first door on the left. Opposite it was the hall bathroom. Jenna's was the next door on the right, and opposite that was Allison's own bedroom, which had a private bath attached. He was guessing her room—now hers and Stark's, a thought he tried not to examine too closely—was still in the same place, and so was Jenna's. Kevin's was probably a home office, unless this world's Allison had kept it as a shrine to her dead son. He'd seen plenty of grieving parents react that way. It wasn't healthy, but sometimes it was necessary for them to keep those reminders for a while.

Since they weren't downstairs, he was guessing he'd find Allison and Kevin in Kevin's room, or what was left of it.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Carter saw that the door to that first room was closed. He tried the handle. It wasn't locked.

Gently, he eased it open. “Allison?” he said softly. “Kevin?”

There wasn't an answer, but he thought he heard movement from within.

Carefully he opened the door. This was Eureka, and even if Allison wasn't the GD director here, her husband was. Which meant she had access to all sorts of home-protection devices. He really didn't want to have his face melted off, or to find himself frozen solid, or to be turned into a puddle of goo.

But no one attacked him.

Slowly, he eased the door open enough to see inside. It was Kevin's room, all right. But Carter frowned. There was a poster up on the wall right above the bed. It was for the movie
Inception
. He had taken his world's Kevin to the movie himself, and they had both loved it. Carter had bought him the poster a few weeks later. But that movie hadn't even been written when everything with the Artifact went down!

Something shifted in the dim light of the room, and he squinted, trying to see through the gloom. Why weren't the lights on? Then he saw the problem. Kevin was a mathematical and mechanical genius, and he was always tinkering with things—he related to machinery and to numbers far better than to people, most of the time. At one point, he'd rewired his room, altering its lighting system so it ran on bioelectricity and responded to his electrical impulses. The lights literally changed with his mood, and cycled down into darkness as he drifted off to sleep.

But it had taken him a while to work out all the details. Carter hadn't remembered the exact timeline, but evidently Kevin had started the process before he'd encountered the Artifact—and finished it afterward.

There were exposed wires hanging from the ceiling and poking out of the walls in places. Clearly this world's Kevin never had the chance to finish what he'd started.

But even in the dark Carter could still make out that poster, staring back at him.

And he could see the two figures huddled on the bed, one of them stretched out and the other sitting up with the first one's head in her lap. Allison was stroking Kevin's head gently, cradling him to her like he was a baby again instead of the tall, slender teenager he'd become.

“He got so tall,” she whispered, looking up at Carter but not really seeing him. “I never thought he'd be so tall.”

“I know.” Carter stepped into the room, slowly, and edged toward the bed. “But you know he doesn't belong here. Not anymore.”

Allison's eyes focused on him as he inched closer. “You're the sheriff,” she said, half-accusingly. “Carter, right?”

“That's right. And in my world, I'm good friends with Allison—and with Kevin.” He was a few feet from the bed still, but he wasn't sure what he could do about it, really. Allison had Kevin's head on her lap and one arm around him. If he had to, he could shove her out of the way and grab Kevin off the bed, but he wasn't entirely sure that would work. Plus, he had a hard time imagining doing that, even if it wasn't really his Allison.

“You can't have him,” this Allison insisted, tightening her grip on the boy. “He's mine, and I won't give him up. Not again. I can't.”

Carter lowered his hands and moved forward to perch on the edge of the bed. “But he's not,” he pointed out gently. “Not really. And you know that.”

“I lost him once,” Allison argued. “And now I've got a second chance. I won't let him go.”

“Think about what you're doing,” Carter urged her. “And about what it means to everyone else. Sure, you could keep Kevin here until we all die, or until they reverse whatever you did and the worlds separate and he can't go home. You'd have him back, plus you'd still have Jenna, and Stark.” He studied her face. “But think about what that would do to my Allison. She's already lost Stark—on their wedding day, no less.” He saw this Allison gulp just thinking about it, and continued to press his point. “She almost lost Kevin, the same as you. We managed to save him just in time. But now you're stealing him away from her. She has to live with losing Stark, and now you want to take Kevin away from her, too. Is that really fair?”

Carter leaned in so she was forced to meet his eyes. “Is that something you can do to someone else, when you know how much it hurts to lose one of them, let alone both? Is it something you can do to yourself? Put yourself in her shoes. She is you, after all. How would you feel if she did the same thing to you?”

Slowly Allison's eyes filled with tears, and her hands shook where they clasped Kevin's shoulders. “I wouldn't want to live,” she admitted softly, her words thick with grief. “I couldn't bear it.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “And I couldn't bear to inflict that kind of pain on someone else. Especially myself.”

Gently, Carter leaned in and lifted her hand off Kevin's arm. Then he held out a hand to the boy, and Kevin grasped it and pulled himself upright. Carter rose from the bed and stepped away from it, toward the center of the room, and Kevin followed him.

Allison watched them retreat from her, eyes mirror-bright, but she made no move to stop them.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. Carter wasn't sure if the apology was to him, to Kevin, or to Allison, but he answered for all of them.

“I know. I probably would have done the same thing, in your place.” He led Kevin out of the room that was half his and half his younger self's, and closed the door gently behind them. He could hear the sobs rising from the bed they had just vacated. He could give her some privacy, if nothing else.

Guiding Kevin by the shoulder, Carter followed the boy down the steps and into the kitchen again. Once they had reached that floor he pulled out his phone and called his Allison. Time to tell her the good news. He was bringing her son back to her.

But when he tried to dial her, all he got was static. Carter frowned at the phone. They were smartphones Henry had designed for Eureka years ago. The clever little devices were powered by a central grid and completely wireless. They provided perfectly clear audio and video anywhere within city limits, and for a few miles beyond. He shouldn't be getting any kind of static on it, and it shouldn't have any trouble connecting. Section Five, GD's top-security military projects level, was shielded to prevent phone signals, but Russell's lab wasn't in Section Five. He should be able to raise Allison without a problem.

Unless . . .

Quickly Carter scanned the house's interior. And what he saw made his stomach clench. The kitchen counter was granite now, just like the counter by the stove. The plant was gone, replaced by an elegant abstract sculpture that practically screamed Stark's influence. As did the floating seats that hovered in place of the barstools.

The kitchen was a seamless whole. It had been half and half before, half his world and half this one, because the two realities had been so close to overlapping completely. But now it was all one—and the wrong one.

Allison and Zane and the Russells must have fixed the problem. They'd gotten the worlds to start shifting apart again.

But he and Kevin were trapped on the wrong side!

“That should take care of that, at least.” Jo hung up
and tucked her phone back into her pocket. She could have issued an alert from anywhere, of course—all of Eureka's smartphones were linked together, and she and Carter and Henry had special access that let them broadcast to all phones simultaneously for exactly this kind of emergency. It was both scary and reassuring that Henry had expected major crises that would require contacting the whole town at once.

But Jo hadn't wanted to try sending the alert while driving, especially not under such hazardous conditions. She'd also wanted to see the situation firsthand, which had required going out in the thick of it. And she thought and functioned best here, at work. It was her safe haven, and had been since she'd first signed on as Eureka's deputy sheriff.

Besides, the office had a whole array of equipment housed within its walls, including systems set up to enhance the power of an all-phones broadcast. Sending it from here meant the signal would reach absolutely everyone, even those in heavily shielded areas. The only place the alert couldn't penetrate was GD's Section Five, but anyone working down there was most likely obsessed with whatever project they were on, and probably wasn't going to be driving anytime soon.

“No more disappearing, reappearing drivers?” Fargo asked. He was sitting in Carter's chair again, with his feet up on the desk, and he was tossing Carter's baseball back and forth. Or at least he was trying—he was missing the catch about half the time, and he'd already fallen out of the chair twice while scrambling back for the ball and overbalancing. He'd flipped the entire chair over only once so far, which was surprisingly good, all things considered.

Jo was doing her level best to ignore those minor mishaps. She could see they embarrassed him enough as it was. No sense in making it worse by noticing them.

She didn't have to ignore his question, however. “I can't be sure,” she admitted. “All I can do is tell everyone here not to drive if at all possible. And hopefully the other Eureka's sheriff did the same thing. If he did, and people listen, there shouldn't be any cars on the road in either reality, so no, no more disappearing and reappearing vehicles.”