Introduction In April, 2011, I started to panic on the BART. For the ten-minute trip under the San Francisco Bay, every single person in my range of vision was looking down at their phone, completely silent and absorbed. I had a headache, and the changing pressure as we sped under the Bay was making it worse. I forced myself to look over my shoulder at the staggeringly normal view of an old man napping and a young woman writing in a notebook. When I looked back straight ahead, the scene was unchanged. But slowly it shifted. The man seated across from us abruptly put his phone in his pocket and began to pray. The guy with the skateboard on the other side of the doors stood up and I saw he had been hunched over a paperback book the entire time.

Then we came to the West Oakland stop and things started moving again. That night, and ever since, I haven''t been able to stop thinking about zombies. Before this, I''d never been remotely interested. Shaun of the Dead was a funny, timely parable, but the gore and kitsch and Jane Austen mashups never appealed to me remotely. But I started to read and to ask around, and what I found was much more complicated and interesting than expected. The original zombie stories were powerful tales of witchcraft and colonial control of peoples'' bodies. In the last decade, it''s the colonizers who have become obsessed with zombie stories, and we have given them new, disturbing meanings. Sometimes they seem to be violent, unthoughtful parables of some sort of class or racial division gone very wrong.

Other times, they read like true stories of city life, where a chronically unhealthy, lonely population slogs through their days behind the wheel of a car, while looking at their phones, mistrustful of anyone who hasn''t gotten the virus; the special, individualistic unbitten meanwhile hail each other as heroes, high-fiving and cracking jokes as they wreak casual destruction on everyone else. And of course these stories increasingly tap into anxiety about end of the world. It was on that same trip in 2011 that, riding down Market Street in Oakland, we saw the giant orange billboard predicting the end of the world coming up that May 27th. We laughed about it a few times and then I forgot about it until it was suddenly all anyone was talking about on Facebook. The millennial feeling was contagious. It took some effort, for a few days, not to joke about the end times, or to click "like" on the fan page for stealing everyone''s stuff after the Rapture. Of course, it''s easy to laugh at a wingnut predicting the end of the world, when the daily news is far more dire. Perhaps by ironically performing the events that scare us to an exaggerated degree we can soothe our real fears.

Zombie marches happen at least once a year in Portland. The idea is that dozens or hundreds of people dress as zombies, with elaborate makeup and ripped clothes, and march through the streets staring vacantly and jerking their arms around. Sometimes it''s a bike ride; often it culminates in a zombie prom or other kind of zombie party. Alcohol is a factor. My friend April has been participating in these since 2006. I asked her: Why? Why do all these people want to be zombies, rather than, say, heroic zombie hunters? "The makeup is really easy to do," she said. "And it''s fun." Pressed further, she divulged that the friend who got her into the zombie scene "definitely felt like the world was turning him into a zombie.

" And finally, "Zombies are scary because people are scary." We are scary. Whether we''re more terrifying to ourselves or each other is an open question, but it''s obvious to anyone who''s been going to the movies lately that we are telling a lot of scary stories about the future of humanity. Zombie stories are by nature dystopian. Zombies signify failure--of political will and social cohesion, of technology and medicine, of the human body and soul. These are all topics that are being battled over right now, among people who care about all three worlds that this series occupies: science fiction, feminism, and bicycling. Questions permeate news and internet discussions like: Who has power and who ought to? What forms of social or personal control are desirable and which are anathema? What is the line between life and death, humanity and inhumanity? When it comes down to it, who will survive? Welcome to the third volume of the Bikes in Space series. These stories may not answer every question you have about the future of humanity, but I hope they at least entertain you in more complicated ways along the way.

Elly Blue Portland, Oregon June, 2015.