Death Stranding: The Official Novelization, Volume One

EPISODE V – UNGER

Sam could hear the BB crying.

“BB,” Sam murmured as he opened his eyes. “Where are you, BB?” The bright white light forced Sam’s eyes closed again. It’s crying. The baby is crying. My baby.

The tears wouldn’t stop. A soft creature lay in his arms. It was crying and it wouldn’t stop. Sam could hear the harsh voices of men in the distance. The noise was intolerable, like nails on a chalkboard. A group of heavy footsteps was approaching. Don’t come, the kid is scared. The BB was never going to stop crying at this rate.

There was a wild knocking on the door. Over and over again. They kicked it down. Arguing. Gunshots. Even though it was spilling out of his own body, the blood that leaked out was warmer than his own body heat. He was hit. He clung to his sides and forced himself onto his feet. The BB was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t hear it crying anymore. He was being dragged away somewhere. He no longer had the willpower or strength to walk. The blood pouring out of his chest was trickling down his leg and leaving a smear along the floor. If he could follow the bloodstains, he might be able to return someday. He needed to remember. Even though he had his eyes closed, all he could see was the blood.

The blood flowed and rose. It passed his waist and swallowed up his shoulders until he felt like he was drowning in it.

He was salvaged from the sea of blood by a yank of tremendous strength.

Then he was dragged and pulled forward again by a rope that wound around him. A faint amount of energy returned back to him.

The sea was dark. A black liquid wound its way around him and clung to his body. He let it drip as he was dragged and forced forward. Maybe he was being dragged to the gallows. It reminded him of a man. A savior who had been crucified on the hill of Golgotha. He had no idea why he knew that.

Four skeletons clutched the rope. Their tattered clothing belonged to the US Army. Even though he knew nothing about himself, he knew that. The water became shallower as the shore approached. A dead humpback whale was floating on its back. Whale after whale after whale… He heard the clacking of machine guns. A bomb exploded with a deafening bang. The whale’s stomach opened up like a blooming flower and a figure spilled out along with its guts. The figure of a baby covered in black blood.

The skeletal soldiers came to a halt, causing him to trip in the shallows. The metal tags around his neck bumped into each other with a gentle chink. They were his. He tried to read the name, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t understand the letters. It made him feel sad. The waves carried the figure to him. He could hear the baby crying again. It was the BB. It was his kid. Why isn’t it alive? His sadness turned to anger. His whole body was burning. His skin was on fire, but instead of carbonizing, it became wrapped in army clothing and equipment. The baby kept blinking over and over.

His body was automatically guided by the baby. He moved with an expertise that had been accumulated over years of experience. An enemy appeared. An enemy who was going to take the kid away. He waved his fingers at the skeletal soldiers to give them their instructions. Spread out. The rope that he thought was restraining him was actually an umbilical cord. He hadn’t been restrained. He had been bound. The umbilical cord wound up back inside his body. In his hand was a rifle, on his head were night-vision goggles.

He was a soldier. He was awake.

Something fell behind him. The gunpowder inside the cast-iron tin exploded and the energy released shook the ground he stood on.

The vibrations traveled all the way through to the top of Sam’s head, waking him up. There were explosions and gunshots all around him. He was assailed by masses of screams that no longer sounded human. The smell of the gunpowder made him feel sick, and his head was pounding. In the murky darkness he couldn’t see what was going on.

He didn’t know where he was. The only things he remembered were leaving the distribution center and getting sucked straight up into that supercell, where he had lost consciousness.

But he knew this was no time to be careless. He wiped the mud away from his cheeks and forced himself up. The BB was crying out of worry. Its body was shaking and it looked like it was drowning in the amniotic fluid.

“Come on!” Sam urged the BB. He was urging himself, too.

An explosion painted the murky sky red, and the next second a thunderous roar shook his body to the core. Where am I? He must have been caught in the firing line somewhere. Sam began to run in an attempt to escape.

Then the Odradek activated. There was a BT somewhere close by. Was this the world of the dead? He tried to shake the question out of his mind. As he kept an eye on the reaction of the Odradek and tried to weave through explosions and fire, he was swept off his feet. His leg had gotten caught on something and he had fallen face-down in the mud. He spat the mud out of his mouth and turned back to find someone grabbing onto his leg. But there was nothing past the arm. A disembodied limb was clinging onto Sam. When he tried to kick it away, the arm turned into fragments, then dust, then nothing.

The sound of bullets and shrapnel became louder. The Odradek sensor was now fully open and whizzing around and around. The BB was sobbing like an animal. It looked like they were trapped, unless the sensor was broken somehow. Sam searched for cover so they didn’t get taken out by any stray bullets. He could see a trench a little way ahead, so he made a run for it.

As he jumped in, he was greeted by blood- and mud- covered corpses.

Unable to stand the stench, Sam covered his mouth and nose with his hand. He followed the trench, avoiding the corpses along the way, until something fell across his back. He reflexively shook himself free and threw it onto the ground. It was a soldier. His helmet and weapon fell to the floor. But he was still alive. He immediately started ranting and raving to Sam about something in a language that Sam didn’t know as he writhed in pain, trying to gather his entrails back into the exploded cavity that was his abdomen.

The soldier stopped moving and looked up. He made eye contact with Sam. Tears of blood trickled from his wide eyes. The soldier tried to talk some more, but Sam couldn’t understand. But even if he could speak the same language, Sam doubted he would know what the soldier was talking about. The body disappeared into a mist.

Sam picked up the gun and continued to move forward. Is there no way out of here? Where the hell am I? He moved down the trench carefully, unable to see outside. Then a pungent smell hit him. It wasn’t the smell of blood. It was the smell of the Beach. Countless tears began to stream down his face. The people here were dead. This was a battlefield where the dead were fighting the dead.

—BB.

He could hear someone’s voice inside his head. Then he felt like the nape of his neck was on fire. The Odradek formed a cross. A threat was imminent. But it couldn’t tell him where, it just kept spinning around and around.

A bomb was dropped right in front of him. Sam’s entire body shook and fragments of earth and rock poured down like rain. They rained relentlessly onto his face, his shoulders, his back… Blood oozed from a wound on his forehead into his eye. He felt dull pain all over his body. Once the fumes that obstructed his vision had thinned, a grotesque soldier appeared in front of him. He wasn’t alone. Sam was obstructed by the barrels of several guns. But all the eyes scowling at Sam were hollow cavities. There was no skin or muscle on the hands that pointed the guns. It was the group of four skeletal soldiers from before. Each bony finger pulled the trigger at the same time.

Sam dodged and evaded the firing line. He got back up and fought back. He roared and shot at the skeletons again and again. His bullets shattered their bones, snapped off their arms, and blew away their helmets, turning their skulls into dust. Fragments of bone caught fire and danced in the air like sparks before being carried away by the wind.

—Where are you, BB?!

He could hear a voice from far away. It sounded like a voice he had heard in a hallucination before. He couldn’t be sure, though. The owner of the voice was summoning them. He felt that if he couldn’t find the man who owned it, then he would never make it out of here. The BB gave a loud cry, as if in response to the man. Sam nodded at the BB and spat out the blood that had pooled in his mouth. He looked up and began to walk.

Sam heard an unfamiliar sound. In the depths of his ears he could hear a humming like an insect beating its wings. Then came a loud noise that tore through his eardrum. Something had exploded, but Sam didn’t think anything more of it.

The ground began to shake. It was like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. Sam couldn’t stand up anymore. When he looked up, a huge wave was before him. But it was no wave. The land itself had swelled upward. Countless stones and rocks rained down. The surging wave of land was headed right for him. The posts holding the trench together disassembled, washed away by the advancing earth. It was already too late to escape. Sam turned his back to the wave, grabbed the pod, and curled his body around it. He took a deep breath.

The wave broke over Sam’s head.

Once he was consumed by all this sediment, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to move anymore and would end up suffocating. But that was not what the wave had in store for Sam.

—BB.

The wave simply washed him along and carried him toward the voice’s master.

It was that man. The man Sam always saw when he connected to his BB. The only difference was that this time he was wearing a helmet and goggles. The man was looking down at Sam, who was buried waist-deep in earth, and was pointing his gun at him. The gun was almost poking into his forehead.

“Give me back my BB,” the man muttered in a low growl. Sam shook his head just as the BB began to cry. The man’s face contorted. Sam couldn’t read his expression very well with this face hidden behind those goggles, but it looked dismayed. Like he was feeling rejected by the BB’s cry.

The man wavered, and in that instant Sam took advantage of the situation to grab the barrel of the gun and get up. But the surprised man soon steadied himself and countered by trying to tackle Sam with all his might. His gun went flying in the ruckus.

The man gave an angry howl and laid his fist right into Sam’s stomach, knocking the air out of his lungs. Sam began to black out, and as he faded, the man grabbed onto Sam’s arm and aimed a punch straight at Sam’s jaw.

Sam managed to block his arm just in time and landed a knee in the man’s abdomen, so hard that the man’s grip loosened. The two men parted and glared at one another.

“Give me back my BB.”

Black tears were pouring out of the man’s eyes, leaving streaks down his face.

Sam tried to ask why, but he couldn’t. Before he had the chance, the man started to shake his head. Sam’s gut was already telling him that he would never be able to converse with this man. Something had inhibited his thinking. Sam may have been overconfident in the fact, but if the man was refusing to be understood, what else could it have been? That idea itself made Sam feel unbearably sad.

“Give me back my BB.”

The man stretched out his arms as he said it. Even if Sam tried to take them, the man would probably be very angry. Sam had a feeling that he would just scream that he didn’t want Sam’s hands, he wanted the BB. Sam couldn’t convey his thoughts to the man. And he knew that he couldn’t understand what the man was thinking. They were never going to understand one another. As they were, things would only become tenser and tenser.

“Give me my BB.”

He tried to shake Sam’s hands away and make a grab for the pod. The man was just repeating, “Give me my BB,” like a broken record. Like that was the only line he had been taught to say. But the man’s expressions showed more complex emotions. There was no way Sam could read them, though.

“Give me back my BB.”

The man raised his voice again, reaching for the pod.

Sam wanted to protect the pod, so he pushed back against the man’s chest. Though the force of Sam’s push never made contact, there was an explosion. But the explosion didn’t give off light or sound. It was an explosion of nothingness. All color was lost from the world, and no outlines remained. All Sam could sense was the BB’s crying.

Then Sam was sent flying out of that world and back into the one he had come from.

He was back right next to the South Knot City distribution center.