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.”