Long Haul by Tom Olbert (ebook review).
There’s an interesting concept at the heart of this short story, ‘Long Haul’. By using dark energy you can drive your vehicle through another dimension to emerge back into this dimension at your chosen destination in a fraction of the time it would normally take. There is a little problem in that the dimension you have to travel through may not be anything like this one and may harbour very aggressive and hostile alien life-forms. To make things worse, if you hit the dimension intersections wrong you may end up in a different place and time to what you were expecting.
With ‘Long Haul’, Olbert has taken what viewers of such TV programmes such ‘Ice Road Truckers’ will be very familiar with, huge trucks and even bigger characters. The driving team consists of Garath Jenkins and Sally Drake. They have many things in common such as doing service in Iraq for the US military and very loose morels. Jenkins has had two previous failed marriages and is supporting two ex-wives and two children. Drake has a steady stream of lesbian love affairs which don’t seem to last very long. While neither Jenkins nor Drake could be called angels, it’s the company they work for which is the bad guy in this story.
Having completed a haulage assignment, the pair are offered an illegal roadside drop-off with a large cash reward. Although it should be an easy job of just collecting the delivery and dropping it off at the agreed site, things quickly go wrong when they meet Keira Takahashi, a human rights activist. This is quite a short story and I think it might have benefited from being a little longer as Takahashi’s impact on Jenkins and Drake happens just too quickly. Still, this is an enjoyable short story and worth the money. With the advent of computer controlled vehicles, seemingly only a few years away, we may never get to see inter-dimensional truckers outside of stories like this.
Andy Whitaker
August 2014
(pub: Musa Publishing. 52 page eBook. Price Kindle version: £1.81 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-61937-733-23. ASIN: B00MBSEAKU)
check out websites: www.musapublishing.com and http://tomolbert.blogspot.com/
