Death Stranding: The Official Novelization, Volume Two

It was just as Heartman had described. The plan was to drop by their shelters and activate the Chiral Network for them. But first, he needed to deliver the medicine to the Geologist. Once he had done all that, he would need to drop by Deadman’s place to pick up Lou. Heartman may have been very talkative and extremely quick-thinking, but he would have to wait.

Sam wanted to point out that their call had been more like a monologue than a conversation, but before he could say anything, a robotic voice interjected with

Heartman disconnected the call with the same urgency that he had originally rung with. The phrase “a fossil Beach” echoed around Sam’s head. He wondered if it had anything to do with the fossils they were finding of the dinosaurs that had managed to cling on until the very end. He wondered what fossilization of the Beach even meant. He couldn’t even fathom it. But, just like Heartman said, none of this was confirmed, so there was no point thinking about it yet. Sam stood up, looked up at the sky, and readjusted his hood. The snow was beginning to fall again.

Black clouds once more obscured the heavens. Something sounded like an animal howling in the distance, but on further listening, Sam realized that it was the sound of the violently blustering wind. Gusts battered Sam, crying like countless invisible beasts, which threatened to topple him over. He braced himself against the land, but he couldn’t withstand the weight of his cargo and fell backward.

The violent, beast-like wind rushed over Sam as he became buried in snow. The flurries swirled and groaned and blocked out his vision. As he struggled back to his feet, cursing, the wind knocked him back down. Standing had become impossible.

There was nowhere to shelter from the wind on this blizzard-battered mountain peak. Sam grabbed a climbing anchor out of his backpack and thrust it into the bedrock beneath the snow. He tied the strand around his waist and secured himself to the other end.

All he could do was lie face down and wait for the winds to calm. He clung to the snowfield on his belly. If there was any space between himself and the ground, the wind would get in and blow him away. He wondered just how far his body would be carried in weather like this. Would it be just like when he was taken by the supercell before?

Sam could feel his body heat draining away as he was rendered immobile. He couldn’t stop the ringing sensation in his back teeth. The feeling of being cold had already disappeared and now the only sensation running through Sam’s body was pain. But that pain would eventually disappear, too. Then it would be the end. He tried to muster all his strength into his limbs, but his fingers and toes only continued to grow more and more numb. The snow gradually concealed the outline of his body from the waist down, making it look as if his body was gradually dissolving away into particles. Just like a BT. That thought felt like part-hallucination and part-dream. It was a bad omen. He couldn’t look inwards at a time like this, he had to look outwards. He had to bind both body and mind back to earth.

After a while, Sam realized there was a rhythm to this wind. It didn’t stop blowing, but there was a little bit of a calm after the more violent gusts. If he could predict when the calm would come, he might be able to move. If he stayed here, he was going to succumb to frostbite.

The wind weakened. Sam gripped the strand that was tied to his waist with both hands, and began to move forward as he kept his center of gravity low to the ground. Once he reached the summit it was all downhill. He concentrated his strength into his hand, which gripped the strand. The feeling in his palms and fingertips was returning. Perhaps it was because of the change in terrain, but the wind seemed to be losing strength. The snow continued to come down in droves and Sam still couldn’t see anything, but he was sure that even at this pace, he was slowly making his way down the mountain.

He kept telling himself that it was just a little farther. He didn’t think about anything else, he just put one knee in front of the other like a machine. If he could just keep doing that then he would escape this blizzard and make it back to the real world.

Something suddenly made Sam nervous. He could hear a sound. It was like the groan of a BT. It was getting closer and louder. He could hear it from overhead, from the peak of the mountain he had just ascended.

But it was no BT. It was only after something hit Sam hard, flinging him down the mountain like a rag doll, that he realized what it really was. It was a rockfall. He had barely avoided being hit head-on, but had still been grazed by the falling rocks. The earth and sky switched places over and over and Sam was plunging through the black clouds. One of his backpack straps snapped and cargo was sucked into the sky.

He was completely disorientated. All because of some stupid rockfall, Sam was tumbling all the way down the snow-covered slope. He was groping for something, anything, to grab onto to stop his fall, but there was nothing.

It felt like his ka had disappeared from his ha. Just like it did at the Seam. Even though he felt like he was falling through the sky, he could hear the sound of waves. A baby was crying.

It was calling out for Sam. A wave had rolled onto the shore and was trying to drag the naked baby into the sea. Sam broke into a run and jumped into the water. Lou was still crying out for him. The waves tossed Sam around helplessly as he stretched out his right arm and barely grasped onto the BB’s umbilical cord. He used it to reel the BB in and take it safely into his arms. As he cradled it to his chest, he realized that the baby was Målingen and Lockne’s daughter. But Sam didn’t question it. A BB was a bond, both shackle and anchor. The BB gave meaning and direction to Sam’s life, a bridge from a fixed start to its end, whenever that may be.

Once he realized that, he broke down and wept. He couldn’t see anything through the never-ending stream of tears. That’s why he didn’t notice the red suit approaching him in the distance. The baby cried out and tried to break free of Sam’s embrace. It was a joyous cry from the heart that Sam had never heard before.

Mama!

The BB—the baby—cried.

The woman in the red suit held out her slender arms and took the baby from Sam. Or rather, the baby escaped to her arms of its own volition. It was Amelie.

Amelie’s eyes were overflowing with tears, too. Tears that were black. As soon as her tears hit the baby nestled to her chest, it began to collapse in on itself, breaking down into countless minute particles. It was just like the way Sam’s blood returned the BTs to the other side. Amelie’s tears returned the BB back to the place where it was meant to be.

Wait! Stop! Give that kid back to me!

Sam’s voice didn’t reach her. (Well, I am being held very far away in Edge Knot City, aren’t I?)

Sam kept screaming in vain until his own shrieks woke him up.

He was lying face up on the snowy slope and it took him a moment to realize that he must have been out cold and having a nightmare.

The winds had died down, the snow had stopped, and the clouds had disappeared. Sam propped himself up and wiped away his tears. But they were no longer tears of sadness. Sam’s nostrils filled with a familiar odor. He was right in the middle of BT territory.

He sensed a strong BT presence. It was so strong that the tears wouldn’t stop flowing. He felt his body break out into goosepimples and his muscles began to spasm and tremble. He broke into a fever. Then came the alternating chills and nausea. He felt like he could hear the breathing of the dead next to his ear, but without a BB, he shouldn’t have been able to hear anything. A handprint appeared right beside him. It formed only one of a trail of black handprints across the pure white snow. The stench of the dead grew overpowering. Sam covered his mouth with his hands and curled up in an attempt to conceal his presence as much as possible, but the trembling didn’t stop. Sam couldn’t tell if he was trembling from the cold or the fear.

The handprints around Sam multiplied, all different sizes and all going in different directions. Multiple BTs were searching for him. He was surrounded on this snowy mountainside. He felt like an offering being made to them in atonement for some past sin. What an ego. If Sam caused a voidout here, he would be back. But the energy from that voidout would reduce Mountain Knot City to nothingness, along with Deadman and Lockne and Lou. What kind of offering brought such destruction and calamity to the world? Offerings were supposed to be given to maintain peace.

Although Sam could identify the handprints and presence of the BTs, his heart was still tormented with speculation and suspicion. He never thought being unable to see them would frighten him this much. The empty area on his chest that was usually occupied by Lou felt heavier than ever.

He grew light-headed as his body begged for oxygen. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. But the handprints were still circling. Sam used his numb hand to remove the glove on his right. The tips of his fingers had turned dark and bruise-like. It was a sign of frostbite. He sank his teeth into his wrist, felt the warmth of his own blood spurt forth, and spread it thickly over his face. Even though it had been coursing through his own veins, it still smelled foul and only made him feel even more wretched. Still, he sensed the BTs flinch.

The handprints stopped moving.

Sam removed one side of the cuff link, exposing the cutter. It was the same cutter that had sliced through Mama’s umbilical cord. Normally, a unit attached to a blood bag would be inserted into a broken blood vessel to maximize the amount of blood drawn. Sam felt a pain like his heart was exploding. Steam rose from the cutter as blood trickled out. Sam groped around for his backpack with his left hand and removed a hematic grenade. It was connected to a full blood pack. Sam had no idea how many BTs there were, or where they were prowling.

He closed his eyes. If he couldn’t see them in the first place then there was no point in looking. He prayed to his absent BB.

Protect me, Lou.

He thought that he heard Lou’s voice in response. Even if he was just hearing things, all he could do was believe in it. Sam threw the grenade, like a separate heart filled with his own blood, overhead toward the voice.

There was a small explosion and blood rained back down on Sam. The blood hit the BTs, revealing the outlines of their bodies and where they were. They soon broke down into particles, but Sam knew that he would have to do more to get rid of them all.

Sam stood and advanced forward, brandishing his blood-covered cuff links like a whip. The BTs shrunk back. Sam’s vision began to spin until he could no longer tell what was up and what was down.

Maybe it was because of all the blood he had lost that all the color began to drain out of Sam’s world, turning it monochromatic. He kept moving forward as black blood scattered across the white snow. He was like a saint, parting tempestuous seas and walking between them toward the promised land. But there were no living people following in his footsteps behind him.

By the time Sam was sure that he was out of BT territory, he no longer had the strength to stand. He barely had any energy left at all. He used the last of his strength to stem the bleeding from his wrists and stitch himself up with a medical stapler. He followed up by throwing some blood replacement supplements and smart drugs into his mouth, and chewed. He even appreciated the cryptobiote that he found in the bottom of his backpack.

The cuff links picked up a weak radio signal, telling him he was close to the Geologist’s shelter. Once he had descended the slope, it would be around three kilometers away, but at that very moment that distance felt almost impossible. Sam found himself some exposed bedrock, thrust in a pile, and tied his strand around his waist. He descended the rest of the slope depending on a literal lifeline.

The Geologist’s shelter lay a distance away that Sam would normally have been able to cover on foot within thirty minutes, but he needed much more time than that now. Thankfully, oxygen levels had increased and the snow had stopped falling once he had descended down the mountainside. Since he took a break partway down, he found some of his strength had returned as well.

The Geologist was a Bridges scientist, and even on the hologram you could see how emaciated he had become. When Sam finally handed over the medicine he had brought, the Geologist was overcome with joy and tears, and could only thank Sam over and over again.

“Thank you, Sam Bridges. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I was feeling giddy or getting majorly depressed over the smallest of things. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I thought that all these haywire emotions were because I was out here all alone at first, but it turned out that wasn’t the case. It was because of chiral contamination. I always knew that it was a possibility, but I never thought it would actually happen to me. It was a sign that the chiral rays the chiralium was giving off were having an effect on both my body and mental state. It presents very similarly to stress, so that’s what I thought it was at first. At this rate, I probably would have started contemplating suicide, but thanks to you I’m going to get better.”

Sam could see some slight effects of the chiral contamination in the speed and breathlessness in the Geologist’s speech. Sam wanted to tell the Geologist to just hurry up and take the medicine, but he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

“It was approximately 3.8 billion years ago when life first emerged on this planet, and ever since then we have seen repeated mass extinction events of varying scales. Out of all these events, the largest ones are known as the Big Five. They each occurred at the ends of the Ordovician Period, the Devonian Period, the Permian Period, the Triassic Period and the Cretaceous Period respectively, wiping out most of the life on the Earth’s surface.

“But why does a phenomenon that eradicates all life on this planet occur in the first place? By what mechanism does it take place? And was the Death Stranding the sixth mass extinction event? I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of all these questions together with Heartman and my colleagues, but the only result that we’ve turned up so far is the discovery of a fossil Beach. Do you understand what that means? When an earthquake occurs, frictional heat at the fault line forms a stratum called pseudotachylyte. They’re known as fossilized earthquakes, therefore making this a fossilized Beach. We were looking at strata from the end of the Cretaceous Period, when we found this strange thing mixed in with dinosaur and ammonite fossils. But it’s not something that can be seen with the naked eye. The term ‘fossil’ is more of a metaphor here. We detected the chiralium and that chiralium is what first caused these symptoms.

“Speaking of chiralium, chiralium was only found after the Death Stranding occurred. It was brought here via the special dimension that we call the Beach. Some of us think that it always existed somewhere, just like the Higgs Particle and dark matter, and we just hadn’t found it yet. This fossilized Beach proves that. It also proves that this isn’t the first time the Beach has appeared on this planet. At the very least, there’s a chance that it also appeared during the extinction event that took place at the end of the Cretaceous Period. We haven’t been able to accurately verify this yet, but we can assume that there is at least some kind of relationship between the occurrence of the Beach and extinction events. By investigating the strata formed during other periods of extinction, we might find other fossilized Beaches, meaning that the Beach is involved in mass extinction events. Are you following me?

“Look, I don’t really understand the Beach. I know that it is linked to the spirit of each person and that it can be used as paths on the Chiral Network, and I kind of get that it is something that can’t be physically touched, but whenever I listen to the stories of people like you with DOOMS, it almost feels as if the place actually exists.”

That impression was correct. Sam knew that even he couldn’t explain his experiences on the Beach to other people. The words that people with DOOMS and people without DOOMS used to describe death were different. The way they imagined death was different.

The syntax they used to describe the Beach itself was different. A gap in perspective that Sam knew couldn’t be bridged.

The one thing that Sam had followed in the Geologist’s ramblings was that the likelihood that the Death Stranding was the sixth mass extinction event had increased dramatically. If the reward for finally solving the eternal mystery known as death was extinction, would everyone just roll over and accept that? Did death use the fate of extinction as a gag for those who found out its truth?

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to further clarify the relationship between the Beach and extinction, but that all hinges on you activating the Chiral Network for this area.”

Sam took out the Q-pid in response to the Geologist’s remarks. He pressed it to the receptor fitted onto the delivery terminal and activated the network. If the Beach had been connected to all those past extinction events too, then didn’t that mean that the Chiral Network, which used it as an intermediary, could have yet another use? Sam questioned as he replaced the Q-pid inside the breast pocket of his suit.

Immediately after Sam left the shelter, a call registered on Sam’s cuff links. It was Deadman.

There was no way that Deadman could have known about all the crap that happened within the BT territory back there, but his cheery tone still annoyed Sam.

So, the new BB was complete. And Lou was gone. Maybe he should treat it as the new Lou. But just as parents could not replace their children, or other people could not replace lovers or friends, there was no replacement Lou. (Hey, Sam, is that true?)

Sam wanted nothing more than to punch the cuff link, but he couldn’t cancel the call from his end. That made him even more annoyed.

Sam even felt annoyed at how Deadman was trying to make it sound like it was the most thoughtful suggestion ever. Sam was the one out here busting his ass, delivering the cargo and rebuilding America. What was he doing? Sam held back his tirade and simply switched the codec itself off. Then he proceeded down the gentle slope alone.

It was getting colder now that Sam had entered the long shadow cast by the high peak, but after the extreme cold of the blizzard that he encountered before, this was nothing.

Once he had climbed this slope he would be able to see Lou again. Or rather, the BB previously known as Lou.

Complicated feelings welled up inside him as he looked up at the ridge of the mountain. To put it bluntly, it hurt to think that even though he would be creating new memories with the BB, he would have to let go of the old ones.

Once he had climbed the slope, he could see the distribution center in the distance. He was almost there.

Lockne’s voice suddenly cried out from the codec transceiver on his cuff link.

Sam scanned his surroundings to try and figure out what she was talking about, but there was nothing unusual to be seen.

The Q-pid that Sam was using was the one that Lockne fixed. Had there been some kind of mistake? As Sam questioned himself, a vivid upside-down rainbow appeared in the southern sky. Even though it was an evil omen that signified a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead, it was undeniably beautiful. Sam must have seen it a hundred times, so he was surprised by this feeling he was having. In reality, it was a terrible thing, but he was so captivated by it. He was feeling something that he couldn’t put into words. He wasn’t quite in awe of its beauty, nor was he fearful; it was something else entirely. Just as he found it impossible to describe his feelings, he couldn’t stop his tears either. This wasn’t his usual allergic reaction. For some reason he was really moved.

The transmission from Lockne cut out. Sam tried reaching her again, but no matter how many times he tried, no sound came from the transceiver. Even though he was in an area covered by the Chiral Network, he couldn’t connect. All of this seemed to back up what Lockne had said about the sudden rise in chiral density. Or maybe something had happened back at Mountain Knot City.

He felt a sudden warmth on his chest, and when he pulled out the Q-pid, its six shards were emitting so much heat it felt like they might burst into flames. What was happening? Sam tried to rip the Q-pid away from his neck, but the Q-pid began to float away as if it was a creature with a mind of its own. It floated off into the air as if it was taunting him.

The second that Sam stepped forward, led on by the Q-pid, the scenery around him transformed in an instant.

An unbelievable gale was blowing at Sam from behind. He lost his balance and almost fell forward. He tried to cover his head with both arms to brace for the impact, but it was useless. His body floated. Gravity was gone and Sam was flailing through the air. Next to him, a huge whale was flying as its body rotated around like a drill. The debris of buildings, ships, and cars of varying sizes that Sam had only even seen in picture form, and faceless people that had appeared out of nowhere, were swallowed up in a giant whirlwind and sucked into the sky.