Length/Rating: 191 words, PG, Gen
Pairings/Warnings: None
Summary: Highways wound through the abandoned countryside like fractures, carving the land into easily defined territories.

Highways wound through the abandoned countryside like fractures, carving the land into easily defined territories. Some of them were still maintained, although the days of blacktop and tar had long since passed. They were patched roughly, cracks and potholes filled with local cements, and each winter the roads died a little more. Soon they’d be reduced to simple gravel beds, torn apart by weather and the vines.

The vines had never liked blacktop, and for a while they’d tried to hold it back with wide expanses of asphalt, vast parking lots that were never meant for cars. For a few months it had worked and the initial losses, while heavy, were acceptable. Mankind might lose battles, but for a moment they were winning the war.

But in the end, the vines learned how to burrow under the blacktop and pull it apart– and slowly the green carpet crept on, covering everything, consuming everything. Burn it and it resprouted, chop it down and it regrew from every tiny scrap, soak it with herbicides strong enough to harm and everything else around it died too.

Which is when someone thought of the sheep.