"That's wrong, isn't it?" Marty nods toward the windshield. He never feels quite comfortable letting go of the steering wheel when he's driving.

"What?" Linda doesn't look up from her phone. Linda rarely looks up from her phone.

"The road." Marty nods again, the sun rising behind the trees to his left and flashing light and shadow across his eyes in a way he's never noticed before. "Doesn't it usually go right here?"

They've been car-pooling for six months now, ever since Marty recognized Linda standing out in front of the Hilltop Apartments waiting for an Uber: the week before, she'd started working two desks over from him on the third floor of Merrill Lynch downtown. He asked, and she agreed that paying him a few bucks for gas and leaving at a set time every day was easier than paying some stranger and then waiting who knew how long for them to show up.

That she's completely gorgeous is great, too, but then Marty finds all women completely gorgeous. She hardly ever smiles, but her sweet, round face doesn't need it. She's short and stocky with hair that's a mix of dark and blonde, and it reaches down to the middle of her back. She always wears a coat and pants, not a dress of any sort, and he's never heard Darryl or Kyle or any of the more pig-brained guys in the third-floor bathroom talk about her the way they talk about some of the other woman who work there.

But that makes things even better. It's like he's got her all to himself.

Not that he has her in any way, shape, or form. When she talks, it's about things on the internet that Marty's never seen. He tried at first to talk to her about the books he reads, science-fiction and fantasy novels mostly, but it turned out that she read books about as often as Marty looked at things on the internet.

So their rides are usually pretty quiet. But now— "I mean," he says, "I'm sure of it. The road always goes to the right around the hill here."

The hills surround downtown, so even though their commute is usually on the order of twenty minutes each way, the route down from the apartment building goes through woods and parkland and suburbs and finally the streets of the city. This part is in the woods, and the road skirts to the right along the bottom of this hill. "I think..." Marty hunches over the wheel, wishing the sun would stop that darn flashing.

From the corner of his eye, he sees Linda jabbing thumbs and forefingers at her phone. "Maps says it goes left." Her head bobs up, then right back down. "Doesn't look like there's any other road, either."

"There isn't." Squinting, Marty shrugs. "I mean, there never has been before." Still sure that something's wrong, he turns the wheel to follow the new road, the road that looks exactly like the road always looks. Except that this one morning out of all the mornings they'vecome this way, it's going around the hill to the left.

The instant his 2020 Civic follows the bend of the road in that direction, though, the road vanishes and the hill vanishes, trees suddenly everywhere like they'd popped up instantly from the ground. The car shudders and jerks, nothing but dirt and rocks and tree roots ahead to drive over, and Marty gives a wordless cry, trying to wrestle the steering wheel away from the spinning it wants to do under his hands.

It doesn't work; the Civic banks right, crashing sidelong into a big pine or something that wasn't there half a heartbeat ago. The engine gives a popping sort of a cough and grinds to a halt, silence dropping down like a sudden fogbank.

"The Hell?" Linda says, and Marty snaps his head over to see that she's still looking at her phone. "My signal just dropped to nothing." She looks up, then, and her eyes go wide. "No," she says, her voice low and sort of strangled sounding. "No, no, no."

A part of Marty wants to say something witty or brave or reassuring like someone in one of the books he's read, but all that's going through his head right at the moment is the same No, no, no.

Something taps on the driver-side window, and Marty snaps his head over in that direction, hoping it's a highway patrol officer or a forest ranger or somebody responsible.

Instead, it's a six-foot-tall raccoon peering in at him.

Except that's impossible, that same part of Marty insists immediately. It must be a person wearing a raccoon costume.

Which is almost as crazy, Marty realizes just as immediately. For one thing, why would a person wearing a racoon costume be wandering around the woods at quarter after seven on a Thursday morning? And second, now that he's been staring at the raccoon for however long he's been staring, the embroidered robe it's got on over its fur registers in his brain, the dark green cloth covered with shapes of leaves done in golden thread.

Another tap comes from the passenger-side window, and for the third time in fewer minutes, he snaps his head over. Linda's done the same, so they're both staring at the second human-sized raccoon wearing a robe that's standing on that side of the car. "Princess," this second raccoon says, its mouth moving in time to the syllables and its scratchy voice sounding exactly how Marty imagines a raccoon's voice would sound if it were calling from outside a closed car window. "It's time."

"No," Linda says again. Or maybe she never stopped saying it: Marty's kind of losing track of things here. "No, no, no."

"Please, Your Highness." The raccoon's pressed his paws together so that the sleeves of its robe sort of fold around them. "This is difficult enough for us all as it is. So if you could please avoid any excessive histrionics—"

"Damn it!" Linda shouts. "You goddamn trash pandas better not be screwing around with me! 'Cause I'm supposed to have another five years at least in this human world before everything goes to Hell!"

The raccoon bowed slightly. "Circumstances dictate otherwise."

A shimmer comes over Linda, and with a sound like a crystal balloon popping—its got more tinkling to it than a regular balloon-popping sound—fur is bursting from her skin, pointed ears springing up through the hair on her head, her hands and face changing shape as a grey-and-white fluffy tail squelches out into the space between her seat and his. "But there's so much I haven't done yet! So much chocolate I haven't eaten! Not to mention garlic! And onions! And sex! I haven't had sex as a human yet!"

Everything inside Marty freezes as she turns a no-longer-human face toward him. "Marty! Humans have sex in the back seats of cars, don't they?"

"Uhh..." And Marty says the first thing that pops into his head. "But you're not a human anymore."

Linda's eyes—shiny and black and wide and staring—go even wider somehow, and she holds a paw-hand up, shifting her stare from him to it. "Damn it!" she shouts again.

"Your Highness," the raccoon outside the car says—and part of Marty can't believe he now has to distinguish between the raccoons inside the car and outside, "you're acting in an unseemly fashion."

Staring at that face, Marty can still see Linda somehow behind the fur and the snout and the quivering not-quite-a-chin. "Damn it!" she shouts for the third time, then she slaps her paw-hand against the door's armrest. White fire crackles around her claws, and the door swings open. "I'm gonna miss you, Marty."

Which is when some parts of Marty's brain shiver and start sparking. "Wait! Did...did you say something about everything going to Hell?"

"Literally." She's sliding out of the car into the dirt and the fallen leaves beside the tree that the right front part of the car's pressed against. "We're trying to experience as much human culture as we can so we can maybe recreate some of it in our universe, but we're not trained anthropologists or whatever." She sighs. "We'll do the best we can, but—"

"Wait!" Every book Marty's read with a similar plotline is suddenly flicking through the bigger and bigger parts of his brain that're getting back to work. "Literally going to Hell? You mean, like, devils and demons and like that?"

"Yeah." Standing now outside the car, she shakes her head. "I've never been involved in a demonic apocalypse before, but there're supposed to get really messy."

"But—" Marty flails his fingers to find the door handle, wrenches and pushes it open and only then thinks of the raccoon who was standing out there. That raccoon's stepped back and out of the way, though, so Marty gives it a nod before turning back to Linda, the top of her head and her big ears visible over the roof of the car. "There's gotta be something we can do, right? Some way to stop it?"

Linda turns and blinks at him. "Stop it?"

"Yeah!" More and more parts of Marty are kicking in, parts he has used in he doesn't know how long. "I mean, if there's a Hell, there's gotta be a Heaven, right?" He hasn't been inside any sort of a church since his confirmation at St. Felicity's ten or eleven years ago, but a bunch of that Catholic stuff is suddenly right there in his head. "You can't have demons without angels, can you?"

Linda blinks some more at him, turns and blinks at the raccoon beside her, then turns back to do some more blinking at him. "We're just raccoon people, Marty. If it's not lurking around the edges, picking up stuff nobody else seems to want, it's pretty much out of our purview."

"But—!" With everything shaking inside and outside Marty, one of the stories he always liked best when he heard it in church as a kid pops up. "What about in the Bible where Abraham's walking along with God before God's gonna destroy Sodom, and Abraham talks God out of doing it if he finds, like, ten innocent people! Can't I, I dunno..." He has to swallow to clear his throat enough to get the words out. "Can't I do that?"

"Whoa." Linda's ears fold back. "You wanna bargain with the Almighty?"

"Well?" Marty waves his arms. "Nobody else is here to do it! Unless—" He catches his breath. "You can! You know what's going on! And you're a princess, so that's gotta carry some weight! And you guys're trying to save our stuff, so you must like humans! Right?"

"Uhh..." Linda looks at the raccoon next to her again, but that raccoon's ears have folded even further than hers. "Really, Marty, that's, like, so far above my paygrade, I can't even begin to think..." Her gaze shifts sideways, then, one claw coming up to tap the side of her muzzle. "I mean, we could go up the side ways to the admin plaza, see what's going on there. 'Cause you're right: if this was really the apocalypse—"

Her mouth scrunches up. "And you know, Marty, that the Bible you folks have here is the 'humans-only' version, right? So it’s just got the basics…"

Ready to grab at anything, Marty decides to ignore that last part. "There’s an admin office somewhere?" And as much as he's disliked dealing with the assistants of the higher-ups during his six years at Merrill, he can't deny that he's pretty good at it. "And we can go there, you said?" Still not sure how all this stuff works, though, he forces himself to stop. "Or would it be better if I didn't get involved?"

She looks torn, her ears flickering between up and down and her claw not stopping its work along the side of her snout. "It'd be better if none of us got involved," she says quietly, but then she sighs. "But yeah. Let's go."

"Your Highness?" asks the raccoon behind him. Marty had forgotten about that one.

Linda's mouth gets scrunchy again. "Go on, both of you," she says with a flick of her claws. "I know you've probably got orders to bring me straight to the palace, but assisting a representative of a doomed populace in making a direct appeal to the Almighty should take precedence." Her scrunchy mouth slips into a sideways grin. "But yeah, if you could maybe take your time getting back, I'd really appreciate it."

Glancing between the two other raccoons, Marty watches them both bow, then they kind of just scurry away. How he can lose sight of two creatures not much shorter than him when he's looking right at them, he has no idea, but they're gone before he can even blink, slipping between the beams of morning light and the shadows cast by the tree branches.

A sigh pulls his attention back to Linda, padding around the back of the car. She's about the same height and size as before, so the pantsuit she'd been wearing as a human still fits her just fine. "I'm not too sure how this'll work." She stops in front of him and sticks out a paw. "Give me your hand, though, and we'll give it a try."

When was the last time he held a woman's hand? Marty reaches over and wraps his fingers gently around her thin finger-things. Only the backs of her paws are fuzzy, he's surprised to find, her palm narrow and dry and pretty much like skin.

Then her claws are curling around to poke the back of his hand. "And we're off!" she cries, leaping sort of forward and to the side at the same time. Marty, not sure what he should do, finds himself dragged completely off his feet, the woods swirling away, her grip hauling him bodily into a random flashing of light and dark a lot like, he realizes quickly, the sun and shadow patterns he first noticed when driving earlier.

This time, though, it's all around, flapping like flags in a windstorm, and it's carrying him away with it.

Except he's not being carried away, Linda's paw a clamp around his hand. He can't quite see her with the light and the darkness ebbing and flowing, but he manages to bring his other hand up to grab her paw, too, and that makes him feel a little better about things.

Not much, he has to admit, but a little. His feet don't seem to touching ground, for instance, his legs trailing out behind him like a kite tail. But the ride's pretty smooth, not churning nearly as much as he might think, looking at the air or the clouds or whatever all this stuff actually is around him.

How long it goes on, he's not sure. But it can't be too many minutes before he and Linda pop out into something that isn't a mix of black fog and white mist. She lands ahead of him and presses herself back immediately against a brick wall that's suddenly right there. Marty does the same, being careful not to stomp on her big fluffy tail.

"Yeah," she mutters. "Something's going on that's got admin's attention. That was a way easier trip than usual."

Marty doesn't say anything, part of him wondering how that could've been easy and part of him glad it wasn't worse. Linda's still holding his hand, though, and quite a large part of him is too busy noticing that to notice anything else.

Then— "C'mon!" she says urgently, and she's pulling him away from the wall.

The plaza they're running into unfolds like one of those pop-up books he remembers from when he was a kid. Walls fan out and become buildings taller than he can see, stretching into a sky either dimming with twilight or brightening with dawn. Doors open here and there along the walls, and even though he's running, his hands still holding one of Linda's, he continues not feeling anything under his feet.

He doesn't want to look down, though, not sure how he'll react to the idea of running through open air. His brain spits up an image of some cartoon character, a coyote he thinks it is, running along just fine till he notices there's nothing under him and then falling...

Fortunately, before one or another part of him can decide to look down anyway, Linda's spinning them through a passing doorway, and Marty finds himself actually standing on a surface, no sign anywhere of the door they just entered.

The surface under him's a greyish-green industrial carpeting, and the room doesn't seem to have any walls. Instead, it's all bookcases running from floor to ceiling—except there isn't any ceiling, that same sort of dimness taking hold maybe ten feet up and swallowing the tops of the helving units. These units spread out in every direction, and Marty's seized simultaneously by a feeling of claustrophobia and a sense of infinite space.

These both, of course, can't be happening at the same time, but before he can get tangled up in trying to figure it out, Linda's pulling him along the bookshelves. "Don't think about it," she mutters. "That's usually the best way to handle this place."

Marty's trying his best to follow her advice when she leads him around a sudden corner into a clearing, a perfectly round space with bookcases sticking out like bicycle spokes on all side. And in the middle of the space sits a desk, and at the desk—

"Clotilde," Linda says, and Marty's never heard that tone of voice from her. If the word she'd just said had had any 's' sounds in it, she would've hissed them, he was sure.

The opossum at the desk glances up from the paperwork she's perusing, and Marty has no idea how he knows she's female. She's regular opossum size, little half glasses perched partway down her snout, and she's got a shawl around her shoulders that's almost the same color—and possibly the same material—as the carpet.

"Highness," the opossum says, and since the word's got those 's's at the end, when she hisses it, it's obvious.

Linda's fur bristles, but Marty can't hear any emotion at all in her voice when she speaks. "You'll forgive me, I hope, if I don't waste both our times with meaningless chit-chat, Clotilde, but I'm wondering if any of the human Earths are scheduled for an apocalypse today."

Clotilde gives a slow blink, then waves a paw. "If you'll pardon an indelicate metaphor, Lady, they seem to be dropping like flies recently." She gives another blink, her eyes moving, and when her gaze meets Marty's, he feels it all the way down to his Oxford shoes. "I can't help but notice, Lady, that you seem to have one of them clinging to you in direct contravention of all established principles."

She sounds ever bit as bored as Linda did, but there's something about her that grabs Marty inside his head, something that wants to freeze him in place and possibly never let him move again.

He tries to take a breath, tries to open his mouth, tries to ask what's happening to his world, but this grip in his head tightens, choking him in more ways than—

The grip on his hand tightens then, too, and that's so much more real and solid than anything inside his head that it just plain squeezes out the freezing sensation. Smiling his first real smile in a while at Linda, he then turns a much more officious version of the smile at the opossum. "I terribly sorry," he says, "but I'm concerned that all the paperwork for my world's destruction might not be in proper order."

He's got no way of knowing, of course, except that everything he's learned during his entire adult life practically screams out that this has to be true. After all, the universe is apparently much more complicated than he'd ever thought, and he'd always thought that it must be really, really complicated. But with human worlds set off separately somehow and using their own Bibles? Linda able to use magic or something like that? Raccoon people and opossum people and who knew how many other sorts of animal people working behind the scenes somewhere and likely even having their own worlds?

Yeah, complicated.

But the universe is also apparently more bureaucratic than he'd ever thought. And if there's one thing he knows, it's complicated bureaucracies.

"Paperwork?" Clotilde's voice cracks. "I...I don't know what you mean."

Linda gives a mirthless sort of laugh. "Clotilde, paperwork is your life."

"And," Marty says, putting just the right mix of pity and empathy into his voice, "I know how difficult it can be to get all departments working on the same page—as it were—when it comes to a major project like an apocalypse." He sighs. "But, well, I think we all know that there's a right way to do this sort of thing and a wrong way. And I'd hate to see any of their errors redound negatively upon you."

Clotilde's round ears almost vanish into her fur. "You...you can't think that would actually happen!"

Marty deepens his smile a bit and shrugs. "If something's wrong about the set-up for this?"

"And there is," Linda chimes in. "I'm supposed to have at least another five years on this world if my calculations are correct." She leans forward, her smile only serving to show just how many teeth she has. "And have you ever known my calculations to be incorrect, Clotilde?"

For another long set of seconds, the whole library or archive or whatever it is seems to brim over with silence. Then Clotilde makes a little choking sound. "The telemetry report has several aberrant figures," she says so quietly, the silence almost overwhelms her. "I've asked Targeting for clarification, but you know how they are. They refuse to admit that they may be pointing toward the wrong universe."

The breath Linda draws in seems deep enough to maybe lead to a shout, but she just says, "Targeting. Of course." Her smile becomes much more actual. "I'll keep your name out of the undoubtedly loud and possibly explosive discussion I'm about to have with Targeting, Clotilde, and thank you."

"Thank you, Your Highness," Clotilde says, every pompous bit of her deflating. "I...I think it might be time for me to take a bit of a vacation."

Linda nods. "I know several good universes if you're interested in cultural phenomena. Text me, and I'll send you some links. Right now, though..." Her claws, which had loosened from Marty's hand at some point, tighten again, and—

Well, what happens in the next little while after that, Marty can't quite make sense of. It's loud, as Linda was saying it would be, and explosive as well. But when Marty next can make sense of his surroundings, he's walking along beside Linda in a warm and lovely woodland, her hand—human again, as is the rest of her—still holding his.

He looks over at her and sees her looking back. "Things clearing up there, Marty?"

It takes him a couple swallows before his throat feels ready to push words out. And then, instead of anything sensible, he finds himself saying, "You're human again."

She cocks her head. "Disappointed?"

In all honesty, he's not sure, but something more important bubbles up. "Did we just save the world?"

"Looks like." She's facing forward now. "For five more years, at least. And a lot can happen in that time. You could all get your act together here, for instance, and make a demonic apocalypse unnecessary." She shrugs. "Or maybe a princess could decide she wants to settle down here, raise a family, declare the place off limits, that sort of thing." She looks back at him. "Either of those sound appealing?"

"Both," he says, smiling as his face heats up. "I'd enjoy that second one more, of course, and speaking as a human, it sounds a lot more likely than that first one."

"Yeah." She pats his arm. "Sorry about your car, too. But I'm sure the cosmos can spring for a replacement."

Marty takes what might be his first full breath in a good long while. "Just point me at the paperwork," he says.