Mrs. O’Neill’s Sheep
By Dara Hughes, iWire
Frederica was thirty-five years old when Abby O’Neill began to notice something was wrong.
“She didn’t look like herself,” says O’Neill. “You know a sheep for that long and you can tell when they aren’t right.”
O’Neill bought Freddie from a neighboring farm back in 2023, when she was just a lamb. After she grew to full adulthood, O’Neill sent her to a livestock biochemist near her family’s farm in Goshen, Connecticut, so that she could receive the cure for aging.
“This was the original vector,” says O’Neill. “Pre-Vectril days. So they had to strap Freddie down on a table and give her the three big injections. Being in there with her was a more emotional experience than I had anticipated. That’s the paradox about us farmers. I spend all day around these animals. I milk the cows. I feed the chickens. I soothe the horses when they whinny. I’ve killed my share of livestock, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for me. I care about all the animals we raise here. When you touch them and look them in the eyes, you feel like you have an understanding with them. They’re not just a tray of meat you buy at a market.”
Abby took Freddie home that night, and soon Freddie became a mainstay of the O’Neill household, providing an average of thirteen pounds of fresh wool every May, in shearing season—a good five pounds more than the average American sheep.
“We used it for everything—clothes, oven mitts, butterdish cozies,” says O’Neill. “I used to open my kid’s closets and joke that these were the closets Freddie built. We used to let Freddie into the house. We never did that with any other sheep.”
Together with her “husband,” Wally, Freddie also gave the O’Neill family a continuous supply of fresh lambs, giving birth to a new one at least once a year, sometimes twice. Two years after buying Freddie, the O’Neill family purchased two more ewes and had them injected with the vector. The family also paid to have three “master” cows and a dozen chickens given the cure, to provide the household with a seemingly endless stock of fresh veal, milk, chicken, and eggs all year long.
In addition to receiving the vector, every animal on the O’Neill farm was given vaccinations for a range of potential illnesses, including tetanus, enterotoxemia types C and D, rabies, and foot rot. Two of the vaccines given to Freddie and the rest of the flock were influenza vaccines.
“We thought nothing of it,” says O’Neill. “It was just standard operating procedure to get the vaccinations.”
For the next three decades and beyond, Freddie and the animals on the O’Neill farm lived, by outward appearances, healthy lives. The farm continued to thrive, even as the surrounding area grew more crowded with urban transplants. But as the years progressed, unforeseen consequences of the vaccinations were preparing to manifest themselves.
“It’s impossible to know exactly how long the sheep flu strain incubated in Freddie’s body,” says biochemist Arlen Maxwell in a ping exchange. “My theory is that the strain took years to develop. The flu virus probably attacked Freddie’s body multiple times, only to be rebuffed by her immune system. But nature has an unlimited power to adapt to its environs to suit its needs—to sustain itself. It’s not unlike a group of robbers trying to get into a bank vault. They may fail the first dozen times they attempt to break in. But they’re constantly scheming, constantly trying to find a way in. As long as they go unnoticed, it’s only a matter of time before they succeed.”
And succeed they did. In early 2059 O’Neill let Freddie into the house and noticed a deep yellowing in the sheep’s eyes. She drove Freddie to a Goshen veterinarian named David Millet, who had worked with the family’s animals for years. Unable to properly diagnose Freddie, Millet suggested that O’Neill leave the sheep with him for further observation.
“And I almost didn’t do it,” O’Neill recalls. “I mean, this was Freddie. We’d had her for years, and there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be around forever. That was the nice thing about her getting the cure. That’s why we let her in the house. We weren’t afraid to grow attached. We weren’t afraid to love her like our own. My kids could nuzzle in bed with her, and I never had that horrible vision of having to sit down and explain to them, ‘Well, Freddie had to go to sheep heaven.’ That was the blessing of the cure to me. It wasn’t about the wool or the food. It was that you never had to worry about love ending.”
At Millet’s insistence, O’Neill left Freddie for the evening and returned home to her family. When she returned to the doctor’s the next morning, an ambulance and a police car sat outside his home. O’Neill remembers that a local police officer came out of Millet’s house to tell her that Freddie, Millet, and Millet’s wife had all suddenly passed away in the middle of the night, and that the paramedic on site had ordered the area sealed off.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” says O’Neill, “and the officer didn’t have a good explanation to offer me. I asked if anything violent had occurred, and he said no. He said that they appeared to have died from some extreme sickness he’d never seen before. He talked about purple lines on their faces. I just sat there, dumbfounded. I didn’t even have time to be shocked.”
What the officer had seen, of course, were the first outward symptoms of sheep flu in the United States. Three days ago, working from his home compound, Maxwell sent a ping to the scientific community pinpointing Abby O’Neill’s farm as the precise origin of the outbreak that has now killed over one hundred million Americans and five hundred million people worldwide.
“Now that Skeleton Key is widely available, I was able to go out to the O’Neill farm and dig up the contaminated soil,” Maxwell explains, “and find traces of remains from the animals the family had to destroy. We now know that those remains contain fragments of the S36 virus. We also know, anecdotally, that the northeastern portion of the country, and more specifically the Berkshire region, is where this outbreak was first reported on the feeds. And medical reports concerning David Millet are, from my search of the indices, the earliest to describe the symptoms, even if the medical personnel reporting on them had no idea what they were looking at. One of the few nice things about sheep flu is that its symptoms are so unmistakable.”
For her part, Abby O’Neill has no idea why she and her family were able to avoid contracting the lethal virus. After being ordered to destroy all their livestock, the family moved north, to a very small farm in Northern Ontario. They have no animals; grow only fruits, herbs, and vegetables; and regularly defend their compound from stray Russian RMUs and bandits. Abby has kept every article of clothing ever made from Freddie’s fleece, even the items that no longer fit her or her children.
“I don’t know why she was the one, of all the animals out there, to start this outbreak. I know we didn’t do anything wrong. So when someone tells me that this innocent animal I adored, who was part of our family for so long . . . When someone tells me she was at fault for killing all those people . . . Millions upon millions of men and women and kids and animals . . .”
She holds up a pair of blue mittens and kisses them.
“Well, that’s not fair. It’s not fair to saddle all that blame on a single living being. We were just trying to live our lives. We didn’t want to bother anyone. Freddie never meant any harm.”