Death Stranding--Death Stranding

by Hitori Nojima

  There was no mistaking it. It was a BB pod. The same kind of BB pod that had been attached to Sam’s chest for almost a year now.

  Why was it in there? What was inside the pod? Sam moved toward the delivery terminal to check, but it was already sinking back into the floor. As it was swallowed back into the earth, the east and west of the continent were finally reunited.

  What have I done? The trembling in Sam’s fingers wouldn’t stop. It crept up through his arms to his shoulders, until his jaw quivered and his brain shook, and then back down his spine to his waist and his knees until his entire body was convulsing.

  What was that? The feeling when he was confronted with something he couldn’t comprehend, something his mind was unable to keep up with and a situation that he never could have imagined, was similar to fear. This thing that he didn’t understand terrified him.

  He sank down onto the floor. He felt helpless and his body wouldn’t stop trembling. It felt like this building and the rest of the world were shaking, too.

  But he couldn’t just cower here. He had to lift this curse here and now. That pod he saw was just another curse to add to his collection. He had to sever every single strand of this chaotic bundle of cursed threads.

  Despite his continued shaking, Sam got up. Then he opened the door and went outside.

  The timefall was still falling. In the time since he had first arrived in the area, it had gotten worse and worse. The ground in front had been transformed into a sea—a black tar-like sea that seemed to drain the color from the world.

  The Odradek activated and transformed into a cross shape. It was pointing forward and was firm in its target. Lou wasn’t crying, but when Sam looked into the pod, Lou was curled up into a ball, fists clenched. This wasn’t fear. It was hostility. Hostility toward the menace that was approaching. Lou wanted to fight.

  Sam followed suit and glared out in front of him.

  The timefall was acting as a heavy veil and obscured the looming threat that neared, but Sam could hear something steadily growing louder. The surface of the tar swelled and the remnants of the past were brought forth from the Beach. An antique Buick and the bones of dinosaurs that had been on display in the museum bobbed up between the waves. The carcasses of the small whales and dolphins were mixed in with the waves of exhibits and became stranded on the shore.

  Then Higgs appeared, tearing through the veil of the timefall.

  “All preparations for extinction are complete,” he proclaimed. His golden mask was slick with rain and was shining strangely like it was made out of the slippery skin of a reptile.

  “Well done, Sam. Let me be the first to congratulate you on rebuilding America. You won’t hear any gratitude or thanks from Bridget or Amelie. Not even from that director of yours. But you did struggle so. And it must have been so lonely to found a country like that. I’ll give you that much.”

  Thunder roared. Every time Higgs gave the signal with his finger, the sky deafened Sam with claps of thunder like a salute of guns for completing his quest.

  “You gave me everything I needed, Sam. A complete Chiral Network. Spread all across America, connecting all them precious little knots,” Higgs declared, spreading his arms dramatically wide and looking up at the sky. A flash of lightning lit up the clouds. “I’ve got the whole world in the palm of my hand.”

  Higgs pointed up at the sky. Beyond his finger the clouds swirled, and in the center it looked like a red flower blooming. It was the shape of a person with their arms held straight out horizontally like a cross. He couldn’t see her face very well because of the long blond hair that hung across it, but the crimson dress told him all he needed to know.

  “Amelie?” Sam muttered.

  Higgs put his finger to Sam’s lips. He had teleported there in an instant.

  His golden mask and gas mask were removed, showing his bare face beneath. Black tears were leaking out of both eyes.

  “Don’t panic. She isn’t going anywhere,” Higgs taunted, before he thrust one arm into the air and Amelie slowly descended. “Five. We’ve had five mass extinctions, each caused by an Extinction Entity. And now it’s time for number six. I’m not talking ’bout the death of a few dozen species, no. This. This is the granddaddy of them all. BT antimatter voiding out all life as we know it.”

  Sam shook Higgs’s finger off his lips. Sneering at Sam’s rage, Higgs held up the golden mask in his hand. It was as if he was threatening to attach it to Sam’s face again if he didn’t do as he was told.

  “And it wouldn’t’ve been possible without a boy scout like you willing to ‘make us whole again.’ What do you say? Come on! Time to meet your ender,” Higgs goaded.

  “Amelie!” Sam shouted.

  Amelie landed next to Higgs and slowly opened her eyes. She sensed Sam with unfocused eyes that had just woken up. Their gazes met. Some color returned to her face and the light switched on in her eyes. Those were the eyes that Sam knew so well. She was really here. Sam held his arms out for her, but Higgs quickly knocked them away.

  With a sidewards glance at Sam, whose face was contorted in pain, Higgs embraced Amelie and placed the golden mask on her. Her face was completely covered.

  “Listen, Sam. I’m knotted together with extinction. The great work is nearly complete. Every knot is joined. Soon I will merge them and all mankind’s Beaches into a single shore. And then will come an extinction like no other.”

  The voice Sam could hear behind the mask sounded exactly like Amelie, but he couldn’t tell if the words she was saying were her own.

  “It will be a stranding more massive than any before it. It will wipe out mankind, along with the Earth itself. The Last Stranding. My reason for being. The first was nothing more than a prelude.”

  Did she and Bridget force me to bring the entire Chiral Network online knowing that?

  Was it all to end the human race and the Earth along with us?

  Was the plan to rebuild America just a cover?

  Higgs was the one to respond to Sam’s questions.

  “Surely you’ve figured it out by now. DOOMS? People like us? She’s the source of it all. The nightmares that haunt us? The visions of an inescapable future? Sound familiar? You can speed this up, or slow it down, but you cannot stop what we’ve started. Happy fucking DOOMS-day, Sam.”

  The clouds parted and several umbilical cords descended from the sky. Like the flailing tentacles of some huge beast, the cords ensnared Higgs and attempted to tie around Amelie. Sam removed one of his cuff links, filled the blade of the cutter with his blood, and tried to leap for the cords. But his legs wouldn’t move. The tar had tangled itself around Sam’s feet and wouldn’t let him go. Higgs laughed at Sam as he struggled.

  “Amelie!” Sam shouted again.

  Higgs was being pulled up into the sky by the cord with Amelie in his arms.

  “There’s nothing you can do except grab a front row seat for the spectacle of extinction. If you want to do that, then come to the Beach. I’ll be waiting on Amelie’s Beach for the grand finale.”

  Higgs and Amelie disappeared as he fired one last vocal parting shot at Sam.

  Sam knew that standing here staring at the clouds wouldn’t achieve anything. He understood it so much that it hurt. He also knew that Higgs and Amelie weren’t physically beyond those clouds anymore.

  At Sam’s level of DOOMS there was no way he could see or detect the Beach. Yet still he looked upward at the clouds, almost begging to be let in.

  “Remember our promise?” Someone held an umbrella open over Sam’s head. A delicate-looking porter clad in a black uniform was suddenly by his side. It was Fragile.

  “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” she asked. “I could see you looking up at the clouds. That’s why I came. Like a regular Mary Poppins,” Fragile said musically, twirling her umbrella. Sam didn’t know what was happening. Only that right now, Fragile had appeared to him like a savior.

  “You did it. You connected all the Knots. That’s probably
why the Beach feels so close now. That’s why I could tell where you were,” Fragile said, giving Sam a look that asked him to acknowledge her greatness.

  “Take me to Amelie’s Beach,” Sam said with renewed strength.

  Fragile’s own expression became more serious.

  “Okay. That’s possible. You’ve been to her Beach plenty of times, right?” she asked.

  It had already been years since he last went. He hadn’t seen it since he was a boy. Ever since the incident with Lucy and his subsequent distancing from Bridges, Sam hadn’t even seen Amelie, never mind gone to her Beach. If Bridget’s death hadn’t forced him into being a part of this mission, he probably would have never seen her again. In fact, he still wasn’t sure they shared much of a bond even now.

  “Make good on your promise and I’ll help you get where you need to go. But bring him back alive. I’m the one who gets to finish him off,” Fragile reminded him. That had always been Fragile’s goal, and if her getting her revenge resulted in Sam being able to rescue Amelie, he saw no reason why he should deny her. Sam nodded and Fragile smiled in return. “Look, I can’t send us both at once… But I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Can’t you go to her Beach, too?” Sam asked.

  “I can’t. I have no connection to her. But I can go to you by the ties that bind us together.”

  Fragile looked at Sam’s wrist. Around it was his worn-out misanga bracelet. It was an ID that had been intertwined with biological information from Fragile’s blood. It represented a part of her.

  Sam had worn it since he departed Lake Knot City. It had traveled half a continent with him now, and was ingrained with the memories he had made along the way.

  “And this will lead you to her,” Fragile said, pointing out the dreamcatcher in Sam’s hand. It was the one thing that connected him to her. “What are you going to do about the kid?” she added.

  She was talking about Lou. Surely, Sam couldn’t take Lou with him. He mustn’t. There was no guarantee that Sam would come back and he wasn’t even sure that he could beat Higgs in the first place. But who’d look after Lou if they both jumped?

  Fragile seemed to share the same worry.

  “I know a great babysitter,” she suggested. “Goes by the name of Deadman. Now that the Chiral Network’s up, I can take Lou to him.”

  It wasn’t like physical distance made that much of a difference, but Fragile would need to jump all the way to Capital Knot City. Sam worried that it would put a lot of strain on her body.

  “Want one?” Fragile offered, holding out a cryptobiote as she munched on one herself. Sam gave a wry smile and took it.

  “For this to work, I’ll have to touch you,” she explained.

  As Fragile placed her hands on his arms with a smile, he thought he felt her hand tremble slightly. Fragile was probably just as scared as Sam was of Higgs’s power. Pretending not to notice, Sam took her hand and placed it over his hand that was clutching the dreamcatcher.

  “Close your eyes,” Fragile told him. Sam placed his hands on Fragile’s shoulders and his forehead to hers. “Now picture Amelie and her Beach.”

  Sam closed his eyes. For some reason, the image that appeared in his head was one of Amelie’s back as she stood by the water’s edge.

  “You love her, right? You love her,” Fragile whispered into his ear.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, his mouth almost moving of its own accord.

  But before the words could reach Fragile’s ears, Sam was already gone.

  AMELIE’S BEACH

  Everything was going to end here. Nothing would remain. The power of this Beach and the power of the Extinction Entity would bring mankind to an end. The vain struggle of humanity to keep on surviving and their resistance to their destiny would all be brought to a neat close here. They would have to say goodbye to the folly of their attempts to fix the Earth that had been so neglected by previous generations.

  It would also bring an end to the days of the mask known as Higgs Monaghan. All that was left to do was to wait for Sam to get here. Then he would kill Sam and sever his connection with Amelie. Only then would Amelie be able to demonstrate her true strength as an EE.

  Higgs wondered how long he had waited for this day to come. When he really thought about it, he felt like he had been waiting for this day since the first delivery he ever made.

  * * *

  When did that old prepper guy die? It was so long ago now that Higgs didn’t know anymore.

  The prepper had always been sickly, but this time Higgs hadn’t been able to deliver his medicine on time. He could already see signs of necrosis, but there was no time to get him to the incinerator. That was why he carried the man’s body all the way to BT territory. It was his second and only option and better than creating a new BT territory entirely, he deemed. Besides, the closest dwelling to here was his own shelter, so he would be able to keep harm to a minimum.

  When he dumped the body just before it necrotized, he felt something—the presence of a BT reacting to the dead body.

  Then the Beach appeared. But it wasn’t the first time he had seen it.

  Higgs had the same sensation long ago when he first disposed of a corpse in this way. It was a little stronger this time, though. I’m being given the power to see them. That’s what he came to believe before he first obtained the mask, before he first started going by the name of Higgs. Back then he was still called Peter Englert.

  Word of Peter’s ability to sense BTs even reached a delivery organization on the West Coast.

  They were an organization slightly smaller than Fragile Express and they had offered him a job. The organization operated in an area where Bridges didn’t have a presence, and they wanted him to join them so that they could expand.

  The reason Higgs had begun transporting cargo was to support himself as a prepper child, but his purpose for carrying out this delivery work gradually shifted away from keeping himself alive to helping other people. The preppers in his area now completely relied on him for their deliveries or they wouldn’t be able to survive. I’m needed, he realized. After growing up all alone, he now had partners. They connected people. Peter wondered what his father would say if he could see him now. The father who had always said that the outside world was dangerous and all they could do was live and die in their shelter. Peter wondered what his old man would make of him.

  Then his partner died. It was while they were crossing the mountains to make a delivery.

  They were making the delivery in a team of two, but his partner had become lost in some fog. Just as Peter received a radio communication to ask for help, everything cut out. His partner was probably already in BT territory by then. Peter could see the light from the voidout from where he was. He wondered how many partners he had lost now. There were hardly any of them left anymore. There were barely any porters remaining who were yet to succumb to porter syndrome and become MULEs, and could still carry out their deliveries “sober” and in control of their own senses. His organization didn’t have any porters who could sense BTs, or any decent equipment, either. And on top of all that, he could feel his own vital abilities waning. He had to do something. He needed more power. An even greater power than before. Peter craved it from the bottom of his heart.

  Humans are made up of a ha and a ka. Once the two are separated, a person passes on from this world, but as long as a soul has a body to return to, it can come back. People used to use human-shaped caskets adorned with masks to preserve the body for all eternity

  Peter had read all about it in an old book called The Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. The golden masks of the pharaohs were decorated with magical adornments to show the power and prestige they had possessed in their previous lives. Peter had no doubt that the appearance of the Beach proved the Egyptians were right about life and death.

  Then I will turn myself into a living casket. I’ll offer my soul to this world while I live. I’ll adorn my own face with the mask of a pharaoh. Maybe that will transform this meas
ly power of mine into that of a king. Starting today, I abandon my bare face. That’s when the porter threw away the name Peter and became the man known as Higgs.

  AMELIE’S BEACH

  “Amelie!” Sam shouted.

  Sam was heading this way. A shabby man desperately trying to survive. Higgs considered it uglier than anything else in the world. So much so that the very sight of him made him retch.

  Higgs placed the mask in his hand over Amelie. She didn’t resist.

  “You ready to end this? Before the end of everything?” Higgs asked before he thrust both arms into the sky, where Amelie hung in midair. Sam’s grim face was fanning the flames of Higgs’s belligerence. The debris and rocks scattered around the sandy beach ignored the law of gravity and flew into the air, surrounding Amelie in layer after layer of rubble. Everything was moving as he wished. Just as he had envisioned. Several umbilical cords stretched out from Amelie’s abdomen, creating a spider’s web. Amelie lay across the center, both like the prey caught in a trap and the predator lying there in wait. It was all just as Higgs wanted. “I’m just doing what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I’m keeping the Extinction Entity safe until the slate is wiped clean. Those of us with DOOMS. Her. We’re all bound here for a reason.”

  Sam was shouting something back. But no matter what he said, Higgs was never going to hear. Even if Sam had reconnected the world, he was still just a laborer who moved things from one place to another. He hadn’t accomplished anything great. Higgs decided to put him in his place by showing him what kind of place the Beach really was.