Experiment With Destiny by Stephen Carr Read Free Book Online

weight against the booth and stared down the length of the platform toward the maintenance block, gulping deliberately deep breaths. Darkness had activated the lurid neon strip lights that bathed the deserted terminus in an eerie, unnatural glow. The rain, carried on a sudden gust, began to fall.
    Marcus felt trapped. He could stay, complete his menial duties and return to his bedsit. Nothing would change. His dull life would go on without meaning or hope…but he would be safe. Safe for what? Safe for whom? What was the point of being safe? Of living safe? His mind’s eye conjured the myriad faces of his framed photographs…people whose lives were much less safe, far less ordinary, much more real. Safe…or sane? He saw his life, a broad, empty highway where the relentless patterns and rituals of existence trudged ever on in monotony. He remembered the words of the teacher in an old archive film about poetry – ‘Seize the day, make your lives extraordinary’. Suddenly his sweaty palms pushed against the frame of the booth and he paced quickly toward the end of the platform. Inside his head it was like a wave thundering toward the shore, the waters folding back and crashing upon the sand in a tumult of foam and spray. His mind was clear, the nausea passed and he could breathe more easily again.
                  The ice age was coming…mankind was doomed to a frozen grave and this drab existence was nothing more than humanity’s death throes. “Naked we come and naked we shall return,” he remembered. God is dead and, in a godless age, there is no life…only death, only hell. “Thou shalt not.” God is dead and who else can judge the thief? God is dead and who else can judge the crime? If life is hell, what else can be the punishment? Marcus marched into the coming storm.
                  No doubt lingered in Marcus’s determined stride. His garden of Gethsemane had come and gone like a momentary eclipse, its searching questions brushed aside with unfaltering certainty. Ignoring the panorama of suburban lights and the sting of the wind and rain, he descended the steps at the end of the platform and strode past the maintenance block to the bunker-like garage beyond it. He paused, staring down the steep ramp that joined the street below, then fumbled in his pocket for the key he had taken yesterday from the hook on the wall behind the door. The drumming of the rain grew heavier as he sought the lock with trembling hands. An instant later the heavy steel shutters were clattering upward and the distant glow from the platform’s neons fell ghostlike across the bonnet and headlamps of the waiting machine. Marcus stepped into the shadows, icy water dripping from the peak of his cap onto his face and blurring his vision.
                  The maintenance van was, as ever, unlocked, the key waiting in the ignition. Marcus gingerly opened the driver’s door and slid inside, removing his cap and placing it beside him on the passenger seat. It had been several years since he was last required to make use of the van, several years since his transfer from CMS maintenance and cleaning to CMS customer relations. Would he still remember how to drive it? He sat for a few moments in the quietness, peering at the steering wheel, the controls and indicators in the gloom. Then, slowly, he turned the ignition. There was a slight delay between the click of connection and the whine of the turbine as it powered into life. He clutched the wheel, his heart pounding, and stared nervously into the darkness ahead, aware of the steep drop down the ramp to the road.
                  Lights…where were the lights? His hands instinctively reached for the stick jutting from the steering column beneath the wheel and twisted its end. One click, two and the beams of the headlamps scythed through the evening sky. He pulled the stick down, remembering, and the right turn indicator blinked on the dash in time