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

Sam saw a faint light in the distance above. But even as he made frantic attempts to reach it, he couldn’t escape the ocean. No matter how much he struggled, he didn’t get an inch closer to the surface. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Sam could feel himself becoming light-headed. When at last he knew that the ocean was about to kill him, he realized he was inside a nightmare.

When Sam woke up, he was in a subterranean private room.

It was an artificial room built to protect and conceal a human race who had been betrayed by the sea and rejected by the earth’s surface.

The cuff link that was linking him to the bedframe automatically released, and Sam sat up. He wiped away his tears and checked on the BB pod that was set inside the incubator. The display on the monitor told him the BB was once again functional.

“Lou,” Sam called, disconnecting the pod’s connection to the incubator. He cradled the lukewarm pod and called out Lou’s name again. Lou was curled up, eyes closed and mouth tightly shut.

There was no reaction to Sam’s voice. It was like the little one couldn’t even hear him.

“Lou,” Sam repeated.

Lou’s eyes eventually opened at the sound of Sam’s voice. Lou, or rather the Bridge Baby now, looked up at Sam blankly with eyes that still couldn’t quite see yet. Maybe it’s not fully awake from its long sleep yet? Then Sam remembered. No, that wasn’t it. Sam had prepared himself for this. He knew he had to face the facts. At the very least, he had been able to prolong this little one’s life. That was one of the reasons he had taken this mission in the first place. To stop this child dying in vain. And that he had accomplished.

“How’s little Lou doing?” Deadman’s voice came from behind Sam. It seemed they had both returned unscathed from the battlefield. Sam knew he should be happy about that, but he wasn’t quite feeling it right now.

“No response.” Sam knew he was clinging on to lost hope, but he still passed the pod to Deadman to have it examined.

But the pod slipped right through him. The BB seemed to react to that. It looked at Deadman’s hologram and laughed. Or maybe that too was all in Sam’s head, because by the time Sam had glanced at the pod, the BB’s eyes were already closed.

“You saved us. Whatever you did back there returned us to our own world. Lockne and the others found us out cold near Mountain Knot City. It seems like only a minute had passed in this world. You and the BB were brought back here. You’ve been dead to the world for near enough twenty-four hours. You slept for a whole day, you know. Slept like the dead. I’m already back in Capital Knot. Fragile’s Beach has been coming in handy, although I have to say that I don’t like using it anymore. I keep worrying that I’m going to end up back there.”

A small metal plate set on the table caught Sam’s eye. Deadman noticed and changed the subject.

“Oh, that. You were holding it. It’s an old dog tag. US issue. Wasn’t easy prying it out of your hand.”

That was the metal Sam had spotted around that man’s neck. He couldn’t be sure, but he must have brought it back from the battlefield. He picked it up and turned it over. A name was engraved on it, along with a few letters and symbols.

“Clifford Unger, as you can see. I looked him up in our database. Found a match,” Deadman stated. He fiddled with his cuff link and projected the 3D image of a man dressed in a combat uniform.

There was no mistaking it. It was him.

“He was US Army Special Forces. Fought in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan.”

Sam hadn’t heard of any of those places, but he assumed they had all once been battlefields, too.

The hologram of the man looked tougher than the one Sam had met on the battlefield, and whose head contained only the most basic of thoughts. He was brimming with youthful brute strength. He seemed sure of himself. There was no sign of the sad expression he had shown on the battlefield.

But what did Lou have to do with any of this?

“Well, that’s all I’ve managed to dig up so far,” Deadman conceded.

Sam nodded back at Deadman and placed the dog tag in his pocket. It was an important clue linked to Clifford Unger, and the key to unraveling his connection with the BB.

Clifford’s hologram disappeared and silence descended upon the room. In the middle of it was the BB. Both Sam and Deadman stared at the pod, searching for something to say.

“Sam, I owe you an apology.” The first to speak was Deadman. “Lou was the name you were going to give your own baby. If he’d have made it. I should have pieced it together sooner.”

Sam sighed. It wasn’t like it was a big secret or anything, but Sam never made a point of talking about it to anyone else. It was only natural for Deadman to find out about it if he was already looking into Bridge Babies and the origins of Bridges, as well as investigating Die-Hardman.

“I found some records from ten years ago. Something about the sudden death of a young woman in a small town on the outskirts of Central Knot. An ex-therapist by the name of Lucy. Nobody knew until it was too late. It caused a voidout. Her husband was a member of Bridges. He even had DOOMS. He tried, but he couldn’t get to her in time. The whole town was wiped off the map… leaving nothing but a big crater. And him. Because he was a repatriate.” Deadman looked at Sam as if he was gauging his reaction. “People wanted answers. Did the man hide his wife’s body on purpose? The only survivor was the only suspect. He was easy to blame, and people did. And pretty soon they were blaming Bridges, too. The man felt responsible. So he left. Lucy had been pregnant, poor woman.”

Sam watched Deadman take a deep breath at the end of his sentence and responded with a sigh of his own.

“They were going to name their kid Lou,” Deadman continued.

Sam bit his lip and said nothing.

“I didn’t just fish that out of the database, though. Bridget told me. Once her condition deteriorated and she could sense the end was drawing near, she told me about all the things that were off the record.”

In other words, stories that had been embellished based on Bridget’s and Deadman’s subjective whims. They weren’t reality, and they weren’t anything that Sam was interested in hearing.

“It wasn’t you who Lucy met last before she committed suicide. It was someone else. I truly believe that. Bridget said the same thing. But on record, you’re officially the last person she met. I don’t know if Bridget was covering for you, or if you didn’t tell her the whole truth about what happened. All I know is that she was sorry to see you go. She used to talk about how you didn’t have to cut ties and walk away.”

CENTRAL KNOT CITY OUTSKIRTS

Lucy had just concluded her first therapy session with Sam Strand. It was not held at the patient’s request. Sam’s adoptive mother, President Strand, had approached her in the hope she might help her son overcome his aphenphosmphobia.

Sam was an intriguing case. His reluctance notwithstanding, he recognized that his condition had and would continue to cause him much distress. Lucy suspected it was rooted in a childhood trauma, but unfortunately, she had only just scratched the surface, and couldn’t even begin to speculate what it might be.

Like many of the Bridges core team members, Sam was a DOOMS sufferer. Unlike them, however, he was also a repatriate. Whether or not this was related to his aphenphosmphobia, Lucy couldn’t say, but he would hardly be the first to manifest phobias as a result of his abilities.