Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (25 page)

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 were 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.

Snake was sitting with his back against a guardrail post and EVA cradled in his lap. She opened her eyes, and in a voice so soft Snake had to lean forward to hear the words, she said, “You and your brother are together a monster—a shadow scorched into the world by a light shining upon a monster. Unless the light is put out, the shadow cannot be erased. As long as there is light, there will be shadow.”

She looked at Snake with unfocused eyes. Her gaze kept drifting and returning, making her seem hollow.

“To return everything to normal … the light must be extinguished.”

Her voice was barely a scratching in her throat. Snake put his ear as close to her pale lips as he could.

Her eyes closed, and a single tear ran down her cheek as if it were her own life leaving her.

“And when that happens, you … will be too.”

And then she was gone.

Snake watched her face for a time—the face of the woman who loved Big Boss, who bore his children, and who rescued him.

“When I kill Liquid and end my own life, the last of EVA’s children will vanish from the face of the earth,” Snake said, to himself more than to me. “That’s our fate.”

Snake heard the sound of a running engine up above. He looked up to see Drebin and Little Gray leaning over a guard railing at the side of the road, each with a can of NARC in hand.

“Hey, we pride ourselves on service. Let’s get you to your friends.”

ACT 4: TWIN SUNS

LET ME TELL you a story about a Snake.

He was one of the twin Snakes, a fragment of the whole. Some called him a shadow.

Like his brother, he grew up knowing nothing of his birth parents. Like his brother, he had a name few were allowed to know. I don’t know what people called him before he was given his code designation. Having never called his twin brother by his birth name, he might have died not even knowing his own.

So I can only call him by his code name:

Liquid Snake.

Liquid was raised in the UK to be Solid Snake’s shadow. And like Snake, the young Liquid was not aware of, or allowed to learn of, the genetic fate he carried within his DNA. Like Snake, he went into the military at a young age. Then he joined the SIS, a British foreign intelligence service also known as MI6, where he proved as capable a spy as he was a soldier.

Back then, the price of oil was consistent and cheap, and the precious liquid was abundant all over the globe. But the market became flooded, and Iraq saw revenues from the sale of oil—the nation’s only commodity—shrink, crippling their efforts to rebuild an economy ravaged by the Iran-Iraq War.

With Iraq and Kuwait’s history of conflict over oil fields, tensions heightened between the two states. War was clearly only a matter of time, and the nations of the world sent their intelligence agencies into action.

The only country in the G7 with an existing intelligence network in the region was Great Britain, who had maintained theirs since the colonial period. Although America later came to see Iraq as an enemy—despite having supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war—the US government had not yet been able to create an effective network in the region.

Therefore, the SIS sent Liquid to infiltrate Baghdad, and there he remained as a sleeper agent. By nature of his birth in the Les Enfants Terribles project, Liquid was part Japanese and could pass as half Turkish and half Caucasian. More importantly, his language abilities were a match for his brother’s, and he achieved a near-fluency in Arabic.

Liquid was gifted. Once inside Iraq, he quickly built connections with resistance fighters among the oppressed Kurds and Islamic fundamentalists repressed as part of Saddam’s pan-Arabist agenda.

With the aid of his contacts, Liquid was able to remain inside Baghdad even after the beginning of the Gulf War, amid the heavy presence of Mukhabarat (the Iraqi Intelligence Service) agents and counterspies within the secret police forces known as the al-Amn al-‘Amm.

Liquid was productive. He uncovered the locations of Scud missile mobile launching platforms, details of mustard gas production, and the movement of Republican Guard tanks. He sent reports to coalition forces, who used his information to plan a number of missions. For a short time during the war, both Snake and he were in Iraq and not far apart—one an American Green Beret, and the other a spy for the British SIS.

Liquid never understood how he, so adept an agent, got captured. Inside the van, headed for the secret police’s headquarters, with a canvas sack over his head, he appraised his situation from every angle.

“Where?” he whispered to himself. “Where did I go wrong? Surely I haven’t made a mistake. Did someone rat me out? Did they work backward from the list of bombed installations and find a common leak?”

What it just came down to was this: before the end of the Gulf War, Liquid’s luck ran out.

Liquid was trained to resist interrogation. But reality wasn’t as easy as training. The tortures of the al-Amn al-‘Amm interrogation squads were beyond imagination.

There, Liquid learned how far humanity was capable of going.

A man could become boundlessly cruel. Even a revered figure, once named an enemy, would be seen as less than human. The soldiers who gleefully rubbed salt into Liquid’s wounds were Muslims, but everything they did, they did for Saddam. There’s not much difference between gods and men.

Given absolute freedom, humans will sink to any depth.

Liquid witnessed what pitiful creatures chains made of men. Prisoner camps were designed to brainwash captives into believing themselves powerless and insignificant. Liquid abhorred all that would constrain life to no purpose but to live.

After the war, he vanished. Not once did he make contact with London. Nor did SIS ever attempt to find him. Maybe the situation was just too uncomfortable for the agency—for you see, they had used him as bait, and allowed his capture in order to secure a new informant valuable to Britain. Liquid was, essentially, a human sacrifice to get intelligence from a man close to Saddam.

Four years later, Liquid was rescued by the US military. I don’t know to where he drifted in the intervening years—from what I gather, he wandered the world, building his own international network. He never returned to Britain. Instead, he was scouted by the American forces and selected for the High-Tech Special Forces Unit FOXHOUND. By that time, Colonel Campbell had already left the unit, and when Liquid joined, he effectively became their new commander.

Under his new leadership, FOXHOUND—once a sizable, albeit hand-selected, group—was reformed as a selective ultra-elite force of a limited number of soldiers with superhuman abilities. Their ranks included Sniper Wolf, Psycho Mantis, and Decoy Octopus—presumably he met them in those four years he spent building his global network.

I don’t know if Liquid found Revolver Ocelot himself or if someone else introduced them. Either way, Ocelot was seen at Liquid’s side from the very beginning. Whether Liquid went to Ocelot or Ocelot approached FOXHOUND, the result was the same.

Liquid learned of his own secret origin.

Why he had been born. That his father was the legendary mercenary. That the man known to all in the underworld, Solid Snake, was his brother.

When he learned these truths, Liquid again felt the enmity he’d discovered inside the Baghdad prison camp. Anger toward his creators blossomed into a fiery rage.

He revered no gods and no heroes, and had come to feel contempt toward those who did believe in something.

But now he came face-to-face with the knowledge that he had been born nothing more than a mere reproduction of the genetic code of a person he neither revered nor respected.

Suddenly he found himself a prisoner of a fate he’d never wished for.

Idols and gods might be forgotten, but his genes were inescapable. His mind, his personality, his intellect, and his skills were all nothing more than traits inherited from his father.

The prison camp was nothing compared to this realization:

I’m imprisoned in my own body—and my genes make it a life sentence.

Surely a certain element of jealousy was involved. He must have surely thought it idiotic that his identical brother, his figurative cellmate trapped with the same DNA, came to be known as the legendary hero and as the man who made the impossible possible.

The accolades bestowed upon his brother were absolute proof of his imprisonment.

Liquid started to fight against his fate—to find freedom from despair and to put his very life on the line; to shout at the world, “I am me! I am myself and no one else! I am here!”

And he would do it by fulfilling his father’s dreams.

He saw it not as inheriting his father’s fate.

He would do what his father couldn’t. And what his brother couldn’t.

If he were successful, he would find liberation from his curse.

That day, the earth was quiet.

A world once filled with the ceaseless gunfire of manufactured revolutions found a moment of peace. All across the surface of this big blue marble we call home, wars fell silent, as if mankind’s wholesale butchery against his fellow man had been nothing more than some distant lie.

In Africa, in the Middle East, in Russia, and in Southeast Asia, soldiers all across the globe looked up to the skies.

What happened?
they must have wondered. Their weapons, along with those of their compatriots and their enemies, suddenly locked and became inoperable. The bewildered combatants fiddled with their rifles before ultimately giving up and retiring from the front lines. A few with naked guns were still able to fight, but their opponents only folded and surrendered with their arms in the air.

In all the varied combat zones across the world, soldiers falling back to their bases looked up to the heavens. In some places, they looked up to the blue, cloudless sky, while in others they saw countless stars, but all were filled with the same feeling—even those of no faith.

Had God, or some godlike being, descended upon Earth?

Had we angered Him with our foolish ways?

Sure, even with their guns disabled, they could still have done battle with hatchets and bayonets, even knives, but to most of the soldiers killing another man at close range with their own hands was unimaginable. Even only a small fraction of front-line troops in World War II ever fired at the enemy.

Even when their own lives were in immediate danger, people tended to avoid shooting one another. The Vietnam War saw the development of new training methods to condition soldiers to overcome the natural resistance to shooting, but many of them suffered for it after their return home. Psychological damage threw their lives into ruin.

That day, not one single fighting unit anywhere in the world attempted to fight by bludgeoning skulls or thrusting blades into hearts. All conflict had ceased.

I was in the cargo bay of
Nomad
, concerned about Snake’s condition. He had already started to recover from the mission, but half of his face was badly burned, and his airway, ravaged by the smoke and the intense heat, sent out an endless torrent of coughs and phlegm.

A call came in on the monitor. I accepted the connection, and Colonel Campbell appeared on the display. A woman—off-screen, probably Rose—was just finishing straightening his tie. The conjugal display stirred up a flash of irritation in me. Sunny remained tirelessly at Raiden’s side. His dialysis and treatment would still take a little while longer.

I asked the colonel, “How’s the White House responding? And the public?”

“The president has yet to make an official announcement. But the media are starting to pick up on it.”

Between coughs, Snake added derisively, “He probably thinks he can still keep information under control.”

Despite his dilapidated state, Snake’s mind was still sharp. And yet at times I couldn’t bear to look at him anymore—to see my friend possessed of the will to fight, to see him even now attempting to fulfill his duties.

“No, not this time,” Campbell said. “The war economy has ground to a complete halt. It’s tough to downplay a crisis of these proportions. War economy–related stocks are already going into a free fall.”

Snake laughed. To think that the extinction of war was a crisis. He said, “They must be shitting themselves at the White House right now.”

“In any case,” said the colonel, “the people of the world had better sleep soundly while they still can. Liquid’s insurrection is about to begin.”

Indeed, Liquid’s control over the System had created the calm that fell over the world. The PMCs weren’t the only forces controlled by nanomachines and ID tags—the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps were also crippled. America’s entire armed forces were at the mercy of the System.