After cocking her head to one side to listen, the avocado seller said, “I sure hope not. That would be a stone bummer.”

“Yeah, wouldn't it?” Liz said. She wasn't sure, but she did think the noises from the north were louder than they had been. Maybe that was just her jumpy imagination talking. She could hope it was, anyhow.

Carrying the avocados in a cloth sack, she wandered through the market looking for a chicken to buy. Meat here didn't come neatly packaged in a refrigerated case at the store. If you wanted chicken stew, you bought a live chicken and whacked off its head with a hatchet. Then, after it stopped spewing blood and thrashing-which could take much longer than Liz would have imagined before she watched the first time-you had to pluck it and clean it. Cleaning it was a polite way to say cutting it open and taking out the guts and the lungs and whatever else you didn't want to eat.

The first time Liz helped do that, she got sick. She could handle it now, but it didn't thrill her-not even close. So she dawdled instead of buying a bird right away. Carrying one back to the house by its feet while it clucked and squawked wasn't much fun, either.

Hoofbeats drummed up the road from the west. That was more interesting than looking at one more beady-eyed chicken, so Liz turned to see what was going on. A mounted soldier galloped his horse toward the market. Liz had seen the look on his face before, back in the home timeline. People who'd just been in a traffic accident had that same air of stunned disbelief.

“What's happening, man?” somebody called.

“They beat us.” The soldier's voice was eerily calm, the way those of accident survivors often were. “They beat us,” he repeated, as if he'd forgotten he'd said the same thing a moment earlier. “They rolled us up. That stinking machine gun of theirs…” He shuddered. “They're coming. We'll try to stop them, but they're coming.”