CHAPTER ONE
My name is Doug Dudley. I have dedicated my life to the researching of the life of Frank Castle, A.K.A. The Punisher. What you are about to read is a documentation of the events that occurred between July 4th, 2014 and July 15th, 2015. According to the federal government, these events never took place and the Punisher never existed. But I’m here to tell you, that these events are real. The Punisher was real. Now I’m not going to pretend that all of you are going to accept this as the truth. I know many of you will put this down right now, will continue to believe the lies that they tell you and will live out your lives to whatever measure you find suitable, storing this away into a deep, dark pit in the back of your head, never to think of this ever again. Hell, I don’t even know if any of this will ever reach the eyes of anyone at all. But I don’t care. I will not let fear keep me from telling the truth to all of you.
I first became aware of the Punisher in December of 2020. I was only eight years old at the time, so while I was indeed alive for the events to be described, I wasn’t old enough to remember any of it. I, unlike many of you who grew up after the events with parents who never told you about the Punisher, was made very aware by my parents that the Punisher did indeed exist, but my parents told me of him to make him out to be the bad guy. I always would lie awake at night afraid that the Punisher would come to hurt me, panicking at the faintest creak, the slightest breeze in the wind, the tiniest sound at all. Then on December 14, 2020, a heavy snow had come and laid its head on the streets of New York and school had been called off. While I was walking home from my friend’s house after a long day of snowball fights on a long sidewalk that no one else was walking along at the time, a man in a windowless van drove by me. His van came to a halt a few yards ahead of me and after a moment backed up to where I was, stopping again to talk to me. The man had cream colored skin and wore a worn green snowcap, a short blonde goatee and had a wide smile on his face as he looked at me through the driver’s window. “Hello little boy,” he said in a raspy voice. “You look cold. Why don’t you get in the back of my van? I’ll make you some hot chocolate if you’d like.” I was very cold, and the feeling of hot chocolate warming my near frozen throat sounded heavenly and I eagerly accepted his offer. He climbed out of the front seat into the back and opened the doors for me, but as I got into the back, I noticed that there were no seats, and there was no hot chocolate. All there was was him wearing a sick smile. I got the feeling that he wanted to hurt me and I started to leave. But he was too fast and I was too slow. As I let one foot to the pavement and brought up my other foot to follow suit, he grabbed my ankles tightly and I tripped and fell face first to the pavement. I scratched and clawed and kicked, trying desperately to get loose from his anaconda grip, but he just laughed to himself with his smile growing wider. It wasn’t long before I realized I couldn’t get away from him. All I could do then was scream, and did I scream. I screamed as loud as I could. He dragged me into the van and shut the door. I tried to go for the door in the front but he pulled me back by my little jeans. I bit his hand in a last ditch effort. He didn’t like that, so he punched me in the stomach. I couldn’t scream any more, my lungs drained of oxygen, and all I could do was cry as he mounted himself on top of me and ripped my tiny sweat pants off my legs.
Then he came.
Suddenly, one of the back doors was ripped off its hinges like it was nothing. There he stood the door in his arms as he threw it away. He matched every description my dad had told me. He was massive, had to be at least 300 pounds, 6’10” with a rugged face with scruffy black hair. He wore a black jacket over a black shirt. On his shirt lay a large, ghostly skull going across the chest with 5 downwards teeth along the abdomen. His face was layered with scars from all the wars he had fought. Right then, I knew he was The Punisher. The man I had feared so much would be the death of me had come to save me. He told the man in a deep growling voice to let me go, and the man rebuked him with a polite “Go [frick] yourself.” Punisher immediately grabbed the man on top of me by the collar with one arm and pulled him out of the van with ease. By then, the man had gone from a smile to a terrified expression. He knew he was in trouble. Frank pulled him off to the right side of the van. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard it. I heard the man pleading desperately, promising to give all the money in his wallet, then resorting to even giving him his car. Frank didn’t respond at all. The next thing I heard I will never forget. I heard a mixture of the sound like a hundred sponges squishing together and a deep crack that echoed in the van. I then heard a deep gurgling sound and more sponge-like sounds that soon stopped, followed by a thud onto the ground. Then I heard the sound of heavy footsteps start to walk away, slowly decreasing in sound and the footsteps slowly walk farther along the sidewalk, until they finally disappeared. The other man didn’t come back into the van, so I put on my pants slowly, staring into the open doorway. Once my pants were back on, I slowly stepped out, looking to the left and right to make sure he wasn’t waiting behind the side of the van to surprise me. I slowly started to walk to the right side of the van. What I saw made me sick to my stomach. The man lie dead on the sidewalk with a blank expression on his face. His chest was burst open and his ribs were collapsed. To the side of him near the front tire lay his heart, splattered with blood.
If you have comments, suggestions, or anything else, tell me in the only place you can! And make sure to look out for my upcoming series of editorials, titled "The Dude is Pissed Off!" where I, The Dude, talks about things in Comic Book Movies, storylines, and comics period that piss me off.
Ciao!