Agent out of Time (The Agents for Good) by Guy Stanton III Page B

the plan and I couldn’t believe our good fortune.
    I had expected to have to roll out of the crate with guns blazing, but now we could come out undetected in the night. The voices grew fainter and fainter. I waited exactly an hour, after the last noises had faded away, before starting my escape from the crate. One problem with that though. My legs wouldn’t move!
    I had to kick the pre-weakened side out at the end of the crate and my numb legs wouldn’t move. Screaming inside with effort and self-loathing from my body’s ineptitude I tried to force my dead legs to life. Nothing doing. I brushed at the sweat rolling into my eyes, as I faced an irrefutable fact. I was old.
    “Oh God please let me keep what little pride I still have left and make my legs work!” I whispered into the darkness, as I tried to move again. I got the same result as before. I was old and feeble, ready for the old folk’s home at Happy Level Acres or something.
    Not even the anger I felt at that conclusion of thought was enough to budge my legs into action. My head sank down onto my shoulder and after a sigh of defeat I pressed the com button at my ear. I had insisted on radio silence until my signal.
    “Ring?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’m going to need your help to get out of this crate.”
    There was a telling pause before he responded, “Got it.”
    I heard the sounds of him breaking free of his crate dimly in the background. I shook my head in self anguish. My task was to break out of a hellish Soviet era gulag sinkhole in the middle of Siberia and I couldn’t even find my way out of a stupid wooden crate!
    I heard prying sounds and soon Trent had the side of the crate off. He half pulled me out and when I was clear I grasped the edge of the crate and pulled myself upward. I winced with agony, as blood and feeling came back to my pinched off nerves. My face felt hot with the shame that I felt and as Trent angled around to face my front I angled my head away. His hand closed down firmly on my shoulder and I forced myself to meet his gaze in the gloomy interior of the storage bay.
    “I’m over 30 years younger than you and I feel like…. Like not good.” He finished lamely in lieu of the earthy vocabulary terminology that he knew I didn’t approve of.
    “Truth is I about called over to you to ask for help to get out of my crate.” Trent added.
    I straightened up a bit feeling and hearing my back pop and crackle alarmingly so, when I did.
    “Typically you move around pretty good for a dude, who will be pushing seventy in a few years.”
    “You should’ve shut up, while you were ahead.” I muttered out unkindly.
    “Thanks for getting me out of the crate. As you know I don’t like swearing, but there’s something else I don’t like too, which is lying. I heard how easily you broke out of your crate.”
    He shrugged, “Made you feel better for a moment.”
    I squeezed his shoulder, as I began to take in our murky surroundings, “Yeah it did, until you blew it.”
     
    Trent whistled softly under his breath, “Speaking of blowing things up!” He exclaimed softly.
    I turned to see what he was looking at. Not twenty feet from us was a wide vat that reached almost all the way up to the high ceiling of the storage bay. It had gas marked on it in Russian.
    “Here help me push the crates over against it.”
    Trent helped me, but I could see the question in his eyes. “You know that when this blows the whole place will go up in flames right?”
    I nodded. I didn’t want to go down the moral rights and wrongs of that road just yet. This place was full of people being tortured to death, but that didn’t mean that they wanted their tortured existences mercifully ended by being blown up.
    It was a tough call and one I wished that I didn’t have to make. Grabbing our packs we headed off into the inner reaches of the prison. It soon became apparent that security was no big priority here. There weren’t even surveillance cameras to have to