The moment he stepped into the hexagonal corridor, Snake was engulfed in microwaves.
Lethal electromagnetic waves emanated from all six faces of the hallway, their wavelength penetrating bone tissue and cell membrane and assaulting the water within every one of the sixty trillion cells within Snake’s body.
Before the mission, I had applied a thick coating of aluminum dust to Snake’s sneaking suit. The process was our best and only option against the microwaves. As in the door of a microwave oven, a metal plate—even if only a mesh—absorbed most of the energy.
I chose aluminum for the metal’s nonmagnetic properties, since metal that reacted to magnets heated rapidly when exposed to microwaves. Aluminum has been used for shielding in microwave ovens because, besides absorbing microwaves, the metal was low cost and wouldn’t radiate heat from dielectric loss.
Of course, I would have wanted to cover Snake’s entire body with a metal shield and provide complete protection from the fatal radiation. But had I done so, he wouldn’t have had the mobility to infiltrate the ship’s interior, let alone the server room.
I could do nothing for the gaps and joints of Snake’s suit. The suit was a complex assemblage of musclelike fibers, and the edges between them—the parts that moved—couldn’t be coated. And even if I had been able to, the aluminum dust only absorbed a small amount of the radiation. The shielding on a microwave oven was maybe half a millimeter thick, but the coating’s protection would not even be one one-hundredth of that.
A few steps in and the pain overwhelmed Snake and brought him to the ground.
I cried out to Snake.
His OctoCamo had gone haywire and turned the same red color as the burning floor. The sneaking suit began to change from its typical grayish blue to a deep crimson. The muscular design of the suit made Snake look like his skin had been stripped away to reveal the blood-red muscles beneath.
Snake couldn’t even cough anymore.
He couldn’t breathe. In his lungs and his heart, and every other organ in his body, Snake’s blood heated, quickly approaching the limits a warm-blooded animal could bear. Broken blood vessels hemorrhaged within the confines of the suit, and the blood, unusually thick, painted dark red stains on Snake’s skin.
Snake was boiling alive.
“Stand,” I yelled. “Snake, stand up!”I knew he wouldn’t be able to. But having the water in his body boil within him would not be a peaceful death. Through the intense heat, Snake extended his right arm.
He crawled. Excruciatingly slow, as if drowning in the inferno, he advanced, one arm at a time.
I thought I saw smoke rise from the joints in Snake’s suit, then his left upper arm exploded.
Snake screamed a bone-chilling scream like none I’d ever heard. Reflexively, I closed my eyes. Somewhere, the heat had localized, and the vaporized water expanded until it had no place left to go, then blew through muscle and skin. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; a human body exploding bit by bit.
I fought down waves of nausea.
On Snake’s arm, his muscles were exposed, and several tendons, detached from bone, dangled like crimson ribbons from which steam continued to waft. Again Snake fell to the floor, devoid of enough strength even to writhe in pain.
“Snake … please, don’t give up on me.”
I wanted to look away. How could I face such a sight?
My friend, who I had stood with through nine years of battles, was being cooked, broken, and mutilated. A mere three seconds of watching the dreadful scene was enough to drive me mad. So just for one second, I closed my eyes, selfishly hiding from the sight of the legendary man, pushed beyond his limits in the fight to fulfill his duty.
But Snake’s moan required better of me.
More than an utterance of pain, it was a song, refusing defeat, rising above the hurt, continuing ahead. I couldn’t close my eyes to his cry. He was trying to press on. To turn my eyes away from him now would be unforgivable.
“Otacon,” Snake said, his creaky voice escaping from a burning throat. “Are you … there?”
Softly, I said, “Yeah, I’m here.”
On the verge of weeping, I forced my voice to steady. “I’m with you, Snake. Now and always.”
“Why … did you … decide … to fight … alongside me?”
I found it odd that Snake would ask such a question amid pain that would make remaining conscious a struggle. For a moment I was stunned, but I realized I needed to answer quickly and set my brain to work.
Snake needed my voice now. To retain his senses while his body was destroyed, he needed something to hang on to.
“I’m waiting for an answer.”
I thought that might not be enough to jar his memory. I believed my answer honest, although in truth, this was only one of my reasons for sticking with Snake.
As I’d expected, Snake seemed not to understand. “An … answer?”
“On Shadow Moses, after we laid Sniper Wolf to rest, and you started off to destroy REX, I asked you, ‘What was she fighting for? What are you fighting for?’ ”
The Kurdish wolf had fallen in the sniper battle on the snowy field. Standing beside her, the falling snow quickly engulfing her body, I asked those questions to Snake’s back. Never before had I witnessed two people fight to the death.
Why do people have to fight each other?
I had lost the woman I cared for, and as I cried, I couldn’t hold back that simple and childish, yet fundamental, question.
“And then, you looked over your shoulder at me and said, ‘If we make it through this, I’ll tell you.’ But we escaped Shadow Moses alive, Snake, and you never gave me the answer. I’ve stayed with you to hear the answer you held back.”
“Back then … I … I lived only for myself … because I didn’t want to die … My survival … instinct … gave me reason to live.”
“That’s the same for everybody.” That was likely true for everyone on that island—including Wolf, Psycho Mantis, Vulcan Raven, and Liquid.
I live; I don’t want to die yet.
To feel that sense of being alive, we had thrown ourselves into battlegrounds to be close to death. After the end of the Cold War, Liquid feared that kind of world would be lost. He led the rebellion at Shadow Moses in order to build a world by warriors and for warriors.
“You’re not the only one,” I said.
“I only felt truly alive … when I was staring death in the face.”
“And after we left that island?”
“I wanted to enjoy life … I really thought so.”
“The nine years with me, have they been fun?” Snake kept crawling, as flesh burned and fluids boiled.
“It’s like what Frank said … when he died … We’re not tools of the government … or anyone else … Fighting was the only thing he was good at … but at least he always fought for what he believed in.”
“I’ve heard you say something like that yourself, Snake.”
“Thanks to you … I’ve remained … true to those words … through every battle … Thanks to you … I’ve seen … my battles through … to the end … I’m content with that.”
After he finished speaking, it took me a moment to notice. Snake had reached the end of the seemingly endless corridor.
Steam and smoke rising from his body, Snake crawled out from the heat-ray hell.