Valkyrie
rides over the face of the Earth. Phil Sheldon sees her from the window of his
plane but his seatmate, Raven Darkholme, suddenly screams and mutates, having
forgotten to take her psychiatric medications….
At
the airport, a Secret Service agent taking her away shoves an old man out of
the way; the sound of breaking glass is taken for a bomb but it is only a
device to suppress magnetic fields. With the device broken, the old man (Magneto)
begins to attract all metal to himself including the jet, causing massive
destruction….
Phil
visits a Texas prison where Warden Wilson Fisk shows him the Shock Corridor,
the wing full of mutants. Scott Summers who had to be blinded after he
incinerated his entire family, Kitty Pryde, seriously injured when becoming
solid while passing through a cell door, Pietro Maximoff, whose legs have been
amputated to keep him still. Fisk reveals that the President himself often visits these
prisoners. Phil was allowed in without his camera, as a favor to a dying man.
Outside he sits by a stream to unwind and a little girl invites him to a picnic
with her and her mom….
Don
Blake leads a crackpot Cult of Thor; Emma Frost leads the Church of the Next
Generation which adopts children and then performs psychic surgery on them to
bring out “psychic abilities.”
Out
West, Phil visits the Quintano Carnival and meets Princess Python. He sees
Saint John (Johnny Blaze) who sets his head aflame with gasoline then rides
around on his motorcycle; he doesn’t survive….
Phil
sleeps and dreams of a place where heroes have arisen to make the world a
better place….
Militiamen
Victor Creed, Jack Monroe, and Bucky Barnes are arrested.
Phil
visits retired space pilot Ben Grimm who tells him of Reed Richards who wanted
Ben to help him hijack a space rocket to fly out to study cosmic radiation. Ben
refused as the ship was lacking in some essential safety equipment. Richards
talked a colleague named Victor Von Doom to fly him and the Storms into space.
They were all killed in a gruesome fashion. Ben can’t help thinking that things
might have turned out differently had he flown them….
Back
in New York, Phil begins to feel ill; he recalls a Bugle photographer named
Peter Parker who was bitten by an irradiated spider, contracted a virus but
managed to infect many of his friends and co-workers before any symptoms
showed. And then Phil realizes he has contracted Parker’s virus; he collapses
in an alley and dies, his briefcase popping open and his notes and photos blowing away….
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