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    10 Miles: A Collection of Short Stories
    10 Miles: A Collection of Short Stories
    10 Miles: A Collection of Short Stories
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    10 Miles: A Collection of Short Stories

    By Lee Robson

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    About this ebook

    A collection of short stories, telling tales of the present and possible futures...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLee Robson
    Release dateJan 1, 2017
    ISBN9781370562978
    10 Miles: A Collection of Short Stories
    Author

    Lee Robson

    The writer/co-creator (with Bryan Coyle) of the critically acclaimed indie graphic novel Babble, published by Com.X, Lee Robson currently lives and writes in the north east of England. His work has appeared in various anthologies, including the Eagle/True Believers Award nominated FutureQuake, its sister publication, the horror themed Something Wicked and Aces Weekly.

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      Book preview

      10 Miles - Lee Robson

      10 Miles

      A collection of short stories

      By Lee Robson

      Cover art by Bryan Coyle

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2017 Lee Robson

      CONTENTS

      1: 8-Ball

      2: House

      3: 10 Miles

      4: Click

      5: The Phone

      6: Dead Drop

      8-Ball

      Go on then, Nick said.

      What?

      Ask it something.

      Like what?

      Anything.

      I looked at the monitor, then back at Nick. He had that semi-serious smirk of his I'd come to know so well firmly in place. I looked at the ball on the screen again and said Is Nick being a twat? I clicked the ask button and watched the ball turn over; a message appeared in the window: The spirits seem positive!

      Fucking hell, Nick, I said. Can't fault its accuracy.

      I'm telling you this is freaky. Remember I told you I asked it if I should quit my job?

      You were going to anyway.

      Yeah, yeah, but I asked it if I’d find my ‘dream job’ before the end of the week, and look. He handed me a folded page from the local paper, his weird telephone scribblings framing a job advert for a network trouble shooter. It looked to be more or less the same thing Nick had been doing, but closer to home and better paid.

      I start in two weeks, he said, taking the paper back.

      Nice one. What's the place like?

      Not too bad, actually. Quiet, modern, dull as fuck. I've got to go and lay the cabling for the new network they're installing. You should come and help over the weekend. I could do with a hand.

      Yeah, okay. I could do with a change of scenery.

      Ha! The perils of self-employment, eh? Cuppa?

      Go on then.

      Nick turned off the computer, and that was the last I even thought about the magic 8-ball for weeks.

      I checked my e-mails that morning like I normally do, with half my mind somewhere else. Checking them every morning was something I’d forced myself into doing a long while ago; I used to pride myself on never doing it on anything resembling a regular basis, but, since I’d gone into business for myself, I realised that was a bad habit that had to be broken, and, as much as I hated pushing myself into routines, I knew it had to be done. I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing it, it doesn't last long enough to become a bore on any level; at most, it's a few mouse clicks and a few seconds waiting. After that, you face the monumental task of deciding whether to read them now or later. It's a decision which has led me to many a sleepless night, I can tell you.

      Scanning down the list of filters, I realised most of it was updates from Facebook, the daily round-up of newsletters and special offers or relatives forwarding me funny attachments. One of the latter, I noticed, was from my wife, so I made a mental note to read that before she came home just in case, but, as I was about to start consigning everything to the bin, I noticed the words ‘magic 8-ball’. Seeing it was from Nick, I clicked it open and, once the anti-virus declared it clean of anything nasty, I grabbed the attachment from it and downloaded it to my desktop; I needed something to keep me distracted during those long hours of sitting around waiting for work to be approved and this was as good as anything. I sent a snarky reply and moved on to getting rid of the rest of the emails.

      And then I noticed that it had bounced back, recipient unknown.

      I opened it up again, checked the address, and realised it was from someone using Nick's name and the e-mail address an94615@anon.penet.fi. For whatever reason, Nick, or whoever had sent it, had actually taken the time out to send the mail through an anonymity server; all identifying marks from its journey stripped out, leaving me with no way to tell where it had come from (or, if there was, it was beyond me). The body of the mail itself was nothing more than some rudimentary instructions for the program, written in block capitals and devoid of anything resembling punctuation, so I knew right then it wasn’t from Nick.

      If you were to ask me now, I'd say I had no idea why I took the time to run that attachment through the usual battery of tests to make sure it wasn't going to screw my computer in any way; common sense said to just dump it and be done with, but something, some impish part of my brain, told me to just take a chance on it for a bit of fun. As I set the last test away, I leaned back in my chair and turned around to watch through the patio as next door's cat stalked through the garden like it was the lord of all it surveyed. It stopped when it saw me watching it and took a moment to stare back, before realising I was of no interest at all. The computer made a noise and I turned back to see the attachment was verified as completely clean. Once it was installed and started up, I asked the 8-Ball if this was Nick’s idea of a joke. I had to look to my heart for the answer to that one.

      Will the phone ring? I asked it in a moment of frivolity.

      Yes.

      I jumped when it did and laughed nervously to myself.

      It was Jan, with Yet Another Tech Question for me. She always preferred to ring me than have to call the office’s own IT guy in; I always wondered why, until I met him. Obnoxious wasn’t the word, but it was as close as you’ll get in the English language. And, just to make it worse, he really fancied Jan. I’ll never forget the look on his face the first time he saw us together in the pub; in just a few seconds, his world shattered into a thousand pieces and Jan’s revelation of who I was pretty much crushed them underfoot for good measure. All of his fantasies about him and my wife were gradually dismantled as we sat next to each other, just joking around with her workmates. When Jan mentioned I was in IT, too, he began to flex his technical knowledge at me in a blatant act of territorial pissing, and me, being a bloke, rose to his challenge like a tit, only walking away from it when Jan dragged me away with vague promises of food and sex.

      As usual, I kept the answer to Jan’s query simple, but informative, a philosophy I’d developed after too many conversations with other IT people who insisted on baffling laymen with jargon that sounded like something the writers of Star Trek had made up. I’d often wondered if it was a display of power on their part, flashing their knowledge of the arcane in the vague hope of proving that old adage about power being sexy.

      I said my goodbyes to my wife, closed down the magic 8-ball and settled down to some honest work related activities.

      You in?

      In here! I yelled. Jan poked her head into the doorway of my office, then vanished again leaving a huge grin hanging in the air. The office was, in fact, our never used dining room; once we moved in to the house,

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