Death Stranding: The Official Novelization, Volume Two

EPISODE XIII – BRIDGES

Sam had left Port Knot City and continued to head east. His destination was Capital Knot City. He was still making his way back to HQ—back to Deadman, Heartman, Lockne, and a comatose Fragile.

His movements were heavy, like each part of him had been placed in restraints. Even though he wasn’t carrying any cargo, his back hurt and his hips groaned. Every single calorie he had ingested had been converted into energy for walking, and there was nothing else left. He had visibly lost weight and it felt like his body was shrinking in on itself.

He lost count of the number of times he had nightmares about his body wearing away to nothing as he continued to walk.

The one redeeming feature of his lonely march back was that the number of safehouses he could take a rest at along the way had increased. As communications had become operational in this area, the amount and frequency of the cargo delivered by Bridges had grown. The safehouses had been constructed along this route to offer support for these deliveries. Chiral printers were also functioning reliably, so the east was reaping the benefits of being brought back online first. The only problem now was that communications were malfunctioning and no new bases could be established. It was like they had gone back to how things were before they had activated the network at all.

Unable to stomach the irony, Sam continued to drag his aching body toward its destination. When he finally found a safehouse for the first time in days, it was almost destroyed. While there were still stockpiles of food and medicine in the private basement room, the electricity supply was unstable and the communications terminal would not activate. He couldn’t even use the incubator with communications in such a bad state. Sam was worried that he hadn’t allowed Lou to rest enough on their way here. Lou was showing obvious changes. While Lou had been connected to Sam, the BB no longer dozed off as much anymore. Lou had become more curious about the outside world and was conveying much clearer emotions to Sam. It meant Lou was being pulled closer and closer to the world of the living. Lou should have been presenting with symptoms of autotoxemia by now, after spending so long away from the stillmother’s womb, but there were no signs of it as yet. It was different from the last time Deadman had treated Lou. Sam worried about what this meant for Lou’s future.

Sam held the disconnected pod to his chest and lay down. As he watched a dozing Lou, he fell into a deep sleep himself.

—This child’s special.

Was this why he had to go through this? There were faces. Faces and faces. Countless faces were staring at him. They edged closer until they filled his entire view, before disappearing. Faces he had seen before, faces he might see in the future, faces he would never encounter and faces that died long ago; they all appeared before him and vanished. Pinned down like an insect under a microscope, he was unable to move. All he could do was let them examine him.

Which are you? A face he didn’t know swam into view. Am I connecting to you? Or are you connecting to me? Where are you? Are you in the past? Are you still alive? Are you in the land of the living? Or the land of the dead?

Somewhere in the distance, a whale was singing. The sound of a mating call.

—But is it? Couldn’t it be crying out in sadness?

One of the many staring faces, a woman, split from ear to ear, becoming one giant mouth. Small canine teeth crowded the mouth right to the back of its throat. It made a disturbing tearing sound as it gnawed through the invisible wall that protected him. The stench of rotting organs surrounded him. He watched a star explode, followed by a vision of a world full of the microscopic life that was first born to these lands. He slid down its throat, mingled with its gastric juices, before being pushed through its contracting and relaxing intestines. Finally, he was expelled from its anus.

A wave washed over the naked body, the ha, that was soiled with blood and excrement. As he was hit by the wave, he felt the world spin around him and he no longer knew where he was. He tried to stand, but fell back. He had neither hands nor feet. He was just a lump of flesh with eyes, a mouth, ears, and a nose carved out of it. The breaking waves were toying with him as they knocked him around the shoreline. An infinite number of sea creatures were stranded all around him.

A baby cried, but without his soul, Sam couldn’t stand. All he could do was shuffle across the sand with his mouth as he looked for the child.

A gigantic wave carried Sam away, far from the shoreline. A sun more enormous than Sam had ever seen before appeared and broke the sky into two, mercilessly beating down on his back. All the water disappeared in an instant and Sam’s skin began to wrinkle and dry out. Now he could only hear the waves. They no longer reached him. He could smell the scent of sea salt, but he couldn’t get back to it. He dug his chin into the sand, and as pain engulfed his entire body, he struggled his way toward the baby’s cries. His dried and hardened skin began to form spikes. Sam used them to try desperately to propel himself forward in the sand. His skin cracked and blood oozed out. Then the bloodied protuberances began to transform into long, thick limbs. Sam used his four limbs to keep on advancing. As he cursed his imperfect ha, he kept on moving forward. Soon, the sun began to sink toward the horizon and a frighteningly cold night set in. Both he and the sea froze over and all sound disappeared.

The sky was clear and countless stars glowed without a twinkle. This place was directly linked to the rest of the cosmos. It felt like if he looked up, he’d fall, so Sam closed his eyes tight. When he tried to draw his own body in tight to endure the cold, his arms and legs grew. Sam could finally stand. Guided by the baby’s cries, he began to walk.

As he walked, his body grew. His thighs became more muscular, his hips became higher, and his spine stretched. Now he could look out far in front of him. Now he could move his arms at will and could grab objects with the palms of his hands.

Now he would be able to embrace the child.

As he grew more confident, the baby’s cries seemed to grow louder.

When he called out Lou’s name, he found a newborn Lou crying at his feet. Sam kneeled and picked Lou up with both hands.

He held Lou to his chest. They were finally together. Lou’s small hands grabbed the dreamcatcher around Sam’s neck.

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.”

Sam seized the cryptobiote as it floated by. When Fragile had first recommended one in that cave, he had been skeptical and turned it down, but he had found himself munching on one a few times now.

“But, having done so, if she does not wish to let you go, if she wishes to keep you, she can,” Heartman finished.

“Fragile and Die-Hardman broke free from her Beach, didn’t they?” Sam refuted, releasing the cryptobiote.

“I don’t think it was any different from what happened to you. I didn’t get out because I wanted to.” It was Fragile’s voice. She was sitting up in bed, chewing on a cryptobiote. “I was forced out. ‘Repatriated,’ if you will. By her.”

Deadman looked like he couldn’t believe his eyes and immediately checked her vital monitors. Heartman was looking at her fondly with a look of paternal concern.

“Welcome back, Sam. Guess you need me after all?” Fragile grimaced as she tried to get out of bed. Lockne immediately lent Fragile her shoulder.

“Thank you,” Fragile whispered as she tried to grab another cryptobiote that was floating around the room. Sam plucked it out of the air and laughed.

“You want it?” he asked.

“There’s no time to waste, right?” Fragile said, chewing on the cryptobiote and looking Sam straight in the eye. “Look, Sam. She wants you. Wants you to go to her. That’s her final wish. Don’t you think?” Fragile commented.

The words “final wish” rang in Sam’s ears. How could Fragile be so sure?

“So that’s it, huh. Amelie’s the EE, and this is her endgame.” That was the only way Sam could bring himself to ask. Fragile hung her head, but Sam couldn’t tell if that was an answer or not. “Just so we’re clear: if I want to stop the Last Stranding and come back in one piece… I need to go to her Beach and talk her out of it. That about right?”

“Correct. As clichéd as it sounds, you’re our only hope,” Heartman spoke up. “Though, quite frankly, I doubt even you can change her mind.”

The room fell silent. Deadman was the one to break it.

“If you can’t make her see reason… you’ll have to kill her. And if you kill her…”

“You’ll save the world, but you’ll be stranded outside of it. Forever,” Lockne finished Deadman’s sentence, looking down at her feet and biting her lip.

Another bout of silence. This time nobody seemed to want to break it.

Sam gripped his dreamcatcher and raised his hand.

“Might as well make it official, then. You ready to deliver the package?” he asked Fragile. She gave a sad smile and nodded.

“I’ll talk to her. Maybe she’ll listen. But with the shape the world’s in, it’ll only be delaying the inevitable. Still, if it buys us time to try and build something better. A new lease on life, at least for a little bit. Well, I can think of one woman who made the most of a chance like that. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the world. But we gotta keep it going as long as we can, right? Patch the holes, change the parts, all that.”

Sam couldn’t stop talking. And nobody else wanted to stop him, either. Deadman, Heartman, Lockne, and Fragile remained silent, hanging onto every word.

“Back when we met at the cave, the only thing I cared about was making it to the next sunrise. Sure as hell didn’t care about America or ‘the future.’ I was living a lie, hung up on past regrets. I was broken. But somewhere along the way, I started changing. Started meeting people who made me think that maybe it wasn’t all bad. People who put their faith in tomorrow and in me. That kept the lights on and waited for hope to arrive. So I gotta deliver, for their sake.”

“Even if it means you never come back?” Deadman asked as if he wouldn’t be able to bear it. All the others in the room had the same fear.

“Fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t, right?” Sam shrugged.

There was no choice. As long as the hypothesis they shared stood true, there was no other option.

Sam disconnected his pod and passed Lou to Deadman. He couldn’t take the kid to the Beach.

Fragile stood in front of Sam. Next to him, Deadman held Lou’s pod in his arms, with a strange look on his face. Heartman and Lockne stood on either side of Sam. He looked at each of their faces in turn and then adjusted his grip on his dreamcatcher. Fragile gently placed her hand on it.

Sam followed her lead and closed his eyes.

“Okay, concentrate,” she told him. Fragile wrapped her arm around Sam. He could feel her body heat. There was no aphenphosmphobic reaction. Sam accepted her. “Help me look for Amelie. Reach for her, Sam. Feel her.”

Fragile tightened her grip and put her forehead to Sam’s. Sam sighed. The pulse of another living being quietly came through. Amelie’s warmth, her smell, her voice; Sam focused on all his memories of her. Even if he only ever had contact with her on the Beach, it didn’t matter. Because those were the memories that were special to him.

“I know you love her. You love her!”

Normally those words would have flustered Sam, but now he could accept them.

—Then you disappeared never to be seen again.