“BB!” Sam heard Cliff shout. Sam, who had just been spectating until this point, was suddenly drawn into the drama.
Cliff made one quick gesture at his lackeys and the four skeletal soldiers immediately began to run in Sam’s direction.
Was this another eternal battlefield? If so, what battle happened here? What kind of atrocity took place on this Beach? How many died in vain?
The soldiers advanced at frightening speed. They weren’t powered by logic or reason, but by some kind of emotion. He could tell they were coming here to kill him. But Sam couldn’t move from the spot. The waves that had ensnared his legs had turned to tar.
“BB, I’ll get you out of there!” Cliff shouted, black tears pouring from his eyes. But his eyes didn’t show any sign of sadness. Instead, they were full of anger. Inside the pod, Lou’s little body began to writhe and cry out in sympathy.
I’m sorry, Lou. I’m sorry I brought you to a place like this.
Protecting the pod with both arms, Sam had a sudden realization. What if Cliff’s anger wasn’t directed at other people? What if it was directed at himself? Maybe it was the same anger Sam felt when he couldn’t protect Lou. Sam felt completely helpless. At this rate, it seemed like he would be engulfed by both Cliff’s anger and his own. This was the end. If Sam’s body was broken on the Beach, then even he wouldn’t be able to repatriate. He would die here like anyone else. But maybe that was okay with him.
He felt at peace with that. Then—
Everything was red. It looked like fresh blood had taken up his entire vision. He was wrong.
Breaking through space and emerging in front of him was Amelie’s red dress. She had transported herself here in an instant and now she was stood in front of him, ready to block the attack from Cliff. Sam screamed at her to get out of the way, but then he gasped. Beyond Amelie’s shoulder, he could see Die-Hardman groveling. Next to him still stood the woman in red. Then who was this? And who was that?
As if to answer half of his question, the red-clad woman covering Sam turned to face him. The golden quipu around her neck swayed, reflecting the light. This one was Amelie.
“Stay back!” she commanded.
Sam could see his own face reflected in her eyes. It was a blank face robbed of the ability to comprehend what was going on. What’s happening here? What kind of plot twist is this? Amelie thrust out both of her arms and the tar released its hold on Sam’s feet. Sam’s body flew up high. Yet he couldn’t tear his eyes away from Amelie’s. He couldn’t tear himself apart from the Sam reflected back in them. He was falling back toward them. Then those eyes as deep as the sea swallowed him up and Sam disappeared.
* * *
The door would not open. Had there been a security breach at the facility?
Sam broke the door lock with the grip of his handgun and somehow managed to wrench open the heavy reinforced-glass sliding door. There was no one else in the hallway.
Had it already been dealt with? Had Lou been saved?
Sam proceeded down the dark, unlit hallway toward the room he had been instructed to go to. Even if he couldn’t save the mother’s body, he might be able to save the fetus. That’s what he had been told. But his time was limited.
The door to the room was unlocked. The lights were turned off, just like in the hallway, and in its center stood a hospital bed.
Laying there, hooked up to all kinds of monitors measuring her vitals, was Lucy.
A man was looking down at her, but he wasn’t a doctor.
Sam pointed the gun at the man. The stranger looked up and their eyes met. It was Cliff.
“Where is the BB?” Cliff asked.
Why was he here?
“I was told that I might be able to rescue the BB,” Cliff said.
Sam shook his head, maintaining a firm grip on the gun. The BB isn’t here. The only ones here are a comatose Lucy and Lou. Your baby isn’t here.
The logical part of Sam’s brain told him that he had been repelled from Amelie’s Beach and was having a nightmare, but the anger emanating from Cliff still froze him in place. As Cliff approached with an anguished look on his face, Sam began to back away. But he backed into someone else entirely. When he turned around, he found Bridget.
It was the Bridget from before Sam left Bridges. The one who had been so happy about Lucy’s pregnancy. Sam didn’t even have the time to ask himself why she was here.
“Give me back my BB.” Cliff grabbed Sam by the shoulders.
Caught between Bridget and Cliff, Sam was unable to move.
“I can’t give it back to you yet,” Bridget replied.
Sam had never heard her sound so cold before. Cliff’s eyes filled with sadness. Sam was reflected in them, now drowning in Cliff’s eyes instead of Amelie’s. Cliff’s stare pierced him, controlled him. Once again Sam could no longer move.
“Give me back my BB,” Cliff repeated, reaching out his arms. It was like they were trying to grab for Sam. They were extending like squirming tentacles. Even if Sam wanted to run, he couldn’t. The palm of Cliff’s hand pushed against Sam’s chest and sank into him. Sam’s skin burned, his flesh melted away, and once his ribs had crumbled to dust, Cliff grabbed Sam’s heart. It began to jump and squirm like a fish trying to slip out of someone’s hands.
SAFEHOUSE
Sam woke up in a private room somewhere.
His right hand had been clutching at his chest. Now it was numb and wouldn’t move. Sam had to use his left hand to drag it away. When he looked under his undershirt, he could see a fresh handprint there.
Lou’s pod was set in the incubator. Had everything since Fragile had transported him to the Beach been a bad dream? Sam certainly hoped so.
“Oh, you’re awake.” Deadman appeared. The outlines of his hologram were slightly blurred. “You’re back east of the tar belt now, in the basement of a safehouse inside Mountain Knot City. You just happened to appear here without any warning. Officially, anyway.”
Deadman’s body suddenly began to expand. His barrel-like abdomen inflated like it was about to explode, and both shoulders swelled to the point that they looked like they were going to engulf his entire face.
“The Beach is going crazy. Chiral spikes have become far more frequent,” Deadman explained. The look of his hologram had returned to normal but now it was frozen in place instead. “I wanted to go there, too, and look after Lou, but… Heartman and Lockne think that the chaos might be a result of expanding the network nationwide. Too many Beaches sharing the same space. Wires get crossed and so forth. It might also have something to do with the newly connected consciousness of those who just joined the UCA still adapting to the system. Amelie said that it should stabilize in time.”
“Amelie?” Sam asked.
“She’s the one who brought you here. I wanted to be able to bring you all the way back to HQ, but she said that while the Beach was in such disarray that it wouldn’t be possible.”
So, Sam’s experiences on the Beach hadn’t been a nightmare. The gravity of the situation began to bear down on Sam again.
“Amelie could have probably jumped there by herself, but she didn’t,” Deadman went on. “After she left you there, she left us a message. She said that she was going to finish what Bridget started.”
There seemed to be some anxiety and doubt mixed into Deadman’s tone, as if he hadn’t quite been able to process this chain of events either. Sam wasn’t surprised, because nothing made any sense.
“The only record we have here is that you turned up suddenly, without warning. That you jumped there instantaneously from Edge Knot City. There are no other records. It’s different from that time on the battlefield, there’s nothing recorded on any of your devices. The only people who know what happened on the Beach are Fragile, Amelie, and you.”
But they weren’t the only ones.
“The director was there,” Sam added.
“The director?” Deadman asked, his hologram suddenly springing back to life.
“And it wasn’t just the director. Cliff and Bridget were there too.”
“Sam, please. You yourself burned her body, remember? She wouldn’t have remained on the Beach. Couldn’t have. Not even if it was her daughter’s Beach. The part about the director I can believe, though,” Deadman said, looking up at the ceiling.
“I always suspected him. It was the way that he seemed to seek you out when Bridget was dying and put you in charge of Bridges II when the original expedition got wiped out. It all seemed a little coincidental. And then the BB experiments… he was the president’s right hand. You can’t tell me that he didn’t know. And he never told a soul. They were definitely hiding something they were ashamed of there. And it was always him who so stubbornly insisted the BBs were to be treated as equipment. And him and the president who decided to scatter Mama, Lockne, and Heartman across the continent as part of Bridges I. If they had really wanted to understand and overcome the Death Stranding, then they would have kept them all together. They all have DOOMS. They’re all experts in their fields. They should have kept them in one place and made them research countermeasures. They didn’t need someone like me there. I’m just a coroner. I don’t even have DOOMS. I suspected that the director and the president made the decision to split them all up so they didn’t start looking too closely at the BBs and the Chiral Network. But now I’m starting to piece together a different narrative.”
Deadman’s expression was stiff. Sam didn’t think that was the network’s fault this time. Deadman may have suspected Die-Hardman, but he had probably wanted to believe in him more than anyone else. It was only a gut feeling that Sam had, but he felt like he could sympathize with Deadman. He knew Deadman’s anguish of not knowing where he came from and doubting his own humanity all too well. Neither of them knew what it was like to have a parent who had brought them into this world, who was connected to them genetically or physically via the umbilical cord. There were plenty of unhappy kids throughout this world in the same boat, but what Deadman, who had no Beach, and Sam, a repatriate who was rejected by the Beach, had in common was their craving for the very existence of a biological parent. Deadman had probably seen a parental figure in Die-Hardman. And Sam… Sam felt a conflicting attitude toward Bridget, one of awe and dependence. It looked like Lucy’s observations about the relationship between Sam and his adoptive mother had been true, after all.
“Something’s been bothering me, you see…” Deadman’s words snapped Sam back to his senses.
“We’ve been operating on the assumption that Higgs was controlling Cliff. But that can’t possibly be correct. Because Higgs is gone and Cliff is still causing trouble.”
Sam looked straight at Deadman.
“So Cliff is the mastermind?” Sam’s question wasn’t addressed to Deadman, it was addressed to himself. It seemed to make sense. Deadman gave a vague nod like he had guessed what Sam was thinking.
“It might sound crazy to you, but this is my theory. I don’t think it’s possible for Cliff to have been behind everything up to this point, but that’s not to say he’s had nothing to do with these events. What Higgs was so obsessed with was the idea of hastening extinction. Now, Bridget’s plan was to bring all the cities back online so that we could rebuild America. The Chiral Network she envisioned could end up proving instrumental in helping humanity to overcome extinction, and with mankind reconnected and reunited and a connection to the wisdom of the past, that would give us a fighting chance of survival. But that gets in the way of Higgs’s extinction ideology. So, he took Amelie, an Extinction Entity, to try and force extinction in one go. Now think, if Higgs really was Cliff’s puppet, that would mean that Cliff also wants extinction, right? But Lou is the only thing Cliff has ever shown an interest in.”
Sam didn’t say anything, but nodded. It fitted so far.
“If Cliff is hoping for extinction, that would also mean that Lou is connected to extinction somehow. Maybe even all BBs.” Deadman indicated toward the pod with his eyes.
Lou was sleeping with all four limbs crossed, connected to the womb of a mother lying far away in Capital Knot City. How could something like Lou be connected to extinction? Deadman said himself that his theory was crazy. Sam wanted to believe that it was.
“BBs are connected to the realm of the dead through their stillmother’s womb and umbilical cord. Don’t you think that’s similar to the Extinction Entities that Heartman and Higgs described? Well, I don’t, but we can’t say that the BBs created after the Death Stranding are in no way involved, can we? That’s why I want to know how Lou and the others were born. I want to use the Chiral Network you connected back up for us to find out the truth.”
Deadman’s gaze was wandering all over. Maybe he was scared of Sam. Sam knew that the look on his own face couldn’t have been friendly. Before he realized it, he was clenching both fists tightly, so tight they had gone white. Deadman looked away awkwardly. Then Sam said something almost in an effort to convince himself to do so.
“I’m going back to that Beach.”
If Cliff was the mastermind, he would probably try to finish what Higgs had started. In which case, he might still be holding the director and Amelie there. And even if it wasn’t, swapping theories and conjecture wasn’t going to solve anything anyway.
“I see, I suppose that’s all that can be done now,” Deadman conceded. “But you won’t be able to leave just yet.”
“What do you mean? Is the Beach still chaotic?” Sam asked.
“Yes. Fragile is at HQ right now, but she won’t be able to jump all the way to you. If you want her to get you back to Amelie’s Beach, then you’re going to have to make your own way here.”
There was a large cracking sound, like the space Sam existed in was being torn in two. The electrical systems in the room all blacked out. Lou began to cry out in protest at being disturbed. Sam released the pod from the incubator in the darkness and placed it in his arms. “It’s alright, Lou,” Sam whispered quietly.
When Lou stopped crying the lights flickered back on.
Sam was once again greeted by Deadman’s hologram. Only this time, Heartman stood next to him.
“Thanks, Sam. You did it. The continent is connected,” Heartman said gratefully. “I’m at HQ at the moment, together with Lockne. Fragile brought us here.”
“Can you ask her to take me there, too?” Sam asked.
“Sorry, but I don’t think that will be possible,” Heartman replied.
Heartman hung his head again and this time his hologram froze in place. Heartman kept talking.
“Deadman was right. The Beach is in disarray and it’s far too dangerous to jump right now. Lockne and I were just lucky. Fragile transported us here after she returned from the Beach and before things became too jumbled. But now she’s exhausted. She’s been comatose since she got back. I’m afraid that if we don’t let her rest, she could die. She said that she’d take you to the Beach once she had recovered, before she drifted off.”
—Wouldn’t want to settle for anything less than perfection.
Sam remembered the last words that Fragile had uttered on the Beach.
Sam hadn’t meant for her to feel that way. She had already sensed the danger when she tried to jump Deadman to the Beach. Yet she still transported Heartman and the others to HQ in case anything happened.
“It’s too far. We know that, Sam. We know how much time it will take to get back to HQ from there. But there’s no other way,” Heartman implored as his frozen hologram began to disintegrate from the feet up, while Deadman’s kept shrinking and ballooning. What was the point of the Chiral Network if it could only produce this sorry excuse for communications? Mama and Lockne pointed out the risk of interference on the Beach years ago. They even took steps to deal with it. Yet as soon as it was all connected, it still ended up like this.
What’s the point of America if it can only produce crap like this? Was this why Sam had crossed an entire continent?
“Everything might be over alread
y by the time I get there,” Sam warned. “Cliff already has Amelie and he’s going to make sure we go extinct. It’s like Amelie said. Once all the knots are connected, all she has to do is connect the Beaches and then we’re all done for.”
“Do you think Amelie really wants to do that? All we can do is believe in her. We have to believe in the woman who went all the way out west despite knowing she was an Extinction Entity. It was the same for you. Nobody had any faith in a one-man expedition. But you still came through,” Heartman replied.
—I can end it all, just like that. But what I want—what I have always wanted—is to be a part of it. For us all to be one.
That’s what Amelie said. All Sam could do was believe in her.
“With all the Beaches so entangled, you should expect the mentalities of everyone living under the network to be in disarray, too. All the alternate worlds that have run in parallel with ours are interfering with each other. What we need now is a symbol to converge them in the same dimension so that we can unify them all. That is what America is for. It doesn’t matter if there are a thousand interpretations of what a country means or what people want from America. It doesn’t matter if people embrace it or reject it. Acceptance and rejection both require the existence of America as a concept. The important thing is that everyone’s Beaches are reintegrated under the symbol of America. Only then will the Chiral Network be able to perform its intended function. That’s why we need to hold an inauguration to appoint someone as the American President. That’s why we need you to rescue Amelie, and that’s not going to change even if she is an Extinction Entity. In fact, I think that Amelie’s actions as an Extinction Entity will ride on what we choose to do now. Let’s put our faith in that.”
Heartman’s and Deadman’s holograms stabilized. Now they were clear, as if the two of them were standing in the room itself. What would Sam choose? Deadman and Heartman looked to be choosing life.
“The two of you share a very special connection. Your dreamcatcher… Her quipu… They are no mere trinkets. They are singular, irreplaceable totems—embodiments of your shared memories. They connect you two,” Heartman explained.
Death Stranding--Death Stranding Page 16