Righteous Plague

By Robert Abernathy

Complete Novelet of Uncontrolled Weapons

It was a virus, against which the enemy could make no defense—but a virus does not distinguish between friend and foe. And immunity to what became known as the righteous plague could exist anywhere, or nowhere at all....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Quarterly May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The ugly, high-backed truck splashed heavily through the puddles of the weedy road. Just before it reached a curve, it swayed and slithered as the brakes locked suddenly. A man had come stumbling from the rain-wet bushes; he paused now, stared dully at the halted, angrily grumbling monster.

An officer heaved himself out of the seat beside the driver, cursed irritably, flung open the door and swung out onto the running board—a malevolently superhuman figure in his panoply of snouted mask and rubberized armor. His gloved hand lifted, sliding a long-barreled automatic from its worn holster, aiming. At the shot's crash the man from the thicket stiffened and toppled into the mud, where he writhed painfully. Two more bullets, carefully placed, put a stop to that.

The officer slid back into the seat and sighed with a sucking sound inside his mask. Without being told, the driver turned the truck cautiously off the road; tilting far over, left wheels deep in the slippery ditch, it ground in lowest gear past the motionless body, keeping several feet away.

In the back of the truck, five oddly-assorted civilian men and one woman huddled together and exchanged vaguely curious glances over the stop, the shooting, and the detour. Then, as the machine climbed back onto the roadbed and they could see the corpse sprawled in the way behind, the interest left their faces; they reflected only the emptiness of the gray sky, the hopelessness of the sodden fields and woods they passed. The prisoners might have found the weather appropriate for death. They did not speak of that, because they knew they were on their way to die.

But the masked and armored soldiers who sat nervously watching them, rifles clutched between their knees, did speak of death, and made sour jokes about it. They did not know they themselves were going to death—that when the execution was done and reported by radio, a 

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