Drax The Destroyer (2005 series) #4

An intergalactic prison transport crashed on Earth and only 5 prisoners survived:- Drax The Destroyer, Lunatik, Paibok the Power Skrull and the 2 Blood Brothers. Young teens Cammi and Dex saw them. Lunatik and Paibok took over their town Coot's Bluff, Alaska to get a workforce to salvage stuff from the crash to build a small escape ship. Meanwhile Drax and the Brothers fought a lot, and getting hit seemed to make Drax smarter until Paibok killed him. Cammi tricked the aliens into letting her have his body and saw a new slimmer version of Drax break out of it. He's retained his intelligence and strength but lost the capability of firing cosmic energy blasts. But he's also naked ...

... so Cammi has now led him into town to steal some trousers and knives from some of the abandoned shops, declining her advice to take a shotgun. Drax ascertains that the girl is 'nearly' 11 and tells her to go away now but she says she's not leaving him. She's got nothing (but a drunk mother) to keep her here. They go out into the rain and her friend Dex sees the alien ordering her not to follow him. The kid tells her he tried to contact the Avengers or the Fantastic Four but got nowhere. He figures they only help rich folk. Cammi persuades him to come with her to the school because that's where she figures Drax will wind up eventually.

But Drax is heading to the crash site where Lunatik and the Blood Brothers are. Lunatik has been killing workers/townsfolk pour encourager les autres. 1 of the Brothers complains to the other that it's just depleting the workforce, but the other Brother suggests that Lunatik is just taking out his frustration because the task is impossible - and nobody wants to tell Paibok that. Lunatik finally tells the Brothers to take the workers away because all the important bits of the spaceship self-destructed to keep tech out of the wrong hands.

We get a brief glimpse of Cammi and Dex approaching the school where principal Mrs Abrahms spots them with a snarl.

After the Brothers and workers leave Drax attacks Lunatik and decapitates him. Both parts are still alive and Drax knows that Lunatik can reconnect them and recover from this, so he settles the matter by stomping the head to bits and commends the villain to Mephisto. The Brothers hear this but decide to keep going to town to get some food.

Cammi leaves Dex in a waiting room while she confronts the 'principal' who she knows is really the shape-shifting Skrull. She tells Paibok how Drax was reborn different, but he thinks she's not told him everything.

On the way back to town the Brothers come across Lunatik's headless body strung up between 2 trees. Drax attacks *them* and tells the townsfolk to flee. After a brutal battle 1 Brother winds up dead and the other swearing revenge. But they are interrupted by Paibok in his natural form along with Cammi. He says that the girl has been 'tainted' by her association with Drax and will be shunned by her fellow humans, which makes her Drax' responsibility now. The 2nd Brother still wants to kill him but the Skrull shuts him up by knocking him out. Then he reveals a distress beacon he retrieved from a dead guard and triggers it. Now they just have to wait for 'rescue'. Cammi asks Drax if he's going to kill the 2nd Blood Brother, but he says no because for that psi-bonded duo life without the other will be worse than death. So the trio settle down to wait.

The townsfolk start to clear up the mess with the help of neighbouring towns. There are a lot of bodies to be bodybagged. SHIELD helicopters arrive too. Dex's parents are alive but traumatised. He went to the crash site and found it razed to the ground. He also found a message left for him by Cammi written on paper in blood (but not hers because he knows she's stopped self-harming). It says she's going to be happy. He leaves it with the body of her mother.

We see Drax and Cammi in space in Prison Transport Vessel Dredge 02 which obviously answered the distress beacon from PTVD 01, the spaceship that crashed in #1 on the way to the Kyln intergalactic prison.