"What's a nice girl like you doin' in a place like this?"
She grabbed the bars and wrenched them apart enough for a man to easily slip through. "Getting you fellas out of here, what do you think?"
"Sounds like a grand idea," the same man agreed, marveling at the bent bars.
"James Barnes," she called. "Where is he? Anyone know him?"
"They took him," another man in the next cell over said. "Not two days ago. They might be experimenting on us, we don't know. They don't come back, that's for sure."
Stevie's blood ran cold, and she wrenched the rest of the cages open. "Go down that hallway, hang a right," she said, gesturing. "There will be guards at the end, you'll have to be fast and sneaky to get them down without setting off the alarm. Most of your weapons are stored in the second door on the left. Go back to the main hallway, go straight for about ten meters, take four immediate lefts, and hopefully you can follow where the guards don't want you to go to figure your way out from there."
"What the hell, Stevie?"
"I toldja I'd come for ya," she said breathlessly, snapping the restraints and slinging his right arm over her shoulders and slipping her arm around his waist. "One woman army got turned into a one woman and a squadron of men around the same time that I broke in, though."
"Lord in Heaven, Father Almighty, please don't let this be a hallucination," he muttered.
"I think it would hurt a lot less if it was a hallucination," she said as they limped through the halls. "Did you want me to punch you, just in case?"
"No, I think I'm okay," he said, dazed.
She grinned a bit to herself. "Good idea, because I joined the Army, jerk. And they think that we should be able to defend ourselves."
Bucky let out a sharp, pained laugh.
Stevie spent half a day rounding up the soldiers that scattered in—quite literally—every direction when they escaped. It definitely explained the bombed-out look that the center had. Windows were broken, crates were smashed, a tank had been flipped somehow, and the east side of the building had completely caved in, the roof connected to the mostly-intact portion sagging towards the ground.
(When she said every direction, she meant that she found one man twenty meters off the ground, hanging out in a tree with a rifle, a bottle of water, his pants, one boot, and his dog tags. She had to take to bribing him with food to come down like he was one of the feral cats around the docks.)
She was also never so glad to be stuck in this suit: this bright, conspicuous, memorable suit. Otherwise, she probably would have been shot about three hundred times at the end of hour five. Even with her healing factor, it would have been fatal to have been shot that many times.
Surprisingly, the 107th squadron was, paired with the bare remnants back at camp, still almost three-fourths of their original size. There was a lot of quiet rejoicing.
Stevie ended up commandeering one of the tanks for the wounded to ride on. Actually, a man named Dum-Dum Dugan decided that it was probably a good idea to have a tank, and hotwired it in the middle of the fierce battle that exploded upon escaping, and then had a hell of a time blowing Nazis to dust. (Which explained the collapsed east wing…)
So yes, three hundred odd soldiers and one semi-stupid super-actress marched thirty miles through hostile land back to safe ground.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Stephanie Rogers went on to lead the Howling Commandos to victory a dozen times over and only lost a single man: Sargent James Barnes, affectionately known as Bucky. Barnes got blown off a train in a middle of a battle between them and HYDRA, and was unable to be saved.
Tragically, Stephanie Rogers gave her life to save New York City and the six million people who lived there only six days later.