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

Igor had been about to say how that included himself and the other corpse disposal teams, but his words died in his mouth. Before them stretched a rainbow. Not a normal rainbow, curving up from the ground toward the sky. Instead, its arch was upside-down, bursting from the clouds down toward the ground and back up again. An evil bridge that carried monsters over from the other side.

Igor pointed at the inverted rainbow. Sam surveyed the sky, most likely already aware of it, and then turned his gaze back down to the body bag in the trailer.

A black, tarlike substance was leaking out of the dull, lead-colored body bag. Especially out of the abdomen area. The cries of the BB rang inside Igor’s ears. His view of the world around him distorted once more. Countless specks were flowing out of the black mass and floating up into the air. When he looked a little closer, he could see them each spiral upwards, twisting into a single, thick rope. It was the first time that Igor had ever witnessed it.

The ha was beginning to go necro and the ka that was seeping out of it was trying to drag the Beach here.

The Beach was a place between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It supposedly wasn’t a part of the physical world, but a special “place” that existed in a different dimension. Normal people like Igor couldn’t sense it, unlike those with DOOMS. When they tried to explain what they were able to see, they often described the world of the dead as an ocean and the boundary that connected that world with this one as a beach. The sea, mother of all life, became synonymous with the place the dead returned to. And when the dead crawled out of that ocean and across the Beach to become stranded in this world, it became known as the Death Stranding.

Sam held his hand out over the body and felt the abdomen where the twisting black thread rose from the navel. His palm turned an angry red instantly.

“How much farther to the incinerator!?” Sam shouted. Tears were streaming from his eyes. The body bag was almost entirely covered in the black mass now. The sky was darkening in response.

“This guy’s about to pop!”

“Shit. We’re gonna have to cut through the BTs!” Igor tapped on the rear window and signaled to the driver. The truck accelerated and changed course to the left. Igor tightened his grip on the rail and crouched down low to avoid getting thrown from the trailer. This close, he got a good look at the body. The necrosis was spreading, farther gone than he’d ever seen. Igor didn’t know how many bodies he had moved before. Most of them were safe; they had been able to estimate the time of death. All Igor and his team had to do was collect terminal patients from the isolation ward once they had reached the end stages of whatever was afflicting them. Even when they received corpses that had died suddenly in accidents, there was still plenty of time to spare before necrosis set in. This was the first time that Igor had needed to transport a corpse that was ready to blow.

Igor wondered what it was like inside the bag. The body had probably already decomposed into an unimaginable number of minute particles. The body bag was probably the only thing left to give the remains any semblance of shape. It was a casket of soft woven synthetic fibers. Once unbound, the mass would cease to look like a body at all.

The truck leapt up into the air. Igor and Sam gripped onto the handrails with all their strength. A wind powerful enough to stir up the ground beneath them blew from behind, throwing the two men around like ragdolls in the trailer. As Igor squeezed his eyes shut to brace for the storm of dust about to bear down on him, tepid drops of water began to fall on his cheek.

His skin tightened. An itch quickly became a pain, spreading across his entire face. He’d felt this before—the sting of rapid aging. Where the water touched his skin, it left a trail of wrinkles and gray hair in its wake. Sensing the timefall, the hood on Igor’s uniform automatically deployed, covering his head, Sam’s doing the same opposite him.

The timefall didn’t care, driving down harder and harder.

When they looked up, the entire sky was filled with black clouds, dark as the tarlike substance pouring out of the body bag. The light of the sun was completely blocked out and a pall of darkness covered the landscape. The same way the timefall snatched away time from whatever it touched, the chiral clouds it fell from stole all sense of night or day. No matter how many times Igor had experienced it, it was something he had never gotten used to. The world felt suddenly wrong, and there was no way to orient himself.

The headlights of the truck pierced this blanket of darkness and illuminated the torrential sheets of timefall. As Igor focused on gripping the rail, his nostrils were hit by the smell of the sea, though they were nowhere near any ocean. The salty air flooded his senses and sent tears streaming down his face as he breathed in the unmistakable stench of the world of the dead.

The motor whined and the headlights blinked off. In this world of only rain and darkness, the truck had lost all power and stalled. The driver was shouting and was struggling to get the motor going again. “Don’t worry. This is just a temporary blackout,” Igor shouted through the rear window, trying to keep his voice steady but it came out full of panic. Timefall interfered with electromagnetic waves and frequently brought down electrical systems. But they usually restarted after a while.

“Calm down.” Igor was no longer just repeating that for the driver’s sake, but his own sake too.

As if his prayers had been answered, the driver’s seat lit up as the headlights blinked back on. Igor looked at Sam with a faint sense of relief when he noticed that Sam’s focus was toward his left shoulder. The tip of the Odradek sensor mounted on his shoulder had opened up like a splayed hand. Waves of chills, nausea and dizziness washed over Igor, combining with the smell of the ocean.

The dead were inching nearer but Igor had no idea which direction they would come from. The nervous Odradek was flickering open and closed as if trying to grip onto the very sky itself. It was the only equipment they had that would coordinate with the Bridge Baby to show the position of the dead. If the BB sensed the dead, the Odradek would show where. But how could it not find them in an aura of death this thick?

“Sam, can you see anything?”

“No, nothing!” Sam shouted back, temper flaring. There was no doubt that Sam could also sense the presence of the dead all around them, his DOOMS ability just as highly tuned as the Odradek’s mechanical sensor. He peered out of the trailer through the dense cloud surrounding them. Igor rapped on the pod. C’mon, help me out. Where are the monsters?

Something like a whine came from the baby and the Odradek began to swing around wildly, like a broken windmill.

“This BB must be busted or something,” Igor said.

All of a sudden, the motor roared back to life. The tires screeched across the ground beneath them and the truck began to shoot forward once again. The driver thrust his foot down hard to escape the aura of death that was engulfing them. Igor gripped the handrail even tighter so that he didn’t get thrown off. The numbing stench that had been offending his nostrils felt like it passed through his nose and out the top of his head. The rotating Odradek came to an abrupt stop. The robotic claw folded into a cross and pointed directly in front of them. That only meant one thing.

That’s where they were. The truck was headed straight for them.