MergePunk: An Ooorah & WattpadPunkFiction Anthology

Train Station Platform - @KarlOConnor - SteamPunk + Anti-Villain SF

Feeling as if he should say something John holds himself back. Indeed time moves faster when it is not being watched as it does if the mind is distracted from watching it, for off in the distance he can see heavy and continuous dark plumes of smoke bellowing out into the air as the train itself closes in on the station. Seconds pass, the train keeps coming and the boy still plays at the platform's edge.

'Little boy ...' he says feeling more than a little bit nervous, how he now wishes that he had a few more minutes before the locomotive would be due.

'Christopher ... get over here' calls the woman, indeed and surely the boy's mother.

John is more than a little shocked that she does no more than just call the boy. She is not even properly looking his way. Then it happens, the boy falls onto the tracks. He lands on his feet but the train; it is oh so close and it is still coming. John has to act quickly and act quick he does.

He instinctively moves from his position on the platform down onto those tracks. Finally attention is being paid to the boy by his parents. John grabs Christopher and hands him off with seconds remaining to remove himself from certain disaster. The train whistle blows its desperate warning. The engine may be slowing but it is still moving too quickly to come to a complete halt. In the rush to return up onto the platform he slips ...

***

According to his watch, the train is five minutes away. What the hell? He looks to his left, he looks to his right, is he is still alive? A reset perhaps, and unlike before ... not full or complete and also without the full on haze? A haze is still there of course but the platform walking boy, his fall and the oncoming train. He remembers all that perfectly.

A brown leather briefcase is at his side, his briefcase? John tries to grab it but he can't. Another man approaches and without even acknowledging John, this stranger picks up the briefcase and moves away.

'Excuse me ...' speaks John being almost sure that the briefcase is his own.

That stranger, who oddly enough is in a way familiar, continues to move on as if he had heard nothing. Maybe he has heard nothing. He moves into the main station room area and looks around as if he were searching for something or someone then moves on to leave the facility altogether and John follows to the point where he all of a sudden finds himself back standing on the platform looking at his watch with the time being five minutes until his train is due.

What the hell? How is he back here? How is his train five minutes away if it had already come? And if it had come the where is it now? Also where are that boy and his family? What is all this? What is going on?

He, being at as much of a loss as he is, indeed can't help but wonder as to what is going on. The man he had followed had entered the station from the platform side to possibly leave it completely with the briefcase in tow and with a train having yet to arrive, maybe for a second time. Yeah, what the hell is going on?

Is John not able to leave the station? Is this why he is back on the platform? As if a reset button had been pressed? If so ... then with not being able to pick up the briefcase and apparently not being acknowledged ... is he ... dead?

Why is it too, that he is waiting on a train? Is there somewhere he needs to be? He had been sure of such not so long ago, or at least he thought he was, and now he definitely is not so sure.

The family who had been on the platform, Christopher's family, they are now nowhere to be seen. If John is indeed dead then the fact that the family is nowhere to be seen makes sense to some degree for they surely have moved on. Alright so John, in a strange way, can handle that partial extrapolation even if he is stretching his reasoning, for maybe this train station platform is some sort of purgatory though with being dead, if dead is what he is, why is he unable to leave the platform? Is he being punished for something? And apart from when it did arrive, why is his train once again five minutes away?