Slowly, he crawled out of the Metal Gear. Like Snake, Liquid had been severely injured by the crash, but he had a gun grasped firmly in his hand, and he staggered toward REX’s wreckage.
This was bad. Somehow, I managed to free Snake from his seatbelt, but his wounds and fatigue left him in a stupor. Liquid was in a similar state, except he could walk while Snake wasn’t going anywhere.
Liquid, in Ocelot’s body. And Snake. The two old, worn-down, and wounded men confronted each other, each resolute in a shared goal: to put an end to their entwined fates. But one had taken his body to its limit and could no longer move.
Suddenly, Liquid grasped at his chest as if trying to gouge out his heart.
Snake had seen this before.
Nine years ago, when Snake escaped in a Jeep from the underground base and was trapped under that Jeep, unable to move, the original Liquid stood before him with eyes wide.
Snake’s own eyes said, I know this. I’ve lived this.
As if it were a magic curse, Snake apprehensively uttered the syllable, “FOX—”
Then Liquid, delivering his own coup de grâce, finished, “—DIE!”
His knees hit the ground, followed by the rest of him. His hand clutched at his heart in agony, nails digging into skin.
Was it over? Could their lengthy battle have ended so abruptly?
Snake gaped at Liquid, forgetting his own pain for a moment. His foe lay alone before him. Once known as Ocelot, the man had taken Liquid’s name and regarded himself as Solid Snake’s shadow and the son of Big Boss.
“Think again!”
Liquid sprang up, and his face radiated delight, even more so than on that night in Eastern Europe when he had cut down the surrounding US forces.
Had his injuries just been an act?
“What?” Snake said.
“Sorry, but that won’t work this time. Behold!”
Liquid pointed to the sea from which he and RAY had emerged. A rumble filled the port, beyond comparison with the sound RAY had made. Snake and I watched in astonishment as the gunmetal sea rose up, erupting into pillars of spray as if in celebration.
What I saw next made me doubt my own sanity.
A giant mass split the ocean, seawater cascading off the front in waterfalls. The mist cleared to reveal the four granite presidential heads of Mount Rushmore rising from the frozen Alaskan sea, faces unperturbed. Snake and I were caught dumbstruck by the sight, absurd, utterly ridiculous, and oddly magnificent.
Moved by the brazen irrationality and sheer shamelessness of the display, I worried that the Naval Hymn might start playing in my head. Snake recovered his sanity ahead of me and began to struggle free from the cockpit.
Not only did his body not work as he expected it to, but age and injury strove to crush his consciousness. Biting down a cry of pain, Snake crawled from the pilot’s seat of the fallen REX.
Seeing Snake on the ground, Liquid did a childish caper back to the water’s edge. He walked jauntily, pointing at us, every bit a picked-on little boy who’d just gotten back at his bully. I guess it could have been worse; at least he wasn’t jeering at us. Still, his gleeful immaturity disgusted me.
Perhaps incited to action by the juvenile teasing, Snake willed his pain away, raised his M4, and got to his feet.
Even so, the dislocated joint of his left shoulder wouldn’t cooperate. Snake could handle the pain, but he couldn’t get his body—not just his shoulder, but all of it—to move.
“Liquid …” he said, trying to lift the seven- or eight-pound rifle in one arm to get a bead on Liquid, but his biceps and shoulder muscles refused. Snake no longer had the strength to shoot anything higher than the ground fifteen feet ahead.
His bronchial tubes and diaphragm had grown too weak to deliver oxygen into his lungs. He was on the verge of asphyxiation. His breath came out in wheezes and gasps. In the cold, his metabolism struggled to convert his stored-up energy into heat.
Snake’s stamina had been depleted. As for the Mk. III, the robot was wedged in the back of the cockpit, the tiny legs flailing pitifully in the air.
At last, the structure beneath the Mount Rushmore heads appeared from the water.
It was a giant submarine at least two thousand feet long. The shape of the vessel, like a whale born the wrong size, marked it a relative of the Arsenal Gear.
Between the Arsenal-class submarine and the wreckages of RAY and REX, I felt I was in a land of giants. Snake and Liquid looked terribly small surrounded by the towering machines.
With a better look, the effigies on this Mount Rushmore weren’t the fathers of our country, Washington, Lincoln, or otherwise. The four faces resembled each other so closely at first I thought they were all copies. Which was only natural, for these were the likenesses of the family of Snakes, including Solid Snake himself. With him were Liquid, Solidus, and the man at the beginning of it all—Big Boss. When I really studied the sculpture, I realized that Big Boss’s face occupied Washington’s place among the four.
I found Liquid’s delusions of grandeur appalling. Was he suggesting the Snakes decided history—that only the line of Snakes would free the world from Zero’s obsessions of monitoring and control?
Then the Mount Rushmore began to fade. This was something I had been too stunned to realize sooner, but now seemed obvious—the image was only an OctoCamo texture projection.
At the edge of the harbor, Liquid stopped and turned to face us. He spread his arms wide, just as he had done after his victory in the Middle East, and proudly proclaimed, “This is the liberty we’ve won for ourselves: Outer Haven!”
Revealed beneath the OctoCamo Mount Rushmore was a gentle slope rising from the deck—the ship’s bridge had been unified into the hull for improved stealth capabilities. That said, Haven was so ridiculously gargantuan its bridge alone was easily three times the size of a typical nuclear submarine.
That huge bridge began to slide open as though the vessel were removing a hat. Inside the exposed interior of the ship stood a citylike cluster of rectangular structures, between which thrust a cannon familiar to me. The barrel angled upward, glaring at the sky.
The weapon was REX’s railgun—a nuclear launcher outside the Patriots’ governance.
“Behold,” Liquid shouted. “With this weapon, I will destroy JD. Then … everything ends, and everything begins!”
A cargo crane extended from the open bridge. Wheezing from his constricted windpipe, Snake struggled to catch up with Liquid.
“Not again,” Snake muttered. “I’ve done nothing but fail to stop Liquid. In the Middle East. And in Eastern Europe.
“But I don’t have any more time. No longer can I afford to let Liquid get away. If this keeps up, my old and dilapidated body will stop moving before I can put myself to rest.”
His lips moved in a silent prayer. God, the will of the universe, fate, whoever is out there. Please let me complete my last mission. Let me, and then I’ll give you my soul, my life, or whatever it is you want.