by Project Itoh
But Liquid wasn’t finished with him yet.
“Snake, we were created by the Patriots.” He sent another punch to the same place. “We’re not men. We’re shadows in the shape of men.”
Snake was utterly defenseless, with no strength left within him. Liquid pushed him back.
“We’re freaks who never should have existed!”
This time the punch came straight at Snake’s face.
“We’re a system to stifle the prosperity of future generations.”
Another punch. But this time, somehow, Snake was able to stop it, wrapping his hand around his brother’s fist.
“The Patriots saw fit to create us, and in doing so became our only raison d’être.”
Liquid drew back his other hand to strike.
“I won’t fight my fate any longer.”
Snake narrowly blocked the punch. Snake had each of his hands around Liquid’s, and they stood posed like wrestlers testing each other’s strength.
“I’ll kill Zero and Big Boss and become a Patriot myself.”
For a few tense moments, Liquid resisted Snake. Then suddenly he relaxed his arms and let Snake go. He turned his back to his brother and started walking to the patrol boat.
As he walked away, he said, “It all began with Zero and Big Boss. Our purpose in life is to fulfill our destinies. And once all is returned to nothing, the world can be reborn.”
When he reached the side of his ship, he turned to face his brother. Snake, exhausted from the struggle, was helpless to do anything but stare into the eyes hidden behind Liquid’s sunglasses.
“So long as we both live,” Liquid said, “there is no future. If we’re to pass the baton to the next generation, the only choice left to us is death.”
Between the fatigue of old age, the loss of breath, and the damage inflicted by Liquid’s beating, Snake was only half conscious, no longer able to tell which emotions showed in his brother’s eyes.
Vamp said something to Liquid, who nodded. Snake and I both got the feeling that something big was about to happen.
The nosferatu made a signal, and the soldiers surrounding Snake quickly backed into the boat, their weapons still trained on the wheezing old man.
The ship began to distance itself from the concrete walkway, and Liquid hopped aboard. “The players have all assembled, Snake. The time has come for you to witness our moment of triumph!”
Snake could only watch as the boat withdrew to the river. Liquid stood on the deck, his arms crossed, the wind across the water blowing his—that is to say, Ocelot’s—long gray hair.
Naomi stood beside him. Her eyes, brimming with sadness, settled on Snake.
Then a bright light flooded over everything.
Liquid’s ship was in the dead center of the river when the beams of light hit it from all directions. American helicopters hovered in the night sky, their floodlights aimed at the patrol boat. In an instant, the pitch dark of the city transformed into the glare of a concert arena.
“Hold it right there, Liquid!”
Meryl’s amplified voice, practically a howl, echoed off the bridges.
Her shout came from a line of five American patrol boats that blocked the width of the river as they sped toward Liquid. A similar force blocked the other side.
US forces poured across both shores of the river and the bridges to either side of Liquid’s boat. In an instant, the bridges were covered with APCs, Jeeps, and Humvees with mounted heavy machine guns—so many that the combined weight of troops and equipment might send the beautiful stonework crumbling into the river.
“Drop your weapons and stand down. Now!”
The roar of whirring rotors multiplied. Liquid looked up to see a fleet of helicopters bearing down on him of such number he must have found it a bit ridiculous—and most of them had sharpshooters on deck. They were like a swarm of flies buzzing in circles around Liquid’s ship.
Liquid was ecstatic—like a struggling artist finally thrust into the limelight.
His boat made a loop in the center of the river, while Meryl led her ship to the docks near Snake and EVA.
Snake put his arm around EVA’s waist. He led her onto the Rat Patrol’s ship and past Ed and Jonathan, who stood guard. As for Akiba, he was slumped at the edge of the deck, taken out of commission by seasickness.
“All of you,” Meryl shouted, “drop your weapons and put your hands up!”
Snake kept on telling her to stop, to run, but his voice was drowned out by the cacophony of rotors and engines—or perhaps she did hear him but chose to ignore his pleas. She believed her show of force would meet with certain success.
She piloted the boat after Liquid, moving in for the arrest.
The horde of machines howled from the land and the sea and the air. To the pilots and snipers, Liquid, bathed in the searchlights, must have looked like a helpless man surrounded by a hundred wild beasts.
Liquid took a deep breath.
It was like the pensive moment when a musician pauses before his audience before launching into his most beloved song with no introduction.
He raised his right arm. His fingers formed an imaginary gun, as if he were a child playing pretend. He pointed its barrel at one of the helicopters.
“Bang.”
What the hell was Liquid doing?
At first, nobody—not Meryl or any of the American soldiers—knew what the gray-haired old man was trying to accomplish with his childish display. He kept pointing his fingers at the helicopters. Bang, bang, bang.
The first to notice something amiss was the pilot of the first helicopter “shot down” by Liquid. All of the chopper’s instruments simultaneously went black, and the navigation display in his headset winked off. Within moments, he realized the control stick had ceased to have any effect.
One after another, the helicopters lost control and were thrown into erratic spirals. The falling vehicles made a sad, absurd dance.
The first scream came from that same pilot. “Metal Slave 01 has lost control! We’re going to crash!”
The SOP’s tactical link was flooded with a continuous noise of shrieks and cries, with new voices coming in waves, filling in for the ones that fell silent.
Liquid aimed at a soldier on the bridge.
“Bang.”
His target groaned and collapsed to the ground. The Marines next to the fallen man didn’t know what had happened.
Meryl yelled, “Fire!”
The US forces raised their weapons in unison and squeezed their triggers.
Click.
The metallic chorus rang through the night sky.
Scores of weapons were pointed at Liquid’s boat, from small arms to light machine guns, to the Humvee-mounted large caliber guns. But none with a hammer willing to fulfill the needs of the inhabitant of the chamber.
Meryl went pale. “What?” She stared at the Desert Eagle in her hands. Reflexively, she checked its mechanical safety, even though she already knew it was off. It was.
Finally she realized what was happening.
Her patrol boat was slowing down, its engine no longer running.
In the distance an explosion violently blossomed. One of the helicopters had crashed.
“The System is mine!” Liquid boomed.
His personal guard opened fire from the deck. This time the attack was with real guns and real bullets. The other helicopters lost their battle against gravity, crashing into the buildings and streets. Amid the thunder of explosions, the helpless soldiers were cut down by an onslaught of lead.
The ones who reacted quickly enough to get behind cover experienced the world falling apart. Their suppressed and compressed residual emotions, suddenly given free rein, became a raging storm battering at their nervous systems.
Blood streamed from their ears as they vomited relentlessly into their masks. With hands to their heads, the soldiers screamed unintelligibly, their wailing every bit as loud as the gunfire. They convulsed like wind-up toys. Everything crumble
d—consciousness, meaning, the world, the landscape, words—into grains of sand blowing in the wind.
Most of the fighters hadn’t made it to cover behind their vehicles. They either collapsed on the spot into a twitching mass, threw themselves over the guard rail, or were shot in the back.
Liquid pointed four fingers straight out and mimicked a Gatling gun with each hand.
He started with the ships to his left and his right.
He aimed at them, Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. His arms shook with mock recoil.
The ships’ engines exploded.
The searchlights were destroyed by the blasts, but the flaming wreckage lit the river orange, painting a beautiful light on the canvas of the water’s surface.
Next were the vehicles on the bridges and riverbanks.
Liquid swept his arms in a 180-degree arc, Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam, and the vehicles launched into a neat, orderly line of explosions. The grenades and ammunition of soldiers caught in the fire ignited, and the earth looked as if it had been napalm bombed.
The city burned.
Golden embers fell from the sky like snowflakes. Liquid raised his arms and bellowed in triumph. “Do you see this, Zero? We are victorious!”
This would only be the first of the flames. These deaths were only the beginning.
A bigger fire was coming, and it was coming soon.
“These are the Guns of the Patriots!”
Like the rest of the soldiers, Ed, Jonathan, and Meryl were fighting off the crushing weight of their emotions and the destruction of their nervous systems. They were helpless to fight back, and the two large men had taken bullets from Liquid’s men and fell to the deck.
Meryl called their names. Ed and Jonathan couldn’t do much but moan through the pain. At least that meant they were still alive. Amid the crumbling world, Meryl lifted herself up on one knee and managed to find her balance. She withdrew a combat knife from a sheath at her hip.
The knife didn’t have any clever mechanisms. There weren’t any ID tags, just a blade, a primitive instrument to cut and slice and take the lives of its victims. Simple and beautiful. True. Meryl held it at the ready and glared at Liquid’s boat drawing ever closer.
But still, her mind hung by a thread.
The thread snapped.
Somebody shouted, “Meryl, get down!”
Somewhere in her hazy thoughts she might have wondered, Was that Snake? but she and everything and everyone she knew fell apart. In that state, she couldn’t parse the command, let alone follow it. Her consciousness stretched infinitely thin, and waves of headache and nausea, like from an endless fever, pulsed through her body with every heartbeat and tore her down from within.
Then someone tackled her. Gunfire echoed in her ears. It took some time for her to realize the person covering her had been shot. His face looked remarkably like Johnny Akiba’s.
“You’re …” she whispered. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Akiba? But why?”
Akiba sensed something and looked to the port side. Liquid’s patrol boat was bearing down straight at the side of their ship. But Meryl’s ship was dead in the water.
“Out of my way!” Ocelot yelled. The ship cannon spit fire.
Akiba grabbed Meryl and dove to the starboard side. In that instant, the port side of the boat was blown to pieces. The blast flung the two to the opposite side. Jonathan and Ed fell to the river where they floated. Akiba made a quick decision and dove into the water with Meryl in his arms.
Just before the explosion, Snake was about to use Naomi’s autoinjector to alleviate the System’s interference with his nanomachines. But when the shell tore a hole into the side of the ship, he was knocked back, and his only salvation slipped from his hand and onto the deck. EVA seemed to be holding on to a part of the deck, and she was still slumped over in the same spot. But now hardly any life remained in her eyes.
Liquid’s ship slowly glided past theirs.
Liquid stood atop its cannon, his arms crossed. He cast them a glance and said, “Let them have it. We don’t need it anymore.”
Vamp picked up a large black bundle. Snake and EVA watched helplessly as he threw it into the starboard fire on the Rat Patrol boat.
EVA let out a tiny, pathetic scream.
Inside the bundle was Big Boss’s body. Disconnected from life support, it was likely no longer alive. The corpse rolled to a stop inside the blaze. Its skin began to wither and shrink in the flames.
Snake struggled to his feet and took unsteady steps toward the body. The deck was enveloped in smoke. Snake’s lungs, already weakened by age and a lifelong cigarette addiction, had no way of coping with the particulate cloud. He coughed ever more violently and nearly blacked out.
“So long, Snake!”
Liquid drew his pistol and fired at Big Boss’s body.
The deck was engulfed by another blast of flames. Fully half of the ship was now on fire, and Snake’s OctoCamo turned orange to match the blaze. Snake raised his hands to protect his exposed face from the incredible heat.
Through the gaps between his fingers, he could see that Big Boss was already halfway gone.
I don’t know where she found the strength, but EVA jumped into the fire to save the body of Big Boss. But it was hopeless. Snake reached into the flames and pulled her away.
For one brief moment, EVA and Liquid met each other’s eyes. Then another explosion disintegrated the burning half of the ship.
The fireball licked across EVA and Snake. The flames burned through the back of EVA’s leather jacket and charred her skin. Snake’s left cheek burned off in an instant. Snake screamed in pain only to be choked by the stench of his own burning flesh.
Snake fell to the deck, defeated.
And then Snake realized that everyone there was his family. His mother, his father, and himself, their son—all reduced to ashes while only Liquid remained, the last of the Snakes, to throw the world into chaos.
That couldn’t be allowed to happen. It wasn’t over.
Snake shouted, “Otacon!”
I snapped to my senses and drew back from the horrors on the screen. I sent the Mk. II across the deck on full throttle and built as much momentum as I could. It rolled past Snake and EVA, aimed directly at the back of Liquid’s boat, and jumped.
I engaged the stealth mode in midair, and when the tiny stowaway landed on Liquid’s deck, no one noticed.
The city was filled with light.
Not daylight—helicopter crash sites blazed like bonfires. Columns of black smoke rose in the gaps between the roofs. The roar of noise—cries, curses, gunfire, and explosions—had fallen silent.
There were more men dead than alive. When the nanomachines threw their bodies and minds into disorder, they were rendered incapable of firing a single bullet in their defense. The soldiers faced down a whirlwind of automatic fire. If you could have looked down at the streets from up high that day, you would have seen their blood over everything.
But some yet lived. There were many only on the brink of death.
Johnny dragged Meryl’s body to the shore. He checked her pulse. Nothing.
He lifted her chin and checked her airway. He removed his mask, pinched her nose shut, put his mouth over hers, and breathed air into her. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her chest rise. The air was reaching her lungs. He breathed again. No response.
Her lips were cold. He nearly lost himself in fear.
“Meryl, don’t give up on me!” he cried, partly in case she was still conscious somewhere inside—in case she would hear it and find her way back to the land of the living—but mostly just to pull himself back together.
Despite the pain of the many injuries he’d received protecting her, Johnny worked the entire upper half of his body, pushing repeatedly into Meryl’s chest.
“Don’t die, Meryl!” he repeated again and again as he continued the chest compressions. There was no one else around who could help. Ed and Jonathan w
ere nowhere in sight. On the bridge were only the dead and those who, like Meryl, were near death.
The only one who could possibly save her was him.
Come back, come back. Johnny’s hands, one atop the other, pumped against her sternum.
Come back, come back, come back, come back!
But she didn’t respond.
He stopped and returned to the artificial respiration, putting his mouth over hers.
Her eyes opened.
Their eyes met, not even inches apart. Johnny hurriedly removed his lips from hers, which had already started to regain their redness.
“I … I …” He tried to explain but stumbled on the words. His cheeks burned. What was Johnny embarrassed about anyway? He did what he had to do to save her life, that was all.
But he couldn’t lie to himself. As much as he struggled internally, his reaction was plain enough to anyone watching. Very few could have seen him and not understood. That’s not all, is it? he seemed to be thinking. That isn’t why I cried out to her to come back from the other side.
“Thank you, Akiba.”
She pulled him down and put her lips to his.
At the end of the kiss, he gently whispered, “If it’s all right, call me Johnny.”
Snake and EVA were on the opposite riverbank, not far from the smoldering husk of her cruiser.
Its nose had already begun to sink under the water’s surface, and most of the fire had died out. The corpses of EVA’s men had grown cold. Though their lives were lost, Snake wanted to do something to save their remains. But the swim to the shore had taken the last out of him. There was nothing more he could do.
Her men weren’t the only bodies left to the river. The surface was littered with them. Some were thrown into the water by explosions on their ships, and some fell accidentally from the bridges, while others jumped of their own accord just to get away from the pain.
Scores of corpses floated downstream, but others, like those who had strapped heavy weapons to themselves or were weighed down by too much body armor, just sank to the bottom of the river.
And this was only one fraction of the field of the dead, with countless others on the roads and bridges.
