The Security Guard

A young man is working as a security guard at a telephone relay station. It's not a bad job, but it gets boring sometimes. It's particularly bad during the winter months, when it's freezing cold as well.

With nothing else to do during the long nights, the young guy takes to exploring the station. One night he finds the keys to a maintenance catwalk that runs along above a satellite dish. He goes exploring, and notices that at a certain point on the catwalk, right above the centre of the dish, it's actually quite warm.

He spends the night stood on the catwalk, bathing in the warmth from the dish. He feels fine in the morning, and nobody notices, and so he starts doing this every night.

For a while things are fine, but then Christmas rolls around, and the young man draws the short straw. He'll be working on Christmas night. He's reluctant, but it's double pay. What the hell, he figures. And so he brings along a deckchair and a couple of beers and sets himself up on the catwalk to wait out the long night.

What he doesn't realise, unfortunately, is that the reason that the area of the catwalk right above the dish is so warm is because it is the focus of the dish's microwave rays. And what he also doesn't realise is that in order to cope with the greater seasonal demand over Christmas, the dish is transmitting at ten times the usual intensity.

When the cleaner comes in at six the next morning the station is quiet. There's a smell like roast turkey, permeating the whole area. Thinking that it must be the young security guard preparing some kind of Christmas roast, he wanders through to the kitchen, but there's nobody there. It's only when he goes out onto the catwalk that he discovers the truth. There lies the young security guard in his deckchair. The beers he brought along have exploded. The man is dead, thin streams of smoke pouring from his eyes and ears and mouth.