Oh Suzannah, Don't You Cry For Me

Chapter Thirty-Nine:

The chapter title is a riff on the movie Saving Private Ryan. I haven't seen the full movie but I did watch the D-Day Normandy scene (for research purposes for an earlier chapter), and by golly, it's horridly graphic. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Saving Sergeant Barnes

Never in her entire life had she been more glad she had listened to her gut than she did now.

When she first saw the barn looming in the distance, she originally thought nothing of it. Once she got closer and watched the Russians kill three of her comrades, her gut shouted at her to search the barn for answers because something lay hidden behind those decaying walls.

It smelled like any old barn, like the one at Uncle Henry's farm in Indiana—rotting wood, musty hay, and the ever-present undertones of animal manure. The barn had no animals now, just a bunch of Russians, more armoured trucks, and even a tank. Stripped of any common barn features, the inside lacked animal pens, stacks of rusty equipment, or anything else one would expect to see in a barn.

Two guards stood in the hay loft, so Suzie shot them first. Manvuering between the parked vehicles, more Russians poured out of nowhere and tried to slow her infiltration.

Then she found a trapdoor leading down a set of stairs. The sudden shift from an old barn to a stark gray, communist concrete hellscape startled her senses enough she hadn't noticed she had run into a shirtless, barefoot, and heavily drugged man on the second floor down.

She had almost shot him—the gun clicked empty when she pulled the trigger—before realizing she had run straight into a ghost.

It couldn't be true. Her brother died months ago, fallen somewhere in the mountains. Steve had seen it; he wouldn't lie.

But, somehow, against all odds, she stood staring at her dead brother. His hair had grown long and wild; it stuck up at odd angles and curled around his ears like a lion's mane of tangles. His beard grew thick enough to make him appear like one of the deranged homeless men Suzie had seen when she worked at the Brooklyn harbor.

From the waist up, he wore nothing other than bloody bandages wrapped around his abdomen. Dried blood ran down his right arm while his left ended in a stump at the elbow. Even from a few feet apart, she could count the ribs poking through his ashen skin. While nowhere near as emaciated as the prisoners at Flossenbürg, his thinness looked far from normal. Aside from the light flush of red on his sweaty face, his skin lacked a healthy shade of color. He looked gray, like a ghost brought back from the dead.

The threadbare pants he wore had seen better days and barely clung onto his hips. Bloody and torn, he had no shoes or socks. Dark bags under his eyes made him appear like they had sunken into his skull. If not for the rapid wheezing and trembling limbs, he could've been a walking corpse.

Shaking off the shock of finding Bucky in the hallways of what appeared to be a secret Russian base in the middle of Czechoslovakia, Suzie holstered her gun and took a step toward him. "Oh, my g—" She clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting back tears. It couldn't be true. It couldn't.

Bucky pressed himself against the wall as if wanting to run away but couldn't. He flinched when Suzie took another step toward him, so Suzie held up her hands, palms flat toward the floor and fingers spread to show she meant no harm.

"Hey, Bucky, it's me," Suzie said. She took another step, all thoughts of the Russians flying away. Getting her brother to safety suddenly became her highest priority. If only he didn't look like a spooked animal, trapped and wary of impending danger.