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.