“Baaah-rains.” The little zombified sheep bleats. Her wool is matted and dirty, her hooves and horns wildly overgrown, but her eyes sparkle with a clarity you don’t see even in most humans these days. She smells like a rotting corpse, like most zombies do. Flies circle her, occasionally landing on her impenetrable wool before taking flight again.

She could almost be mistaken for a normal, living lost sheep, except for an infected bite mark on her leg where a truly desperate zombie had bitten her. Despite her transformation, she just eats yellow grass in the same field she grew up in. Her bites could, in theory, turn someone into a zombie, but she’s just a little sheep in a little field a little ways from a little town where the war against the undead had been lost months ago.

She was grazing by an open road when a couple of survivors approached her. They were talking amongst themselves, seeming wary as they grew closer. One of them held a length of rope with a loop at the end like a lasso. She didn’t even notice them as she continued chewing on her patch of grass.

“Finally, food.” One of them, a man, said.

“It’s so cute.” A young girl responded.

“It’s fucking filthy.”

“So we’ll give it a bath.”

“We’re not bathing it, it isn’t a pet. Don’t go getting attached to it, understand?”

“I want to name him Woolbur, like Charlotte's Web.”

“It’s a him now, is it? Listen, we’re going to eat it. I know it doesn’t feel good, but that’s how we’re going to survive out here.”

“Mom wouldn’t let you eat it.”

“Stop talking, you’re gonna spook it.”

The little sheep looks up at them while chewing on her grass. She isn’t afraid of them, she doesn’t know she should be. She thinks of her kindly shepherd that always treated her so well, and she stays still.

The man gets closer, swinging the lasso as he walks. He looks closer, starving eyes surveying the small sheep.

“Aw fuck.”

“Mom wouldn’t like you saying that.”

“It looks like this lil’ lamb’s been bit.”

“Been bit?”

“Yeah, look here.” He gestured to the sheep’s leg.

“The sheep is a zombie?”

“Appears so. Never seen something like that before.”

“We can’t eat it if it’s a zombie, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Doubt any meat on it’s good.”

“Can we keep him?”

“Christ no, it’s dangerous.”

“Come on, he’s just standing there.”

“Baaaa-rains.” The sheep bleated.

“Lord Almighty.” The man put the lasso around the sheep’s neck and tied it to the post.

“Please don’t kill him daddy.”

“It’s already dead.” He looked at her and shook his head. “We have to dispose of all zombie-kind if we ever want things to go back to normal, alright?”

“He isn’t doing anything!”

“H- it’s a zombie, that’s enough. Don’t go arguing with me now, you know where you’d be without me?”

“With mom?”

“You’d be dead.”

“Not if I stayed with mom.”

“Staying home isn’t all she made it out to be, alright? We didn’t have food or water and it was near a five mile walk both ways to get any. It only would’ve gotten worse too.”

“All we do is walk.”

“Look, I had my reasons for leaving and she had her reasons for staying, her reasons were just an awful lot less compelling or she wouldn’t have let me take you.”

“I wish she didn’t.”

“You’d be dead if she hadn’t.”

“Mom’s not dead.”

The man stood still for just a moment. “Yeah, mom’s not dead. Please stop arguing, alright? We gotta take care of this sheep.”

“We can keep him?”

“I meant dispose of him. Grab my knife out the bag.”

“No daddy, please.” The girl was on the verge of tears.

“Fine, I’ll grab it myself.” He took off his backpack and started digging through it to grab his knife. The girl inched closer to the post where the sheep was now tied up, still mindlessly chewing on the grass. She yanked the knot loose as the man pulled his knife out of the bag. The glint of the blade caught the sheep’s attention but it still didn’t know to be afraid.

“What’d you do that for?” The man picked up the end of the rope. “Look, you think I enjoy killing these things? I don’t, it’s just what needs to be done.” He yanked on the rope and the sheep bleated in protest.

“No, daddy!” The girl grabbed the rope and tried to pull back. The man scoffed and put his blade to the sheep’s neck, but the girl yanked on the rope and he just barely cut it’s shoulder. The sheep bleated loudly and bit the man’s hand. He dropped the blade as the girl got the noose free of the sheep.

The sheep ran away as the man was working on carving off his own hand behind her. She ran until she was in town, surrounded by other zombies. She found an overgrown yard and started eating the grass there. If she ever saw a human again she would forget her kindly shepherd and remember the wound on her shoulder, always skittish of humans from then on, always ignorant to the carnage she'd left behind.