Technically, this story fits into the Multiverse War. I may turn it
into a novella some time.
***
The car came at Carl…and then he collapsed in a wave of dizziness. A
man put his hand on his shoulder, helping him to his feet; there was
no car there. He started to move, attempting to dodge the car…and
staggered.
“The car,” he said. “Where did it go?”
“What car?” His helper asked. “The road is clear.”
Carl looked up, around the street; it was all deserted. There were a
handful of cars parked on the side of the road, but for all the
movement that he could see, he and his new friend might have been
the only people in the world. There was no one else around at all,
not even a pedestrian.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I saw a car; it was going to hit me.
What happened?”
“You probably had too much to drink,” the man said, his tone
becoming impatient. “Look; I have to go on to work.”
Carl nodded and let the man go, recognising the signs of the Good
Samaterian getting bored with being pulled into the life of a man he
stopped to help. He reached the other side of the road and entered
the office, passing his car on the way.
“Hey, Carl,” the security guard called. Carl waved as he entered the
elevator, riding up in silence to his office, picking up the paper
that his secretary had left on his desk. The headline jumped out at
him and he gasped.
PRESIDENT ROBERTS ELECTED IN LANDSLIDE!
“But it was President Hasting who get elected,” he said, in outright
horror. He’d heard it on the radio before coming into work. Hasting,
a middle-aged black man, had been giving a victory speech; he
wouldn’t have done that if there had been any doubt at all about the
results, would he?
Carl sighed, feeling dizzy again, and logged on to the Internet. A
brief search revealed a deeper mystery; there was no sign that
President Hasting had ever run in the election campaign. President
Roberts had defeated former President Lumbago.
“I’m going mad,” he muttered. He hadn’t been the same since his wife
died. “I’m going nuts and…”
He nearly collapsed from another wave of dizziness. “I’m going to
have to go sleep it off,” he decided, and left the building. He
drove home very carefully, alert for dizziness, and reached his
house without mishap. There was someone in the house.
“I closed that door,” he snapped, removing his pistol from the glove
compartment. Cold logic and common sense suggested calling the
police; fury forced him onwards. He opened the door…and fainted.
“Carl?” His wife asked. She was standing there, bending over him.
“Carl, are you all right?”
“Dawn?” He asked. “Dawn?”
“I think you’d better get to bed,” Dawn said, her voice becoming
practical. Carl couldn’t argue; seeing his wife alive was more than
he could take. She helped him upstairs, into a neatly-made bed
rather than the mess he’d left in the morning; he pulled her down
into it. She giggled and came willingly.
Afterwards, he wandered downstairs…and stopped. A woman was standing
there, waiting for him. He stared at her and she placed a finger on
her lips, pulling him into the drawing room and closing the door.
“Mr Havie?” She asked. Carl nodded. “I’m afraid there’s been
something of a…displacement.”
Carl blinked. “A displacement?”
She nodded. “I’m afraid, Mr Havie, that this is not your world.”
Carl felt dizzy again. The thought had occurred to him; it had just
been so unbelievable that he had dismissed the thought at once. “The
President,” he said, and then remembered the most important change
of all. “My wife.”
“Indeed,” the woman said. She gave him a dazzling smile. “My name is
Sally, by the way.”
“Carl,” Carl said automatically. “What’s happened?”
Sally pursed her lips. “That’s something of a long story,” she said.
“Suffice it to say that in a seemingly-impossible coincidence,
yourself and your counterpart walked into the same twist in the
space-time continuum at the same time. Naturally, you swapped
places.”
Carl sighed. “You know, I really miss the days when my life made
sense,” he said. “Why is my wife still alive here?”
Sally laughed briefly. “You know, there are people who would agonise
endlessly over why one President got elected, but not over the lives
of individual people,” she said. “Your wife died at a campaign
meeting for would-be President Hasting; your counterpart’s wife
never went because Hasting didn’t win the candidacy.”
“My counterpart,” Carl snapped. He mentally cursed himself for not
thinking of himself first. “What happened to him?”
Sally’s brown eyes were sad, caring. “Don’t you remember?”
Everything fell into place. “That car,” Carl said. “It was going to
hit me.”
“It did hit you – the other you,” Sally said. “Your counterpart died
in the accident, after a desperate attempt by the doctors to save
him.” She frowned. “Normally, if both of you were still alive, we
would offer to exchange you back, but now it’s just you. Do you want
to go back to your own world?”
“They think I’m dead,” Carl said. “They will have held a funeral and
everything.”
“There’s still time,” Sally said. “It hasn’t been that long; plenty
of time for some enterprising young doctor to bring you back to
life. You could return to that world…”
A woman’s voice echoed down the stairs. “Carl…?”
“No,” Carl said. “This world has my wife in it. Everything else is
the same.”
“No, it’s not,” Sally said. “There will be differences.”
Carl shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “My wife is here.
I don’t want to put her through thinking that her husband is dead. I
want to stay.”
He was prepared to fight, but Sally merely nodded. “It’s your
choice,” she said. “Good luck.”
She vanished. Carl heard his wife calling again and walked up the
stairs – back into a life he had lost forever. This time, he was
determined, it would not be wasted.