The only thing unusual about the facility was how generic it was. The place was in a non-descript building in a non-descript city. It had the same endless stretches of sterile hallways, the same fluorescent lights, the same dim-witted guards on the same predictable patrol routes. The latter were all in disguise, but Snake could tell. Trained killers always had some variant of the same gait, that purposeful stride always towards the same end.
He who lives by the gun tends to not live by it for long.
He wondered, vaguely, if they could tell the same about him.
They'd reached the target computer and Otacon was somehow coaxing it into giving up its secrets. A guard walked in, asked the routine questions about who they were, why they were here, he hadn't known anyone was supposed to be accessing that system, and Snake got fed up enough to give him the routine round to the head. He was striding towards the dead meat to deposit it in a convenient hiding spot before it even hit the ground. Otacon, finally desensitized to his partner's casual brutality, barely noticed.
Then something slightly less routine happened.
Snake had been on a hell of a lot of missions. He'd seen some odd logic- and physics-defying things. He'd seen things that made you wonder if the world wasn't just some lunatic god's playground.
He'd never seen a man stir after sustaining an injury like that. He'd never heard a growl like that, or seen anyone clumsily get up and shamble towards him with that same blank soulless look, devoid of all humanity.
Nor had he seen a man's eyes glow red in precisely that manner.
The rest of his didn't send the dead man back where he belonged. Snake was unnerved.
He was not a coward. Not by a long shot. He'd take on any fight he knew he stood half a chance of winning, but there was always that pesky "better part of valour" business. Besides, they were done here. Easier to retreat now and find out the answers later. Best to get back to Philanthropy HQ as soon as humanly possible. The engineer nodded and backed away from the terminal. Snake grabbed his arm.
"Move it. We're getting out of here..."
It was a struggle to keep the shake out of his voice.
Well, almost.
The place descended into chaos behind them. Whatever else the lab was doing, it involved more than a few involuntary human participants. The pair left everyone to their fate. It was none of Philanthropy's concern.
On the way back, they saw more of the things, the dead men clumsily imitating life. Not many, just a few here or there. Enough to makepeople crazy.
Otacon barely said a word the whole way back. That alone would've been enough to worry Snake.
The stately apartment building's front entrance appeared to have been blocked off by disparate body parts. It was almost child's play to slip in through the fire escape.
Eventually they reached a place that prouder men might be ashamed to call "home".
"So, what have you found?" Snake said, still in his sneaking suit.
Otacon didn't look up from his monitor; his fingers were still tapping over the keyboard as if sending the message "We're fucked, we're fucked" over and over again in Morse code. "There are reports from every continent. Most of it's just amateur video. There's a tape recovered from two cameramen who were holed up in a basement somewhere. The poor guys must have gone nuts. Near the end they just start babbling about bunnies with big teeth."
"Sounds boring. Does it tell us where the damned things came from?"
He actually paused for a second to push his glasses up. "Well, no."
"What else?"
"They're all just pieces from scattered survivors. A video here, a photograph there. Someone managed to get a lot of good ones from a shopping mall in Colorado. There's a resistance movement up in Ontario, but they're weakening. America's dairylands are completely devastated. No one has any idea why it's happening. Anyone who dies just doesn't seem to stay that way. The experts seem to have just gone into hiding," Otacon sighed. Information was to him what water was to a fish. It was his native element; not having any made him more nervous than usual.
Snake fumbled with his lighter, finally managing to light a cigarette. His hacker friend hated it when he smoked in the apartment, but surely he'd forgive the slight this one time. "What are our options? There must be something. What's the National Guard doing? What about the Army?" Otacon might take solace from sitting in front of a computer, but Snake was a man of action.
"All the major airports are closed, so we can't run. It was hard enough just to get back here. Highways are jammed. They're everywhere, Snake. The army is...Jesus. Opening fire on civillians across the country. Some of the top officers have gone into hiding. So has President Johnson."
Desperate times, desperate measures. "What about the plans for that Metal Gear we picked up? It might make a decent fortress, if nothing else."
"They're only preliminary. The unit itself is nowhere near completion. Even if it was, we'd never be able to get to it. Even if there was, I don't know if anyone would be left to pilot it. Snake," said Otacon, "There's no way out of this."
He took a long drag. "Maybe not, but we're staying here and going down fighting. We'll organize all the survivors we can, hold the fort until..." He didn't know how to finish the sentence.
With impeccable dramatic timing, the power went out.
After a few weeks that blurred into an unchanging monotony of endless days, they'd learned about as much as they needed to. Anyone who died came back unless their body was too damaged to move. Any scratch or bite from the things inevitably spread their infection.
And their numbers were endless. Every window showed nearly the same view of foetid corpses shambling through the streets for God knew what. Some were little more than tattered skeletons. For all Snake knew, they only kept walking out of habits ingrained into their skulls while they were still alive. However, even removing that skull didn't stop them. The monsters only stopped when they were hacked to bits or burned to ashes. When the wind shifted, the firepit in the parking lot filled the survivors' noses with the stench of seared flesh, but it was still better than being added to the inferno himself.
Snake had, with his usual irresistible charm and charisma, managed to convince a few ragged handfuls of survivors to join his and Otacon's resistance. Actually, they stayed because it was a damned sight better than staying out there alone and because there are some circumstances where a big burly man with a gun tells you to do something and iyou'd better goddamned well do it because it's no trouble at all to shoot you because it's all the same to me whether you die right the hell here and right the hell now or later when you come back all bloated and twisted and reeking and rotted because we're all dead men anyway each and every one/i
Anyway, the apartment building didn't make a bad fortress as long as they kept every entrance locked and barricaded. They'd long since raided every store in the area that had anything resembling dried, preserved, or canned food. Water, thank God, was not a problem. Snake estimated that they'd be able to hold out for a long time.
Their little shelter seemed as strong, secure, and safe as a house of leaves before the wind.