Death Stranding: The Official Novelization, Volume Two

EPISODE X – HIGGS

It was Higgs. He was hovering several inches above the tar.

Sam shouted his name and shot to his feet. Higgs responded with exaggerated surprise.

“Keep your voice down. You don’t want to scare the poor girl away, do you? You came all this way to see her, didn’t you? That’s why I did you a favor and brought you over that tar belt. How about a little gratitude and respect?” Higgs said theatrically as if amused by Sam’s loss for words, and pointing behind Sam with one hand. Sam turned around to find the silhouette of a city. It was Edge Knot City. It was his final stop. The place where he would find Amelie.

Higgs snapped his fingers. An upside-down rainbow appeared high in the skies above the city, which was subsequently drowned out by thick black clouds. There were several flashes of lightning followed by roars of thunder. Some of the lightning bolts reached all the way down into the city and exploded in dazzling flashes of light. The clouds began to rain timefall. In mere moments it turned into a torrential downfall, cloaking the city in a veil of rain.

“She’s in there. I can smell her. Of course, I wouldn’t’ve known for sure if it wasn’t for you and your wonderful network.”

Sam turned toward the voice, but there was no one there. Just a floating golden mask.

“Bless your heart,” Higgs whispered in Sam’s ear. Sam jumped away. Higgs’s face had been just inches away from his own and his cockiness had snapped Sam back to his senses. Sam looked back, but Higgs was no longer there. Just his golden mask floating in midair.

“Thank you kindly,” Higgs whispered, his words coming from the mask.

It was obvious Higgs was enjoying toying with Sam. Sam knew that he mustn’t take the bait, but he could no longer control his rising anger. He stretched out his arm in an attempt to grab the golden mask and the gas mask behind it. But all his hand managed to grab was thin air. Higgs had disappeared again. With nothing to grab onto, Sam lost his balance and fell forward. His palms hit the ground, but when he tried to lift his hands back up, he couldn’t move them. Tar was oozing from the rock below them. It covered the palms of Sam’s hands like an amorphous creature, coiled around his wrists and bound him in place.

Higgs was approaching again. As Sam looked up at Higgs from the ground, with his hands tied, he looked like a criminal begging for forgiveness. His face began to burn with disgrace and humiliation. Higgs squatted down and brought his own face close. He grabbed Sam by the hair and with his free hand removed his golden mask.

His true face didn’t look like the face of a destroyer. In fact, there was a delicateness to it. Like that of a philosopher. Or maybe it betrayed the truth-seeker in him that had eventually been caught up in this doctrine of extinction.

“Sam Bridges.” A snake-like tongue poked out from between his captivating red lips and licked Sam’s cheek. It was cold, like a kiss of the dead. But Sam’s face was getting hotter and hotter in anger.

“I’m not the only one wearing a mask,” Higgs said as his hand released Sam’s hair and, with a wave, his golden mask appeared.

“There’s your boss man, that woman… And… oh, let’s not forget little ol’ you.” Before he had even finished speaking, Higgs was pressing the mask onto Sam’s face. The mask immediately hugged Sam’s facial contours as if it had been made for him. It was like he was wearing another layer of skin. One that had melted the real skin on Sam’s face and fused with it. It covered his eyes, nose, and mouth. He couldn’t breathe. His head felt like it would explode out of pain and anger. The inside of the mask that was stuck to Sam’s skin was cold and clammy. Just like Higgs’s tongue. Sam finally managed to free his hands, which had been stuck to the ground by the tar. He dug his nails into the mask in an attempt to tear it off, but its surface was hard as crystal. No matter how much he struggled, the mask wouldn’t budge. In fact, it was Sam’s nails that got ripped off instead, covering his hands in blood.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. I know it ain’t easy wearing a mask all the time.”

Maybe it was because the mask was covering Sam’s eyes that it felt like Higgs was speaking right inside his head.

His body craved oxygen. It began to convulse.

“But now the mask can come off, right? Both yours and mine,” Higgs sneered.

A burning pain blazed across Sam’s face as if the mask had ripped the skin away with it. As it came off, Sam fell forward onto the ground. Higgs mercilessly grabbed Sam by the hair and held his face up. He thrust his free hand in front of it. In his fist was Amelie’s quipu.

“I got this from Amelie,” Higgs stated.

No. Sam shook his head. He had been the one who gave it to Amelie. Amelie would never give it to someone like Higgs.

“Mmm… poor sweet Amelie. She’s holed up on a Beach nearby. Tell you what. What say we make it a race, hm? Whoever wins gets to usher in the end of days. Nothing like the eve of extinction to bring focus to the mind. Makes folks honest. There’ll be no need for masks soon,” Higgs said, replacing his own. “But, I wonder—when you look death in her eye, will you blink? If you want to chicken out, now’s the time to do it.”

Higgs disappeared. A large clap of thunder boomed from the direction of Edge Knot City. Sam could see the timefall continue to pour down on the city, speeding up its demise.

Higgs may have gone, but black clouds still hung over Edge Knot City. The closer Sam got to it, the harder it rained. Sam had heard that this whole area was desert before the Death Stranding. The original coastline of the North American continent had been farther west than Edge Knot City was now, but that coastline had been significantly cut back because of the bigger explosions during the initial phase of the disaster. As a result, one of the manmade cities from the era of the United States of America, which used to be in the middle of the desert, found itself located right on the West Coast. It became the prototype for Edge Knot City. Its original name was Santa Maria.

The sandy soil was already saturated and, without anywhere to go, the water had begun to form into rivers. Sam had his hood all the way down over his face to protect himself from the timefall, but that solution only offered a temporary peace of mind. All he could do was cover Lou’s pod with both hands and continue to walk. His soaked porter suit degraded more and more with every sheet of rain.

He was almost at the outer rim of the city. Edge Knot wasn’t like the other knot cities. It had quite a complex structure.

—It’s the result of conflicting ideologies.

Sam thought back to something Die-Hardman had said in a briefing. He wasn’t even sure when it had taken place. Sam hadn’t spoken to the director for a while now, and now that Deadman and Hardman had aired their suspicions about the man, he felt like talking to him even less.

Normal Knot Cities are surrounded by walls. Not only were these walls for protection, but they also formed a feature that clearly separated inside from outside. It was a way of visibly assuring the people who lived there of their autonomy, their independence, and their safety. That’s why the Bridges distribution centers were always built alongside the outer walls of the cities and not inside the cities themselves.

But Edge Knot was different.

The people who lived here had inherited the West Coast spirit that had historically prized freedom and independence above all else, and that spirit had once again been demonstrated in how they coped with the aftermath of the Death Stranding.

It was the cities on the West Coast that were the source of the secessionists. They had developed their own city revival plans, secured their own food and energy provisions, and had built their own distribution system. Edge Knot had its own delivery system and equipment. They didn’t have a problem with Bridges borrowing from it. Had no problems with bringing in goods. It was the same as how trade worked in the old world, anyway. They wouldn’t permit the building of a new Bridges center within the city. It was seen as equivalent to being occupied and colonized by America again.

Because of this there was no Bridges-owned equipment in the area. However, that didn’t mean that Edge Knot City was made up entirely of secessionists. There were a fair number of people who supported the plan to rebuild America. There was also a fixed number of centrists who sat somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, the city was just like a miniature America of old. Its outer wall was made up of many twists, and in some places even two separate walls. It was like a manifestation of the immediate chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the United States.

Bridges had only been permitted to build a small facility on the eastern edge of the city, back when support for American reconstructionism had been stronger. Even the name Edge Knot City was one that only Bridges really used. Most people still called it Santa Maria.

This was the city that Amelie had left for all those years ago.

Originally, Amelie was a special envoy and was supposed to negotiate with the cities diplomatically, joining them to the UCA if both parties agreed. That was the procedure Bridges was supposed to follow. But Santa Maria had imprisoned her instead. And now Sam was going to have to force them onto the Chiral Network under the pretext of saving her. That was Bridges’ plan now, but it didn’t seem much different from an invasion to Sam.

Even if Santa Maria had already fallen, forcing it onto the Chiral Network would still be an act of aggression.

If Amelie’s message was to be believed, the area should have been crawling with BTs. But even if that did turn out to be the case, Sam still wasn’t comfortable with the task he had been given. Even if Higgs was after Amelie—Amelie the EE—and Sam had to confront the danger that he posed in his attempts to not only wipe out America, but all of mankind, that didn’t mean he could accept what Bridges was up to either. But unless Sam kept on going, nothing would happen. Nothing would change.

They’d never be able to escape from here. Not from this continent. They’d never exist anywhere but here. There were no more promised lands for them like the ones their ancestors sought and fled to. Edge Knot City was as far as their ancestors from the east could take them. And now Sam was going all the way to that dead-end for Bridges. A different type of anger than when he faced Higgs began to bubble up in Sam’s chest.

“This is bullshit,” Sam found himself muttering out loud. It was a comment aimed at what man called destiny.

Sam had arrived near the entrance to the city, but the Bridges facility that he was looking for was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was because of the chiral clouds blocking out the sky, or the influence of the strange magnetic field of this area, but his compass wasn’t working. Lou wasn’t crying or anything, so he couldn’t have been near BT territory.

Sam decided to enter a nearby building to get out of the rain.

As soon as he stepped inside he found himself in awe. Contrary to its rotting exterior, the inside of the building was expansive and magnificent. The walls and floors were clad in faux marble. Pterosaur skeletons hung from the high ceiling. The support that ran through the center of the elegantly curving spiral staircase read: “American Memorial Museum.”

In the darkness of the entrance hall, Sam could make out rows of exhibition cases. As he stepped closer, he found most of the glass to be cracked and broken and the cases empty. Sam stopped. He thought he could hear voices coming from upstairs. He held his breath and strained his ears, but the noise had already gone.

Sam crept up the spiral staircase. The first thing he saw at the top was something that looked like a long car. Farther away lay an overturned gramophone like the one Heartman had at his lab. Cameras, projectors, and what looked like circular canisters of film—relics of the old world—were piled up haphazardly.

Next to those were huge stacks of books. The exhibition cases that lined the walls were full of jumbled collections of bones, both big and small, and fur of animals that Sam couldn’t identify. Farther along stood some bulky, deep-set monitors, along with a board that was captioned “Television Sets.” And beside those was a strange-looking contraption that was made of a dial inscribed with the numbers 0 to 9 and connected by a cord to some sort of funnel-shaped device. Sam read the description card to find that it was an early telephone. He carried on down the hall.

Sam walked past an exhibit that depicted Native American life, before stumbling on a board that illustrated the concept of the Apollo program. Beside it was a case that was captioned “Moon Rock,” but this also stood empty.

There was another exhibition about Columbus’s discovery of America and the achievements of Amerigo Vespucci, from whom America took its name. The next exhibition area was a wall plastered with all sorts of images, including prints of red-and-white soup cans, a photograph of a cliff with the enormous faces of four presidents carved into the rock, a picture of a smiling family flashing the peace sign between two people zipped into a duck costume and a mouse costume, and print media that reported on a presidential assassination.

It was all that remained of the American dream. The American history that Bridget taught Sam about when he was young depicted an America that had already been torn to pieces and scattered to the wind. Would stitching America back together with a thread made from the remnants of the American dream really bring back the United States of America that Bridget dreamed of?

Sam didn’t think so. If Edge Knot City was a miniature version of America after the Death Stranding, this museum was nothing but a metaphor for the America that had existed before.

Sam heard voices again. It sounded like they were whispering. They seemed to be coming from the next room. Sam exited the room he was stood in, walked down the hallway, and stepped into the room next door.

He was immediately confronted by a row of soldiers with their guns at the ready. Sam instinctively grabbed for his ID strand. But they were just life-sized replicas. Sam breathed a sigh of relief and scanned the room. It was full of life-sized mannequins. It was like a forest of people. When Sam inspected the models of the soldiers more closely, he found they all had different equipment and represented different soldiers throughout the ages. Among them was a soldier that looked just like Cliff.

And there weren’t just soldiers. There were men in suits and cowboys wearing huge hats. There were even some models that looked just like the characters found in movies and comic books. On the chest of one mannequin that wore a red and blue body suit was a symbol of a spider, whereas the mannequin dressed in the black bodysuit had pointy ears. The face of the mannequin that had a star on its chest and a shield in hand was half-covered by a mask. Had the past heroes of the United States of America once worn masks?

Sam heard a voice from within the forest of people and made his way deeper, under the watch of America’s heroes and cowboys.

—Sam? Are you there?

As Sam heard the voice, the mannequins all moved to the side, creating a path.

There was nothing between them now. Before Sam stood a woman clad in bright red.

—Can you hear me? Sam?

Amelie? Why? Sam thought he asked, but he couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice. It felt like being trapped underwater. He couldn’t hear a thing. Then his body became heavy.

—I can see you, Sam. You came.

Amelie said that she saw him, but it didn’t look like her eyes were perceiving him. Her body and her eyes may have been turned his way, but she seemed vacant, like a mannequin without a soul.

—I’m on the Beach, Sam. Our Beach. The one where I was born. Higgs will never find me here. He can’t. So, don’t worry.

Contrary to what she was saying, Amelie seemed worried. Sam had no idea how she was accessing here from the Beach. Perhaps she was manipulating Sam’s consciousness and speaking to him within a dream. But if what Amelie was saying was the truth, there was no need to be afraid of Higgs. Maybe this dream was just showing Sam what he desperately wanted to be true.

Wake up, he urged himself. Dreaming about this won’t fix anything.

—Sam, I’ve kept things from you.

If this is a dream then wake up! Sam begged. The mannequins had formed a circle around Sam and Amelie. All of them were wearing the same mask—Higgs’s golden mask.

—I’ve worn a mask for the longest time. Everything Higgs said about me is true.

All the masks on the mannequins tore away and fell to the floor.

—I could end it all. Us. Mankind. Extinction. That’s what I am.

The faces of the mannequins were all flat. There were no eyes, no noses, no mouths. Even the heroes in their masks were the same. Their faces where the masks had been were gone. Even the faces of those heroes that had protected America had been snatched away.

—But it’s not what I want to be. All I want is for you and me and everyone in this world… to be whole.

The mannequins collapsed to the floor, each one knocking down the next in a domino pattern.

—Sam… Promise you’ll stop me. Don’t let me end it all.

Amelie began to disappear from her feet up. She was disintegrating into fine particles, just like the BTs.

—I’ll be waiting for you on…

She disappeared before she could finish her sentence. Sam was left all alone in this room among a pile of soulless mannequins. All alone in a museum that contained the last traces of America.

Sam’s memories of leaving the museum were hazy. He had no idea how long he had stood in that empty room after Amelie disappeared. It was as if he had sleepwalked out of there. Before he knew it, he was back outside. The timefall was still falling.

Maybe this museum was the same kind of Beach as Cliff’s battlefield. A fantasy museum born of an anonymous someone’s lingering attachment toward America that connected to this world.

As if to support Sam’s theory, the doors to the museum closed behind him and didn’t allow him to enter again.

Sam hadn’t realized when he first arrived, but the Bridges facility that he was looking for was right in front of the museum.

Sam’s cuff link and ID strand were authenticated, and the door opened, greeting him with the smell of dust and rust. Sam was on alert as he entered, thinking how cave-like it seemed. There was no other sign of life in this manmade metal cavern. Bridges staff must have been stationed here once upon a time, but there was no trace of them left. Sam wondered if the staff here had been slaughtered along with the Bridges I members who had accompanied Amelie all the way to Edge Knot City. Sam fiddled with his cuff link and the delivery terminal rose out of the floor. He had been through this routine so many times now. The receptor that would receive the Q-pid was now ready, so all Sam had to do was hold the six shards of metal to it and activate the Chiral Network. The whole continent would finally be online. Sam would finally be able to put down the baggage he had been forced to carry ever since he had transported Bridget’s body to the incinerator.

The America that she had dedicated her life to would be rebuilt. In this empty room, with no other witness, her dream would finally be realized. But there would be no jubilant applause nor shouts of happiness. Sam doubted whether anyone even wanted it to be rebuilt.

Sam removed the Q-pid from under his suit. The shards were floating slightly. It would be the last time Sam performed this rite, and he wanted to get it over and done with quickly. Sam held the Q-pid up to the panel. He was overcome by a severe allergic reaction to the chiralium as per usual.

Now, it’s over. I kept my promise to you, Bridget. But as Sam thought those words, he froze. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Maybe it was because there were so few people on the expedition, or because no sooner had they arrived here than Amelie had been taken. Perhaps the team that had been ordered to install the equipment at this facility had prioritized getting this place up and running first. They probably hadn’t had time to make it look nice or think about security. The interior of the equipment that was usually covered in shielding lay exposed. And inside was the same piece of equipment that Sam had attached to his chest.

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 measly 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.

The sands swelled and several whales appeared. They cried as they breached the surface and slammed their massive bodies onto the shore. More followed suit, stranding themselves on the sands. The entire Beach was getting buried in the corpses of whales that neither came from the sea nor could return to it.

“We’re all of us a part of the Death Stranding,” Higgs declared.

It didn’t seem to matter how Higgs explained it, but Sam never understood. As long as all he wanted was Amelie, he would never see the truth. Higgs had once been the same.

“And this place, this fucking ‘Beach.’ There’s no repatriation here, no. One of us dies, that’s it. He goes to the other side. Nice, huh? Lucky loser gets to put an end to this rinse-and-repeat bullshit once and for all. So… No BTs, no voidouts, no bullshit. Just a good old-fashioned boss fight. Stick versus rope. Gun versus strand. One more ending before the end… One last game over.”

All Sam had was his ID strand. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how this fight would end. Higgs aimed his assault rifle and pulled the trigger. This gunshot will sound in the beginning of this rite of extinction.

It wasn’t long after Peter assumed the name of Higgs that he joined forces with Fragile Express. He may have professed himself to be the God particle and may have worn a mask to imitate the pharaohs, but he was still painfully aware of his own lack of power. The leader of the organization, Fragile, had DOOMS more powerful than Higgs had ever seen. Her organization was better than the one Higgs was a part of, too.

Now that Bridges I had finally departed on a mission to rebuild America, terrorist attacks and assaults by Homo Demens were on the rise, and that, combined with the BTs and the MULEs, made it harder and harder for Higgs and the others to work. That’s why it was better to join forces. The more porters they had, the easier it would be to cover the entire continent. Luckily, Fragile agreed with Higgs and they began working together.

Fragile’s DOOMS was even more incredible than Higgs had first heard. Not only could she sense the Beach and the BTs, she could actually use the Beach. Compared to that, Higgs was nothing. All he had was the power he had received as the human corpses necrotized and became BTs. But now he didn’t need it. He could use Fragile’s abilities to make deliveries. Higgs didn’t want to rebuild America as it once was, like Bridges. He wanted to create a new world on this continent, one that protected the freedom and liberty of every single person living within it. Higgs was practically drunk on that vision.

Yet he knew that it was a brittle and fragile dream.

AMELIE’S BEACH

Jeering at Sam, Higgs thrust the rifle at him. Out of bullets, it was now just a steel stick to beat Sam with. Even though he had a spare magazine, he no longer felt like using it. He wanted to fight Sam man-on-man.

Sam had already lost a lot of blood and was gasping for air, but he had lost none of his fighting spirit and continued to glare at Higgs. Unlike Sam, Higgs barely had a scratch on him.

“You just don’t get it, do you. What do you think you’re going to achieve by struggling like this? Fragile was the same. She gave up her time just to save a town that was gonna to get destroyed anyway. It’s not like they’ve got long left here after all this. Now she’s stuck livin’ inside that shriveled body, just giving them hope for a fake future. Listen up, Sam. There is no future. If all there is to do is waste away waiting for tomorrow, isn’t it better to graciously accept extinction? That’s what the planet wants. So, you’d better start groveling before me. Then at least you might be remembered as a wise man. If you don’t want to, then kill me,” Higgs declared, waving a knife at Sam and slamming it into his windpipe. Sam managed to get away with a stagger, but Higgs simply tutted and closed in on him once more. As Higgs lunged, Sam’s ID strand caught the arm that was flailing the knife. As he pulled on Higgs and Higgs braced his feet against the ground, their strength was evenly matched. The ID strand stretched longer and longer, looking like it might snap at any moment. Sam was breathing heavily with his shoulders, but it didn’t feel like he would loosen his grip anytime soon.

Higgs could feel himself growing impatient. The situation was overwhelmingly in his favor, yet their fight was not progressing as planned. I need more power. He sent his will to Amelie asleep in the spider’s web, but she didn’t wake up. What does this mean?

Sam’s injury-riddled body suddenly seemed to look much more imposing than before.

Things between Higgs and Fragile Express went great at first. But Higgs soon had to face their limits. No matter how great Fragile’s abilities were, they couldn’t turn this world into one that he dreamed of for everyone. Even if they were able to make deliveries and keep people connected, people still couldn’t go out into the outside world.

This world where the timefall fell, where BTs attacked, and layers of chiral cloud separated them from the rest of the universe would never change. It couldn’t change.

Now that Bridges’ plan to rebuild America had been put into motion there were more terrorist attacks than ever before. And with more terrorist attacks came more bodies and more BTs. Voidouts were happening everywhere. If they had just kept quiet and stayed put then this would never have happened. The Earth was crawling with different motives and purposes, each battling it out to reign supreme, but it felt to Higgs like he was the one choking on them all. These were the limits of humanity.

But then he met someone who surpassed those limits.

Her name was Samantha America Strand and Higgs knew from the moment he first spoke to her that she was the only one who could make his ideal world a reality. She told him that she would lend him the power to restore the world to its former glory.

The symbol of her power was a human-shaped BT sensor called a Bridge Baby. It wasn’t a real baby. Instead, according to Amelie, it was a child who had been born on the Beach and who could connect the realms of the living and the dead. She explained that if Higgs used one, he could always stay connected to her. She told him that BBs were the new children born into a new age.

I’m no ordinary porter.

I’m the one who’ll create a new world.

Higgs didn’t need to borrow Fragile’s abilities anymore. Now, he was able to dream again.

BBs were dolls who took the form of babies. But they weren’t just any old dolls. They were neither living, nor dead. They were something in between human and doll, much like the mummies of Egypt with only their shriveled, dried-up hearts still in place in their chests.

Higgs believed the BBs were a symbol of humanity.

The Death Stranding was the sixth mass extinction event to strike life on this planet. Higgs saw it all in his visions. The visions that he was sure he was being shown because of his connection with the BB. In other words, the visions that were being shown to him by Amelie.

The voidouts that had suddenly occurred the world over one day, and the subsequent transformation of the dead into BTs that caused ever more, were all phenomena to speed human extinction along. It was already set in motion.

There was no meaning whatsoever in trying to rebuild America. No reason to sacrifice the lives of those already living for the chance of a tomorrow that would never come.

Higgs asked Amelie the true meaning of the Death Stranding. But she never answered him. Whether she knew it or not, she never told him anything. But Higgs somehow understood it all. So did Amelie. Extinction was a foregone conclusion.

Yet Amelie was still trying to rebuild America. Perhaps that was the final struggle. The final hesitation. Higgs couldn’t understand what was going through Amelie’s mind, but if she was hesitating, then he’d make the decision for her. He’d bring extinction to everyone on this planet. That’s why he needed to get stronger. Detonating a nuclear bomb had been an expression of that urge. He wiped the whole of Middle Knot City off the map. Fragile had been the one to smuggle the bomb into the city. She didn’t have the slightest idea that she was the one who delivered its destruction.

The city had blown up because of its connection to the outside. Connections brought ruin. It had been well documented for centuries. When people began to move between continents they brought new diseases with them, sometimes so bad that they wiped out over half the native population. The human race would die. Now even the delivery systems were being used to hasten the extinction. That must have been why Higgs had joined forces with Fragile. Why they had expanded the delivery network. Everything had been preordained from the start.

It was around that time when Higgs first heard about Sam Porter. He had DOOMS and the exceedingly rare ability to repatriate from the dead. When Higgs found out that he was Amelie’s adoptive brother, the jealousy drove him insane. Sam had found meaning in survival by connecting people to people without connecting to them himself. Higgs felt like he was looking at a past version of Peter, and that only further fanned the flames of his envy.

After researching Sam, he realized something. Amelie was constrained by Sam’s existence. She seemed to believe that if anyone could rebuild America, it was him. If Amelie was ever going to be able to demonstrate the true extent of her power as an Extinction Entity, Higgs needed to sever her bond with Sam.

After finding out that Sam was near Central Knot City, it was him who had formulated the plan to leave a dead body within it and cause a voidout. When he found out that the body had been discovered he summoned a BT to consume the men on the Corpse Disposal Team. Central Knot City was wiped out just as planned. Not only was it the self-proclaimed capital of America, it was also home to Bridges HQ and Bridges II. Higgs had wiped them all out. The plan to rebuild America had disappeared in a puff of smoke.

But Sam repatriated.

So even a voidout doesn’t kill a repatriate? What a stubborn creature.

When Higgs found out that not only had Sam repatriated from the dead, but that he had now departed as the sole member of Bridges II, it only enraged him further. He decided to speed up the inevitable conclusion to this saga even more.

Your DOOMS abilities are worthless. I have SODOM. And with this power, I’ll turn the Earth into my power’s namesake and watch it burn in fire and brimstone.

AMELIE’S BEACH

“I am the bridge who brings the extinction!” Higgs screamed, letting go of Sam’s ID strand and making Sam tumble back into a swamp of tar. Higgs took advantage of Sam’s fall and charged. Connecting the Extinction Entity to this world and ushering in the extinction was his purpose. The tar grabbed at Sam’s legs, making it more difficult to move as Higgs lunged at Sam’s hips and took him down. Sam was half-submerged in tar as Higgs grabbed his hair and punched him in the face. It no longer looked human, covered so thickly in blood and tar. He knew the truth of the Death Stranding. The meaning behind the Sixth Extinction that neither Sam nor even Amelie understood. Its horror. Higgs punched Sam again as he tried to shake Higgs’s arm away. He gripped Sam’s skull tight, wanting to crush it into dust, and plunged him deeper into the tar. It didn’t matter that he was a repatriate. If he suffocated him here, Sam wouldn’t be able to come back. It was time for Sam to die. “You can watch this world go up in flames from the realm of the dead. There’s no way back for you this time. You’ll just have to be satisfied with the show!” Higgs ranted wildly, strengthening his grip on Sam.

Then a jet-black hand grabbed Higgs’s arm.

It was jutting out of the tar. It belonged to Sam. The tar’s grip on him was slackening. Higgs’s own grip on Sam loosened as the hand grabbed onto him with a newfound strength that made Higgs’s bones creak.

Sam dragged Higgs down into the tar as well.

Higgs’s vision was immediately plunged into darkness and a sticky tar-like substance mercilessly rushed into his mouth. The tar that he had always been able to manipulate freely was going against its master’s will. How could this be? Higgs was backed into a corner.

Their positions switched and Sam was now straddling Higgs. Sam had him by the chest and punched him in the face over and over. Higgs felt like he was blacking out each time.

The extinction is already set in stone. I’ll deal with Sam first and then exercise Amelie’s power. It’s already decided. So, what’s happening now is just some meaningless detour. Right, Amelie?!

But Amelie didn’t answer.

The extinction can’t be reversed. That’s why you first appeared, right?

Instead of Amelie, Higgs was answered by Sam’s fist.

As the taste of iron spread through his mouth and blood gushed into his throat, Higgs realized that his nose had been broken. Was he supposed to choke to death? Was that really the way he was to go out? Higgs was grabbed by the chest and shaken until he vomited out a mixture of blood and tar. He could breathe again. It was only afterward that Higgs realized how great a contradiction his feeling of relief was. How could he believe so fervently in extinction yet feel such relief when he was able to keep on living?

It was only then that Amelie finally answered.

“Sam!”

Why wouldn’t she call out his name? Discouragement and doubt extinguished what was left of Higgs’s fighting spirit. He saw that Amelie, wearing his golden mask, had broken free of the spider’s web and was now standing on the Beach. It wasn’t time yet. Amelie’s appearance betrayed Higgs’s vision.

“Well, congratulations. You won the game. Too bad you didn’t stop shit. Well? Get on with it,” Higgs said, staring up at the sky once Sam had hauled him out of the swamp of tar. Those words were half for Higgs’s own benefit. If he abandoned his prayers, they would never come true. Even if he died, the path to extinction would never be blocked.

Sam looked down at him and shook his head.

Higgs could hear somebody approaching in the sand. They weren’t Amelie’s footsteps. Sam’s face disappeared from his sight and was replaced by another.

“Fragile?”

Before he could ask her what she was doing here, she spoke: “Guess I left a lasting impression.” His ex-partner’s face drew near, a dreadful smile forming upon it. “I’m Fragile… but I’m not that fragile.”

Those were the words she had recited back when Higgs made her dispose of the nuke.

“This time, you’re the one who’s going to break,” she warned him.

“Is that right? I think you’ll find our bond is made of stronger stuff,” he sneered back.

Higgs knew it was all in vain. But he felt like he really would break if he didn’t say anything at all and couldn’t stop himself. He looked to Amelie again. She was stood there leaning on Sam, but it didn’t look like she was fully conscious yet. She was still wearing his mask. In that case, he wasn’t finished just yet.

“Give me power, dammit!” he screamed.

Amelie woke up, removed his mask, and simply discarded it onto the sand.

“Oh? What’s this? You’re already broken,” Fragile remarked indifferently.

“What the fuck!? I’m Higgs!” he raged. “I’m the particle of God that permeates all existence. What are you? Honey, you ain’t nothing but damaged goods!”

Fragile removed her glove and stroked Higgs’s blood-and tar-stained face. It was a gentle gesture, like those she would make back when they were partners. But it was the first time he had felt it through her aged hand.

Fragile’s smile filled Higgs’s field of vision. Then came a thump and intense pain as her fist made contact with his face.

“You’re damaged goods,” she replied.

“Here you go. As promised.”

Fragile grabbed Higgs’s bound body along with his rifle and magazine of ammo. He looked so small now. The golden mask of his that lay nearby looked shabby and fake. Nobody needed it anymore.

“I’ve got a delivery for you, Sam,” Fragile said as she stepped toward Sam and Amelie and presented Lou’s pod. “Babysitting is hard work. Take your little one.”

Sam took Lou’s pod, but looked confused.

“I was going to ask Deadman to look after Lou, but he couldn’t make it. After I jumped you here, the Beach became unstable, so I had to keep the kid with me. I managed to bring it here by picturing it as ‘equipment.’”

Inside the pod that Sam cradled, Lou laughed. Fragile returned the smile and opened her umbrella.

“The Beach is stable for now, so where should I send you?” Fragile asked.

“He doesn’t need your help. He’s got the Chiral Network. And he’s got me. We can jump east together,” Amelie interrupted.

“Lucky him.” Fragile closed her umbrella.

“We appreciate everything you’ve done for us, we really do. But we’re good for now. Besides, I’m sure they need you back at Fragile Express,” Sam explained.

“Yeah. Who better to scoop up all the pieces and put them back together? Wouldn’t want to settle for anything less than perfection. We’re square. Nothing owed, nothing left to say. So long, Sam.” Fragile turned her back on Sam and said her goodbyes, this time a rifle over her shoulder instead of an umbrella.

As she listened to Sam’s and Amelie’s voices grow more distant as they walked east along the shoreline, Fragile took a deep breath and gently lowered the rifle until the barrel pointed at Higgs.

The first memory Higgs had was of the gloomy ceiling of the shelter. He must have been crying, because right then a big hand appeared and blocked out his view. It was his father. He had come to shush the crying Peter and shouted something at him angrily, but Peter couldn’t understand the meaning of his words.

The man wasn’t Peter’s real father. His real father had died while his mother was still pregnant. Then, just after he was born, his mother passed on too, of an infection. Baby Peter was entrusted to his mother’s brother and moved from his parents’ shelter into this one. His uncle was reluctant to become his foster father, and all Peter could remember from his childhood was abuse and violence. He had no memory of ever being loved. He was brought up to believe that the shelter was the entire world and that he and his foster father were its only inhabitants, but one day he dared ask the innocent question of where their food and resources came from. The only reply he ever received was a punch. But once it had taken root, that question never disappeared from Peter’s mind. One day, he stole a glance at the monitor when his foster father wasn’t looking, and it showed him the outside world for the very first time. When he asked his foster father about it, he was served with yet another fist to the face.

Peter’s foster father eventually told him about the world that lay beyond their door. About how it was a dangerous world dominated by timefall and monsters, and one in which people must never venture outside. Peter’s mother’s death must have added to the man’s paranoia. Never mind going outside, Peter was hysterically warned against even letting in the breeze. The man had to raise the baby he had been entrusted with by his sister to adulthood somehow.

The man’s sense of duty and love manifested itself as the violence against Peter, but eventually that lost its original purpose and became nothing more than a daily habit. The man used to hit Peter just in case he ever even thought about venturing outside That was his way of showing love and protecting him. But Peter felt like he was dying, cramped up as he was. He may have seemed fine on the outside, but he felt like he was dying inside.

That’s why he hatched a plan to escape the shelter. He prepared little by little, whenever his father wasn’t looking. But he was discovered and his father launched into a rage and attacked him. Tables and shelves were overturned and the atmosphere inside the shelter reached breaking point.

Peter’s foster father had held him down and shouted at him about how he could never understand the man’s feelings. Peter’s field of vision grew narrower. It became more and more difficult to take his next breath. The man was wringing his neck.

As Peter struggled frantically, he grabbed for a knife that had fallen to the floor and plunged it into his foster father’s neck.

The strength faded out of the man’s hands and his body slumped to the floor.

All Peter could see above him was the gloomy ceiling of the shelter once more.

Unable to process what he had done, Peter spent an entire night with that body in the shelter, but he had to get rid of it sometime.

Ever since he had first told Peter of the world outside their door, his father had also been careful to fully inform him of the terror of necrosis and the BTs. Peter knew that if he didn’t get rid of the body, his father would come back and cause a voidout.

The body had already begun to give off a pungent odor. But there was no place or any way to burn it. All Peter could do was take it somewhere far away, so he dragged the body out of the shelter and got his first taste of the outside world.

What he saw was patches of jagged rocks and short grass as far as the eye could see. The mountaintops in the distance were hidden by chiral clouds. Peter was in awe of this spectacle he was seeing for the first time, but getting the body away from here had to take precedent.

But as he dragged the body away, he didn’t notice the fog of black particles emanating from the corpse. It had already begun to necrotize. Time had run out. All Peter could do was dump the body and run. Then he had a vision. Both hands that had a hold of the body disintegrated into a mist. Simultaneously, he felt the presence of a BT, attracted to the body from the other side. Ever since then Peter had been able to sense BTs, and that had given him the ability to work alone as a porter for so many years.

The necrotizing body had given him power, and whenever he had felt that power waning, he killed in secret. That was how he had managed to survive all alone.

AMELIE’S BEACH

Higgs raised his head and looked for Fragile, but she was long gone.

He was all alone. The golden mask, Amelie’s quipu, and the human-shaped BB no longer belonged to him. He had lost everything. There was nothing left. There wasn’t even anything left of his power he had intended to use to bring the extinction. He had believed that he was in control of everything, but he had been stupid. It had all been make believe.

He finally understood.

Now he was all alone on this Beach and there was no one to hear his mutterings.

I’m Higgs, the particle of God.

He was all alone, isolated without a person in the world to connect to.

This is how I’m supposed to be.

Peter Englert had been forsaken on this Beach with nothing else to do but continue to confess his endless sins.

HEARTMAN’S LAB

Heartman could hear the tune of the Funeral March. He had to get back to his body soon. The passage of time on the Beach was without end and as close to zero as you could get, but there was still a time limit. Humans perceive the passage of time not as the changing of events along a timeline, but as the switching of phases. Each individual event is not washed away by time to disappear, they remain intact as a perceived phase. That’s what we call the past. The future is an as-of-yet unperceived event and humans, bound by time as they are, can only perceive one of a myriad of alternatives.

While Heartman’s ha was bound by the laws of the world of the living, he was unable to search the Beach indefinitely. Choosing a song that mourned the dead as his signal to return to the realm of the living and wake up was Heartman’s own little act of quiet resistance.

The Funeral March should have sounded the same as always, but this time it sounded different. It was hurting his ears. The sounds were overlapping. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been listening so attentively, he would never even have noticed. It was the same tune, but there was a slight delay. It felt like listening to an optical illusion. Once one tune had seized all of Heartman’s attention that was all he could hear, but when he disengaged his focus he could detect something very slightly out of synch. The realization affected his sight. The world around him that he perceived visually felt similarly layered, with a single layer slightly out of alignment. It was the first time he had felt anything like it.

Although, logically, infinite layers of parallel phases selectively unacknowledged had to exist.

Have I augmented my abilities? Heartman wondered, feeling a spark of excitement.

He looked out across the Beach as the limit of his stay approached. It looked different than before. The shoreline that stretched eternally into the distance was being followed by countless numbers of people. Each and every one of them was existing simultaneously within phases out of alignment with one another.

What’s going on? His brain was on fire. It didn’t matter that his heart had stopped, it was ringing like an alarm bell. Huge droplets of sweat merged with his tears, dampening his face. It was like the very limits of his consciousness were trying to break.

“Wait!” he shouted. For a split second, he thought he could see his wife and daughter’s backs among the crowd.

“Wait! Don’t go! Don’t leave me by myself.”

It was just like a repeat of what happened before. As the realization first flashed across his mind, that old woman appeared and jabbed her finger into his chest. Multiple people grabbed at his legs. Heartman was being dragged down from the Beach.

When he awoke, the lab was empty. His image of the world was stable and clear, maintained in a single phase. Heartman turned toward the monitor to check his Beach logs. Now he understood. The entire Chiral Network had been connected. Sam had done it.

He had connected all the knots from east to west.

It was possible that this phenomenon that Heartman interpreted as phase misalignment was occurring on every Beach. He could perceive the potential phases from before choices were made and events were determined. It was like all cause and effect was being disassembled. Without the reintegration of this world using some kind of meta-level law, this world could become engulfed in a wave of potential worlds. It meant that while this world would exist, it would also disappear.

AMELIE’S BEACH

The sound of a gunshot echoed in the distance.

Perhaps Fragile had finally achieved her goal. Maybe she had finally got her revenge on Higgs. With any luck, maybe she had even managed to lay her past mistakes to rest alongside him.

“Come on, let’s go. We still have work to do,” Amelie said without the slightest hint of cheer in her voice. Sam should have had so many questions, but he couldn’t put anything into words. He was fine with that, though. It was enough that he was able to see Amelie again—in the flesh, not as a hologram or in his dreams—and nothing else mattered. That said, seeing her again after all this time, all these decades, stirred up its own strong emotions within him. Amelie had to know what Sam was feeling, yet she silently began to walk away. All Sam could think of was to keep chasing after her.

“Do you still believe in me?” Amelie asked.

Wasn’t it too late for that now? Surely it was more a question of whether he could believe in her. Whether he had no choice but to believe in her.

“It’s true. I am extinction,” Amelie admitted.

But that wasn’t what Sam needed to know. He wanted to ask her if she was a living human being. The image that Sam couldn’t get out of his head was her with an umbilical cord coming out of her body like those dinosaurs and ammonites in Heartman’s lab, connecting her to the world of the dead.

“Did Bridget know?” Sam blurted out.

Had she known about all this when she had begun involving people in her plan to rebuild America?

“I can end it all, just like that. But what I want—what I have always wanted—was to be a part of it. For us all to be one,” she replied.

Sam didn’t understand. America had been destroyed by the Death Stranding. And Bridget had dedicated her life to rebuilding it. But if Amelie was an Extinction Entity, then by giving birth to her, Bridget was responsible for why the world had collapsed in the first place.

It was like Ouroboros, the snake that ate its own tail.

“Maybe you don’t believe me, but once we get back east, I’ll tell you everything. If we don’t let everyone in the Knot Cities and all of the preppers know that America is restored, then Bridget’s plan will never come to fruition. At least let me see to that. I know you have questions, but let’s save them for later.”

Sam nodded silently.

“Let’s go home.” Amelie smiled for the first time and began to walk along the shoreline again. It seemed to stretch on forever. It looked like it stretched out even farther than the horizon. Sam wondered if this was the same Beach that he used to play on with Amelie. Or was this the Beach they had completed by connecting all the knots?

Amelie didn’t look back toward Sam once, and simply continued to walk along the shoreline. All Sam could do was follow silently.

I don’t want to go home.

Why had he cried so much when he was a kid?

Had he really wanted to stay on that Beach, where there was no one else but just the two of them? Like a baby crying and screaming in fear of being born?

Amelie suddenly stopped in her tracks.

A figure was standing next to the shoreline up ahead. They were too far away for Sam to make out any details, but he could tell that it was a well-built man. Amelie looked back toward Sam. She had a faint smile on her face but seemed nervous for some reason.

“Wait here. Okay?” she asked as she left, in the same tone she used to use when he was a kid.

A wave lapped at the shore. But it didn’t pull back out. It remained in place. It had already engulfed Sam’s foot and he soon found that he couldn’t move. It was the same move that Higgs had pulled on him in the sea of tar.

Sam could see a delicate red silhouette next to the man.