We didn’t have a disinfectant chamber on our end, and there wasn’t one on the portal’s other side.

We’d have to go in raw, microbes and all.

First, we disassembled the bridgemaker and collapsed it back into its portable state. The portal remained imprinted in space, floating an inch above the soil. A pair of men dragged the bridgemaker into the back of the van. They drove off to return to the portal in the barn and alert the rest of the MEAD forces that the bridge to my Earth was established. And to hand off the stolen bridgemaker to eagerly waiting engineers on the widow’s nest.

The rest of us built a small ramp of dirt to allow the van to drive up and into the portal. When the van returned, one of the soldiers drove it up our ramp and into the bridge. After it was inhaled by the passageway, we activated our body shields and followed it.

The bridge worked.

After a nauseating swish through the interdimensional ether, we were spat out in a field near an elementary school.

J Thompson Elementary.

I recognized the place from dozens of laps through the carpool lane and listening to wine-drunk mothers at PTA meetings.

Violet went to school here.

It wasn’t currently in session, but the fact that it looked the same as I remembered – notably, that it wasn’t a pile of rubble on the ground, gave me hope that Michael hadn’t wreaked his havoc on this reality yet.

It also meant we were close to my home.

I understood that the fate of the planet hung in the balance, but I needed to see my family.

“We have to find my husband,” I told Lannon.

He frowned.

“It can’t wait?”

“No,” I answered firmly. “Plus, he’ll be able to tell us what’s happened in the time I’ve been gone.”

He sighed and turned to the soldiers.

“You heard her. Everyone back in the van. We’ll gather intel from the husband and then set up a base of operations. I’ll drive.”

The soldiers piled inside. Someone grabbed the Revella clone from the cab and tossed it in the back of the van like it was a bag of garbage. I supposed it had already fulfilled its purpose. Now that the Republic knew that Revella’s identity had been compromised, they would scrub her access from every facility in the connected multiverse.

Lannon climbed into the driver’s seat and beckoned me to join him in the cab. I did so, and we navigated around a playground to exit the school campus.

The road home looked the same as I remembered.

Nothing seemed to have changed drastically while I was gone.

Lannon pulled out a plastic wand from within his vest. I recognized it. Revella had been wielding one when I first met her.

A helix neutrino scanner.

Guiding the wheel with his left hand, Lannon used his right to click on the scanner and hold it upright like a tiny radio antenna. The device beeped softly and displayed a number on its tiny screen.

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Catching some helix neutrinos on our first sampling. The original radish demon is probably still in this area. Maybe some offspring, too.”

“Some offspring? As in a few? Or a few hundred?”

He shrugged.

“Hard to tell. The original demon will be dripping in neutrinos it carried here from the interdimensional space. Any offspring will have a much weaker signal, since they’ve been born in this reality.”

I scanned the row of shops and boutiques to our right. They looked closed, but it was midmorning on a Tuesday, so that may not have been out of the ordinary.

The streets weren’t busy, but there were a few other cars sharing the road with us.

“It doesn’t look like radish demons have taken over.”

“No. We still might have a chance to exterminate them before they reproduce past the tipping point.”

I guided Lannon to my house. It looked exactly as I remembered but laying my eyes on the property still conjured an unsettling disconnect. Like I was reaching for a deep memory rather than making a daily observance.

Lannon parked the van, and I reached to unbuckle my seatbelt, but he held up a hand to stop me.

“What?” I asked.

He grabbed Revella’s scanner and clicked it on.

It beeped with much greater agitation. An arrow on the screen appeared, pointing at my house. Like a compass with magnetism for overpriced starter homes, the arrow remained locked on my house no matter where Lannon waved the scanner.

“Could be danger inside,” he said. “You hang back. Let us handle this.”

I climbed out of the vehicle as Lannon coordinated his soldiers. They spread out, taking position behind the van or crouching inside the bushes that bordered my modest front yard. Guns were drawn. Someone produced a spearlight rifle like Revella had used before. He aimed it at the front door with home-remodeling intent.

I flipped my vision into the infrared spectrum. There was only one person-shaped heat signature in the house, and it was too cold to be human.

My heartrate quickened.

One of these things was living in my house? What had it done to my family?

Bile bubbled up my esophagus in a nauseating heartburn.

I knelt behind a hedge with one of the soldiers and watched Lannon approach the door. Another soldier carefully laid down a row of explosives under the welcome mat before dashing for cover. Lannon made sure to stop just short of the landmine newly installed on my front porch, squaring his shoulders up to face the entryway.

I’d given up hope that my home was going to make it through this in one piece. The thought didn’t bother me, though. My husband and daughter’s safety was unknown – I couldn’t give a damn about some property damage right now.

I was sure the homeowner’s association would feel differently, but I’d never given a damn about them.

With his right hand wrapped tightly around the grip of his handgun, Lannon used his left to ring the doorbell. He stepped back from the door. Giving the soldiers a clear line of sight.

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Dry-mouthed seconds ticked by. My heart threw itself against my ribs as I watched through the infrared spectrum as the humanoid figure gravitated toward the entrance. I flipped my eyes back to visible light just as the door opened.

The heat silhouette had been too big to be Michael’s true form. I expected to see him in his human shell again. Or another radish demon wearing a human skin that closely resembled its father’s.

I saw myself.

Her hair was longer, but that was because I’d cut several inches off mine while enduring the desert sun on the widow’s nest. The face and build were identical to reflections and photographs I’d seen of myself. I even recognized the blouse she was wearing – it was straight from my own closet.

A woman who looked exactly like me pulled the door open. Her smile fell when she glanced down and saw Lannon gripping his gun.

Before my copy could react, Lannon leapt backward, producing a square of translucent light, which he brandished like a shield. At the same time, the front porch exploded.

Smoke and flame belched up out from the floorboards, sending splinters and dust flying. The micro-communicator in my ear puffed up to protect my tympanic membrane from the concussive blast.

“Fire!” Lannon ordered.

Solders began pouring laser beams into the smoke cloud.

At the same time, the soil beneath my feet began rippling with malevolent anticipation. I put a hand down for stability. A gust of wind from within the cloud cast the smoke away.

A radish demon, complete with lava-tinted scales and sinewy anaconda arms, had burst free from the humanoid shell that had borne my face. The husk of skin ripped and peeled off like a t-shirt that was five sizes too small. Free from its disguise, the monster swelled to double my height.

More laser blasts peppered the beast as it raised a hand and made the power lines overhead explode in an avalanche of sparks. Little fires started in the dry grass underneath.

“I was warned multiversers like you might show up,” the demon growled to us with a disapproving tone. “I thought we made it clear that this is our reality now.”

An armor-piercing shot punched into its belly. The demon was knocked into the pile of rubble that was formerly my front porch. It didn’t bleed, but the blast had ripped through the scales, revealing shiny blue gel underneath its flesh.

The demon waved a hand our way, and the earth swirled into a cresting wave that rose up and poured down on half of us. The demon scrambled for cover, and I lost sight of it as a mountain of dirt fell on top of me.

The world went dark.

The weight would’ve crushed a normal person. Fortunately, my body shield protected me from the mass of the soil. I held my breath, letting the oxygen injector take over. According to Dr. Glass, I had about ten minutes of synthetically oxygenated blood before the injector ran out of reserves.

Even with my augmented strength, it was hard to dig myself free from the oppressive smother of the ground. A navigator arrow in the corner of my vision directed me upward as I clawed away at the dirt as quickly as I could manage.

My anxiety was growing. I was stuck temporarily buried alive while this demon could be getting away. This demon who might know what happened to Jack and Violet.

I scratched and shoved at dirt, kicking my way up to the surface. After a half-minute of struggle, I burst through. I tumbled out of the mountain that had been erected in my yard, just as Lannon freed himself nearby.

“You okay?” he asked me.

I cut off the oxygen injector and took a fresh breath of air.

“Yeah.”

He pressed a button on his watch, and said, “acknowledged.”

He turned to me, pointing down the block.

“They’ve got eyes on it. Let’s go this way to intercept.”

I climbed to my feet, dusting myself off. Lannon started jogging down the street with his effortless antelope gait. I caught up and ran alongside him.

“What was that?” I asked. “Why did it look like me?”

“It was a trap,” he huffed. “Designed to catch your husband if he returned to the house.”

A weight was lifted. If the radish demons had laid a trap for Jack, it meant he was still alive.

“But why? Why would it go after him?”

We rounded a corner and Lannon slowed down, raising a hand to stop me. We began walking down a tight pathway between two duplexes.

“After you and your mother abandoned this reality, that left him as the only human on this Earth who knows about radish demons. He’s a loose end.”

I studied Lannon.

Something wasn’t right about that statement. I stopped in the middle of the alleyway.

“What?”

“One second.”

I fiddled with the dial on my watch, tuning my vision to the infrared setting.

Lannon disappeared.

There was nothing there. No heat signature.

Fuck.

I jumped back onto the visible light spectrum, and Lannon reappeared. I swiped a hand at him, and it passed right through his torso. The swipe disrupted his entire being. His phantasmic form wavered and dissolved into nothingness.

“How’d you figure out it was a hologram?” a voice rumbled from where my back was turned.

I felt an awful presence lording over me. I shuddered involuntarily and turned to face the radish demon. It stood a few feet away, waiting for an answer.

We were alone in the alleyway. This was a trap. And I’d been led straight into it like a peanut-brained rat to a block of stale cheese.

“Lannon never called her ‘my mother,’” I said. “He always called her ‘my mom.’”

The demon raised its hairless brow with reptilian admiration.

“Sharp observation.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew conversation was a way to buy myself a few extra moments of survival, but coming up with small talk for an interdimensional demon was harder than I expected.

He filled the gap.

“We thought you left this reality for good after our father almost killed you. Why are you back?”

A nagging voice in my head gently suggested that it wouldn’t be wise to explain that we’d returned to this Earth to exterminate the radish demon infestation.

“You know,” I said. “I guess I got homesick.”

The serpentine head bobbed closer to me, ignoring my previous comment, and asked, “what about your mother? Is she coming back? I don’t sense her presence.”

There was a note of longing in the question.

This wasn’t even Michael. This was one of his offspring who’d never met her, and it still had a connection to my mother? Even when she’d been gone for over two months? I was freshly disgusted by how tightly Michael had imprinted on her.

“No,” I said. “She’s not coming back.”

The change was instant. Venom-soaked teeth bared and the earth beneath us began to tremble.

“Why not?” the monster bellowed.

“I…”

Again, the small talk was hard to conjure while locking eyes with a fuming planet-killing monster.

“I’ll make you tell me where she is.”

He lurched forward with supernatural speed, and a clawed hand sunk its rusty-nail grip into my body shield. I was thrown against the wall of a house, ragdolling hard against the cinderblock with enough force to crack cement. The deceleration of the impact jarred me, but white sparks from the body shield blossomed all around as the kinetic energy from the blow was absorbed.

I guessed I had enough juice to survive one or two more strikes of that magnitude.

The demon was on me again in and instant, slashing at my head. I instinctively tried to protect my face with my forearm. My efforts to shove the demon off were ineffective. This thing was like a fucking mountain. Its gravity was immense.

“Shield, shock!” I shouted.

Electricity flashed all around us, permeating the alleyway with the pungent scent of hot ozone.

The demon barely flinched.

I grabbed my gun and blasted it in the face. The shot stunned it for a half second before a clawed hand knocked the weapon out of my grasp.

Red letters flashed in the corner of my vision.

Warning: Shield battery at twenty-five percent.

God damnit.

This wasn’t how I wanted to go – getting my guts ripped out by some demonic baby duckling trying to reunite itself with my mother. I would’ve rather the bridgemaker failed and killed me quickly in a black hole.

Before I could be shredded to ribbons by the slashing claws, the demon was struck with a blast of laser light that knocked it off me.

I kicked the jump-thrusters in my boots. They blasted a spray of air that propelled me a dozen yards away. I rolled awkwardly to my feet and oriented myself. Lannon was running my way with a spearlight rifle. He squared up and landed another shot, pushing the demon back with beams of energy that cut into its gelatinous core.

The demon looked weakened by the injuries. It turned to run, warping the gravity of the concrete sidewalk to pinch up a barrier of crumbling cement.

“Now!” Lannon ordered.

He threw down an umbrella shield, which sprouted a dome of protective light around us. At the end of the alleyway, right where the demon was scrambling, an explosion erupted. It disintegrated the concrete barrier like a house of cards, sending chips of cement flying in all directions. They splattered against Lannon’s force field like sticks of chalk. The heat from the blast seeped through the layer of protective energy and its concussive power rocked the earth under my shoes.

Then, silence.

Lannon stomped on the control, deactivating the umbrella shield, but he kept his gun aimed down the alleyway.

“I think we got it,” he said.

I examined Lannon through the infrared spectrum with a gambler’s distrust. He had a normal heat signature. This wasn’t a hologram, and it wasn’t a radish demon wearing a human disguise.

“It’s dead?”

“Let’s see.”

He crept forward, rifle perched in shooting position. I picked up my gun and shadowed him as we approached the settling dust and smoke.

A group of MEAD soldiers, all with distinct heat signatures, stood over the blackened remains of a radish demon. There wasn’t much in the ways of internal organs. Just shreds of scaly flesh, half a leg, and smoking blue goop. The air was acrid with the stench of radishes mixed with vinegar. It burned my nose.

“Well,” one of the soldiers laughed. “One down. Just got to do that a few more times.”

“We’ve got to link up with reinforcements,” someone else said.

“We have to connect with local law enforcement first,” another voice chimed. “We can’t bring our army into this reality unannounced.”

“We’ll do all that,” Lannon said. “But first we should try to figure out what happened to Laura’s family.”

“I know Jack’s alive,” I said. “This demon was a trap for him.”

Lannon nodded and fished a palm computer out of his pocket and typed a few commands. He handed it to me.

“It’s Jack’s number. Call it. Maybe we can get an answer.”