Synopsis
In Avengers #14-16 Captain America (Steve Rogers) successfully led a scratch team of Avengers against the vampire hordes of the Blood Hunt event. Springboarding from that last issue he inaugurated a continuing team he calls the Avengers Emergency Response Squad (AvengERS). This has a large membership and whoever's currently available will deal with any emergency that arises.
This time we see many ghosts of apes aggressively haunting Kingsport, Massachusetts, and learn that it happens every night.
In Avengers Mansion Edwin Jarvis is taking out the trash while Hawkeye (Clint Barton) savours his new batch of ginger cakes and tells Cap that he'll takes as many shifts as he's asked as long as Jarvis is cooking. Night Thrasher (Dwayne Taylor) shows Cap the matching team jackets he's supplied (and showed last issue to the team members who didn't go on that issue's mission). Hercules is on monitor duty and alerts them to the Kingsport hauntings. The ghosts are radioactive and it's spoiling the food and water. They've received no help from the authorities so Mayor Tom Sole has made a plea in the media. Clint grabs a jacket and goes to prep a quinjet.
They land in the town (all with jackets) and start hitting ghosts and saving citizens. But only demi-god Herc's blows have any effect, the others' just pass through the apes. NT takes time out to test the reservoir for radiation and reports that the ghapes quietly let him do it. He also reports that it's cosmic radiation. Hawk leads some apes away leaving Herc to enjoy battling the others. But Clint winds up defending a bunch of townsfolk until Cap vaults in to help him. Thrasher reports that he's tried using sign language to communicate with the apes but to no avail. Then Clint tries a longshot and just tells the foes to "Stand down" and they do. He also reminds Cap that he's partially deaf and can lipread, and says the apes seem to be saying the same thing over and over again which he interprets as "Off drag". But then Herc joins them and his godly All-Speak ability enables him to 'translate' it to Kragoff, ie Ivan Kragoff the Red Ghost who used cosmic radiation to create his Super-Apes.
Elsewhere in town 1 of the ghost apes sees some of the Serpent Society in a shack. We saw a slightly-different group last issue doing something near where the AvengERS were busy with their previous task. This time Sidewinder is again on watch while the mysterious Tiger Snake leads a different pair (Asp and Princess Python) searching a fruit cellar for moonshine booze. But this stuff was created by an evil embalmer who added bone fragments from murdered folk to produce the mystic Griever's Swill. The Princess is fed up with running these 'errands' for their leader Pit Viper. They're not making any money and she doesn't believe in Mephisto and the Serpent's Tears this will contribute to. TS tells her that he owes his life to the demon, and in the end the payoff will be *big*.
In the middle of town the Mayor is ordering the police to keep firing at the ghosts even though it does no good. Then Cap leads the AvengERS to tell him that the apes aren't attacking the town, they're looking for Ivan Kragoff. Sole doesn't recognise the name but says that an unknown out-of-towner recently bought an old house that had been foreclosed. He leads them there and Taylor detects large amounts of cosmic radiation here and 1 infra-red reading in the basement. Rogers tells Herc to bring the building down.
We get an interlude back at Avengers Mansion where some other team members are waiting for any other crisis that crops up. Lightspeed and Wasp are on the roof. Young Julie Power complains about fitting shifts in between her College work at ESU but not going on missions. She's also in awe of Janet Van Dyne who seems so good at multi-tasking:- Running her fashion empire and the detective agency (in the Avengers Inc mini-series). She's led the Avengers and even learned an alien language while she was trapped in the Microverse (between the end of Secret Invasion and the end of the 2010 Avengers series). Jan tells her not to try to be like her or anyone else but be the best version of herself.
With the above-ground house cleared away the AvengERS can go down to the basement. Thrasher has a flashlight which reveals lots of canned food but no Kragoff. Clint recalls that he can go invisible but that should still mean he can see. So he fires a flash arrow (without warning his colleagues) which makes the Red Ghost involuntarily turn visible. The RG has a big 'gun' which he claims is a coagulation ray. He tells them he nearly died recently and came here to heal, but his near-death allowed the ghosts to find him. They are the ghosts of his earlier failed attempts at creating his Super-Apes. They didn't gain super-powers but they did become smart enough to learn to speak. NT's heard enough so he dives on the villain because he recognised that his gun was just an X-ray flashlight. And Hercules suggests that his adamantine mace may be able to absorb and disperse the apes' radiation energy and give them peace.
In a 2nd Mansion interlude Lightning (Miguel Santos) has persuaded Shang-Chi to watch with him a 3-film set of action buddy movies co-starring Arnold Schwarzburger and Simon Williams (Wonder Man of the AvengERS). Gay Miguel is trying to convince Shang that the film is really about 2 macho men trying to convince everyone that they're not in love with each other.
Meanwhile back at the real action Clint Barton is reporting another lip-reading chat with the ghost apes, with Hercules occasionally correcting his translation. It seems that they can't go to their final rest until they kill Kragoff. Cap and the Mayor can't allow that because Kragoff must face human justice. But Steve says they can do whatever they want to him short of killing. Ivan obviously doesn't agree. But the apes pour down into the basement with him. And when they leave he's a whimpering wreck. Then Herc's mace removes their cosmic radiation and the ape ghosts fade away. And the team prepare to help repair the town.
This issue's epilogue is in a wooded area deep beneath(?!) Texas streets. A man with a bowie knife refers to it as their habitat as he whittles short stakes while watching a report of the vampire invasion of New York on a large screen apparently floating in the air. He tells his daughter Abby she's ready to take up the family business and go vampire hunting in NY. We see her stepping over the body of a 'fanger' that she's apparently just ripped the heart out of.