Episode 1: Strange Beginnings

A Shadow Remains

Most people don’t know this, but Charles died back in 2020. Shadow Man remained.

An atom bomb blasted him to pieces, leaving only a shadow tattooed to the wall, palms open, hands outstretched as if he were grasping for something.  Or maybe he is still clinging to his past life. 

The strangest part, though?  That Shadow that remained?  It crawled up on its knees, two-dimensional, paper-thin like some cartoon from the other side.  You could still see it out and about, catch it on Facebook smiling, floating around like a ripped-up kite that won’t return to Earth after being separated from its beacon. 

That Shadow stayed down, though, for a while.  It lived in its nuclear hell after the blast.  Sprayed down by acid rain and trampled all over by the soles of everyone around it.  I guess we can say its half-life whittled it to its atomic core, like eating an apple to the center and finding the gnawed remaining piece that held it together.  You throw it in the trash.  Head over heels, it went, being bashed into the sides of buildings with ferocious, hurricane-like winds.

Only after several weeks did the winds subside, and Shadow Man floated back to the ground, a leaf that appeared to have survived the storm despite being tattered and filled with holes throughout. 

What was probably an ice-cold wind blowing all around Shadow Man, but it couldn’t feel it.  The nerves had been bio-shocked and ripped out of their form like so many entrails from a dying carcass that had been ripped open by the mad predator and strewn around the ground somewhere, presumably in a pool of maroon, but not here.  Instead, the frigid blast moved around it, shifting its form listlessly – shoulder blown to the left.  Now again, to the right.  Pick your foot up from the molten concrete it seems buried in and hope the wind doesn’t carry it away. 

It could put one foot in front of the other and move – arms stretched wide to maintain balance – like a drunk man on a rocking boat atop a tumultuous sea.  But it could hold its balance and sea legs by reaching for rails that didn’t exist except in its mind.

It was ripped up and down by what felt like a flash of lightning.  Glowing currents set it on fire and made a blaze–hot coal in a furnace heaped on, piles and piles of it, white-hot.  In the incinerator that was its mind, a spark burst, orange amid coal and white.  In that orange burst, a flash of a supernova, Shadow Man had a thought. 

I didn’t survive the blast in 2020.  I died in 2020. 

Newfound consciousness rocked him, and he jolted his head up like a puppet on strings.  The marionette was a cruel and vengeful God who was selfish and lacked pity.  Shadow Man jerked with the steel strings and tore them loose from his shoulders.   He left them hanging in the air, blowing back and forth in the wind.  He looked straight ahead and began to walk. 

Shadow at The Park

Ashen trees splashed on what looked like a park, grey bushy cloud-like forms on top of solid black stalks.  Wildflowers littered the ground but brought no joy, for they were only shades of grey, black, or white – a mockery of what otherwise would have been a pleasant scene.  Shadow Man looked closer and saw kids on swings, but no life in them. 

Their ceramic doll faces and button eyes were glued to their cellular phones.  Somehow, their digits, only the size of glass thimbles, petite and weak, could grip the machines with unparalleled authority.  A birthright.  A decree.  Their eyes were glassy like a pool of water disturbed and twisted with a stick, forming clarity occasionally, only to be blasted again and distorted. 

He could see the cast iron gate surrounding the park, contrasting stark black against the grey dolls on the swings and their white handlers.  Eggshell white moms with cracks running through them all over as they took pictures of their dolls for their social media, and Shadow Man could see the yolk dripping out of them thick and oozy, almost as yellow as the sun once was, but more like jaundice in a sick man’s eyes.  It was contaminated like the forms it leaked from, dropping in big splashes.  Gloop.  Gloop.  Gloop. The grins on the handlers’ faces twisted upwards with evil jester sneers. Shadow Man gripped the iron gate, his paper-thin hands wrapping around it, and he pulled himself a little taller and took in what he saw. 

The dolls sat upright, riding the swings beneath them with the rhythm of the freezing breeze.  They had grimaces on their faces now, twisted expressions stretching for miles.  Shadow Man could see the expressions bursting from both sides of their faces and storming outwards, going on for acres, knocking down everything in their tracks.  They only stopped when they had plowed down 1,000 acres outside of the City, 1,000 acres of cornfields gone, and had left everything around them burning like Sherman’s Atlanta. 

He had followed these grimaces and noticed no people were by the wayside, which concerned him.  Like Sherman, the dolls didn’t care at all.  Nay couldn’t care if they wanted to because what they didn’t know was that the maker of those phones in their little hands had traded them for their little hearts, and every day, rather than charge a quarter for the price of admission, it sucked life out of them and everything that came with it.  Compassion.  Sympathy.  Empathy.  You name it.  Like some twisted and hellish black hole fueled by malice, the thing took more and more.  That was why the dolls didn’t care, and their handlers were already gone, perpetuating this, one social post at a time, as the sticky yolk dripped from their cracks. 

Shadow at the Iron Gates

His hands gripped that wrought iron gate when they felt a rattle and hum start building up on one side of them.  It started slow and methodical – thump!  Thump!  Thump! A giant emerging from the cave in some nightmare fairy tale.  The kind that warns its prey with that gnarly wooden club, beating the ground as fear is driven into the awaiting victims with each strike on the ground.  That gate shook again.  Thump!  Thump! And the hum started crawling through Shadow Man’s neck and shoulders – a hot flash that first felt like warm molasses crawling over him but got hotter. 

It was icy-hot dry ice that by the time it reached his neck, Shadow Man suddenly saw that emanating fog from Halloween props start billowing up around him.  When it entered his head, it was rattlesnake venom with the sting of a soldering flame. The hum had become the viper’s hiss, projecting right into his ears and through them, the rattle shaking violently as his hands could barely hold onto the gate any longer – not without help.  That gate had turned into a tuning fork. This tuning fork had been smashed with that giant’s mallet. It sent vibrations all through Shadow Man until his eye sockets nearly exploded – and there was now a clearing in the billowing dry ice fog.  That was when Shadow Man saw it. 

TNT

At some point, his eyes had come alive and were gripped with a newfound transparency that no one had seen before.  Not Shadow Man or those cracked-up, Humpty Dumpty “mothers” taking everything out of the dolls.  Inside the cellular phones, Shadow Man saw the gears and machinations working. They exposed the skeletal nightmares under those plastic cases and LED screens.  Gears crunched together and locked up, connecting one soulless thought to another in a perverted symphony that worked together.  The system was wrapped up like Twizzler candies, gripping and twisting wires between the gears.  Inside that nervous system of the phone was something underneath it all.  There was something that nobody saw.  It was a tiny microchip that held the destruction of TNT, and all it needed was more shared photos, and the whole park would go up like Nagasaki. 

The microchips were ticking time bombs, and the countdown was marching on.  Shadow Man could no longer hold still and watch as the dolls gripped their chain-link swing set handles and got annihilated.  He stood up straight and looked down at his hands – wrenching them from the gate they had been bolted to.  With the curiosity of a newborn baby, Shadow Man stretched out those black arms, arms as black as crows that were now flying away from his trembling body and looked at them. 

He realized those powers as he tried the fingers’ flexibility and stretched them. Once, all the way out, now enclosed in a fist, brought them back down with a crash on the gate and spaced them on the top crossbar about shoulder length apart.  With Herculean strength, he pried the bar upwards in two parts and ripped it clear in half; the gate was torn apart. 

He walked through the opening of the bars and put his foot on the ground inside the barrier. The park enlivened him, and that familiar current of electricity pulsed through him.  He heard a tick ticking in his mind that slammed like a baritone drum.  He knew it was the TNT in the phones and moved in that direction, crossing the park’s gray without notice, a cloud that glides overhead. 

The mothers and their claw-like hands continued to operate the weapons of mass self-destruction.  As Shadow Man crossed the park like a black cat, the mothers had some sense that something new was on the scene, but it could hardly register in the jumbled-up mess that their wired minds had become.  The transmissions were obstructed, and the synapses didn’t fire as they should.  Years of that yolk and ooze coursing through the circuits had caused the systems to be bogged down.  Messages, even important ones such as S.O.S., had to cross what was quicksand in the CPU and ultimately failed to reach any meaningful destination. 

Heads Will Roll

Instead of reacting, instead of grabbing Shadow Man with their metallic grips, instead of fighting for their awful and diseased existence, the mothers’ machine heads turned in hellish synchronicity but only to the shoulders and back to the front.  Back and forth with the phones remaining on the dolls.  The grins revealed sickening and rotten smiles that starkly contrasted the eggshell-white faces.  Black teeth dripping with that yellow goop continued to show.  The handlers’ eyes were rapidly blinking as he approached from behind them. 

The dolls were unmoved by any commotion – even the wind swirling the leaves and flowers of the park did not affect them.  They were lifeless in many respects, no longer able to move or even register the situation.  Years of being removed from reality and exhibited as twisted social media art had rendered them unable to surmise what might be developing in front of their own marble eyes. 

If they had been able to appreciate anything, to feel or experience anything at all, a warm feeling of joy, like hot chocolate on a winter’s day, would have spread through their tummies.  The 1,000-acre grimaces that had burned down so many Atlantas saw the first signs of life propping up on the rings of fire and destruction, but the dolls couldn’t feel or see this, not yet.  Thus, the butterflies that began to appear around those charred cornfields went unnoticed.  Shadow Man’s looming presence was yet undetected by the swinging figures.  They were still captured.

But not for much longer. 

He had crossed the park with the agility of an alley cat but now had the wrath of a tiger storming inside him.  The clanking sound of the mothers’ heads operating, back and forth, back and forth, rang alongside the tick-ticking of the TNT.  Shadow Man got behind one of the handlers and raised his fist.  The fist was black and 2D but given life and purpose as it raised up into the air.  It became heavy with its weight and fury.  He brought it down with a force that knocked one of the mother’s heads off its shoulders with a loud crack of lightning. 

A geyser of yellow goop shot out from the mother’s neck and exploded all over the scene.  The yellow painted the park and turned the black-and-white scene into technicolor. Whatever the yellow ooze touched, it would turn into its natural color.  A splash on the flowers had turned them pink and violet. 

Shadow Man did not pause when the head crashed and rolled along the park’s ground.  As the head rolled, it went on grinning and blinking its eyes stupidly, unable to comprehend what it was experiencing.  Shadow Man tore into the convulsing torso with his hands.  Its cracked exoskeleton made it crumble and fall apart.  He ripped apart its interior wires, shredding them.  Sparks and ooze flew in all directions, splashes of the goop returning color to anything it touched.  Anything except Shadow Man, who remained black through and through. 

The phone dropped to the ground, and he pushed the corpse-like remains of the mother to the ground.  When it hit the surface, it exploded into a cloud of dust.  Poof!  A million grains of eggshells went into the air, and a burst of wind blew them back to hell, away from the crime scene. 

Only this explosion, this bursting of sand and ooze, woke the remaining mothers.  Their eyes grew to the size of saucers, and Shadow Man could see fear in their eyes.  Or was it regret?  He did not know.  What he did know was that his work wasn’t finished.  He left the cell phone on the ground and moved to the next mother.  And the next.  And the next.  He shattered and destroyed each one, their eggshells blown into oblivion. 

A Clean Canvas

The park was now a beautiful canvas.  Green grass painted by the blood of the handlers felt cool under Shadow Man’s feet.  The ashen gray trees now had their natural colors back.  Shadow Man, still coal black, wasn’t finished yet.  He turned his attention to the time bombs on the ground.

Each phone’s screen began whizzing through images with whirlwind speed.  Still-life pictures of people’s captured souls flew by, one after another, with terrific sharpness. The snapshots captured the dolls in various poses – grinning here, posing there, and dressed up in costumes at other times.  The slideshow looked horrifying as the pictures turned grainy, black and white, and the dolls’ faces looked scared.  The grins had melted, and they appeared to be prisoners of the devices.  Shadow Man stepped towards the phones and grabbed a stone.  Careful not to detonate the TNT, he smashed the screens one by one. 

The crystal screens shattered and flew into the air, spraying dust all over the park.  Fine powder trailed in all directions, and the dolls o. Their heads turned towards the exhibition with curiosity they hadn’t known in their lifetime.  Besides the spray, the colors around them struck them, but their hands still clung to the chain links of the swing.  Their fingers were still forged into them, and their bottoms were still bolted to the seats.

His fingers reached into that dizzying array of gears that was whirring under what had been the screen.  Each gear was a volatile machine that lashed out with every turn.  Shadow Man was at first cautious, and as his hand went into that abominable device, the screeching of the gears sounded around him.  He reached to diffuse the bomb, and the sounds of it stabbed into his ears, creating a ringing that grew more painful – like someone driving a nail into his ear.  But Shadow Man did not stop.  He endured and grabbed two wires, one with each hand, and ripped them off the atomic bomb that was rigged to explode. 

When he tore the wires apart, a gush of blood exploded from the exposed ends as they pulsed with the beats of a dying circulatory system.  Blood shot out, painting Shadow Man’s face and hands crimson, but he remained undeterred.  He could see the gears slowly begin to stop rotating—the cries of the whizzing and turning dulled.  The pain in the ears subsided a bit.

He had destroyed one phone but there was more work to do.  Shadow Man moved on to the next phone.  And the next. 

The final phone left Shadow Man soaked in blood, his coal-black hands unrecognizable.  During this time, the hands had fleshed out, grown, and taken on more dimensions, along with the rest of his body.  He looked up toward the dolls after disengaging the final nuclear bomb.

 

New Life, New Shadows

The porcelain faces began cracking from their hairlines to their chins.  The glass eyes shot out toward Shadow Man with the velocity of a cannon, and he bounded for cover behind a large stone as the projectiles shot past him.  He heard a cracking sound like ice thawing after a long winter.  At first, it was hardly audible.  Creak.  Creak.  And it exploded.  Crack! The sound of a baseball bat going through a plate glass window.  Shadow Man peered above the stone he had been taking cover behind to see his work.  And what magnificent work it was.            

Massive shards of glass covered the green grass.  Grass as brilliant and green as a shamrock.  On the swings were children, giggling and chattering and talking with one another about the butterflies and clouds around them.  The kids were flesh and blood, joy and energy.  They swung for a few more moments, then leaped off their swings, taking a long jump into the crisp air before landing on the soft grass beneath them.  They enjoyed the feeling, and their smiles and laughter showed it.  Their toes wriggled on the grass, soaking in the incredible feeling of turf beneath their feet.  Shadow Man watched the scene for a few moments – taking in the kids, the clouds, the colors, and the life. 

And then the kids looked up.  Not at him but past him, the children ran in his direction.  They blew right by him with the force of a locomotive, and it turned his body right around.  He saw what they had been running toward.  Their mothers were waiting for them with smiles at the iron gate.  The moms’ pearly whites shone in the sun, and their hair sparkled.  In their dresses or shorts and T-shirts, they waited with open arms as their kids bounded towards them. 

The resurrected children were safe, but the sky was dark in the opposite direction.  Dark and thunderous clouds cascaded across the horizon like so many zeppelins.  When the mothers opened the gates to greet the kids, a lightning bolt shot from the sky, igniting Shadow Man with 300 million volts of power.  Like a sledgehammer, it pounded through his skull, cracking it wide open.  A shot of adrenaline penetrated his heart, and he collapsed to the ground like a man who had been run over by a train.  His pencil-thin arms shot out, and he was a chalk outline – legs spread-eagled in bleach, permanently scarred into the Earth. 

The fire scorched the sketch through and through.  Kids from all over who would later come to the park, none the wiser, would stop and see it.  What was it?  Some said it was a prank.  Some said it was some Banksy art.  Others said it was aggressive police tactics to keep the Black kids away.  None knew what it truly was.  How could they?  How could they know Charlie started to see again at that spot?  Pure energy had passed through the 2-dimensional freak and sent him through Dante’s Infernos and all nine layers of his Hells. 

Shadow’s Flashback

For when Shadow Man was taking in that lightning, riding all 300 million volts of it, the electricity was convulsing through him, his legs and arms trembling—a violent seizure that rocked all the places that had been coursing through him—Seoul, South Korea; Wuhan, China; New Taipei, Taiwan; Houston, Texas—and the violence of the seizures shook those places and the people he had known. 

A woman in Seoul rocked and flew out of her bed on a moonlit night, her body thrown to the wooden floor, and her husband horrified. A boss in Wuhan threw up on a colleague in a karaoke room and had to excuse himself from the embarrassment. A neighbor in New Taipei jerked to the side and tossed through his television, leaving the game show he was watching unfinished and him in complete disbelief. His brother in Houston hit a guardrail on the freeway. He got out to check the damage. The bystanders looked at the wrecked car with the shattered windshield. 

The Shadow Man was on the ground during all these phenomena. He felt cemented to it under 10,000 pounds of agony and hell.  As the violence pulsed through him, his appendages writhed and convulsed – squeezing his torso and expelling the past from his mouth.  His eyelids shot up and down, blinking REM at the speed of light.  Here is a memory.  Here is a person.  Here is an idea.  A projector flew out of his retinas.  Flashing light and moving film.  The backdrop was the canvas of the sky lying outside of his reach beyond the park’s gates. 

And still, he shook with pain.  Still, the concrete poured onto him. But something happened as immense pressure compressed and squeezed his chest. 

The violence stopped. 

The concrete was weaker than he had thought, and the convulsions of his body broke through.  The fingertips of Shadow Man began tingling.  At first, it was like a muscle that had fallen asleep.  Then it moved down to his biceps, coursing through him.  A strength entered him, and the eyes began to flicker less.  The projector was slowing down; the engine was losing steam, at least in one respect.  Instead of rapid eye movement, pictures started appearing.  Click. Click.  Click. 

Shadow Man saw something.  Click. An image moved onto the screen.  Click.  It was gray and foggy, like the infamous picture of Sasquatch.  Click.  His leg felt a jolt.  Kick! The concrete budged.  Click.  The shape moved into focus.  Click. Shadow Man saw Charlie, and the concrete broke all around him. 

He remembered.  He had once been alive.  Charlie…

Episode 2 Will Continue Shadow Man’s Story