Synopsis / Summary / Plot
This issue's surrounding flashback is James Wa's interview. Pepper Potts is doing the interviewing again. His dad was a successful baseball player in Japan, and moved to the US so his son could have a better chance at following in his footsteps. James loved baseball too, and was good at it in High School, mainly because of his speed. (He doesn't want to talk about where his nickname Calamity came from, but it may have involved him being too rash and trying for 1 base too far.) But he also wanted to be an engineer, and studied Engineering at college, at the same time competing successfully in athletics.
But when drunken truck driver Carl Crenshaw smashed into his car, that ended Wa's sports career when it took his legs. But he went on to design the Calamity brand of Cheetah prosthetics, which he uses himself and which made him a millionaire.
Later flashbacks to the interview establish that James doesn't know where Crenshaw is, but that he'd very much like to find him.
Now cyborg zombies have invaded LA. Pepper has sent Anthem, Aralune, Calamity and Mulholland to deal with it. She's kept Supernaut and Veda out of it to see how the smaller team cope. (And Heavy is off injured.)
Anthem fries a lot of zombies with a lightning bolt, but shatters a lot of windows in the process. Mulholland is only using her hammer to hit zombies, and avoiding using her power to charge it up. James calls her on it, and she responds by ramming the hammer handle into his stomach. But this just makes Calamity go berserk, racing around bashing zombies with a makeshift weapon. Until Aralune changes into a gelatinous blob and envelops him. But the damage is done and there are no zombies left 'alive' for study.
Back at base Mulholland Black gets revenge on James Wa by reminding him how he froze when ordered to kill to save LA last issue. But their argument is broken up by the return of 2nd-in-command (in the field) Heavy, mostly recovered from being shot in the face last time. Dennis Murray orders Mulholland to go see Pepper, and James to see Anthem.
Henry Hellrung takes Wa to task about not following the plan out there. And he either deliberately let Mulholland hit him, or her ability to nail a very-fast moving target is much greater than they realised. James admits that last issue's mission has got to him. Henry says it would have been a dilemma for anyone, but tells Wa to shape up.
Pepper Potts is asking Mullholland Black 1 of the same questions - did she mean to hit Calamity, and if so how did she do it? Pepper thinks she subconsciously used her powers. Holly expects to be kicked off the team, but Pepper just wants her to learn how to better control them consciously. To that end she gives Holly a task.
They go down to the morgue to see the body of Avona, 1 of the those who were fired in #1. Her body was found last issue. Avona's power was a psychic link to her sword, and somehow she kept the sword after she was depowered and thrown off the base. And she appears to have been killed by/with it. Potts wants Black to use her own power of tapping into the psychic energy of places and objects - to find out how Avona died.
Meanwhile James is visiting Milo Fields. Milo has a neural network that he uses to control his Supernaut armour. But now he's using it to surf the Stark info system to find out more about the agents who took away the Infernal Man in #1, who seem to work for some agency call SHADOW. Wa is very interested in the capabilities of the Stark system, but his musing is cut short by another zombie invasion.
Meanwhile (again) Hellrung is hosting a meeting with city councillors who want the team to quit the historic Bradbury Building before they wreck it. This despite the fact that Tony Stark now owns the place, and it's been reinforced to Avengers standards. But he has to halt the meeting because of multiple oubreaks of zobos, including some of them just outside the Bradbury HQ. Calamity escorts the councillors to a secure basement.
The cyborg zombies are called zobos because it seems someone is creating them from hobos. (I think they're also killing them 1st, hence zombies. But these zombies aren't infectious, though they do seem to want to bite.)
Pepper wants the whole team scrambled this time, except Mulholland who's continuing her 'autopsy', but Anthem gives Calamity the day off clear his head. Supernaut goes to Culver City, Heavy and Veda to Century City, and Anthem and Aralune handle the zobos on the doorstep.
But Pepper sees Calamity accessing the computer system at super-speed. And then we see him outside Crenshaw's stationary caravan (or travel trailer to you Americans) with a baseball bat.