... I AM BECOME DEATH
The Boss never took her eyes off her old apprentice until he disappeared beneath the roaring river. The scream that echoed in her ears would never leave them.
She heard a laugh from above, guttural and phlegmy. That was The Pain, never one for sympathy. "The new blood has been rejected."
"Are we done here?" Volgin asked impatiently.
The Boss tore her gaze away from the river at last. Her eyes were like flashes of steel. "Now," she said, "on to Sokolov's research facility."
Volgin's mouth broke open in that grin again. "The Shagohod is ours!"
He turned, walking to where another one of the gunships would be awaiting them. The Boss lingered a moment longer, then looked back into the channel. The water continued to flow, as it always had, angry and swollen.
Drift away, she thought. My place is with them now.
. . .
He was tumbling through the current at an alarming rate, his lungs filling with water. The pain in his arm was blinding, but he somehow managed to kick towards the glimmering flashes of sky. When he broke out, he gasped, sucking in air and coughing out water.
He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the water like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped again from his body. He clung to it, trying to keep his head above water. The sharp edges of the rock scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He braced himself against it, gasping, desperately searching for the shore.
There. He saw the riverbank, fifteen feet or so to his left. He took a deep breath and shoved himself back into the current, desperately kicking with all his might. When he felt his knees scraping against rock he managed to fling himself onto the beach, and he came to rest with his ruined fatigues soaked to his skin and his heart beating crazily in his ears. His arm was white fire. His jacket and the shirt beneath were both rucked up to his chin.
He began to feel as if he were going to puke. He looked up at the cloudy sky still pregnant with rain and tried not to scream.
He rose to his feet and took two big staggering steps and leaned against a fallen tree that rested on the bank. His head felt light. Color kept washing in and out of the world.
He heard a faraway drone, and for a moment he thought the hornets had returned. Then a voice, distant: "Snake? Snake, can you hear me?"
The codec. Snake groaned, sicked up water and gravel. "Yeah. Just barely."
The world seemed to wash out in that sick gray again. The codec chirped again and Major Tom's voice came in louder, his voice dark with worry. "Snake, what happened? Report!"
Snake raised his head slightly, sending an incredible bolt of pain through it. His body was a ragged mess. The pain in his arm was monstrous. He also suspected he'd sprained one ankle, and his entire torso was a great throbbing mess. I hope my ribs aren't broken, he thought. He winced at the daggers of agony as he spoke. "Multiple injuries."
"Snake, listen to me! You need emergency medical treatment. Can you move?"
Snake groaned, did his best not to vomit.
"Snake!" Another voice, softer. It was Para-Medic. "Let's get you fixed up. Just relax and it'll all be over before you know it."
Snake opened his mouth and groaned.
"Stay with me!" she said urgently. "I've seen people in worse shape before. You can handle it."
Snake squeezed his eyes shut. He gasped out words in a slurry. "The . . . The Boss, she . . . defected . . ."
"We'll talk about that later." The major's voice was dark with worry. "First, you've got to patch yourself up."
Carefully, Snake propped himself up on his good elbow. The large pain rocked his head and his backbone gave out an alarming cry. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did.
When he opened his eyes, he looked around for something to craft a splint. A stick, a limb, anything. When he saw what lay a few feet away his breath caught in his throat.
A body was lying on the bank.
Not one of the men who had flung themselves off to escape the hornets; this one had been here longer. It was a skeleton, the skull turning to stare directly at Snake, the empty eye sockets somehow accusatory and at the same time sympathetic. Snake shuddered despite his agony. A drift of green rags were around the bones. They might once have been the remains of a uniform, military maybe. Snake wondered if maybe the soldier had suffered the same fate he had, only not being quite as lucky . . .
I hope I don't end up like you, buddy, Snake thought.
"Snake?" Para-Medic's voice was full of concern. "Snake, are you still with me?"
"Yeah." Snake turned away from the corpse and found a chunk of driftwood on the sand. He groped for it, picked it up. He clenched it between his teeth and braced his arm. He took a deep breath and snapped the elbow back into its socket. The arm flared up and he screamed, biting down hard on the stick against the agony. When it was done he fell back to the ground, wheezing for breath.
"We're coming to get you now," the major's voice said. It sounded far away. "Just stay where you are. We'll drop a recovery balloon."
Snake nodded despite nobody being around to see him. A sudden wind had picked up, a gust of rain-sodden wind that brought with it a sound. Many sounds. Helicopters.
Snake opened his eyes and saw them, high above him now, a squadron of gunships. They flew in formation, and he saw that most of them were carrying a cargo of something other than passengers. Something gigantic was chained to the bottom of them, and they were all hauling it in the sky, like great birds working together to carry away the largest of prey. Even through the dull fog of pain, Snake knew what it was.
The Shagohod.
. . .
The lead helicopter was not attached to the Shagohod, but nevertheless it had its own important cargo. The chopper was crowded, mainly because of Colonel Volgin's massive bulk. He stood hunched over on the edge of the deck, looking out at the mechanical titan Sokolov had designed. The other gunships could scarcely carry the thing, it was so vast. It was a thing of terrible beauty, Volgin thought, and even though he thought little of its pathetic creator, he had to give Sokolov due credit.
There were three others in the gunship's personnel bay as well. One was Ocelot, who had wandered out of the Rassvet area with a lump on his head and a sour look on his face. He'd faced off against the American and lost, something that rankled the youth and secretly pleased Volgin. Ocelot was too brash for his own good, and he needed to be knocked down a peg or two. Pity they'd had to dispose of the American; he'd have liked to have pitted him against Ocelot again for his own amusement.
The Boss was there as well. Unlike Ocelot, her face was a mask of stone. Yet there was a power about her, and Volgin felt an uncomfortable feeling course under his skin when her gaze fell on him. He tamped it down as best he could, grinning as he did, but he couldn't help but feel annoyed and unnerved by the feeling. Was it fear? He'd never known fear, not really, even as a boy. With his size and skill set, there was no use for it. But he'd never encountered anyone like this woman. Like the Shagohod, she possessed a terrible beauty.
Ocelot rose to his feet. His cold gaze fell on the fourth passenger in the helicopter. A young woman, barely older than he was, with flax-colored hair tied behind her head. She wore a stiff KGB officer's tunic and spectacles, which she pushed on the bridge of her nose mournfully. They'd found the woman in Sokolov's quarters when they captured the Shagohod and had spirited her away much as they had the machine he'd been building. Ocelot's brow furrowed. He'd been dealing with the American spy and had not been present, so he didn't understand why they'd even bothered to take the woman along.
The woman looked up, winced at Ocelot's slate-like stare. "What are we going to do with the girl?"
Volgin swiveled his head and looked at her, seemingly for the first time. "Who is she?"
Ocelot shrugged. "Apparently, she's Sokolov's woman."
Volgin reached over and cupped the girl's face in the palm of his massive hand. Her skin was like porcelain, a living china doll. He felt that if he so much as flexed his fingers, he'd crush the girl's skull to powder. "What is your name, girl?"
The girl stiffened at Volgin's gloved touch. "T-T-Tatyana," she stammered softly.
Volgin nodded, then idly sent a spark of electricity running between his fingers. The girl jerked back as the spark singed her cheek, not enough to scar but enough to smart. She placed a hand to her cheek and Volgin laughed. "She's a nice catch," he mused. "I'll take her."
Tatyana massaged her cheek while her other hand slipped in her pocket. She plucked it out, and Volgin's hand moved sharply, almost too fast to believe.
"Not so fast, my dear," he said as is sausage-like fingers closed around her forearm. "Let's see what you've got."
Her hand opened, dumping what she was holding into his open palm. He held it up, studied it. A small brass tube.
"Lipstick?" Ocelot muttered.
The girl flinched as Volgin shook his head, still grinning. "A kiss of death?"
He'd heard of such a weapon—a concealed one-shot firearm, disguised as a lipstick container. It was a special gadget designed by the KGB.
Ocelot seized the girl by the arm. "Are you KGB?" the youth hissed.
Volgin looked back at Tatyana, grinning despite the fact she'd just tried to kill him. "We might be able to use her. She has spunk."
He shoved the tube of lipstick back into her hands, hard enough to knock her to the metal deck of the helicopter. She picked herself up slowly, flinching as Ocelot shot her a withering glare.
"Shall we take her back to the base?" he asked.
Volgin shrugged. "Perhaps we should."
He turned back, looking out at the rolling expanse of wilderness. He saw the gleaming complex of buildings nestled there, a few miles away. OKB-seven-five-four, the design facility where Sokolov had been forced to design the terrible cargo the other helicopters were carrying now. It was little more than a small collection of domes and smokestacks, busily chugging away in the jungle wild.
"We have no further use for Sokolov's research facility," he mused aloud.
He bent over and opened one of the stainless-steel cases. It was padded inside with foam. Two conical shells, each a meter in length, were nestled in the foam. He took one out, balancing it on his massive palm as though it weighed as much as a football. He cracked open the other case and raised the launcher from its coffin. It was made of heavy gray tubular metal. He screwed the shell at the end of the huge canister and held it at his waist, his muscles bulging from the weapon's weight.
"I think it's time I gave this marvelous new toy a try," he declared.
Ocelot's eyes widened in sick realization. "Colonel!"
Volgin turned and looked at the youth, that grotesque sneer still on his gray face. "They are our enemies, Ocelot."
"Even so," Ocelot said in dismay, "they are still our countrymen!"
"But it won't be me that pulled the trigger," Volgin told him simply. "It will be our friend, the American defector."
Ocelot turned and looked at The Boss. The woman just sat there, her face a mask of stone, her eyes betraying nothing she hadn't already betrayed. Are you just going to sit there and let this happen? he wanted to scream, but his throat had locked and the words died in his chest.
Volgin turned back and slowly and methodically raised the launcher. "Remember the Alamo," he muttered, and fired.
There was a burst of pale gas, and Ocelot saw a white streak shoot forward in the air towards the design facility. But for a moment, nothing seemed to happen.
A dud, he thought triumphantly, it's a dud—
Then, with a searing flash, a small sun came up on the horizon. It rose hot and yellow, blasting back the storm for just a moment.
"Cover your eyes, you fools!" The Boss bellowed, just loud enough to be heard. But neither Volgin nor Ocelot bothered to avert their gazes.
A brilliant ball of supernova fire plunged like a spectral blast, knotting itself into the chillingly familiar yet horrifying shape of a mushroom cloud. A smothering blanket of caustic fire engulfed the network of buildings, crushed them, subsuming everything in its blinding, somehow supernatural fire . . .
"Do you see it?" Volgin was cackling with insane glee. "Do you see it?"
"Get us out of here!" Ocelot screamed at the helicopter pilot.
Growing brighter in the blaze of unleashed nuclear fire, the mushroom cloud rushed towards them with increasing fury, vaporizing jungle, turning foliage into dust, rock into lava . . .
With a whine, the rotors began to swing harder, and the helicopter banked sharply to avoid the rising blaze from Volgin's great sin.
. . .
His body was already starting to puff and swell in places, and long streaks of pain stabbed pins and needles all over his body. Snake clenched his teeth and rested his body back against the rock. He kept his eyes on the sky, waiting for the recovery balloon to be sent down.
"You're going to be all right, Snake," Para-Medic was saying, but her voice sounded hollow, tinny, a thousand miles away. "Just stay conscious and—"
The rest of what she said—and every sound in the world—suddenly vanished in a great thundering roar that consumed everything around him. The world had suddenly begun to glow white-hot, a throbbing brightness that hurt his eyes. He screamed with pain and fear, his cracked voice shattering in the thunder. The light around him grew brighter and brighter, seeming to emanate from the high bluffs, a searing harsh glare that filled the air.
Reaching a critical point.
Snake held up his one good hand to shield his face from it. It sounded like the world cracking open, and through his fingers he could see the source of the heat and fire. Downriver, miles away and yet still dangerously close, the mushroom cloud rose like the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone—only a million times bigger—in an incandescent plume that towered like an awesome thunderhead heralding Armageddon . . .
Several hours later, after it was all over and the air had grown calm again, the recovery balloon dropped from the heavens. He grabbed for it, realized he was already losing feeling, already feeling slower and stupider. His hand moved; he wasn't sure how or why. Everything was washing out, going gray.
He started to rise.
He held fast to something. Something. He rose toward the light, that was his only thought, to join the light, to reach the light, to be one with the light, the light, the light . . .
The light.
The images confused him. His body clanging on the metal, inside the plane. His knee bleeding on the metal, the drops of blood spattering. A woman's shaking hands reaching for him. Para-Medic's voice in his ear. Drowned out somehow. Lights in his eyes. A terrible pain all over. Shapes. Rust very close to his face, a sharp edge of metal. Cold metal. Cold air. Lights in his eyes, dimming. That raging roar in his eyes. Like a whirlwind of vengeful whispers. Fading. Fading.
Blackness.