Road Less Traveled (28 page)

Of course, if she didn't do something now to correct the damage her other self had caused, she might not survive anyway. None of them would.

“We need to reset the frequencies,” Allison rasped, her throat still hoarse from the recent shock. She was still propping herself up against the console, she realized, and levered herself to a standing position, then took a deep, slow breath and straightened up properly.

“Trying,” Zane replied over his shoulder, his fingers dancing across the keyboard. “But the changes were locked in.”

Allison reached past him and typed in a command. Then she pressed her finger to a small scanner set to one side, and winced slightly as a tiny needle pierced the flesh and drew a single drop of blood.

“Identity confirmed: Allison Blake, Director, GD,” the screen flashed in one corner. “Access granted.”

“Try it now,” she commanded. Zane nodded and, retrieving the keyboard from her, canceled the lockdown.

“I've got access again,” he confirmed. He pulled up the frequency diagram and figures. Then he called up the ones they'd built off their previous calculations. “One digit off, that's all it took.” He shook his head. “Clever.” His fingers massaged the keys. “I'm resetting it now.” The top diagram shifted. Now it matched the lower one exactly. “Okay, we're all set.”

The other Eureka's Dr. Russell nodded in the monitor. “I've got it,” she told them. “Configuring new energy packets now.” She tapped in more commands. “A minute, maybe two, and we'll be good to try again.”

There was a strange shimmer in the air right beside Allison, and the tiny hairs on her arms tingled. She glanced over and frowned. The disturbance was faint, as if the air itself were rippling, and was only a little wider than she was, but arcing a foot or more above her head. Then she glanced back at the overhead screen—and gasped.

Nathan was starting to fade from view.

Realizing what that meant, Allison took a step back. And just in time, too, as the shimmer darkened. There were details beginning to appear within it—a human form, tall and broad-shouldered, in a dark suit. Darker blotches at the top and just below that—hair and a beard. She couldn't see the eyes yet, but she knew them all too well.

Nathan Stark was returning to Eureka. Her Eureka. But not her Nathan Stark. Not exactly.

A tiny, tiny part of Allison smiled and nodded. “You can steal Kevin from me,” it said, sad and gleeful simultaneously. “But I get Nathan back in return.”

She stamped that part down and threw it aside. This wasn't a game. These were real people, people she loved. People they both loved. She wasn't going to treat them like pieces on a checkerboard.

“It looks like we're running out of time,” Nathan stated, holding up his hands to study them as they wavered between the two worlds. His words echoed strangely, heard both in the speakers and from inches away simultaneously, both not quite with his full resonance but vibrating from the strange doubling.

“Damn, that's not good,” Zane agreed, starting as he swiveled back to watch Nathan's dramatic appearance. “We're dead center for the overlap—the pivot, essentially. If people are starting to merge here, our realties are almost finished overlapping. We've got an hour, maybe less, before they collide completely—and squash everything in both worlds flat as a pancake.”

“Sending the energy burst now!” the other Russell reported. She stabbed a button, and the lights on her data banks and other equipment flashed as her system fired off the reconfigured energy.

Everyone waited. Allison realized she was holding her breath. So was Nathan, she noticed—he was almost completely on their side now, with just a shimmer remaining behind the other Dr. Russell. A few more seconds, and he'd be here in the flesh. Her hand was already reaching out to touch him, and she forced herself to withdraw it. Now was not the time, and she didn't want to open that door, anyway. Not until she knew what was going to happen with Kevin, with her, with Nathan—with all of them.

So they waited.

“Yes!” The whisper came from her side, and Allison turned back to Nathan again. He still had his hands up in front of him. But was it her imagination, or were they less solid than they'd been a second ago? She squinted at the monitor. Had the afterimage behind Russell gotten darker?

Another second passed, then two, and Allison nodded even though a little piece of her heart was breaking all over again. Nathan's presence behind the other Russell was definitely gaining solidity once more, even as he was turning translucent beside her. He was returning to his own Eureka.

It was working.

“We've stopped the overlap!” Dr. Russell announced. “We've achieved stasis!”

Allison had never thought she'd be so happy to hear that nothing was happening.

“Fire another energy burst,” she and Nathan told the other Russell at the same time, and they smiled at each other in the monitor. Allison looked away first. She didn't want him to see the fresh tears that had sprung up. He was solidly back in his own world now, not a trace of him remaining here, but she thought she could almost feel his presence still beside her. It ached.

“Second burst,” the other Russell confirmed, entering the commands and hitting the activation button. The wait felt less tense this time, like they already knew what the outcome would be. But Allison held her breath anyway.

“We've got movement!” Zane reported what felt like hours later, but had probably only been seconds. “Our realities are shifting apart again!”

“Yes!” Dr. Russell turned and held out a hand, then laughed as Zane slapped it instead. “We did it!”

“We still have a ways to go,” Nathan warned in the monitor. Yet he was smiling. “But it's definitely a start. We'll have to take the rest of the separation slowly, to keep from tearing anything apart by wrenching it loose. Nice and easy. Another energy burst, Dr. Russell, but not for a few minutes, please.” He met Allison's eyes again, and she saw the understanding there, and the compassion he kept hidden from most people but had never been able to disguise from her.

He was giving her time.

Time for Carter to find Nathan's Allison. Time to find Kevin.

Time to bring him back home.

She just hoped it would be enough, because they couldn't delay too long. They still had to combat the inertia that had built up over the past two days, as the worlds drifted together. If they let up the pressure for too long, they ran the risk of that inertia overpowering the new push apart. Their worlds could swing back toward one another. And if that happened, they probably wouldn't be able to pry them apart a second time.

Their realities would collide completely, destroying everyone and everything.

Allison appreciated the gesture Nathan was making. But they both knew they couldn't risk their entire realities just for the sake of her son. Better for Kevin to be trapped on the other side and alive than for all of them to die.

She hoped it wouldn't come to that.

There was nothing she could do about it, though.

It was all up to Carter, now.

“Come on, come on!” Carter hammered the horn with
the heel of one hand, the other still gripping the wheel tightly as he tried to maneuver around a small silvery car that had swerved onto the road right in front of him. He cut into the opposite lane and sped up, racing past the smaller vehicle and then switching back into his proper lane again ahead of it.

But when he glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure the little car wasn't too close behind, it was gone.

“What the hell?”

His attention was jerked back to the front by a flicker of movement ahead and off to the side. He was approaching an intersection, a minor one of two roads with stop signs on the other lane, and a sporty red sedan was sitting there revving its engine, clearly waiting the customary few seconds before peeling out again.

It would sail right across Carter's path, and there wasn't enough distance for him to brake in time to let it get past, and too much space for him to speed up and hope to scoot by before it reached him.

The sedan was going to wind up smashing full into him.

He braced for impact, clenching his jaw and squeezing his eyes half-shut. His whole body tensed, and his other hand curled around the steering wheel as well, arms locked in place.

But the collision never came.

Surprised, Carter glanced around. He was crossing the intersection now, but the red sedan had disappeared.

“Okay, welcome to the phantom highway,” he muttered as he sped on past.

At the next corner, Carter slowed and took a sharp right—

—and almost rammed a rusty green pickup truck as it barreled on by.

“Watch where you're going!” he shouted, rolling down his Jeep window so he could stick his head out. “You had a stop sign, you know!”

But something nagged at the back of his mind. He checked the rearview again.

There was no stop sign.

“I'm losing my mind,” he told himself. “Clearly.”

But there was another explanation, he realized.

The overlapping realities.

He was seeing—and almost running into—vehicles from the other Eureka. They were wandering over into his world, or maybe he was wandering into theirs. He knew there was a stop sign back there, but when he'd looked it hadn't been there. Had the sign vanished into that other town, or had he? There probably wasn't any way to tell. What it meant was that this race across town was going to be a thousand times more difficult. Normally he just had to watch for cars that didn't get out of his way fast enough, and oncoming traffic that couldn't see his lights and hear his sirens in time.

Now he had to worry about drivers who would never see him coming because they were in a whole other world.

Just then his phone chirped. He fished it out with one hand and held it to his ear.

“Carter.”

“Carter, it's Jo.” His deputy sounded frazzled, which was rare for her. He could also hear background noises—the rush of wind and the rumble of an engine—that told him she was in her car. Great minds thought alike. “We've got problems.”

“Tell me about it.” He hit the brakes and his Jeep fishtailed as he tried not to rear-end an old-fashioned wood-paneled station wagon that had not been in front him ten seconds ago.

“Cars and other vehicles are sliding into our Eureka from the parallel world,” she reported. The way she said it so calmly almost made it sound like a normal occurrence, like saying that a streetlight was down or that someone had been caught speeding for the third time in a week. “Driving right now is extremely dangerous.”

“Yeah, I think I figured that out.” He swerved to the left to avoid a tall, powerfully built biker in a blue spandex biking suit on a black and blue racing bike, and sped up to get past him. The biker was still there when Carter drew alongside, but now the biker was wearing red and his bike was red and gray. The man himself looked the same, however, and he nodded to Carter as the Jeep pulled past.

“Are you on the road right now?”

“Allison—the other Allison—took Kevin,” he explained. “I've got to get him back.”

“Damn.” There was something more than just shock and anger in his deputy's voice. “It's my fault,” she added a second later.

“What?”

“She came to talk to me in the cafeteria,” Jo explained. “I didn't realize it was the other Allison. But she was talking about Kevin, and how worried she was about him. I said . . . I said something about his school, and how they were there for him.” Her words were heavy, her voice dull. “I told her where to find him, Carter.”

“You couldn't have known,” he assured her. “None of us realized until it was too late. And she'd have found out from someone else. This isn't your fault.”

“Maybe.” Jo's voice had turned brisk and businesslike again. “Do you need any help?”

“No, I think I've got this,” he replied slowly, after considering her offer carefully. “I don't want to spook her. Where are you, anyway?”

“Almost back to the office.” He could hear the sound of squealing brakes, and someone yelling. Was that Fargo? “I'm going to issue a city-wide alert, tell everyone to stay in their homes and off the streets.”

“Good.” That had been his thought as well. The streets were dangerous right now, and the more people they could get off them, the better. Which led to another idea. “Have Allison get in touch with Sheriff Fargo—she can have Russell talk to their Russell, if necessary. If he issues the same alert on his side, that should cut down on traffic considerably.”

“I'm on it.” He could hear the pause. “Are you okay? You sure you can get Kevin back on your own?”

“No,” Carter admitted. “I'm not sure. But I've got to do it anyway.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. Oh, and don't forget about the Thunderbird. Now would be a perfect time to get it out of Eureka—with everything that's going on, he could walk right by us, balancing the Thunderbird egg on the tip of his nose, and we'd never even notice.”

“Got it.” Jo hung up, and Carter slipped his phone back into his pocket. Even if Jo reached the office a few minutes from now, and put out the alert immediately, and everyone got off the streets as they'd been told, that was still ten to fifteen minutes before the streets were clear. And he couldn't be sure “Sheriff” Fargo would even receive, much less follow, his advice in issuing the same order. In which case there could still be plenty of traffic, only it would all be from the other side.