Death Stranding--Death Stranding Page 4

  The Odradek showed that the man was here. It had formed into a stiff cross shape and stood unmoving. Lou wasn’t crying, but still seemed to be trembling with fear.

  Something fell on the altar. It bounced off the whale’s exposed belly and rolled to Sam’s feet.

  It was a doll. But its eyelids were opening and closing furiously as if it was having a fit.

  —BB.

  Sam turned in the direction of the voice to find the man standing there.

  “Give me back my BB,” he said.

  As soon as the man opened his mouth, the sound of a gunshot rang out. The bullet grazed Sam’s shoulder before lodging itself in the altar directly behind him. The bullet had still caught him with enough force to throw his balance, and he crashed backward with it. Blood trickled out from the tears in his uniform.

  Sam clutched the pod containing Lou with both arms, as if to hide it. The blood from his shoulder wound trickled down his arm, dirtying its exterior. The man looked down at the unsightly form of Sam, clumsily sat on his ass against the altar. The man’s expression seemed to flicker for a moment. Sam thought he could see a flash of sadness, but it soon disappeared.

  “Give me back my BB,” repeated the man, almost as if muttering deliriously. He slowly lifted his arm and pointed the gun toward Sam. But for some reason, Sam didn’t feel the same bloodlust that he had felt right after the man first appeared.

  “Let it go…”

  The man’s tone was vague. It was like he was remembering something. Sam glared at the barrel of the gun and shook his head. He couldn’t leave the BB. He had no reason to hand it over. Lou didn’t belong to this man.

  The man was slowly tightening his finger’s grip on the trigger. Sam thrust out a single hand and tried to cover the barrel. Even if he had to lose this hand, he would never leave Lou behind.

  The man’s face once again contorted into a sad expression. His focus was no longer on the pod, but on Sam’s hand. The man was trying to remember something. That much Sam was sure of.

  Who the hell was this man? He didn’t belong to this battlefield. He wasn’t like the other soldiers, who simply continued to slaughter one another as apparitions of this warzone.

  The man had something in his head, but it seemed like he couldn’t express it.

  There was a crash of thunder, and the stately wooden doors to the chapel blew open before shattering into pieces and bursting into flames. When he saw it, the man screamed something. It was an animalistic roar full of anger and fear. He was howling at the entrance.

  Perhaps he was enraged that the pristine spire had been broken, or scared this holy ground was about to be defiled. The only thing Sam could be sure of was that the man was confused. Sam mustered the last of his strength, got back up, and sprang forward. But the man was quicker as he turned and blocked him.

  Arm crashed into arm and shoulder rubbed against shoulder. At that moment, a shard of metal jutted out from near the man’s collarbone.

  It resembled Sam’s Q-pid and was attached to a chain around the man’s neck. The force of the collision toppled the man over backward.

  The shard around the man’s neck burned red. Sam’s own Q-pid emanated heat, almost like it was responding.

  Somehow, the fallen man seemed to have lost the will to fight, but as Sam looked into his eyes, they weren’t those of a man who had given up completely and was ready to surrender. If Sam finished him off now, then he would be able to return to his own world. But his confidence was shaken. This man wasn’t dead like a BT.

  Defeating him wouldn’t send him back anywhere. This man was after a different kind of funeral.

  “BB…”

  He wanted Lou. But there was no way Sam would hand Lou over. If this child was neither born nor dead, then there was no reason to hand Lou over. Sam only wished he could have done something so that Lou could have been properly born into the world of the living.

  The man reached out. He was riddled with injuries, yet still staggered to his feet and began to step toward Sam. Sam readied his gun with his left hand and defended the pod with his right. But that was all he could do. He couldn’t move forward, nor could he move back.

  The man frowned and squinted at Sam as if blinded by light.

  “BB. BB… This is all my fault.” The man tried to touch the pod. “I should… I should never have put you in that prison, BB…”

  The man was crying. Black tears rolled down his face. The man mustered strength into his arms and pulled the pod toward him. He was so surprisingly strong that Sam toppled forward. The two became entangled and writhed on the church floor. Sam grabbed the man’s neck as he tried to tear himself away, but something coiled around his hand.

  Time seemed to flow extremely slowly. The man’s bangs swayed and Sam could see everything in minute detail, from his fine movements and ensuing flying specks of mud to the chain from which the metal shard hung as it broke and flew away from the man’s neck. Sam pushed the man away and attempted to stand. The man was face up and made another grab for the BB.

  Sam’s eyes met those of the man. It was like he was being sucked into them. He felt that he would drown in those eyes, which were deeper than any sea. He felt like he was being dragged down eternally, slowly crushed to death by the water pressure of this ocean, never to return to the surface again. Sam closed his eyes as fear took hold.

  MOUNTAIN KNOT CITY

  He was drowning.

  He had been swallowed up by the sea, the source of all life, and now Sam was drowning.

  This universe came from a bang. This planet from another bang. When life eventually emerged, what nurtured it was the sea that had cooled down this molten rock. Eventually, life crawled out of the sea and onto the land, where it became a slave to gravity on the frontier known as the earth’s surface and formed new chains of existence.

  Then the scorned mother ocean became a vengeful goddess and drowned all the life on that earth. The Beach was her pathway to exact her revenge.

  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.

  As an infant, Sam lost both parents and was adopted by President Strand. Owing to her stress and time-consuming responsibilities, Lucy could only presume that she was unable to afford him sufficient attention, which is to say that a distant relationship with his adoptive mother may have been a contributing factor. Sam was still very reluctant to talk about himself, and as an intensely private person it would take time to build trust and convince him to open himself up to her.

  * * *

  Progress has been slow, but Sam finally started to open up about himself. However, his recollection of early childhood was confused and contradictory. He had difficulty distinguishing between genuine memories and reoccurring dreams. Sam even claimed to have met his stepsister Amelie on the Beach several times while quite young. An impossible claim, to say the least.

  Lucy was only a little older than Sam, but she was born before the Death Stranding—a fact that tended to affect the way people thought about the Beach. In her professional opinion, the Beach was a figment of their collective imagination. A shared delusion. But people born later were more likely to take its existence as a given. She wondered if they found comfort in the belief because it helped to explain phenomena like BTs and repatriates like Sam?

  Similarly, her theory was that Sam’s manufactured childhood memories of the Beach were his way of coping with the fact that neither Amelie nor Bridget spent much time with him. She believed this to also be the reason he still clung to the dreamcatcher Amelie gave him even now, as an adult. You could call it his security blanket. It could also be the key to overcoming his aphenphosmphobia. If Sam were to emotionally distance himself from Amelie, it could reduce his resistance to physical intimacy. She decided to propose this approach to him in their next session.

  * * *

  It came as no surprise when Sam was unreceptive to Lucy’s suggestion and rejected her assessment of his relationship with Amelie. He asserted that he was not dependent on her or Bridget, and even went so far as to question Lucy’s credentials as a psychotherapist. His pronounced resistance to the idea only served as further evidence to Lucy of his dependency. Nevertheless, there was little she could do if Sam was unwilling to explore the possibility, other than continue to share her observations and hope that he eventually changed his mind. For the time being she decided to focus instead on Sam’s feelings toward Bridges and his place within the organization. Given that it was founded to support and protect his adoptive mother, and that the other core members had DOOMS like he did, she thought there was something to be gained from the discussion. His growing responsibilities within Bridges due to
their expanding mandate and his abilities as a repatriate surely put him under greater pressure, and she wondered if his enthusiasm for their mission was sincere.

  Based on their time spent together so far, she believed he may have embraced his role because it helped him to cope with the feelings of isolation—that he pledged himself to an impossible endeavor because it was preferable to living and dying alone.

  * * *

  Lucy decided a different approach was required, and so she requested a meeting with the president. Discretion was vital, as any information which might suggest she was receiving mental health treatment could be exploited by her opponents. The meeting was listed as an interview in official records—though she was more than willing to offer her services, had they been requested.

  She opened by asking about Sam’s childhood, to which the president responded with an immediate and heartfelt apology. Her frankness shocked Lucy. Bridget expressed deep regret for her failure to engage with him, physically and emotionally, as she felt a mother should. At times it felt as though she was apologizing to her son by proxy. Her candor was as impressive to Lucy as it was appreciated.

  The president told her that her daughter Amelie had mostly taken care of Sam in her absence. She glossed over the details, but she divulged that Amelie also had DOOMS, and claimed that she would often take Sam with her to play on the Beach.

  President Strand loved her son. Lucy’s meeting with her confirmed that beyond any doubt. The question was whether or not Sam perceived his mother’s love. Both Sam and the president talked about the Beach as though it were a real, physical place, but Lucy remained convinced that it didn’t exist—that it was a shared delusion, and that Sam and Amelie’s so-called “visits” were mental constructs. Sam would not necessarily be convinced of this—especially if it had been “planted” in his mind… But such an explanation would fit with his claims that he had never been able to visit the Beach of his own volition.