In
an alternate reality where everything has gone wrong, Phil Sheldon sees a
Patriot missile from the US military strike and destroy the Avengers Quinjet,
killing all on board. He recalls how Tony Stark was critically wounded by a
grenade when he was trying to mediate between a secessionist group and the
National Guard; he saved his life with technology then formed a revolutionary
cell called the Avengers, with Hank Pym, Janet Van Dyne, Captain America,
Stephen Strange, and others. He heads to a bar reading about Matt Murdock, a
boy who was killed by radioactive waste thrown from a truck. At the bar he is
hassled by a barfly who is a Canadian with a weird bone disease….
T'Challa
has been arrested with the radical Black Panthers; Clint Barton was executed in
San Francisco by a military advisor; Wanda Maximoff has turned against the
Avengers, seeking immunity.
Phil
journeys out to the prison camp where the Kree invaders are being held to
interview their leader. After being required to don a radiation suit, he meets
the leader, Mar-Vell who relates how their invasion fleet came across the
corpse of the Silver Surfer in space and the radiation it emitted negated the
Kree cloaking devices so they were shot down by the Earth military. The few
survivors were imprisoned in these camps located at an atomic testing ground
and over the years, all of the Kree have developed cancer….
In
Washington DC, Phil sees a homeless woman, Jean-Marie Beaubier fused at the
elbow with her dead brother Jean-Paul. Phil then meets with Nick Fury, who, on
finding out Phil is wring a book, punches him in the gut. Phil assures Fury he
has no political agenda and only wanted to talk about Captain America. Fury
shoots a rabid dog and tell Phil that Cap introduced him to cannibalism. A
prostitute, Jean Grey, approaches them and Fury calmly shoots her to death. He
then tells Phil that Cap was killed recently and then fires a bullet into his
own head….
The
corpse of Galactus has been found floating in space; a porn star called
Enchantress is accused of murdering a Hollywood producer; there has been a
sighting of the reclusive US President Charles Xavier….
In
a Chicago slum, a woman tells Phil that her baby Daimon Hellstrom will be the
messiah some day. He meets Rick Jones and his drug-addicted girlfriend
Marlo Chandler. Jones, drinking liquid morphine, tells Phil how he was traveling
across Arizona when a scientist tried to warn him away from an area. The man
pushed Jones into a trench when a bomb went off; the man was immediately
swelling and breaking out in cancerous tumors; Jones heard that he was still
alive being kept in a lab under the code name: Hulk. Marlo sneers at his story
and Jones beats her. Phil leaves hurriedly. In the street it begins to snow but
Phil trips over the corpse of a murder victim wearing a black T-short with a
stylized skull on it….