Hitori Nojima - Death Stranding - The Official Novelization, Volume Two

Lou. Sam called out Lou’s name over and over. Lou. I won’t leave you anymore.

—This child’s special.

Sam’s chest suddenly became light. The wind pierced it as though a hole had opened up within him. He wasn’t holding anything anymore. There was nothing in his arms.

When he looked up, he was once again surrounded by countless faces. “Where are you?” he was asked as he began to feel his own body slip away.

Sam awoke to the sound of a steady tapping.

It was a quiet sound right next to his ear. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. He was curled around Lou’s pod, asleep. Lou was fervently tapping on the window of the pod from the inside. Lou had brought him out of his nightmare. Sam’s whole body felt stiff, but the ache gave him comfort in the knowledge that everything was real again.

Sam wiped the tears from his face, turned toward the pod, and stared at Lou. Had Lou been having the same dream? Sam felt anxious. He didn’t want this child to be sullied with such a nightmare. He thought about the voice he had heard in his sleep.

This child’s special.

“That’s right. You are,” Sam whispered to himself.

But there were no children who weren’t special. Each and every child mattered. Had a right to exist.

Sam’s eyes met Lou’s. Lou was making a strange expression, and Sam realized just how angry the situation made him feel.

Once Sam left the safehouse, it was only a matter of time before he began to hurt again. He had begun to feel so numb that it was like he was walking in another person’s body. He felt like he was putting someone else’s foot on the ground with each subsequent step and was breathing through an invisible veil. He felt ungrounded, like he was still dozing in the tail-end of a dream. He slapped his cheeks a few times to try to wake himself up.

Although Deadman had denied it, what if Sam had been dreaming this whole time? He couldn’t shake the idea from his mind. Maybe he was still inside his mother’s womb, just tormented by the laws of this nonsensical dream. Not that there was any guarantee the outside world was any more sensible.

Was he dreaming? Was this real? The world all this was taking place in was so convoluted. Numerous threads were entangled with one another and wove a complex and mysterious pattern. To escape from his dreams and to confront reality, Sam would have to head for their source.

Between the ridgelines to the north, Sam could see the faint shadow of a tower. It belonged to the incinerator where he had burned Bridget’s body. Sam wondered what would have happened if he had just left her body in its hospital bed instead. Would her ha , with its umbilical cord that connected her to the Beach, have necrotized and turned her into a BT? Would she still have felt a strong attachment to America and tried to come back? Would she have betrayed her wish to see this world connected back up and caused a great extinction in its place? Questions kept running through Sam’s head.

That incinerator was the first place where Sam connected with Lou. It was the place where he had sent Bridget off to the next world and begun his mission to save Lou. It seemed both so long ago and like something that had happened only yesterday.

When Sam finally approached Capital Knot City, all he could see was decay, like an old monument that had been slowly chipped away with the passage of the ages. Perhaps it was all in Sam’s head. Maybe it had always been like this. Large cracks ran through the outer wall that surrounded the periphery of the city and the Bridges logo on it was dirty and faded. The air was heavy with the smell of rusted iron, to the point where Sam hesitated to breathe in. It looked nothing like the capital city of an America on the brink of being rebuilt. It was a city of death.

Nobody came to welcome Sam, so he took the elevator to the basement alone. It was the same route he had used when he brought Bridget her morphine. Even when the cage reached the elevator hall, Sam couldn’t sense anyone around. Most of the lights were out. Sam proceeded through the gloomy hallways and opened the door to the president’s old room.

“Sam!” Lockne burst forth. Sam instinctively moved out of her way. Sam grimaced at himself as he recoiled from his friend who had been waiting for him all this time. He could change the way the entire world worked, but he still couldn’t change himself. Perhaps he just didn’t want to.

“You’re back! It must have been one hell of a journey, especially on your own.” Deadman approached Sam, trying to gloss over the awkward atmosphere. “But now the whole team is together again,” he continued, even though the only other person Sam saw was Heartman in cardiac arrest on the sofa. Deadman read Sam’s puzzled expression and showed him to a bed against the wall. Lying there on the hospital bed was Fragile. She was hooked up to a respirator and a drip. Her vitals were being monitored by the surrounding equipment. Despite their earlier conversation, it still seemed like she had a way to go to recover. The sight of Fragile lying there like that reminded Sam of Bridget on her deathbed. He shook his head to try and get rid of the mental image.

“That’s our fault. Too much traveling to and from the Beaches in such a short span. It’s not just from transporting us. She’s been looking for Amelie, too,” Deadman explained. “Chiral matter contaminated her cells, effectively causing jet lag on a molecular level. Because of that, her homeostatic mechanisms were shaken. Don’t worry—she’s not in any danger. But she needs some rest.”

Sam didn’t understand all of Deadman’s explanation, but he was relieved to see a bit of color in her face while she slept. When Sam heard the phrase, “jet lag on a molecular level,” he had imagined an even more serious version of what she looked like from the neck down.

“The director—sorry, Die-Hardman—is back, too. He’s being looked after in another room. Bridges personnel found him lying outside the isolation ward… Similar to when you came back from Cliff’s Beach,” Deadman added.

Then it seemed like the whole team was back together.

The AED kicked in and brought Heartman back to life. At first, he looked surprised to see Sam there, but his serious expression soon returned as he looked over to Fragile. He nodded as Deadman informed him that he had told Sam everything, and this time turned to Sam.

“This world is in a similar state to Fragile. Nothing is integrated anymore. The cells that make up her body are all running on different time axes and egos. In Fragile’s case, the solution is very simple. A single person is made up of a myriad of different components all intersecting and working together, but what connects all these components is a person’s will. It’s this will that will correct any misalignment for her. Now, in the context of this world, humans, and by extension our Beaches, play the same role as the cells in Fragile’s body, and in much the same way, we also require a higher plane, an equivalent to her will, to retune everything so that we’re all running on the same time axis again.”

Sam thought he suddenly saw Fragile move from the corner of his eye, but she was still sleeping with the exact same expression as before. He had been tricked by a floating creature near her head. It was a cryptobiote.

“Traditionally, all of our Beaches have existed independently. We have connected to each other not through the idea of the Beach, but through talk of family and tribes, concepts of this world, the universe, and this planet. These concepts and connections formed the driving force behind the survival of Homo sapiens. But now we have this new concept called the Beach, which we have connected to our reality via the Chiral Network with the added component of the existence of an ‘Extinction Entity.’ Amelie’s Beach exists on a higher plane that can control other Beaches. If each of our Beaches is a single capillary, Amelie’s Beach is the heart that pumps blood to the rest of us. Capillaries are subordinate to the greater whole. A whole governed by the heart, which gives direction. Which dictates flow. You may be the only one able to travel against the flow and reach her.”