A fighter jet streaked overhead as I was running, ovulating a cluster of blinking bombs from its underbelly like frog spawn.

The jet wasn’t MEAD or Republic. It was American. I could spot the painted flag on the tail.

I swore, opening a direct line to Agent Clifton.

“What’s with the airstrike?”

The bombs weren’t particularly effective. Weapons from this reality didn’t have radar scramblers, so the drones could react to the movement and hit them with lasers the second they were dropped. The explosives combusted harmlessly a few thousand feet in the air.

Agent Clifton spoke in my ear.

“There are foreign powers fighting a war on American soil. The director himself ordered this strike. It’s out of my hands.”

“You know the bombs aren’t going to do anything, right?”

“Lannon told me as much, but we can’t stand by and do nothing.”

“I wish you would.”

“Me too.”

Clifton clicked off. My running had brought me back to the conflict. A row of tanks could be seen through the gaps in crystalized foam and wire matrixes. They were unloading a steady barrage of missiles at the MEAD stronghold around the portal. Most of the missiles were shredded by protective artillery or blocked by hastily erected force fields, but some slipped past and detonated with enough force to carve ice cream scoop sinkholes into the earth and rip through the body shields of MEAD fighters.

The mass of Lannon’s soldiers had received a boost from the reinforcements. They were centered around the portal but spread out in all directions, taking shelter behind buildings, trees, and portable force fields.

Behind the portal, I saw my mother. She was dressed in the cotton robes favored back on the widow’s nest and sported the only head of graying hair in the crowd.

I ran to her, staying far away from the front lines.

“Mom!” I shouted.

She turned, face brightening at the sight of me. She stepped forward for an embrace, but I stopped short.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’m trying to help.”

I pointed at the flashes of laser light nearby.

“Do you see all this? You don’t have any protection. You’ll be killed out here.”

She didn’t back down.

“On the widow’s nest, they told me you were in danger. I had to do something.”

A voice updated the main communication channel.

“The neutrino scanner’s going crazy. Suspected radish demons incoming. Treat with suspicion but do not engage at this time.”

I looked around, scanning for Michael in either one of his forms.

No blond hipsters or giant reptilian monsters to be seen.

Then, the earth began rumbling. A sinkhole opened up on the other side of our barricade, swallowing two Republic tanks. They sank into the depression like a pair of drunkards slumped over a bar, conking their gyrating cockpits against each other. The machines whirred angrily, fighting to pull themselves out, but the soil and concrete fragments continued churning around them until the tanks were almost totally submerged.

I blinked, and there were radish demons everywhere.

They didn’t even try to hide themselves, arriving in their natural form with scales, tails, and hooked claws protruding from the ends of their fingertips.

There were dozens of them, swarming onto the battlefield like ants pouring over the lip of a nest. They charged through the ranks of MEAD soldiers without paying them a second thought, heading straight for the tanks.

Our soldiers reacted in surprise and terror, leaping away from the demons and aiming their guns defensively. To their credit, nobody pulled a trigger.

The radish demons shrugged off the peppering of laser beams from the drones overhead. With a raised hand, a demon brought several of them crashing to the ground. More tanks were buried alive underneath a tidal wave of soil and asphalt conjured by demons manipulating the gravity in synchrony.

“Fucking mackerel,” someone breathed on the main communication line, probably not even aware we could hear them.

One of the demons appeared in front of my mother and me. He grinned a delirious toothy smile. I reflexively put a hand on my gun.

“Sally! You came back!”

She smiled back, uncomfortably.

“Yes. I did.”

“Do you remember me?” the demon begged. His Goliathan height cast a shadow over us as we peered upwards to meet his eyes. His breath was caustic. My nostrils flared as the stench of rotting vegetables seeped over us.

My mother paused for a moment, deciding on a response.

Overhead, another American jet looped overhead for a bombing run. The demons flipped the gravitational pull on the bombs it dropped, sending them drifting skyward like lead balloons. The aircraft itself snapped a wing as it passed through the gravitational and electromagnetic grasp of so many radish demons.

The plane roared and spewed smoke as it spiraled into a fireball wreck a few miles in the distance. I shuddered, but the demon was talking again before I could speak up.

“Here. Let me show you.”

Before our eyes, the monster shrank, pulling its long sinewy limbs inward and compressing its towering frame into a cloak of fibers it pulled out from a marsupial pouch in its belly. The fibers solidified as he blanketed himself with a sheet of the stuff, sticking to his frame and taking on humanoid proportions.

It was Michael. As I’d originally met him. Complete with that stupid haircut and a plain black sweater tucked into wrinkled jeans.

“See. It’s me.”

My mother smiled, sensing her plan had worked.

“Michael.”

“Who are these people? They’re not from this reality. Why do they want to hurt you?”

“They have a disagreement with my daughter’s friends,” she waved at the MEAD fighters, surging forward with renewed energy as a battalion of radish demons crushed every Republic tank they encountered with frenzied gusto. “They’ll kill me just for being affiliated with this group.”

Michael’s forehead, stained with a few spots of acne, furrowed in a blind rage.

“I’ll kill them. I’ll kill every last one of them.”

He squinted at her, animalistic fever cutting through his words, even when spoken through human lips.

“Why did you leave us? All of my children were born without your presence to anchor them to this place. We didn’t have access to your knowledge of this Earth. We were stumbling in the dark.”

“I had to go,” my mother said. Firmly.

“But you’re here to stay? With all the children?”

“I’m here to stay.”

Michael turned on me.

“And you. You took her away from us.”

His face curdled in disgust. My fingers tightened around the gun.

“Leave her alone,” my mother ordered. Even I was stunned by the authority she mustered.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Michael turned back to her.

“That’s my daughter,” she said. “You won’t hurt her.”

“But we have to. She takes up space. She breathes atmosphere that the children will need. She doesn’t even like you.”

My mother stepped forward, closing the distance between herself and Michael. His human form was a few inches taller than her, but she went chest-to-chest with him. The smell must’ve been like stuffing her face in a soiled diaper, but my mother didn’t flinch.

“If you touch my daughter, I’ll leave this Earth again. And I won’t come back.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would.”

“You don’t have anywhere to go. Your home is on this Earth.”

“I don’t give a damn where my home is. If you hurt her, I’m leaving.”

Michael glowered at her.

“You weren’t mean like this before.”

“Before,” my mother snapped, “I was lonely, and you took advantage of that. Now, if you want to use me as an anchor on this reality, you’ll have to do it on my terms.”

I couldn’t stop myself from grinning at the agitation on Michael’s face. He looked like he was sloshing around a threat in his cheeks, but he swallowed it down rather than risk my mother following through on her word.

A voice crackled into my micro-communicator

“How are we doing with the radish demons?”

“There aren’t as many as it seems. Some are holograms.”

“They’ve destroyed most of the tanks in that first wave. The rest of the Republic fleet is approaching.”

“Status on the bridge, Lannon?”

“Still need an engineer. This thing’s giving me critical alarms, but it’s not responding to any controls. I don’t know what’s happening to it.”

“Ah shit. Headed to your location now.”

“Everyone, keep your guns on that portal. This fight isn’t over, the Republic bastards are going to hit us with everything they’ve got now that they know we have radish demons on our side.”

We were sheltering behind the backside of the portal, which appeared as a floating obsidian circle pinned in space. A dozen soldiers had their weapons pointed at the other side, ready to shred any enemies who came through.

Lannon came running over, conversing with an engineer.

“…can we do about it?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s safe to be this close.”

I stepped closer to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Why not?” Lannon demanded.

“It’s been compromised.”

“But what does that mean?”

“Think of this bridge like road with a fence on either side. It’s been corrupted. Part of the fence has been torn down, and wildlife from outside can get onto the road.”

“Wildlife?”

“Get away from the portal!” the engineer shouted at the assembled soldiers.

Confused, they looked to Lannon for guidance.

“Do as he says!”

“What’s going on?” my mother asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I think we should get farther away from this thing.”

I gently led her in a retreat from the portal. Michael followed, keeping his body between us and the Republic tanks.

“Your engineer is right,” Michael said. “There’s something inside that bridge. I can sense it.”

“More Republic soldiers?” I asked.

“No. Something much bigger.”

With a hangman’s dread, I recalled what Revella had said when she’d warned me about using the bridgemaker illegally.

It’s a big multiverse out there, and radish demons are at the bottom of the food chain.

“What’s in the bridge, then?” I asked, but Michael put a hand up to stop me.

He closed his eyes, concentrating hard. Explosions and the snaps of electrical discharges jamboreed all around us as the gelatinous seconds passed.

Michael’s eyes snapped open.

“It’s headed this way.”

“What?”

“Something that size? It must be a hungry centipede.”

“A what?”

Michael became agitated. He grabbed my mother’s hand and began tugging her along.

“It’s what we call them. We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

My mother stumbled into a run as she allowed Michael to lead her away. I hurried after them, speaking into the main channel.

“There’s something in the bridge. A centipede? I don’t know what that is, but it’s got the radish demon scared.”

A million voices chattered at once.

“Radish demon? Scared?”

“What?”

“Run?”

“Centipede?”

Moments later, all questions were answered.

There were shouts from the MEAD soldiers who’d lingered around the portal despite the engineer’s warning. The perfect circle of the portal became irregular. It stretched and strained around the edges like a birth canal as a big-headed baby was forced through it.

First, the fangs appeared. They burst through the portal at our end of the bridge like two mammoth’s tusks. Then, a shiny black and blue boulder of a head thrust itself through. Its vortex of a mouth opened and released a steel-grinding scream. Four eyes blinked along the side of its head, taking in our reality for the first time.

The body of the centipede appeared. In the same way a clown draws an endless chain of handkerchiefs from his sleeve, a segmented body continued to ascend out of the portal. The segments ballooned out, tripling in width after they squeezed through the portal, as though this thing had compressed itself to worm through the bridge’s exit. Dozens of long whiskers hung from its head and body, flailing in the air. When the tail of its body finally emerged, the thing towered over the tallest buildings in downtown Pemberton. It had to be manipulating our gravity to not be crushed under its own weight. It screamed again, and the radish demons reacted.

Like Michael, they began to flee.

I turned and hurried to rejoin my mother, who was now accompanied by Michael and two other demons in a protective entourage.

Casting glances behind me, I saw the long whiskers hanging off the centipede’s frame flash like lightning bolts, elongating and snatching demons and humans alike off the ground. The wiry tendrils stuffed a dozen humans and two radish demons into the swirling mouth of the centipede. There was a haze in the air around it’s buzzing teeth. The scream intensified, like the swirling maw was a jet engine. The first victims disappeared inside.

This thing ate radish demons like they were peanuts.

The main communication line was an uproar of panic. Screams and curses and utter chaos. Sirens had begun whooping all over the city with a head-splitting peal. I struggled to tune out all the noise.

The demons picked up my mother and shared her weight. No longer limited by her achy knees, they broke out into a full sprint. Warping the soil around their footfalls, they ran like Olympic sprinters. Even with all my augmentations, I could barely keep pace.

They were going to run right past where Jack and Violet were sheltering, and I couldn’t let my family be split up.

“Where are you taking her?” I shouted.

“The other side of the continent.”

“What?”

“Buying ourselves a few hours to find a way to escape this reality. This Earth is over.”

“Over?”

They kept running, ignoring me.

“Mom!” I shouted.

She’d been staring at the centipede looming overhead. At my voice, she snapped out of her horror.

“Stop!” she ordered.

“Sal…” Michael began.

“I said stop.”

They did, although they didn’t look happy about it.

“Answer my daughter’s questions,” she said.

“What the hell is that thing?” I asked.

“A hungry centipede. The interdimensional void is crawling with them. We do our best to avoid them, because as you can see, they eat us.”

“That’s why you call it a hungry centipede?”

Michael stared at me with a look of consternation.

“No. We call them that because whenever they find an Earth with oxygen, they eat the entire atmosphere.”

“Huh?”

“They crave oxygen the same way we crave radishes. Look. It’s already started.”

I whipped my head back to the colossus. Now that Michael had said it, I could feel the fingers of a breeze shifting my hair toward the monster. Little wisps had begun peeling off low-hanging clouds, spooling along the air currents pouring into that swirling, screaming mouth.

A few laser blasts blinked against the segmented armor body. Explosions blossomed where missiles touched its frame. The creature didn’t react. I don’t think it even noticed. It just sat in a coil the size of a small mountain, rearing its massive head as it inhaled air like a giant vacuum cleaner.

Whiskers continued to snap up men, women, and demons from a half-mile radius, tossing them into the digestive vortex.

“There’s no way something that size can fit all the oxygen on Earth inside it’s body.”

Again, Michael’s expression suggested he was dumbfounded by my stupidity.

“These things spend most of their time living outside three-dimensional space. They don’t follow all the laws of your physical sciences.”

“So, what do we do about it?”

“Nothing!” Michael snapped. The tenor of his human voice cracked with anxiety. “We run. That’s what we do. Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll find another weak point in the shell of this universe and we can slip out the same way I arrived, but there’s no salvaging this situation. It’s over for this Earth.”

“I refuse to believe that,” I said.

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“This planet has over seven billion people on it. There has to be a way to kill this thing or make it go away.”

“You really don’t realize how small you humans are, do you?”

I ignored him.

“Before we do anything else, we’re picking up my husband and daughter,” I said. “Then we can talk about what to do next.”

With growing impatience, the radish demons toted my mother overhead as we ran over to where I’d left Jack and Violet. They both reacted with shock at the appearance of the demons in their true forms. Jack started and Violet tried to hide herself in the folds of his shirt.

Jack lowered the umbrella shield and looked up at me, still relegated to sitting on the dirt, thanks to his injury.

“These are radish demons?”

“You bet.”

“And they’re on our side now?”

I looked over at them. If they didn’t think this Earth was viable anymore, then they didn’t have a reason to still be invested in my mother’s wellbeing. No point in having an anchor to a world you were abandoning, after all.

But they still carried her on their shoulders like dutiful servants. Judging by that, and the fact that they’d seemed to lose all rationality when presented with anything that threatened the bond between themselves and my mother, I wondered if they even had a choice. Maybe the imprinting process was that powerful.

I answered Jack’s question.

“Looks like they are.”

I picked him up carefully and tossed him over one shoulder. I tucked Violet under my opposite arm.

I signaled to the demons.

“Let’s get somewhere safe. For now.”

We ran.

I was the limiting factor. The speedometer function in my corneal lenses told me I was running close to thirty miles per hour, and it was obvious that the Michael and his two kids were barely even running to pace with me. From how quickly I’d seen them move in a fight, and my growing suspicion that they didn’t experience fatigue, I was beginning to believe they really could cross the continent in a few hours if they’d wanted to.

As we ran, Lannon spoke in my ear.

“Hey. Laura. Your cardiac sensor says you’re still alive. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I guess. Have you ever heard of these hungry centipede things before?”

“We know less about the life forms of the interdimensional void than we do about the bottom of the ocean.”

He followed immediately with, “sorry, it’s an expression from the connected multiverse. You have marine biology on this Earth?”

“We don’t know what the…” I corrected myself because I once again had Violet under my arm. “…what the heck is on the ocean floor here either.”

“Good. The expression still stands.”

“So that means you don’t know how to deal with these things?”

“Unfortunately, no. I’ve stopped getting any reading from the bridge we created – the centipede must’ve destroyed it by crawling through. And since our reinforcement team collapsed their thread behind them, we no longer have any viable portals off this reality.”

“So we’re stuck?”

“Yep.”

I didn’t say it to Lannon, but I was glad the portals were destroyed. Now he and the rest of MEAD couldn’t run away and leave my planet for dead. We were all in this together.

“Okay. Any ideas?”

“I’m sending you a location. Be there in an hour. Clifton and I are organizing a temporary truce for all parties involved today.”

“What are we going to do there?”

“Hopefully, we’re going to figure out how to stop the end of the world.”