IRON HAIL

Philip Brian Hall

Fay crouched behind her front yard’s cherry laurel hedge, squeezing up hard against its thick, glossy, green leaves. The foliage shivered as the ponderous alien machine stomped thunderously along the road outside, its great feet shaking the ground like earth tremors.

She knew she mustn’t run, though incipient panic tore savagely at her resolve; she’d already seen what happened to those who’d fled. Human bodies, as charred and lifeless as the wrecked automobiles and smashed store fronts surrounding them, littered the streets of Poland, Ohio.

On the northern horizon a thick pall of oily, black smoke drifted lazily, marking the disaster zone where what remained of Youngstown burned uncontrollably. A fitful, sultry breeze carried with it the evil smell of scorched flesh.

From across the road, Fay heard a sharp crack from old Mr. Junghans’ hunting rifle, followed by a metallic ping as the bullet ricocheted harmlessly from the lumbering robot’s head. She sucked in air through her teeth and grimaced.

Although she’d half-expected some rearguard action from the septuagenarian marine veteran, she’d no confidence in its success. Like her, he knew better than to run, but without a supply of armor-piercing ammunition he couldn’t make so much as a dent in the mechanical monster. His futile gesture was only drawing its attention.

A sizzling roar accompanied the death-ray that lashed out from a projector in the robot’s chest to claim its latest victim. The blast from Mr. Junghans’ exploding house bent Fay’s hedge over twenty degrees, covering her in scorched leaves and twigs. Blazing fragments set the leaf litter below the laurel smoldering, forcing her to stifle a cough.

Fay cursed her bad timing. Newly returned from a training week, she’d just an hour ago changed from her Air-Force reservist’s uniform into a polka-dot gingham sun-dress. Pressing herself flat against the grass, she lay motionless, waiting for the beast to pass by. So far as she could tell, it relied on line-of-sight sensors and had little or no intelligence when it came to seeking out its prey. Then again, so far it hadn’t needed much.

Slowly, the crash of its footsteps receded and the ground ceased to shake. Peering carefully over the hedge, Fay watched the thing lurch around the corner at the bottom of her street and disappear from sight.

Across the road lay a smoking gap where the Junghans house had been obliterated, along with the near side walls of both its neighbors. Fay hoped most of the street’s families had enough sense to take to their basement storm shelters. As for herself, she needed to report for duty as quickly as she could.

She was about to turn away when out of the corner of her eye she noticed a stirring in the blackened yard across the street. A square of burnt turf heaved itself up on edge and a green-and-brown-streaked face topped by a camouflage forage cap emerged from a hole in the ground.

“Had to try,” said old Mr. Junghans with a rueful smile as he caught sight of Fay. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.”

“Mr. Junghans! I thought it’d killed you!”

“What? D’you suppose the Marine Corps trained me to be an idiot? I thought I might take out one of its optical sensors, but with just my old Winchester here, and cheap commercial ammunition, I suppose it was a lot to hope for. Back in the day I’d have nailed it for sure.”

“You used to be a marksman? I never knew.”

“Huh. You think it’s the sort of thing a sane man advertises? I’d no ambition to end up a target myself, Miss Forsyth. Anyhow, we ain’t stopping those babies with bullets. We’re gonna need some kind of heavy artillery to launch a counter-attack.”

“I can’t stay; I have to get to Wright-Patt,” Fay objected. “I’ve not heard any call-up, but they’ll need every pilot they can get.”

“To fly what? Everything we had airborne when the alien attack first started just fell out o’ the sky. Everything else was taken out on the ground.”

“What? Everything?”

“Yep. Seems the alien mother ship radiated some force-pulse—sorta artificial geomagnetic storm. Everything electronic just stopped working. Jets, tanks, APCs—ain’t no modern engine built without them silicon chip gizmos.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Oh, some of us old boys still have our battery-powered short-waves, you know. Not everyone loves the Internet.”

“Just as well, I guess, if things are the way you say.” She paused. “But I still need to report in, no matter what.”

“A long way to walk,” the old man observed.

“What do you mean?”

“You got a car old enough to have no electronic parts?”

“Ah, now you mention it, no, I guess not.”

Junghans surveyed the wreckage of his house. “Well, it don’t look like I’ve much to keep me here. How ’bout I give you a ride?”

“Give me two minutes to change back into my uniform,” Fay said. “I’ll be right with you.”

* * *

Junghans’ vehicle was even older than he was. He kept the 1944 vintage Willy’s Jeep in a rented storage garage some distance from his house.

“No sense having all your eggs in one basket,” he observed.

When he pulled off the dust sheets he revealed a machine so well preserved it might have rolled off the wartime production line yesterday. Painted drab camouflage-green, complete with white star on the hood, a fold-flat windscreen, no doors, no side-windows, and a retractable canvas top that might just barely keep the Jeep’s occupants dry as long as raindrops were considerate enough to fall vertically, the Jeep was about as basic as a car could be.

“You just gotta love the hardware they came up with in the forties, don’tcha?” he gestured proudly. “This here vehicle can go anywhere a tank can go. Course it helps if you don’t want to go at night. It’s a six-volt system, and the headlights give about as much illumination as a cigarette lighter.”

“But it will go?” Fay marveled.

“Oh, she’ll go, lieutenant.”

“Maybe you should call me Fay,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Junghans grinned.

* * *

Outside Akron, on Route 76, the old man in outdated Marine combat uniform and his youthful Air Force passenger were stopped at a National Guard roadblock. The ancient armored cars didn’t look heavy enough to hold back one of the alien robots, let alone an army of them. The part-time troopers were nervously checking through a steady flow of civilian refugees from the east.

“Lieutenant Forsyth, sir, Air Lift,” Fay reported to a bespectacled captain at his dug-out command post fifty yards further back. “When we came by they’d hit nothing west of Mineral Ridge.”

The middle-aged, balding guy looked like he ought to be behind a desk in a bank, but there was steel in his gaze.

“I need to get to Dayton to join my unit,” Fay explained.

“Well, good luck with that!” the captain retorted. “We’ve reports of attacks on Cleveland and across the state line in Pittsburgh. No communication with Columbus, but Canton’s been wiped out and our scouts have eyes on a group of robots heading up the road from Greensburg. They could be here in an hour.”

“You gonna fall back?” Junghans asked.

“No orders one way or the other. Anyways, you want to suggest where we should fall back to? They’re landing everywhere.”

“I guess. You got anything heavier than those machine guns I saw?”

“Nope. No armor built in the last fifty years can turn a wheel. Even modern anti-personnel mines won’t work.”

“And my .308 slugs just bounced off ’em.”

“Huh. Well, I found me some dynamite to dig into the road. When that’s done I guess we can always throw rocks.”

* * *

Long before they arrived outside the burning shell of Columbus they were moving against a new tide of refugees. In places, every lane of the road was jammed with people heading northeast, one or two with horse-drawn carts, some with wheelbarrows full of possessions. Junghans needed to make good his boast about the Jeep’s off-road capabilities.

When the crowd thinned, the travelers encountered a few broken-down vintage cars and a couple of very elderly trucks scattered across the highway.

“See, people should maintain their vehicles better,” Junghans observed.

“You mean you never know when an alien invasion might leave you dependent on your grandfather’s ’58 Chevy?” Fay inquired sardonically.

“I mean if you keep things, you should keep ’em ready to use, not just for show,” Junghans said. “Like this old wristwatch o’ mine. See, most folk nowadays are too cheap to service clockwork watches occasionally, and too lazy to wind ’em up once a day. They don’t understand the beauty and value of a real machine.”

“I suppose not,” Fay acknowledged, less than convinced.

“Thought they could buy five dollar quartz watches and throw ’em away when the battery failed, right?” Junghans persisted. “Well today those folk can’t even tell the time. If the aliens don’t kill ’em, they’ll starve, because none o’ them electronic whatchamacallits they rely on to keep ’em alive will work anymore.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Fay said.

“Young folk, huh!” Junghans snorted dismissively.

* * *

Through the old man’s antique but powerful field glasses, Fay could see clearly the two giant robots bestriding the road three miles away. Like the one she’d encountered in Poland, these monsters were basically humanoid in form. They stood approximately twenty feet tall, reddish-brown in color with arms resembling a series of metal basketballs fixed together and terminating in articulated claws, like a dockyard crane. Their tubular legs were backwards-hinged at spherical knee joints and ended in bird-like feet, each with three spiked toes pointing forwards and one back.

At the top of each thorax, Fay picked out the centrally-mounted death ray projectors, dark-tinted opaque rectangles that reflected light like glass. The machines each possessed what appeared to be eyes, mounted in the upper part of their heads, just like humans. On closer inspection though, these turned out to be compound structures each with a large number of separate lenses.

“You see their weak spot?” Junghans inquired.

“Can’t say I do,” Fay replied.

“Any mobile weapon is only as strong as its means of propulsion,” Junghans said. “You knock a track off your enemy’s tank and what’s he got left? No more ’n a very conspicuous piece of fixed artillery with a limited field of fire.”

“I understand.”

“So, these bird-legs o’ theirs may be effective for locomotion, but if we could just knock off one o’ those rear-facing toes it’d unbalance the whole kaboodle. At worst, it’d be hobbled; at best, it might even fall over.”

“Aha.” Fay nodded. “I’ll bet you’re right, but how’d we get close enough to do that?”

“Old Willy here,” Junghans patted the hood of his Jeep, “can do sixty-five miles an hour flat out.”

“You mean barrel straight down the road at them?” Fay exclaimed. “You’re crazy. They’d blow us to bits before we got anywhere near.”

“Not necessarily. Tell me, you ever walk a dog?”

“Yeah, for my aunt. Why?”

“Ever use one of your modern automatic cameras to try and photograph your dog running straight towards you?”

“I did try with my phone camera once. Got nothing but a blur.”

“Because most automated systems can’t lock the focus and fire the shutter fast enough to freeze the picture of a fast-closing target. Now I figure these robots for none too smart, yeah?”

“I’d say so. Looked to me like a line-on-sight ranging system.”

“That’s what I reckoned, too. Pretty much like the anti-aircraft guns on a World War Two battleship, right?”

“So?”

“So, did you never ask yourself how come so many of them half-trained Japanese kamikaze pilots still managed to get through our defenses and crash their planes on our capital ships?”

“I see what you mean.”

“If you’re up for it, I got a couple o’ hand grenades in the ammo box.” Junghans smiled like a man back where he belonged after too long an absence.

* * *

With the windscreen folded flat and the canvas canopy removed, the Jeep was still nothing like streamlined and its old Go-Devil engine produced a mere sixty horsepower. But when the wind pressed you back into your seat and the engine screamed, the scout-car might have been a Corvette racing around Sebring.

Fay clutched a grenade in each hand. Crouching low as the robots opened fire, she pulled out the first pin with her teeth and held the spring shut manually.

“Pull ’em both!” Junghans shouted as the road exploded fifty yards behind them. “Won’t be time when we get there—an’ if’n we’re hit, won’t make no difference.”

A series of explosions bracketed the Jeep on each side of the road, rocking the speeding vehicle in a blast of hot wind. Fay was grateful for the old helmet Junghans had made her wear as stones pinged like shrapnel off the vehicle’s skin.

Still the old man drove straight rather than weave. Present the smallest possible target and close the range as fast as you can—that was the tactic. He trusted his machine to take damage and keep going; he trusted his own nerve too.

Remarkably the two robots seemed unable to adjust their pattern of fire to deal with an enemy approaching at top speed rather than fleeing. The incessant explosions were always behind the racing Jeep, the shots from the robot on the right overshooting to their left and vice versa. Adrenaline coursed through Fay’s veins. She was more deafened than afraid, and more exhilarated than either.

The final fifty yards was a riotous blur. Turning to kneel in her seat, Fay flung a grenade with each hand as the Jeep sped between the two monsters and careened onward.

Each robot began a lumbering turn. The left grenade bounced off a metal calf, but the right dropped perfectly beside a robot’s ankle. Simultaneous explosions erupted behind them as they fled, throwing up a cloud of debris.

By the time the air cleared around the robots, the Jeep was already a hundred yards away. There was no possibility of slowing to inspect what damage they’d done, but Fay was pretty sure the right-hand robot had halted in mid-turn and stood swaying like a drunken sailor. The left-hand robot completed its turn and re-opened fire, but a bend in the road took the Jeep out of its view.

Breathing heavily, Junghans eased his foot from the floor and allowed the Jeep to slow. “Whaddya know?” he said. “We made it. Hoo-rah!”

“Sure did.” Fay laughed as her tension released like an uncoiling spring. “And we damaged one as well. They’re not invulnerable after all.”

“Great!” the old man said. “Now all we need to figure out is how to deliver a whole lot of high explosive up real close to the rest of the bastards.”

* * *

“After you’ve made such efforts to get here,” Colonel Parker said, “I’m only sorry we’ve got nothing for you to fly.”

The travel-stained, battle-scarred refugees from Poland had been conducted directly to the Wright-Patterson Air-Lift Wing Commander’s office to deliver their report. They found Parker and his aide in shirtsleeves poring over a large map unfolded across his desk. Daylight from the window was their only illumination.

“Nothing at all?” Fay asked.

“We’re trying to rig a Hercules to carry bombs,” Parker sighed. “We’ll have to push ’em out by hand, but as of now we still can’t get the damn crate to fly with all its electronics dead. We’ve crews working on rigging mechanical controls, but the enemy’s moving too fast. Our bases are being overrun. There are a hundred robots within a couple of hours of us here.”

“Anybody figured out the whys and wherefores yet?” Junghans asked.

“We’ve no communication with NORAD. If they’ve any idea who the aliens are or what they want, there’s no way for us to find out. All we know is there are thousands of these damned robots and so far no-one’s found a way of stopping them. In fact, yours is the only report I’ve heard of one even being damaged.”

“Hand grenades are easy enough to come by,” Fay pointed out. “A pity we don’t have thousands of Jeeps. There’d be plenty of volunteers to try more kamikaze strikes.”

Junghans frowned. “Maybe we can do better than that. It so happens, Colonel, Second World War hardware’s a bit of a hobby of mine. You got a P39 in the Air Force Museum here, don’t you?”

“I think we do,” Parker agreed. “Help me out here, Mac—am I right?”

“Yes, sir,” his aide replied. “As a matter of fact it’s one of the three old planes Sergeant Malcolm’s restoration group’s been working on. You’ll recall, sir, they’d some notion of organizing a fly-past for Veterans’ Day?”

“That’s right, and a damn crazy idea it is, too, but it keeps those jokers out of trouble.” Parker returned his attention to Junghans. “So yes, we’ve got a P39; what of it?”

“Number one: It’s as old as my Jeep; no electronics. Two: it’s designed for ground attack—the first ever tank-buster. It’s got a 37mm cannon in the nose that can fire armor-piercing shells. Three: this young lady here’s my neighbor; you may not know it, but she’s one of very few Air Force pilots who regularly flies single-engine prop-driven planes.”

“I do a lot of crop-dusting.” Fay confirmed enthusiastically.

“That aircraft hasn’t flown in decades. I’d be surprised if Sergeant Malcolm’s team have got it anything like airworthy.”

“And modern safety laws say our Jeep isn’t roadworthy, Colonel. It still got us here.” Fay’s face lit up. “If you can get hold of some fuel and ammunition, we’ll find some way of making the old kite fly.”

“Hell!” Parker exclaimed. “In normal circumstances I’d refuse permission for a dumb stunt like this, but these aren’t normal circumstances—and anything’s better than sitting here waiting to die!”

* * *

Malcolm’s team of mechanics, who’d volunteered to work on the eighty-year-old Bell Airacobra, had chosen it because it was so unusual in design. The engine was behind the pilot, not in front. Most fighters of the period, he explained, were aircraft first and weapons-platforms second; the P39 by contrast had been designed around a huge Oldsmobile Cannon that was far too large to share the nose with an engine.

“Each of these here shells,” Malcolm said, showing Fay the aircraft’s weapons bay, “weighs the best part of a pound and a half. You’ll only be able to carry around fifty and your rate of fire’s real slow compared to a machine gun. But at a quarter mile range you can turn one inch armor plate into a colander.”

Fay studied the sleek machine. Painted camouflage drab on top and sky blue underneath, the low-wing monoplane sat on a tricycle undercarriage just like many modern light aircraft. It looked seriously menacing, the snout of the huge cannon poking out through the spinner of a black and yellow, triple-bladed propeller that almost scraped the ground. An unusually high cockpit—elevated because the drive-shaft tunnel ran underneath it—was accessed by a door rather than the more usual retractable canopy.

“All-round visibility should be good from up there,” Fay said.

“You’d better climb aboard and familiarize yourself with the controls,” Junghans suggested, wiping his oily hands on a rag and nodding to Malcolm. “She’s fueled and armed. We’re about ready to roll her out.”

“Will her engine start?”

“Oh yes.” Malcolm nodded. “Your problem’s like to be this gun was always prone to jam, even when it was new. That and the concussion from it might shake the old girl apart of course.”

“Won’t know until we try,” said Fay.

* * *

Fay felt like a bubble-car driver drafted at short notice into the Indianapolis 500. The power and torque developed by the fighter was so difficult to control she began by slewing about embarrassingly on the runway. When she finally managed to take off, one wing dipped alarmingly before she could correct it.

She needed a couple of circuits of the field just to feel confident she could fly level. Not exactly what you’d call a competent fighter pilot, let alone an ace. She gritted her teeth, willing herself to relax and get the feel of her aircraft.

Explosions and small arms fire had already been audible when she’d climbed into the Airacobra’s cockpit. As she turned its nose south, she fully expected the enemy to be in sight.

She wasn’t wrong; at least a score of giant robots were advancing on the airbase in a long extended line, blasting aside everyone and everything in their way. She’d no time to learn more than level flight; in any case a diving attack in the old World War Two style was more likely to tear the wings out of the aged airframe than hurt the enemy.

Maneuvering out to the flank of the robots, Fay dropped the P39 down to tree-top height and turned to run along the enemy line from east to west, thumbing the safety catch off the cannon’s trigger button as she opened the throttle wide. The airspeed indicator hovered around 350 mph—not bad for a wheezy old-age-pensioner.

The first target robot grew rapidly in the optical sight as she hurtled towards it no more than fifty feet off the ground. Its death ray reached out for her, overshooting by a hundred yards. The limitations of the robots’ fire pattern the Jeep had exposed were once again on display.

“Huh,” she grunted. “Call that shooting? I’ll show you shooting.”

Pressing the gun button reminded her of the time she’d absentmindedly thrown a solid cake of butter into a food mixer. The aircraft juddered and shook, threatening to tear itself apart. It was all she could do to hold it in a straight line. She’d no idea whether her shells were hitting the targets that appeared one after another in her sights. A series of explosions crashed out in her wake, more death rays flashed all around her, and by the time she reached the end of the line and began a slow climbing turn her cannon had stopped firing.

Hearing a hiss of air from the breech, she finally managed to release the button from her rigidly-clenched fist. Behind her was a scene of devastation. Three robots were down, smoking ruins on the ground. Another wandered in circles with its head blown clean off. Two more were stationary. The remainder of the ragged line still advanced, but with great gaps between the surviving machines.

Fay looked for the runway. Her job wasn’t done, and landing an aircraft like this was far more difficult than taking off, a job she hadn’t managed too well. Come in nose down and she’d catch the giant prop on the ground; come in nose up a little, as she would in her crop-duster, and the weight of the rear engine would drag the tail on to the tarmac and probably break the plane.

Fay reckoned she should fly as low and slow as possible, raising the nose just as the two middle wheels were about to touch, half-stalling the nose-wheel down onto the tarmac.

Nice theory; shame about the execution. But a horrible bounce followed by a short nervous hop later and the Airacobra was back on the ground. Fay breathed a heavy sigh of relief and taxied towards the hangar to re-arm.

Colonel Parker was waiting with a cheering, waving group of mechanics and armorers. Spontaneous applause broke out as she opened the cockpit door. “Well, lieutenant, your take-off and landing needs a bit of work, but I sure as hell liked the bit in between,” Parker said, grinning.

Old Mr. Junghans was actually capering up and down. “You showed ’em, Fay! That’s given ’em something to think about!” he cried delightedly. “Hoo-rah!”

“Get me back up there, quick as you can,” Fay instructed the ground-crew. “They’re still coming on.”

* * *

As darkness closed in, Fay brought the P39 in to land for the third time. By this time the other two vintage aircraft the restoration crew’d been working on had also been pressed into service to harass the disorganized enemy. Neither the P38 Lightning nor the Beaufighter packed the Airacobra’s punch, but they’d been able to score significant successes with their multiple smaller cannon. The robot force had retreated to regroup.

Two of the ground crew helped an exhausted Fay from the cockpit in the gathering twilight. She could barely stand.

“Can somebody get me a coffee?” she begged. “Maybe a sandwich or something? We need to hit them again.”

“Enough!” Colonel Parker emerged from the gloom. “You’ve performed miracles out there, Lieutenant Forsyth, but even you need to rest.”

“I can still fly, sir!” Fay protested.

“Right now we’ve more pilots than planes, and in any case this old lady’s pretty beat-up. Let the mechanics work on her overnight. I expect the war will still be going on in the morning.”

“If you’re sure, sir.”

“Damn right, I’m sure. When did you last eat or sleep? Come and see the debriefing officer, then we’ll get you sorted out with some quarters.”

“What about Mr. Junghans?” Fay asked as an afterthought. She’d been too tired earlier to wonder why her friend hadn’t shown up.

Parker grimaced. “He found a bazooka in one of our stores and took a couple of men down to the perimeter when the robots got really close.” The colonel hesitated. “I’m sorry, lieutenant. I know he was a friend of yours. They shot up two of the robots real good but the third in line was too quick for them.”

Fay felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.

“He was a good man,” Parker said.

“One of the best,” Fay nodded. “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t even be here.”

* * *

The White House and the Capitol were both flattened ruins, but the Lincoln Memorial was still standing. They held the ceremony on the steps, in the open air, under a clear blue sky, with an earlier war victor’s giant figure brooding over them as the President pinned the award on Fay’s brand new dress uniform.

“It falls to very few individuals,” the President said, “to render their country such remarkable service. In our darkest hour, when everything seemed lost, two heroes showed us the way to fight back and set our feet on the road to eventual victory.

“We have all too many dead to mourn, we have whole cities to rebuild, but as long as the United States of America endures we shall never forget those who struck the first blow against these merciless alien invaders.

“I’m proud to award our country’s highest decoration for valor, the Medal of Honor, to Captain Fay Forsyth, who I’m happy to say is still with us here today, and posthumously to Staff-Sergeant Axel Junghans, her companion in battle, who gave his life in his country’s service.”

Fay stood to attention as the anthem played and the flags flew proudly. As the music drew to a close she struggled to repress a nostalgic smile. Without even glancing to her right, she knew for certain the spirit of old Mr. Junghans stood ramrod straight beside her.