Death Stranding--Death Stranding Read online

  Deadman’s face flashed before Sam’s eyes. He could feel the anger billowing up as he imagined punching the liar square in the jaw.

  Then, Lou let out a laugh.

  As Sam peered down into the pod, Lou gazed back up. Lou seemed to be trying to tell him something. Sam looked back toward the BT. He could have kicked himself. It was a dummy.

  Sam flicked it with his finger and carried on forward, led by the unending music.

  Someone was lying face up on a padded lounge chair ahead in the darkness. The sleeping face beneath the glasses was that of Heartman, who Sam had talked to over codec a few times now.

  “Heartman?” Sam whispered.

  The man didn’t look like he was sleeping. His chest wasn’t rising or falling at all. He wasn’t breathing. Sam had a bad feeling about this. This was why there had been no sign of life.

  He supposed the piece of equipment beside the chair was there to monitor Heartman’s vitals. It was similar to one of the machines in Bridget’s room. It was most likely an EKG. The EKG reading should have depicted a wave, but it wasn’t oscillating a jot. It was flatlining. Heartman’s heart had stopped.

  “Heartman?”

  The music stopped. It felt like someone’s funeral had just come to an end. Lou was staring at Heartman with a strange expression. The Odradek was still unresponsive. Then, a small device on the left side of Heartman’s chest let out an electronic noise.

 

  Immediately afterward, the body shook. With an electronic beep, the EKG graph began to draw waves. Then the man drew a deep breath and sat up, and looked at Sam with the face of someone who was still slightly groggy, with tears in his eyes.

  Sam still hadn’t grasped what was going on when Heartman stood up and wiped the tears away. He adjusted his glasses then offered his hand to Sam. Seemingly unperturbed by an unresponsive Sam, the man began to speak.

  “Well, you certainly caught me with my pants down. Glad you could make it, Sam. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you. But I am what I am.”

  Sam just stood there, not knowing what Heartman was talking about or how he should reply.

  “Ah. Please lay her down there,” Heartman instructed. He seemed to think that the reason Sam was so confused was because he didn’t know what to do with Mama, and indicated toward a stretcher next to his lounge chair.

  “Still no sign of them,” Heartman muttered to himself, not paying Sam any mind as Sam laid the body bag down. Heartman was skillfully fiddling with his cuff link.

  “You know your heart stops beating?” Sam said in an attempt to get Heartman to turn around.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Heartman replied, pointing at the device on his chest. “It stops every twenty-one minutes. I spend three minutes on the Beach, and then return.” His voice was as casual as if he was describing his day.

  “Sixty deaths and sixty resurrections per day. Sixty opportunities to search the Beach for my departed family. This is how I live. This is my life,” he explained.

  Sam was becoming increasingly confused, but Heartman was paying no attention and continued to fiddle with his device. On a small table beside the chair stood a small hourglass, but for some reason, no sand was falling from the top compartment. Old books, images, and music neatly lined the ceiling-high bookshelves. Between the books and other objects stood a picture of a woman with a wide, innocent smile and a shy little girl. The ceiling was almost hidden from view by the hanging skeletal samples of whales and other creatures.

  Somehow, the room appeared the way Sam had always pictured a room belonging to Heartman would appear. The look of the man himself, still fiddling with his device, fit Sam’s image to a tee, too.

  The windows displayed on the monitor that monopolized one entire wall were closed one by one, until the monitor itself faded out. Then a large picture window appeared. The entire wall was a window. Heartman beckoned Sam, who was squinting in the bright light.

  Outside the window, Sam could see the heart-shaped lake.

  “That’s my heart right there,” Heartman said, pointing outside. “That crater was made by a voidout. I see myself in that crater. My wife and my child.”

  Sam was even more confused. Was that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?

  “It’s like looking at the shape of my heart,” Heartman continued as the AED in Heartman’s chest projected a hologram into the air. A 3D image of an animated heart was pulsating rhythmically. “The doctors called it myocardial cordiformia. Mine is an especially unusual case. It doesn’t run in the family.”

  Heartman gestured toward the sofa and encouraged Sam to sit down. Heartman sat back down in his lounge chair.

  “You know, I never came to terms with their loss. In the days that followed, I became obsessed with an idea: that the Beach is real, and they are on it. Some of my colleagues ridiculed me for it, they said that it was just a theory or the dogma of some groups who shared a particular paradigm, but I knew it was real. I would induce cardiac arrest—three minutes at a time—and search for them. Day after day after day…”

  That meant that the two people in the photo on Heartman’s bookshelf were his wife and child. Here was a man who Sam could somewhat relate to.

  “All so you could say goodbye?” Sam asked.

  “Quite the opposite. It is said that everyone’s Beach is different. So what if everyone’s afterlife is different, too? I find the thought terrifying. Spending eternity alone. Which is why I decided to find my family and make sure to move on with them.”

  “You mean die with them?”

  Heartman smiled at Sam’s question and raised his thumb.

  “If death would see us reunited, then yes. But the repeated cardiac arrests took their toll on my heart. The muscle gradually deformed. And after a while they started calling me ‘The Beach Scientist—Heartman.’” Heartman got up from his chair and held out his hand. “So, I’m Heartman. Nice to meet you.”

  Sam’s expression remained blank as Heartman approached the stretcher. Mama’s face slowly appeared as he pulled down the zipper. There was no paleness to her face, nor any hint of postmortem lividity or rigor mortis. It looked like she was sleeping peacefully.

  Heartman let out a curious sigh.

  “A body that doesn’t necrotize. No sign of decomposition. It’s as if she were still alive,” Heartman commented.

  Sam recognized that look. It was the same look that Deadman had given him when they had first met. The look of a scientist filled with pure curiosity.

  “She’s the perfect mummy. An impeccable corpse,” Heartman continued, fiddling with the body. Behind his curiosity there didn’t lie some great moral motivation to help mankind, but the innocent urge of child to disassemble a toy to see how it worked. Sam had to say something. He didn’t like the way Heartman was tinkering with Mama’s body so brazenly. It wasn’t about respect for the dead, he just didn’t want to see Mama’s body violated like that when Mama’s ka still lived on inside Lockne. Luckily, Heartman seemed to sense Sam’s disapproval and looked up.

  “Where’s the other thing you were supposed to bring? Ah, found it. Behold.”

  Heartman showed Sam a small case that he had removed from the depths of the bag. From it, Heartman took out a transparent cylindrical container that Sam had never seen before. It seemed to be made of reinforced plastic and filled with some kind of liquid. Inside floated something that looked like a string. Were Bridges up to something again?

  Sam remembered how Deadman and Die-Hardman had made him carry Lou all the way to the incinerator without telling him anything. Once again, he had found himself lugging cargo he was kept oblivious to. Back then it had been with Bridget’s corpse, and this time it was with Mama’s. He was furious at Bridges for once again using him as an unintentional errand boy. Sam’s anger must have been showing on his face, because Heartman wiggled his index finger at him to placate him and indicated toward the container.

  “It appears to be an umbilical cord,
yes?”

  Sam didn’t even bother responding. He supposed that it did, but it also looked like the remains of some kind of weird creature. One that lived on a planet with an entirely different kind of ecosystem.

  “Human, by the looks of it. I think?” Heartman remarked, showing Sam his cuff link and throwing him a meaningful look. Heartman was telling him to play along. Sam didn’t know what Heartman was up to, but he could understood that much. The situation seemed awfully similar to when Deadman had raised his suspicions about the director.

  “It doesn’t look biological. I can’t say for sure without looking into it further, but I don’t think this was an ordinary conduit between fetus and placenta. It looks more like a BT’s tether.”

  Heartman showed Sam the container up closer. Once he got a good look at it, Sam could see a substance like fine particles writhing around upon its surface. He had no idea that BT tethers that materialized like this could be harvested.

  “And this was Mama’s?” Heartman wondered aloud to himself.

  Sam had been the one to sever it, but he had no recollection of picking it back up. Heartman gave another meaningful nod.

  “Yes… A body that doesn’t necrotize and an umbilical cord connected to the Beach… These are remarkable discoveries, Sam…” Heartman commented excitedly.

  Sam began to back away, hoping to escape the hug that Heartman looked like he might give him at any moment. Heartman gave Sam an apologetic look, and placed the container with the umbilical cord in it back on the stretcher, before closing the body bag back up.

  “Would you mind looking at this for a moment?” Heartman asked, turning to the monitor on the wall.

  It showed a four-legged creature lying in a snow-covered field—a mammoth. Sam wondered if it had been dug up around here and continued to gaze at the monitor, unsure of Heartman’s intentions.

  “Look closely. Can you tell what it is?” Heartman asked.

  He zoomed in on the mammoth’s abdomen. The camera was picking up something strange. An umbilical cord was extending out from its belly.

  “Do you see it? An umbilical cord is extending out of this mammoth’s body. This record, made before the Death Stranding, happened to get left behind. And look here.”

  Heartman switched to the next photo. This one showed an ammonite with a similar cord. It was dangling from the center of the ammonite’s spiral-shaped shell.

  “So far, I’ve only managed to dig up these two photographs, but I have been able to establish that neither of them are fakes. Now, the umbilical cord issue might be one thing, but what’s stranger is that neither this mammoth nor this ammonite were found fossilized or preserved in ice as you might expect. Both of these species have been extinct for thousands of years, but, as you can see in the photographs, they look as though they only died yesterday. Just like Mama. And I’ll bet that even more of these specimens are out there, waiting to be found. My colleagues are on the hunt as we speak. Once you activate the Chiral Network, I might even be able to retrieve some of the past records, too.”

  To Sam, it all seemed a bit out-there. Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the monitor. Had that cord dangling from the ammonite really connected it to the Beach? And what else did that imply?

 

  The AED’s voice rang out across the room. Heartman shut down the monitor and the view outside the window reappeared.

  The heart-shaped lake was right outside. If that lake which had been gouged into the earth by a voidout was the same as Heartman’s heart, that made his heart itself a scar. The fact that he had chosen to settle near it and looked down on it every single day as he went about his unusual routine told Sam that this man was living in the past as well. Mama and Deadman were the same. They may have adopted the name of Bridges, but they were attempting to build Bridges toward the past.

  “Each person has their own Beach. Just as an umbilical cord attaches one fetus to one mother, we are attached to one Beach. That’s the rule. But I’m the exception. My Beach is connected to others. As if it were the beneficiary of a coronary bypass. Maybe this twisted heart of mine made it possible. I just want to find them. I’ll be back soon, hopefully from where my family are,” Heartman said to Sam as he reclined in his chair.

  “You probably think what I do is strange. That no matter how special my Beach is, that doesn’t mean that my wife and daughter are still there waiting on it. And you’re right. There’s still so much that we don’t even understand about this world, so how can we possibly expect to understand anything about the Beach? But I have a theory. When a ka departs its ha, it goes to the Beach, which forms a corridor between this life and the next. Under normal circumstances, a body is incinerated within forty-eight hours of its passing and before it can necrotize, so that the ka can pass over to the other side knowing that it has no ha to return to. Its attachment to this world disappears. But once a body necrotizes, the ka becomes bound to this world. But because it doesn’t actually have a body to come back to, it becomes a BT.

  “In any case, the ka doesn’t spend a long time on the Beach. But there are exceptions. For example, those who didn’t die a natural death. Those whose bodies were wiped out in an instant without necrotizing or being incinerated don’t become BTs, but their attachment toward this world keeps their ka from leaving the Beach. You can laugh it away as the delusions of a mad man if you like, though, since no matter how many times I wander the Beach, I never find my wife and daughter.”

 

  The AED announced how long Heartman had left.

  “My body will never go back to the way it was now. I’m willing to bet on that. But it all has to have some kind of meaning. The battlefields—the endless wars you found yourself trapped in—they’re from a time that actually existed. From a world war that took place over a hundred years ago. That war was a particularly nonsensical one. One in which weapons of mass destruction slaughtered people on a vast scale. The inherent meaning of each individual death was snatched away from those victims and they became nothing more than a number. They had no idea why they died. It’s the same for those who die in a voidout.

  “If that strong attachment to this world and the yearning to stay connected to it created that battlefield, then that might support my theory about voidout victims becoming trapped on the Beach.”

 

  “Deadman told me that man, Clifford Unger, was in the US Special Forces,” Heartman went on. “He must have seen a lot of war in his time. His misery and hatred, combined with your BB acting as some sort of catalyst, may have brought these battlefields to our world. It’s just a theory, but perhaps that man who can summon BTs also summoned Cliff’s anger.”

  “You think Higgs is pulling his strings?” Sam asked.

  Sam found himself unconsciously gripping Cliff’s dog tag in his pocket. What if Higgs summoned Cliff and that battlefield to get in Sam’s way, now that he could repel the BTs?

 

  “I don’t know. But evidence does suggest that Higgs brought them here,” Heartman mused.

  The window on the wall went into shade mode and the lake outside disappeared. The interior of the room slowly grew darker.

  “Oh, before I forget, I have a favor to ask,” Heartman quickly interjected.

 

  “Could you just… relax until I come back? Time stops on the Beach, but not in the Seam. Rest assured, it’ll only feel like three minutes to you,” Heartman explained. Heartman closed his eyes and the gramophone placed at an angle to his lounge chair began to play music. It was Chopin’s Funeral March again. “We’ll continue this shortly.”

  The AED emitted a beep and the EKG flatlined.

  As the Funeral March echoed quietly throughout the lab, Sam had no idea what to do. It was just him, Mama’s corpse, Heartman’s temporarily deceased body, and a gently snoozing
BB. There wasn’t a single person who was truly alive or truly dead in the entire room. Although it was unclear what really defined who was alive and who was dead in the first place.

  All Sam could do was settle himself on the sofa and wait for Heartman to come back. He was still holding onto Cliff’s dog tag. It was covered in scratches and listed his name, affiliation, and religion, but no matter how long Sam stared at it, he still didn’t understand anything about Cliff. He didn’t understand Cliff’s relationship with Lou, nor anything about the man’s life or death. If Higgs was harnessing Cliff’s anger and summoning the battlefield to get in the way of Sam’s mission, it seemed like a very roundabout method. There must have been other things that he could have done that would take less time and effort.

  For someone who talked so big about bringing humanity’s extinction, why didn’t Higgs just use a nuke or voidouts or something to destroy all the cities and take out the Chiral Network knots? No matter how effective a repatriate’s blood and other bodily fluids were against BTs, they were just still byproducts of one body. It wasn’t like there was enough of Sam’s blood to get rid of every single BT. They still posed a massive threat.

  Higgs had once been a respectable porter. Fragile’s comments and Bridges’ data backed that up. In fact, when he first started working with Fragile, his main motive had been to help other people. But that had all changed when he jumped ship and began working with someone else.

  That meant this new partner must hold the key to everything. But neither Bridges nor Fragile knew who it was. Higgs had made good use of Fragile’s DOOMS and organization, so his partner must have offered him something even more powerful. Maybe Higgs’s true intentions lay beyond extinction. His proud proclamations about how he was the particle of God and the arrogance that went with that claim seemed to imply as much.