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

—This is all my fault. I should… I should never have put you in that prison.

Even from within that pod filled with amniotic fluid, he could distinguish Cliff’s voice.

—And the second all this is over, I’m gonna take you wherever you wanna go.

“Don’t hesitate, sir. This is the only chance you’ll get.”

This wasn’t the first time Sam had seen the revolver that Cliff had just been handed. It was the gun that Amelie had given him on the Beach. The gun he had tried to blow his brains out with after he lost all hope. Cliff checked the cylinder. This time it was fully loaded. John silently left the room. He only had five minutes.

Cliff opened the cabinet and took out one of the stacked towels, wrapping it around the gun. Then he found a cushion and turned toward the bed. This bed was no ordinary bed. It was a manmade cocoon composed of light metals and reinforced plastic and electric circuitry. Or a manmade coffin. The sleeping woman within was half-dead.

“I’m sorry, Lisa.” Cliff pressed the cushion to Lisa’s face and the gun into the cushion. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him. I promise you.”

As he bent down to kiss her, he saw the black and blue bruises. The marks that had caused her brain death in the first place. Cliff didn’t know what had driven her to do such a thing. He had shut those memories away.

“I’m sorry.”

How many times have I said those words to her now? And how many times am I doomed to repeat them in the future? Cliff wondered as he squeezed the trigger. He turned his face away and heard two muffled gunshots. The instruments connected to his wife hid her death and carried on spoofing vitals as if she was still alive. He had five minutes to get everything done.

The face got closer and closer to Sam as Cliff cradled the whole pod in his arms.

“ВВ. Can you hear me?” Cliff asked. Sam’s world shook, but it didn’t feel unpleasant. “Can you hear me? It’s Daddy.”

Cliff opened the door to the room and exited into the hall without making a sound. Even though Cliff had walked these corridors plenty of times before, tonight they felt like a labyrinth. But this Orpheus wasn’t trying to take back his lover. He was trying to reclaim his son.

There should still have been a little time before the guards made their rounds. Cliff advanced straight toward the end of the hall, looking left and right as he went. As he took a left toward the entrance, alarm bells went off in his head. Several soldiers were headed his way from the right. But they hadn’t spotted him yet.

Cliff immediately went back the way he came and held his breath.

Three soldiers passed by silently. He couldn’t go after them. He had to stick to the plan. Cliff headed to the right, the direction from which the soldiers had come from. He had three minutes left.

He decided to sneak into a separate building from the adjoining hallway. But the door was locked and made of reinforced glass.

He gave up and considered his options. Should he use his original escape route? Or take a detour and head straight for the exit? Before he could decide, one of the options was taken off the table. He could hear voices at the end of the hall. They were getting closer. It sounded like a doctor and their staff.

If he acted casual, maybe they would just walk right past him. It was still one minute until the alarm alerting them of Lisa’s death went off anyway. His temples were covered with sweat. Cliff realized he was nervous. His hand that gripped his gun and his arm carrying the pod were both trembling slightly. This had never happened to him before. He had always managed to give any kind of danger the slip. He wasn’t afraid of death. But once his son was conceived, death became much more of a worry. Even if he wasn’t afraid of death himself, he still couldn’t allow himself to die.

That in itself had dulled Cliff’s judgment and forced him to resign from active duty.

It was no longer Cliff but the impending alarm that decided his next course of action.

The doctors were heading back in the direction they had come, but from the opposite side came the sound of several sets of footsteps.

Cliff put his hand to the door in another attempt to open it, but from the other side of the glass came several guards with their guns at the ready.

“Freeze!”

The laser sight attached to the soldier’s gun was dancing around Cliff’s chest area. Cliff held up his own gun in his right hand and pressed it against the pod. The sound of the gun scraping along the side of the pod traveled through the amniotic fluid, but Sam wasn’t scared.

“Drop it!”

The call for Cliff to put his gun down was echoed throughout the hallway. But Cliff made use of his trump card and kept the BB hostage. The soldiers backed off as he glared at them. Then, the commotion from the other end of the hall grew louder.

“Stand down!” a soldier shouted, but Cliff was already off running in the opposite direction. He heard a soldier fire on him.

His left shoulder grew hot. Lukewarm blood dripped down his arm. The pod was also covered in it and Sam’s view of the world was stained red. It was the same red that he saw in the sky and in the sea on Amelie’s Beach.

Sam had unconsciously yanked the cord out of the pod.

A pain blew through his shoulder like he’d also been shot. His body was covered in sweat. It was that vision again. In it, Sam had played the part of both Cliff and the BB. But Cliff was already gone and Lou had grown extremely weak. Why was he seeing that now? Something had made him see it. Maybe Lou was trying to reconnect with him. While one part of him hoped that was the case, another more logical part of him knew that he shouldn’t get any more attached. It was the same logic that knew that Lou shouldn’t be kept in the gap between life and death forever.

That pushed Sam forward.

The incinerator gave off the same sour scent of decay as always. This place was the end of the road. It was where all traces that someone’s body existed in this world disappeared. To the living, this was the world’s end.

Sam remembered when he first met Lou. How Igor had entrusted Lou to him, and how he had repatriated from the Seam. He remembered going against the command to incinerate Lou, and the first time he tried connecting to Lou. He and this kid had come a long way together.

If it wasn’t for Lou, Sam never would have made it to the other side of the continent and back. Even though Lou had exceeded the usual one year of service life, Sam had relied on Lou to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Of course, Sam was mad that the Bridge Babies were used as communications mediums and that they were sacrificed as the cornerstones of American reconstructionism, but Sam had done the same to this child.

Had Sam really thought about what was best for Lou? He’d just blindly believed that because Lou was a kid, still just a baby, the BB needed protection and guidance.

But he was the one who had been protected.

The incineration apparatus rose from the floor.

The reason why it resembled an altar to Sam was because he wanted to remember the months and years he had spent with Lou as something special. For Lou, he wanted to transform the incinerator from a place of simple erasure to a place where he could preserve those memories for all eternity. This was to be a ceremony just for them, not for the American nation, so he removed his cuffs links.