We made Richard limp by himself as we carried Sensei to the gate. We kept him from bleeding to death but it was a close thing. Richard brought back his brother’s sword, and we’re saving it. Boy or girl, his child deserves something of her father’s.

All that throwing up wasn’t just something Lou had eaten.

“Sensei would never have allowed you to come along if he’d known you were pregnant.”

Lou nodded and kept crying.

Danny, the southern guard, was discharged from his post and set to garbage detail. He wasn’t at the gate because he was pilfering in the kitchen gardens. Had a nice business in black market tomatoes.

Sensei’s shoulder was never the same. He still lives at the dojo and he makes comments from the side of the mat, but mostly he leaves it to me, and he never went out of the gates again.

But I did.

The Days of Flaming Motorcycles by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente is the critically acclaimed author of The Orphan’s Tales series, which has won the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel, Palimpsest-which she describes as “a baroque meeting of science fiction and fantasy”-is a finalist for the 2010 Hugo Awards. Her young adult novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which was originally self-published online and is forthcoming in print from Feiwel and Friends, recently won the Andre Norton Award. A new series, beginning in November with The Habitation of the Blessed, retells the legend of Prester John. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, and Lightspeed, and in the anthology Dark Faith, where this story first appeared.

The inspiration for this story came when Valente visited Augusta, Maine, for the first time. “Augusta, despite being the state capitol, is an extremely economically depressed region, and the dilapidation of the downtown area and the general atmosphere of silence and a city long past its prime truly struck me,” she says. “It looked like the zombies had taken over in 1974 and people just said: ‘Well, we have to go to work tomorrow.’ The idea of that quiet apocalypse took hold of my heart; an apocalypse you just have to live through and find a way to co-exist with was fascinating. I finally felt like I had something new to say about zombies.”

Zombies may be caused by any number of factors-a supernatural event, a man-made virus, or radiation from a passing comet-but one thing is nearly universal: you have to kill them to survive, and killing them is completely justified because it’s self-defense and you have no choice. But what if zombies didn’t have to be killed? What if they shouldn’t be? What if you could live side-by-side with them and make a new kind of life for yourself among them, even as the world around you has fallen to pieces?

To tell you the truth, my father wasn’t really that much different after he became a zombie.

My mother just wandered off. I think she always wanted to do that, anyway. Just set off walking down the road and never look back. Just like my father always wanted to stop washing his hair and hunker down in the basement and snarl at everyone he met. He chased me and hollered and hit me before. Once, when I stayed out with some boy whose name I can’t even remember, he even bit me. He slapped me and for once I slapped him back, and we did this standing-wrestling thing, trying to hold each other back. Finally, in frustration, he bit me, hard, on the side of my hand. I didn’t know what to do-we just stared at each other, breathing heavily, knowing something really absurd or horrible had just happened, and if we laughed it could be absurd and if we didn’t we’d never get over it. I laughed. But I knew the look in his eye that meant he was coming for me, that glowering, black look, and now it’s the only look he’s got.

It’s been a year now, and that’s about all I can tell you about the apocalypse. There was no flash of gold in the sky, no chasms opened up in the earth, no pale riders with silver scythes. People just started acting the way they’d always wanted to but hadn’t because they were more afraid of the police or their boss or losing out on the prime mating opportunities offered by the greater Augusta area. Everyone stopped being afraid. Of anything. And sometimes that means eating each other.

But sometimes it doesn’t. They don’t always do that, you know. Sometimes they just stand there and watch you, shoulders slumped, blood dripping off their noses, their eyes all unfocused. And then they howl. But not like a wolf. Like something broken and small. Like they’re sad.

Now, zombies aren’t supposed to get sad. Everyone knows that. I’ve had a lot of time to think since working down at the Java Shack on Front Street became seriously pointless. I still go to the shop in the morning, though. If you don’t have habits, you don’t have anything. I turn over the sign, I boot up the register-I even made the muffins for a while, until the flour ran out. Carrot-macadamia on Mondays, mascarpone-mango on Tuesdays, blueberry with a dusting of marzipan on Wednesdays. So on. So forth. Used to be I’d have a line of senators out the door by 8:00 a.m. I brought the last of the muffins home to my dad. He turned one over and over in his bloody, swollen hands until it came apart, then he made that awful howling-crying sound and licked the crumbs off his fingers. And he starting saying my name over and over, only muddled, because his tongue had gone all puffy and purple in his mouth. Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin.

So now I drink the pot of coffee by myself and I write down everything I can think of in a kid’s notebook with a flaming motorcycle on the cover. I have a bunch like it. I cleaned out all the stores. In a few months I’ll move on to the punky princess covers, and then the Looney Tunes ones. I mark time that way. I don’t even think of seasons. These are the days of Flaming Motorcycles. Those were the days of Football Ogres. So on. So forth.

They don’t bother me, mostly. And okay, the pot of coffee is just hot water now. No arabica for months. But at least the power’s still on. But what I was saying is that I’ve had a lot of time to think, about them, about me, about the virus-because of course it must have been a virus, right? Which isn’t really any better than saying fairies or angels did it. Didn’t monks used to argue about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin? I seem to think I remember that, in some book, somewhere. So angels are tiny, like viruses. Invisible, too, or you wouldn’t have to argue about it, you’d just count the bastards up. So they said virus, I said it doesn’t matter, my dad just bit his own finger off. And he howls like he’s so sad he wants to die, but being sad means you have a soul and they don’t; they’re worse than animals. It’s a kindness to put them down. That’s what the manuals say. Back when there were new manuals every week. Sometimes I think the only way you can tell if something has a soul is if they can still be sad. Sometimes it’s the only way I know I have one.

Sometimes I don’t think I do.

I’m not the last person on Earth. Not by a long way. I get radio reports on the regular news from Portland, Boston-just a month ago New York was broadcasting loud and clear, loading zombies into the same hangars they kept protesters in back in ’04. They gas them and dump them at sea. Brooklyn is still a problem, but Manhattan is coming around. Channel 3 is still going strong, but it’s all emergency directives. I don’t watch it. I mean, how many times can you sit through The Warning Signs or What We Know? Plus, I have reason to believe they don’t know shit.