Carson Knight
Shadow Man’s Previous Adventures
Please see these for Shadow Man’s exploits and his origin.
Episode 2:
Episode 1:
Disaster
The disaster was around him in all its totality. His origin in the back of his mind . A Siberian wasteland was all he could see in his vision. Wolves were dead, and the bodies of the innocent lay all around. For a moment, Shadow Man could only think, What have I done?
Signs of movement.
Water dripped from the bodies, and there were movements in the appendages. A boy’s hand let go of the vice grip it had had on the dollar bill. One of the girls released her hold on the second-hand purse she had been gripping. She let out a gasp of air, and a plume of frosty vapor came from her mouth. A wolf twitched its neck and let out a guttural and primordial sound of pain and exhaustion. Was it dying? Charlie didn’t know.
Charlie needed fresh air.
Remnants of the crash covered his body. Wooden shards of the desks protruded from his black flesh from various points. One above the knee. Two in his forearm. They penetrated his wrists like stigmata. Concrete powder dusted his faces, giving Charlie a spectral look that masked half of it and left his eyes and the other half unhindered.
Charlie gazed down at his own beaten and abused body without thinking much about it. Shadow Man methodically took out the wooden spears that had gone through him, working from top to bottom. The piece that had severed his ankle led to a torrent of blood that began pooling at his feet.
Deep Cuts
The next stop was right below the knee. After trying to walk it off, Shadow Man found that the formerly computer screens’ glass was too much to bear. More than an inconvenience, it was a dagger that made him practically immobile. His black hand, now 3D, gripped the thing, and it was a filet knife. The glass severed Charlie’s hand, and a clean red line of blood seeped out from either side of the glass. He winced and pulled the fragment from his skin. A grimace breaking the concrete specks on his face was the only tell of the pain he felt. He discarded it, tossing it onto the wolf that was growling in pain beside him.
The ankle, knee, and hand were bleeding profusely. Crimson now dyed the formerly pristine ice. Flowery botches of rose red spread out on the cool–blue surface that Shadow Man stood on, and wisps of clouds infringed on his vision. Several pieces of shrapnel remained. Like a grenade, the Bank had penetrated him through and through.
He had to continue. Charlie had to go down. He had to reach further depths of the city.
Consciousness was leaving him. Fog was setting in. A desk that had survived the disaster stared back at him, and Shadow Man slowly limbered towards it. He surveyed the casualties of what he (what is he??) had brought down on them all. Only then did he hear the alarming sounds all around him.
Had they been here all along?
Keep Moving
He kept moving forward, wavering as he took one loaded step after the other. The molten concrete of the sidewalk came back to him in a vision, the explosion. The kids in the park. Overhead, the sky rumbled, still lit up in a blitz of fire and thunder. Dark clouds flashed with brilliance, and the thunder reverberated like cavalry.
A soldier is what he thought. I’m a soldier. Not a soldier, a field agent.
Charlie grabbed the stake of wood that had gone through his left wrist and wrenched it out in a violent thrust that shot a spray of blood all over his face. The copper taste of the stuff flooded his mouth, and he swallowed reflexively, downing it and making him gag. The blood continued to drip from his left arm, an uninterrupted reminder of the situation.
Above him, rain pattered down, and he considered climbing under one of the other desks to shelter himself, but thought better of it. Not enough energy. Instead, he turned his attention to the other spike in his right wrist.
Blood ran down the left arm in rivulets. Blood ran down his arm when it was raised, it ran its course down the forearm, biceps, and shoulder. On his face, lines coursed from the sides of the mouth, creating the image of a monstrous phantom like that of Le Rouge. Part black. Part ghostly white from the debris. Hollow eyes filled with purpose and red dripping down the sides of his mouth like the vampire Lestat.
Awakening
A quick pull finished the deed with the right wrist. A fountain of blood. Lack of oxygen. Rainfall overhead. The clouds moved into his vision and intensified. An armada. Their cannons thundered, and the blitz, whatever blitz had been in the works, was enlivened. Drops of rain billeted the glacial surface underneath him and assaulted his body like infantry.
Charlie passed out. He dreamed of his days as an agent.
Flashback – The City
The Chinese lab was cold and unloving. Tiled floors stretched out for what looked like kilometers, and the smell of bleach and disinfectants spread through the nostrils like a spectral vapor. Men in coats walked around hurriedly, trying to get from one room to the next, constantly feeling the pressure and alarm of something big.
A radioactive bomb. Shadow Man had recollections of his origin.
The city was Wuhan. A sprawling metropolis that spanned miles and was home to approximately 12 million people. Its inner workings were connected like a finely tuned machine. Or an anthill, depending on how one looked at it. Wuhan offered a subway connection that would make most American cities envious (12 lines extending around 300 miles). The skyscrapers that cut up the grey sky put most foreigners in awe. Never had they seen anything on this scope if they had not been to a Chinese city before.
The people were somewhat ungainly and not used to the type of foreigner, laowai, that other metropolises in China would see, places like Shanghai or Beijing. Initially, Charlie saw that as part of the charm, an untouched city devoid of Western tourism and bullshit that would define many cities in Asia. Wuhan was not for the meek, the untraveled, the unprepared. One was as likely to be spit on or cussed at as he was to be offered a cigarette. The lab was something else entirely. Something that neither the people living in the city nor most Chinese people were even remotely aware of.
The Lab
The structure outside of the lab was concrete and mirrored a lot of the architectural indifference that defined the Soviet – Era thinking of the time it was built. Namely, it formed a purpose rather than any image that one might be looking for. It was devoid of gardening or name plates, or even the remotest indication of what its purpose was.
It was a place for war.
Charlie remembered walking by it many times. “What’s the purpose of the place?” He would ask a colleague or friend. “What is it doing here?” It sat there on the corner of a block, blending in like a pillbox, another concrete structure in the behemoth that was so consistent with any tier–2 or tier–3 Chinese city. He always got the same answer.
“Progress,” a friend would say. “They’re doing a lot of good things there.”
Good Things
It was a common ploy in his day-to-day activities. He questioned this, but his job was geo-political and social, not war. It appeared as 100 other buildings in the city did. Old, dull, and drab. He didn’t know that they were constructing a bomb. A new kind of bomb that would wipe him off the planet for all intents and purposes. A bomb that would turn him into a shadow of himself. And so, he would carry on, with his books and his idealism, and carry himself to the library that was a few blocks away, hoping to find a solution to this mess that his “handlers” would deal with.
“Sounds mysterious,” he’d remark. The friend or colleague would laugh. He was used to that. The Chinese people he worked with were friendly and laughing, often patting him on the shoulder and walking with him to continue his research into the trade and progress that was occurring between his home, the USA, and China.
The Walk
The streets of Wuhan were both impressive and appalling. Skylines dwarfed the pedestrians as they walked the streets. Impressive buildings stood like giants, and in a crowded metropolis that thrived everywhere. The landscape was minimal, but the picture was incredible, as architectural feats of construction stood, row after row, at all corners and in every turn. Busy people crowded the streets, men in suits and ties, women in dresses sporting their luxury handbags; no one had the time to say hello or sorry, bustling past one another to get here or there.
Wafts of food tantalized the nose as the street food assaulted one’s senses. Street vendors would line the streets and cook Chinese barbeque, roast chicken or beef, served on a wooden spit or stick, and serve the masses of people all along the roads. It was an incredible sight: a silver metal cart run by a mom and pop, maybe a kid working the grill from time to time, serving this incredible cuisine for the equivalent of $1. The lines would astound Charlie.
“How good is the food?” he asked one time.
Hot, Dry Noodles
“The best in the world, we’ve been practicing for 5,000 years,” his friend said. He believed his friend. Why else would there be that kind of line? And then there was the most famous dish, the dish that defined the city: hot, dry noodles. A simple dish that quite literally was what it was named, noodles with a peanut–tasting sauce that provided high calories and little nutrition, but would get one to lunch. It was often topped with chives and various other things to add some flavor.
It amazed Charlie how the city had been captivated by such a simple dish, but it was, he couldn’t deny, amazing and inexpensive. A noodle meal that fed the city for breakfast nearly every day of the year. Lines would be down the street as dozens of people stood to get their daily fix. There wasn’t an ample comparison that he knew in his hometown of Houston, but the salty dish did its job, and for less than a buck. He passed all these sights as he got to the library.
Library
The library was as unique as its mission. It stood two blocks from the lab, and unlike the other behemoths around it, it sat squatly at only two stories high. The entrance was a glass foyer that was flanked by vegetation that Charlie had always thought seemed a bit out of place. Around it were palm trees, roses, and all sorts of flora and gardening that one wouldn’t necessarily see anywhere in Wuhan, unless at the famed West Lake, a popular and beautiful tourist spot.
Unlike the Soviet–era concrete structures that shot into the air around it, it had a more British feel. A modern building that mixes glass, domes, columns, and other elements, reminding Charlie of a Greco-Roman meets modern feel, akin to what he saw in Hong Kong. Its mission was to attract people who were studying the geo-political issues that China and the USA were dealing with—specifically, trade, culture, and sea routes. What the future Shadow Man was utterly unaware of was that things were working behind the scenes, both in the USA and China, that he had no clue about how much the Chinese were aware of.
He and his friend, Zhou, walked in on Tuesday. It was cold, grey, and the sky was overcast, as it usually was. It was hard to know when exactly it was overcast versus when it was smog-covered. Wuhan was once, and still is, to some extent, a highly industrialized city that suffered from bouts of smog so severe that even the most diligent people would be forced to stay indoors. It wasn’t uncommon for a cell-phone reading of pollutants to be off the charts, quite literally.
The Study
The aim of the mission, where Charlie and Zhou were concerned, was to analyze the seemingly self-defeating policies behind the mutual trade war. Unlike the lab that worked behind the scenes, day in and day out, covertly and under the guise of research, Charlie was a marked man. His doom clock had been set in motion months before, and the man who set it? Zhou.
Charlie was on his own mission as a field agent, and Zhou was much further in.
Charlie opened the research books around him, without knowing that he had set off an atomic bomb. Zhou checked his watch. Nervous, as he saw Charlie opening his laptop and connecting to the people and researchers he knew back home. Unlike Charlie, sweat began to pool around Zhou’s forehead, and a nervous twitch began to accentuate his hand gestures as the two of them spoke about what was being uncovered, things that they had been researching for years, which would set the geo-political balance back 30 or 40 years.
An epiphany flooded over Charlie, a wave of information as he finally cracked the code he had been working on, and suddenly it had all made sense. The lab, the trade war, the deals, and negotiations. It wasn’t a Cold War. It was an actual war. But that wasn’t the worst part.
Paranoia
Books crawled from the shelves as Charlie looked over his shoulder, arachnids with eight legs and 100 different pathways. His studies, which had taken him from Houston to Korea to Wuhan, suddenly felt oppressive on his shoulders. A weight he didn’t want to bear. He knew something was going to happen because of what he had learned—the lab and the Americans.
It didn’t matter to Charlie much now.
The library was suddenly larger. It was bigger somehow. It expanded its wings, a pterodactyl that was lifting off from some tropical aviary in one of Michael Crichton’s novels. Around him, he checked what was going on, a paranoid delusion wrapped itself around him like some lead–filled blanket. The people are not your friends – and never were. His training had taught him that, but the reality was a brick in the face.
Dread
What crept through him was a dread many have felt. A realization akin to a soldier walking into an ambush when everything is quiet. He had watched and studied a great deal about the Korean War when he was posted there and had understood how terrible it must have felt when MacArthur took his men into the mountains, only to face the elements and a Chinese army that far surpassed anything the soldiers had imagined.
It came as only a dreadful sense can. Starting with the chest. A tight compression that hits you like a punch. Your arms begin to seize up, and it goes down to your fingers and toes. Suddenly, the heart picks up a beat, and you’re wondering, What the hell did I get into? He hadn’t lost his senses yet. Not yet. But a blurry vision started around him, and the people, it dawned on him, were no longer there under the auspices to help him. The books were spies, and the tables were something else entirely.
War Front
The desks around him were ominously empty. Soulless. They stood like graves around him, yet they were stacked with books. Thoughts of the lab came back to him, and the rumors he had heard. Things about atomic bombs, radiation, and war with America. His ears burned hot, thoughts burned into them, fire pokers as he considered what he had just learned.
He saw the staff moving along in a hurry here and there. He loosened his tie as he tried to recover from the devastating fact of the matter. People were moving and shaking things behind the landscape of the librarian’s desk. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. He glanced around.
“Zhou? You got any water?” Charlie asked. Charlie scanned the room, scanning for exits.
“Sure,” Zhou checked his watch. Cool and collected. Zhou looked at his book and took a few notes. “You know where the water is, but want me to grab a glass? You don’t look well.”
“Please do.” Charlie undid the buttons of his sports coat and knew that he was flushed and red. Don’t panic. Don’t panic, he said to himself, it reverberated in his brain like some surreal catechism. If it were a catechism, he didn’t find sanctuary. It was a realization. The staff in the library were moving around him and getting ready for something.
Library – Battle of the Self
Whilst Zhou was away, the realization hit Charlie like a sledgehammer. An appalling matter. It occurred to him that everything America had done to get into this quagmire reflected American policies and self-deprecation that couldn’t be undone. He needed to speak to someone.
He needed a phone, a lifeline—some way to relay his information to his superiors and get out of here.
The chair was cold, his body was hot, but the chair was ice cold and felt like something from the frigid Narnia. He looked around, his shirt undone a few buttons, tie loosened, and he saw a pay phone in the corner of the room. It stared back at him, some ghoul daring him to go that way, flanked by two beautiful Chinese ladies in dresses pretending to make notes from their corner desks.
Were they pretending?
If only… if only . . . He had remembered that short story he had read, “The Black Phone”, by Joe Hill. About dead kids calling a kidnapped boy to aid him in his escape. If only someone could reach out to him. Not that Charlie would know what to say. What could he say? Everything they’ve got planned is because we have been stupid. Everything is compromised. Did we do this to ourselves?
Game is Up
When he saw Zhou speak to the librarian, he knew that the game was up. It was the classic game of chess. One makes a move, does something he thinks is brilliant, thinks he got the rook, and BAM! The moment you take your hand off that piece, it becomes official. The second you take that hand off the piece, it’s official, and you realize you’re screwed.
He had figured out America’s problem, why they would never win against China if things weren’t set straight. All the information he had researched coalesced – Americans were their own worst enemy, by design.
But he had taken the research too far, and Zhou had to end it.
The Raid
A scream came across the library as Charlie ducked underneath the barricade. Zhou was gone. That much was certain. He heard a howling wind, something like he hadn’t heard before. The air smelled like gasoline, and the sky from the library windows turned jet black. Everyone disappeared; they made themselves scarce. Librarians needed to check the phone and go into the back office.
The jets soared overhead; they were screaming eagles. That’s when the rain poured down.
The fire alarm rang, and the water shot out, an oasis that drenched all the knowledge of the library into oblivion. Words dripped from books, ink onto the floor like so many wasted thoughts. He was incapable of moving. It stunned him. The ink bled, and so did everything he had been trying to research and know, pooling out on the floor like some spilled paint.
An avalanche came in, rushing ice that was the government agents. It hit Charlie first where he had been burning. His chest seized up, a vise grip, and he looked around. Stormtroopers moved in, but not before the alarm had gone off. It was a rain-drenched hell with shelves all around him.
Charlie dove under the table just as an explosion engulfed the library and all the information it held.
“Atom Bomb”
In his dreamscape, Charlie’s subconscious couldn’t recall if it had been an atom bomb. He knew it was something from the mysterious Wuhan lab. He knew it was a hellscape, and he knew that it was radioactive. Surely it wasn’t an atomic bomb. Why would the Chinese have wiped out an entire city? It had to have been something smaller but practical. It wiped him away, Charlie at least. Still in his dream, he was a shadow standing next to a murky pond. Under the water, images and memories remained. There was still information to be recalled. He reached in to seize them, and when the water was broken, he awoke.
The American Dream
He awoke rejuvenated in City Bank. Charlie recollected being blasted and burned to pieces, but he did not know all the answers. Debris lay everywhere around him, and he was determined to move forward. Memory lapses remained but they were neither here nor there. The mission was to continue. The mission was to save society from itself, no matter how, why, or who employed him. He was dead by most accounts. Dead to the Agency. He was dead to the Chinese. Charlie was dead to everyone.
Yet he lived as Shadow Man.
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