Please see the previous episode for Shadow Man’s exploits and his origin.

Origin:  Shadow Man – Episode 3: Origin Recalled – Horror Obsessive

Part 2: Shadow Man: Episode 2 – Horror Obsessive

1st Appearance: Shadow Man – One Man’s Redemption, Another’s Horror – Horror Obsessive

Out of the Rubble

Charlie had destroyed the Bank. The computers, the screens, and the corpses all lay on the floor in disarray. He pushed himself up from the ground and surveyed the scene, scanning for a way out. Eventually, he found an exit by going back to what remained of the foyer he had entered. Pushing the massive door open, he stepped out onto the streets.

The air was crisp around him. Shadow Man could see that the water he had trudged through earlier had subsided, and most of the streets were clear again, albeit they were grey and decrepit-looking. Remnants of the trash and litter remained, but most of the people had cleared up the area. The disaster at the Bank had them sheltered inside various buildings. Charlie didn’t see signs of the crocodilian monsters he had seen on his way to the Bank. Now that the water had drained, they were gone or had been pulled down with the Bank when it had collapsed.

The City Before Him

Across the street, the city spanned out before him, a behemoth. Everything in front of him was colorless. Turning around to survey everything, he saw that the Bank, in its destruction, was splashed with color. The rebuilt version wouldn’t be the black abyss that City Bank had been.

“Squaaaawk!”

The sound reached Charlie and grabbed his attention. He searched for its origin and saw it across the street. The Crow was back, perched on a black and white fire hydrant on the other side of the road. Knowing that the Crow had led him to his mission to upend the Bank, Shadow Man moved in its direction once more. His memories, which he recalled, gave his new reality a definite purpose, and he looked forward to seeing where the Crow would guide him.  

Splashes of Color

Shadow Man followed the Crow through the city. As he walked, the color practically oozed in his tracks. The streets and buildings, which were ashen and grey, became filled with color. As if tubs of paint were poured from him, where he went, color followed, moving slowly like magma from a volcano would. But unlike magma, this color gave life and didn’t diminish it.

The trees in his wake were lush and green, streetlights had returned to their standard colors, and cars had regained their brilliant, colorful hues. Ahead, though, things were still coal black or ashen. It was a dismal landscape that stood before Shadow Man, and he knew that the mission wasn’t quite over yet. The black Crow kept flying. He would stop at every corner, perched on a tree, lamp, or building, and wait for Shadow Man to advance.

Where is he taking me? Charlie thought. Various ideas crossed his mind. A list of snakes and their dens. Political headquarters, crooked cops, scumbag movie executives. It could be any number of things the Crow wanted Shadow Man to confront.

And then it happened. The Crow was sitting on a steel gate that reached for the sky, an entrance flanked by two humanoid Pigs standing upright in neat, blue, uniform attire. The color stopped pouring from Shadow Man, and realization hit him.

Fort. Television

In front of Shadow Man,  sat a massive studio lot and broadcast station. Its gates were cast iron steel and tipped with menacing, dagger–like points at the top. It was a fortress compared to the Bank. The brick walls stretched for miles in each direction. Brick upon brick were neatly stacked, towering above Shadow Man and the Pigs waiting outside.

Shadow Man was still a block away. The structure sat in front of him like a behemoth. Everything about it was dark: the clouds hovering above it were jet black, the gate was the color of oil, even the bricks were the grey of an impenetrable fog.

Each corner had a circular turret, unlike a typical studio, but more akin to a fortress. The Pigs, Pigs standing on their hind legs, “manned” each turret, shotguns in their monstrous “hands”. It was horrifying in a way. The pigs were treating an “entertainment” HQ as a battlefield.

Towers of Horror

Broadcast towers jutted up beyond the brick walls. Charlie could see at least half a dozen of the spires. They stood, latticed steel, black as midnight, horrific obelisks of brain rot. Electricity crackled from each of them. The sound of the power surging through the air gave the scene an ominous buzz.

“Pop!” A current would sound, jumping from one of the towers to the other. Those hellish electric bursts provided the only colors to the scene. The surges that leapt forth between the structures illuminated the black canvas of the overcast sky. The scene was a hellish symphony of power.

Breach

The sight of it all set off a string of memories in Charlie that ultimately set off another atomic bomb. The horrors of the burns and fire that consumed him sent convulsions through him that pushed him down to the street. Memories of Wuhan and the knowledge he learned pulsed through him. The broadcast towers were Tesla coils and shoved him to the ground, his face in the street. He shook as he recalled the nonsense that he had discovered back in China. Understanding that these waves inundated the Americans around the clock.

The fire consumed his shadow, the scars burning deeper, a hellish, black stigmata. Shadow Man coiled on the ground; burned like a worm in the face of some awful heat. Everything stung. His hands clenched, and he writhed in pain as he recalled the flames that consumed that library—the knowledge of it all. The black soot of his body continued to take what the obelisks gave him.

Shadow Man endured it. His screams were in his mind. He channeled the energy. He lay there . . .

The place disturbed the Pigs surrounding it. Nobody had ever questioned the fortification that they had guarded. Lightning struck the black clouds above them, lighting up the coal man before them. They approached with care, shotguns in hand. The dead man was on fire. The broadcast signals had ignited him, Pacific Palisades—rolling hills of fire, the Jim Morrison sort.

It was a dry ice feeling that came up through Shadow Man’s feet when it hit him. The feeling that was so cold it burned. He thought it was Zhou’s words that had done it, but in fact, it wasn’t. The words created the sensation. The people of his country were self–determined slaves. Pigs all around.

Resurrection

As Shadow Man recalled the knowledge, and icy hot feeling burned through him, he gained more consciousness. The Pigs stepped up with hesitation. The coal man was searing a heat outline into the ground, burning the grey concrete deep—an outline formed in front of their beady eyes.

“What is this?” One asked another.

“Nothing I’ve ever seen.” He checked that his shotgun’s safety was ‘off’, on the red.

With guns pointed, they kicked the dead man on the street, and that’s when the blast came.

An explosion ripped out of Shadow Man. Pigs went through the air and cannonballed into the steel gates they had protected. Shotguns were meaningless as they tossed in the wind, useless weapons in the face of the blast. They rattled down onto the concrete with a “crack” and were smashed to pieces, ineffective in the face of what was coming. Shells sat in the chamber, shells meant to obstruct adversaries and freedom of thought.

Shadow Man pulled himself up from the flaming hot concrete and got back to his feet. He walked through the gate enclosures and surveyed the structure that hid behind the guns and pigs. He clenched his fists to relieve the stress that the shocks had caused his body and continued to move forward.

Inside, people were moving everywhere. Animatronics moved from here to there, driving golf carts and loading television equipment from point A to point B. They didn’t notice him as they zoomed by in their hurried way. Shadow Man saw them and found them pitiful. The barking noises coming from their mouths were nearly unintelligible and reminded him of the garbage he had heard in his government work: a strict code of “Yes, sir” or  “No, sir” and blind obedience.

Bunker

The structure of the broadcast station stood before Charlie. A bunker that Hitler would envy. Concrete in all directions, it stood out in the center of the parking lot and was exempt from the movements of the animatronics. Acidic rain poured down all around Charlie, and the lightning above him illuminated the stage. Carts of mindless and faceless people zoomed back and forth behind Charlie as he approached the entrance and opened the door. [add to this, Hitler’s bunker]

He flexed his hands and entered.

The inside of the structure shocked him. A chaotic scene of madness that he hadn’t known since his former self. The City Bank had order, and so did the Park. In front of him was a scene that mirrored the chaos of day traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Lemmings ran around with scripts and papers from one director to the next. Gophers in jeans were screaming at one another for coffee with extra cream.

Like the Bank, numbers scrolled through digital hellscapes all around him. Various things, such as viewers and time watched, a running tally of how many hours people have wasted sucking their brains to rot, and watching the country die.

Three hours on the Mormon Wives show. Eight Hours on a Korean drama. 10 hours on the lives of an American football player. Lemmings collected all the numbers, and gophers printed the results and ran them back and forth across the desolate hellscape that stood in front of Shadow Man.

He was in awe. The entire scene was surreal to him. From the faceless people who manned the parking lot to the scene spread out before him. No one even noticed him.

Cameras Rolling

Cameras were panned on actors tied to strings, moving to this and that direction, strings attached, and marionette dolls. The cameras rolled, and the garbage they put out streamed towards the populace of the United States.

Unfortunately for the country and its people, the actors, contestants, narrators, and presenters were dummies—lifeless marionette puppets with strings that reached up through the sky. They moved like people, and appeared to be such, but they did not have a mind or heart in their being. They repeated words and repeated sounds to get the human population on the other side of the television engaged and happy.

“Who is Taylor Swift married to?” A puppet would ask.

“Who’s marrying the next bachelor?” One would wonder as the string pulled his shoulder up into the sky.

Strings to Nowhere

The strings to nowhere were most appalling to Shadow Man. Strings that went through the ceiling. Strings that shot up through the bunker. Puppet strings that are held by people on another level set the standard for what we know and see. He looked into the air and all the lemmings, all the gophers, even they were not held to them, only the actors in the play.

The gophers and lemmings stank. Rodent things that permeated into Charlie’s nose. His human qualities were alive, and he was disgusted by them. Fur in suits. Wretched behavior. A lack of awareness. Through madness, he saw the orchestrators of this horror—the Maestros.

As the rodents scurried here and there, Charlie looked to see who was behind all the insanity. He strode into the bunker and walked through the aisle; multiple sets were on his left and right. A gopher here, and a lemming there, brushed into him, only to be covered in the soot that covered his body, but he moved forward.

Words of Dismay

The ticking tablets of numbers stood before him. 10 million watching Mormon Moms, eight million watching Buried on the Bayou, cash flowing in all directions as the actors, contestants, presenters, and narrators were being jerked around by nothing but strings.

What flew around Charlie were words. Words of dismay, words of regret, words of self–loathing. From the marionettes to the cameras they spoke to, words were flowing that were disgusting, full of hate, and did nothing but instill doubt.

He could see them with his own eyes.

They floated from the puppets to the camera. Outside, the broadcast towers were blazing, sending the same messages of depression, hate, doubt, and self-loathing to hundreds of millions of people under the guise of entertainment. Electricity shot between the towers, terrible and thunderous, and prevalent.

The glass offices of the Preachers of Doom stood before him. They were bulletproof and enclosed the psychopaths who made money on preaching this sad emptiness. Charlie saw them chatting around their ornate desks and talking, Cats in suits. He remembered when he used to wear them, picked them out as Armani.

The sounds of everything thundered around him as he walked through the hallways towards the doors.

His fist was full of power, and he smashed the door open, sending the door flying across and leveling the fat Cat sitting at the head of the oaken table. The others flung their chairs and began to scramble from their locations. They scurried under the tables, and a few of the Cats jumped to the ceiling, using their sharp claws to cling to it.  

Shadow Man had no patience and channeled the energy that the bomb in China had given him—the atomic knowledge.

He planted his black legs into the ground as the Cats around him scowled.

Attack

One of the felines sprang and attacked, a mountain lion in its ferocity, but Shadow Man saw it coming and grabbed it by the nape of its neck in mid–air. He flung the thing through a window of the office, sending glass shattering and causing the room to erupt in noise.

A Cat jumped at his legs, dexterous even in its suit. He kicked it in the snout for its trouble, blasting the Cat into a backward flip and landing it implanted into a wall, dead as the eyes behind the gophers and lemmings that had gotten him there.

The remaining Cats trounced him from above and below. Shadow Man used the bomb’s energy to knock them away, break their necks, and leave them all lifeless. He was shaking with the electricity that was coursing through his body. His legs trembled and his hands convulsed. The adrenaline that had shot through him from the fight was running through him like the shots of power that the towers were sending to the American people.

At a certain point, it was almost too much to bear, but unlike the last destinations, Charlie knew that this had to be a final stand of sorts, at least for now. He surveyed the room and saw broken glass, a Cat dead in the wall, Cats with broken necks, and blood everywhere. This satisfied him.

The Cats’ suits were meaningless now. Shadow Man had stripped away their powers, standing up to their greed and power. An Armani suit meant nothing on a dead creature’s body, and the ties were stained in blood.

He had declawed the cats.

Charlie turned his attention to the weapons of hate and despair—the cameras.

Show’s Over

The puppet show carried on, and Shadow Man felt the anger and purpose that had brought him here. He could still see the marionette strings pushing and pulling actors on stage throughout the bunker.

One stage here. Another there. Dummies all around, but Shadow Man started to notice something. The strings were falling. In real time, he saw what looked like fishing line drop down with the speed of snowflakes, wafting in and around the bunker’s room, light as feathers, and finally reach the ground.

It happened all around him, a surreal scene where thousands of white ropes of controls were clouding his vision. Some fell faster than others, and marionettes who hadn’t had an original thought in 10 or 20 years suddenly became human. Their eyes opened with life for the first time in decades, and they stood bewildered. Many were checking their own skin, as if to see if they were real.

One actor to Shadow Man’s right pinched himself, and when he felt pain for the first time, fled the scene like a wild emancipated man. This confused others, not knowing if the movies or TV shows they were in were doing this as a bit.

“Is this cut?”

“Is it time for a break?” They’d ask, looking around.

Still others had been so entrenched in their puppet shows that they collapsed with the lack of guidance, some sobbing like children or having panic attacks. Shadow Man surveyed the scene with initial disgust, but a glimmer of hope. He knew that he had to take it to the next step and destroy the cameras.  

Lights, Camera, Action

Impervious to the actions of those around him, Shadow Man went for the first camera he saw. The cameras rolled, despite the actors having largely fled, been disabled, or wandering the sets in shock. Through their lenses, waves of hate, despair, self–doubt, and all the other despicable messages continued to shoot out into oblivion. A knife could cut those waves.

Shadow Man cut them down. In a rampage, he went through set by set, smashing the purveyors of depression to the ground and smashing them into the concrete floor of the bunker. He did this methodically for hours as the actors scrambled around, either fleeing or writhing on the floor in self-loathing.

When he felt content, Charlie made his way to the exit of the bunker and went outside. To his dismay, the sky was grey, and the towers continued to shoot through the airwaves. The signals hadn’t stopped.

Thunder rumbled and lightning shot around the clouds. Charlie considered what he might have to do. The Cats, the puppets, the cameras, maybe that wasn’t enough. Perhaps he had to blow this place up like they had blown him to smithereens in a place so far away. Send it all back to the shadows, send it to 2D so it can find its own life again.

He stared into the clouds and made his decision. He turned and went back inside the bunker, ready to use the energy he had to annihilate this place. Once inside, he walked over the cameras and debris, searching to find the main control panel of the HQ.  

Headquarters

The office he found was full of controls and panels and stretched for a mile. Hundreds of screens covered one wall, all their frequencies disrupted, and they were saying that they were pausing for a  “Momentary Interruption”. Like the Bank, numbers scrolled on tickers that canvassed the entire place, marking the success or failure of this show and that.

The time had come for Charlie to decide on what to do. He knew what he had to do, but he didn’t know if he was ready for it. Could Shadow Man die? Charlie died and came back. Could Charlie ever really live again? The power that had overtaken him caused hellish seizures and immense pain. The convulsions that fleshed him out ultimately led him to feel more human, but somehow poisoned and still incomplete.

Flashbacks

Flashbacks of his friends and family crossed his mind. Lovers, brothers, parents, cities, countries. A bullet train shot through his memory, each carriage taking him back to one place or another. China, Korea, Houston, wherever the hell this place is.

It occurred to him, even knowing this place meant he had gotten his life back, to a large extent. But he saw the numbers. The screen ticked away numbers, showing him, the job was not done. The streaming services and television were still teaching children to hate, and teaching both children and adults to celebrate greed, amongst other things. The numbers, even with his disruption, kept going, up and up and up.

The information he had learned in Wuhan was that America was destroying itself, that society was imploding, and that was what he knew had to be stopped. It had to be. He had died before, but maybe this time would be –

Baaaaaaaam!

A shotgun whipped Charlie out of his reverie, and he dropped to the ground, bleeding that inkwell blood he was currently full of.

The Pig and Fat Cat

Charlie felt the pain, more than Shadow Man ever could have. The shell had ripped his shoulder to pieces, and he bled on the ground. A pig in one of its sharp uniforms jabbed his Benelli shotgun into Charlie’s face and made it clear that he’d kill the son of a bitch. Behind him, one last Fat Cat stood, his hands tucked into his suit jacket’s pockets, thumbs out, like those assholes on TV shows.

Charlie thought, nobody does that in real life.

Incomprehensible words were going back and forth between the serf and his master. Something about take care of this, how did this happen, all you bastards should be fired. Charlie could barely make out any of it. His dream continued. People came to him—the same people in the prior reverie.

He began to smile. The Pig hit him in the face with a 12–gauge for doing so, and that was the catalyst he needed. Shadow Man went away in his mind as the brutes held him at gunpoint and kicked the shit out of his body.

Fading Vision

He went away to a better place. A place without TV and streaming executives reminding you about how life is hellish and awful, and you should want to die. A place without banks that were predatory and used up everything you got, ripped you off, paid off CEOs, and got bailed out by governments. He went to a better place where kids weren’t social media dolls made of porcelain meant for likes, but were flesh-and-blood children who deserved to be cared for and encouraged.

The Pig and Cat were foggy in his vision. Clouds. Discussing his fate. Something about putting him on TV. Call him a terrorist, Charlie heard.

A terrorist… this upset Charlie; he had spent his life serving the country, and he snapped.

The Burning Fuse

Shadow Man had been here before: the pain, the writhing, the hell. He had essentially died. He flew back, a kite in the wind with no thought, consciousness, or understanding, besides justice. They kicked and beat him, but he thought about justice; he thought about what it would mean if he could rid the black and white hellscape he had awoken up in and do what he needed to do.

He put his hands to the ground and channeled the fuel that the bomb in Wuhan had given him, an unknown disaster that nobody would probably understand. His now 3D hands, once just shadows of themselves, turned white hot for the first time since the Shadow had taken form.

Veins coursed, estuaries ran through them, liquid hot magma from his wrists to his fingertips. The fingertips grew red, like a Devil in Georgia, they burned hot from the fingertips and ran straight back to the shoulder, and that was when the Pig and the bastard leading the way started to worry.

Shadow Man, like someone possessed, was wrenched from where he had lain and thrown over. The seizures began, and that black mamba venom that had been running through the forearms shot through him from head to toe.

Blam! Blam!

Three shotgun shells went into Charlie, but Shadow Man stayed alive. His mind survived. The memories and lessons he had survived, and the convulsions continued. His seizures grew more erratic, and the tyrants grew more concerned. Charlie’s left arm shot erratically to the left, a jerk, a hitch. The right arm shocked and clamped up, his elbow coming up and down.

His mind wasn’t up and down. His mind was as clear as ever.

Time’s Up       

The explosion ripped the entire building to pieces. Glass flew in every direction, and not a single concrete section of the place would later stand. Towers of steel flew into the air, piercing skyscrapers like arrows unleashed. The bodies that hadn’t fled had nothing left. The Pigs became bacon.

For the first time in decades, Americans’ TV signals and streaming devices were destroyed, and some were forced to talk and discuss things with their families and friends. It was a weird day for many. Some even read books, as bizarre as that sounds.

Most people don’t remember that there was an explosion that blew into the darkness, that day, the dark, cold day that people had been so accustomed to.

What they don’t remember is that streets for miles around, colors showered the roads, and children ran into the streets. Kids ran into the streets to play again, no longer waiting for what the TV and streaming services were going to tell them, but maybe what their friends would.

No one found Charlie’s body. The whole was 18 feet deep, where his own personal atom bomb went off. But people who were there at the park and the bank claim they have seen him floating around, back in 2D.

Let’s hope so. There are still many battles to fight.

– The End, For Now –

You can follow Carson Knight on X: Carson Knight (@CarsonKnightwr) / X