Marvel's Ant-Man - Phase Two

by Alex Irvine

  It was a standoff.

  “Here we go,” said Mitchell Carson as he backed away so he wasn’t in anyone’s line of fire.

  “Drop your gun,” Hope said to Cross, biting off each word.

  “You know, I came to the house the other night to kill him, but you were there,” Cross said. He didn’t drop his gun.

  “You’re sick and I can help you,” she replied. Her voice shook, but her hands were steady. “Just put the gun down.”

  “I wasn’t ready to kill you then. But I think I am now!” Cross was lost in full-blown madness. Whether it was the Yellowjacket particles or not—whatever the cause—he’d completely lost it.

  “Drop your gun now!”

  “You picked the wrong side, Hope.” Cross’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Inside the pod chamber, Scott realized he still had an option. The discs. He hadn’t used them. He got the blue one out. Blue for enlarging.

  He threw the disc at the window. When it made contact, it forcibly expanded the distance between the atoms of the window, shattering it in a violent explosion. Scott charged through the hole, shrinking as he went. Cross shot at Hank but missed him because the blast of force had pushed him off balance. Gunfire erupted. The bodyguards were shooting at Scott, but they didn’t have a chance of hitting him. Hank threw a punch at Cross and grappled for his gun. Another bodyguard attacked Hope, knocking her gun away. She fought back, landing a couple good hits that took him down.

  Another gun went off. Flashing back to full-size, Scott saw Hank fall and land flat on his back with blood leaking from a wound in his shoulder. “Dad!” Hope screamed.

  The last guard standing leveled his gun at Hank. Scott shrank again and hit him in the midsection. Before he could recover, Scott grew again and knocked him out with a final shot to the jaw.

  “Hank,” he said, running over to Pym and flipping up his mask. “Hank. Listen, you’re gonna be okay. All right? You’re gonna be just fine.” The wound looked bad, but maybe not fatal. Hank’s eyes were glassy with shock.

  Then Scott heard a clink and felt something against the back of his head. He’d forgotten about Darren Cross.

  “Take the suit off,” Cross said, “or I’ll blow your brains out and peel it off.”

  Scott didn’t know what to do… but Hope did. She still had an earpiece, and she could still control the ants. Cross tried to fire his gun, but there were ants blocking the hammer. Bullet ants. A moment later they were all over him, biting for all they were worth. Flailing at them, Cross grabbed the case containing the Yellowjacket suit and ran… while Mitchell Carson crept up to one of the fallen bodyguards and retrieved the vial of Yellowjacket serum.

  Alarms were sounding all through the Pym Tech complex. Cross reached the outer atrium of the lab. Picking off the last of the bullet ants, he issued a series of orders to his waiting men. “Get me to the roof and radio ahead. I want to make sure the helicopter’s ready to take off,” he said. “You two,” he added to a pair of security guards near the vault door, “kill anything that comes out of that vault.”

  Hope knelt over her father, who was in bad shape. “Can you move?” she asked him. Hank didn’t answer.

  “We need to get him out of here,” Scott said.

  Hope turned to him. “Go get that suit,” she said. They hadn’t gone through all this just to watch Darren Cross get away.

  CHAPTER 20

  Scott raced out of the vault and immediately started dodging bullets. He veered away from the two guards, shrinking and dashing across the resin model of the new Cross Technologies complex. The guards kept firing, their bullets chewing the display to pieces. Scott couldn’t dodge them forever—but he didn’t have to, because Luis came to the rescue, flying into the room and taking both of the guards out with two hammering right hands. “Hey, Scotty,” he said, shaking his sore hand. He couldn’t see where Scott had gone. “Hey, did I save your life? Scotty? Scotty?”

  Scott appeared, expanding to full-size. “Thank you, Luis,” he panted.

  “Hey, are we the good guys?” Luis wondered out loud, as if it had just occurred to him.

  “Yeah, we’re the good guys.”

  Luis grinned. “Feels kinda weird, you know?”

  “Yeah. But we’re not done yet.” Scott started running again. As he shrank he warned Luis, reminding him of the explosive charges in the particle chamber. “Get out of here before this place blows!”

  Luis started running, too… and then he stopped as he passed the server room. “Oh! That guy.” He couldn’t just leave the security guard lying in there. If he was going to be a good guy, he had to act like one.

  He swiped his ID card and started yelling at the unconscious guard. “Hey! We’re getting out of here.”

  Back in the Yellowjacket pod chamber, Hope tried to get her father to his feet. “The charges are set. We’ve got to find a way out of here and fast.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hank said. He was out of breath, but he could sit up… and maybe more. “I’m not going to die. And neither are you.” He held up a keychain. Dangling at the end of it was a tiny tank.

  Hope looked at her father, who, even in his agony, had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. “It’s not a keychain,” he said.

  Paxton had called in the shots fired when he’d first heard them, and let go of the two lowlifes who had swiped his car. Now everything was spiraling out of control. “Total chaos in here,” he radioed in to HQ. “Multiple shots fired.”

  Above him, something blew the walls out and over the front of Pym Tech’s main building. A full-size tank, engine revving, had burst through the wall and crashed down—trailing a giant-sized chain and what looked to Paxton like a key ring. What was going on here?

  He had no idea, but he was a good cop, and he radioed it in. “And there’s a tank.”

  The dispatcher asked him to repeat it.

  Luis got the security guard out, but he had to detour around the tank to reach the paramedics. “A little help!” He handed the guard off and saw Hope and Hank climbing out of the tank. “I got him,” he said, helping Hank walk while Hope called out to another pair of paramedics.

  “We need a doctor!” she said. The paramedics took Hank away and Luis looked around, wondering what to do next. Where was Scott? How long did they have before the building blew?

  He heard the unmistakable horn of his van right before he saw it swerve into the VIP parking area. Dave and Kurt were still on the job.

  On the roof, Cross and his men—and, most important, the Yellowjacket case—were on the helicopter. “Let’s go!” he shouted over the rotor wash.

  Then he saw a cloud of flying ants coming from the roof access door. Lang, he thought. He pulled out his gun and started firing. He didn’t have a great chance of hitting any of them, but who knows? Maybe he would get lucky.

  Riding on the faithful Ant-thony, Scott was toward the front of the flying battalion of carpenter ants. Cross’s first shots roared by without hitting anything. He kept firing and Scott felt a shock below him. Suddenly he was falling into space. He landed on the back of another carpenter ant a foot below. Looking back he saw one of Ant-thony’s wings spiraling down toward the roof.

  “Ant-thony!” Scott cried out. A nine-millimeter bullet hitting a carpenter ant… Ant-thony never knew what hit him, Scott thought. He turned back toward the helicopter. Its fuselage door was slamming shut, but Scott could see Darren Cross inside, looking right at him.

  “You’re going to regret that,” he said. The helicopter lifted away, and the ants followed.

  Paxton watched the helicopter take off. Following its flight path, he saw the van. The one Lang had driven, and now he knew the two losers inside had something to do with the chaos here because a third guy in a security guard uniform was hopping into the front seat.

  “Get out of that van!” Paxton shouted, running toward the van.

  “What?” Luis shouted back.

  “Get out of that van!”

  Luis touched h
is ear. “It’s too loud—there’s a tank! I can’t hear you!”

  Dave gunned the van and they made their getaway, Paxton shouting uselessly after them.

  If Darren Cross thought he’d gotten away, he didn’t think so for long. The helicopter took a little while to reach full speed, and carpenter ants were faster than most people knew. Scott caught up to it before it was five hundred yards from Pym Tech. He punched a hole through the window and knocked out the first bodyguard.

  Cross responded quickly and carelessly. He started shooting at Scott, making more holes in the windows and fuselage of the copter. “Are you crazy? Put the gun down!” one of the other bodyguards yelled. Still trying to track Scott, Cross fired directly at the guard holding the Yellowjacket case. The case saved the guard’s life, but the bullet broke it open.

  Scott looked down at the Yellowjacket suit. Maybe there was a chance!

  Cross saw him and swung the gun up to point it right at Scott. “Did you think you could stop the future with a heist?” he shouted.

  “It was never just a heist,” Scott shouted back. He saw understanding on Cross’s face right as all of the explosive charges inside Pym Tech went off at once.

  The explosion blew out every window in the building and started to collapse the upper floors. Then—just as Hank Pym had predicted when they first planned the operation—the Pym Particles did what they did best. Unleashed by the explosives, they shrank the entire Pym Tech building into a tiny glowing point of fire. From a gurney being loaded into an ambulance, Hank watched his life’s work disappear—but Darren Cross’s crazed plans were also disappearing. They’d done what they had to do.

  A moment later the tiny fireball winked out, and Pym Tech was gone as if it had never existed.

  Cross kept shooting at Scott until Scott made a mistake. He dodged a bullet and lost his balance. He skidded out under the fuselage door and grew back to full-size, hanging on the outside of the helicopter. He glanced down—the ground was a long way off—and saw the van roaring along the road below them. Dave and Luis and Kurt were still on the job. He’d been right to trust them.

  Scott clambered back into the helicopter. He didn’t see Darren Cross for a moment… and then, growing into view, the Yellowjacket suit appeared.

  Uh-oh, Scott thought. He shrank again and Cross blasted away at him with the Yellowjacket’s energy beams, which were mounted on little appendages that stuck up from its shoulders. The beams tore through the helicopter, destroying whatever they touched—and in his frenzy, Cross didn’t care when a stray beam fried part of the dashboard between the two pilots in the cockpit.

  The helicopter swerved crazily. “Got to set her down somewhere!” one of the pilots shouted. The helicopter started descending as he wrestled to keep control of it.

  Scott launched himself at Cross and landed a powerful punch right on the Yellowjacket mask. He bounced off and Cross shrank, rocketing toward him. They traded punches and Cross kept firing energy beams. He didn’t hit Scott, but he did manage to hit both pilots. The helicopter went into a spin.

  The force of the spin threw both Scott and Cross across the floor and into the open Yellowjacket case. The case slammed shut, and as the helicopter kept tilting, it slid back—and out the open door. They bounced around inside the falling case. Cross’s beams kept zapping out. They shattered a roll of candy into little green pieces. Cross’s phone activated as Scott bounced off its home button.

  “I’m gonna disintegrate you!” Cross shouted.

  They both were flattened by the impact of the padded case as it hit the ground—but it wasn’t the ground, they figured out right away. Chlorinated water came pouring in through the holes made by Yellowjacket’s beams. They’d landed in a swimming pool.

  Cross expanded to full-size, blowing the case apart. The terrified family whose pool they’d landed in started screaming. “Call 911!” the father said, but Yellowjacket disintegrated the table where his phone lay. Scott flashed back to full-size, rising up out of the pool and slamming Cross aside before he could harm the family. Both of them crashed through a patio door and then back out onto the patio. Scott, knocked flat on his back, saw the miniature Cross coming at him… and he saw a discarded Ping-Pong paddle lying near his hand. So he did what came naturally.

  He grabbed the paddle and slapped Yellowjacket out of the air. Cross hurtled across the back yard and hit a bug zapper hanging from the eaves over the shattered patio door. It crackled violently and then subsided.

  Scott turned to the family, who were huddled together by the far end of the pool. “It’s okay,” he said.

  They screamed and ran. Scott looked at the bug zapper, wondering if it had really put an end to Yellowjacket. Then he heard an unwelcome familiar voice. “Police! Put your hands up! Get ’em up!”

  He turned around, seeing Paxton and Gale. Scott flipped the Ant-Man mask up so they could see his face. “Scott?” Paxton said in amazement.

  Scott was relieved to be talking to a cop he knew. “Paxton. You have to listen to me—”

  But Paxton didn’t. Instead he zapped Scott with a Taser, dropping him like a sack of potatoes to the pool deck.

  CHAPTER 21

  Scott woke up in the back of Paxton’s squad car. The Ant-Man helmet was next to him on the backseat, but he couldn’t reach it. “Paxton. Turn around, take me back,” he said.

  “I am taking you back. To prison.”

  “There’s something in that backyard that needs to be destroyed,” Scott said. “In the bug zapper, it—”

  Paxton stomped on the brakes and turned to face Scott. “You need to desist right now! Your delusions are out of hand!”

  Delusions? Scott thought. Does he think the suit is a delusion?

  Things might have gotten worse, but the squad car’s radio crackled and a dispatcher came on. “All units, we have a two thirty-six in progress at eight-forty Winter Street.”

  The address registered with both Scott and Paxton at the same time. “Cassie!” Scott said.

  Paxton floored it and the squad car squealed away, lights and sirens going. They got to Paxton’s house in record time and Paxton brought the car to a rocking halt, opening the door before the car had completely stopped. “Paxton, let me help.”

  “Don’t move,” Paxton ordered him as he and Gale got out of the car.

  “Let me help!” Scott begged, but Paxton ignored him. He saw Maggie coming toward him from a cluster of other police cars that had also responded. She was frantic. “He’s got Cassie!”

  “Who’s got Cassie?”

  “That thing, that thing, I don’t know what it is!”

  Scott threw himself flat on the backseat. Maybe he couldn’t reach the helmet with his hands, but if he could work his head into it… yes! It worked! The faceplate swung shut, and Scott shrank out of the handcuffs. Then he was out of the car and running toward the house to save his daughter.

  Inside Cassie’s room, her toy train ran around and around while she sat on the bed trying not to look scared of the man in the yellow-and-black suit. “Are you a monster?” she asked.

  “Do I look like a monster?” Cross responded.

  “I want my daddy.”

  Cross nodded. “I want your daddy, too.”

  She screamed as he picked her up, and at that moment Ant-Man appeared in the room, growing to full-size as he came through the window. “There you are,” Cross said with satisfaction.

  “Daddy, is that you?”

  Scott flipped up the mask. “Hi, peanut,” he said, trying to keep his voice normal. His heart lifted when she gave him a smile, showing the new gaps in her front teeth. Then Scott looked back to Cross and said, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

  Before Cross could respond, Scott hit him with the second of the discs Hank Pym had made. Red for shrinking. Yellowjacket vanished and so did Scott, and Cassie ran into the closet. Scott landed on her train table and started running between the fibers of a little rug Cassie had set there as a play area for
her stuffed animals. Cross was on top of the train engine, looking around. “Now where’d you go, little guy…? There you are.”

  He blasted away at the rug, the Yellowjacket’s energy beams hitting it with tiny puffs of smoke. Cassie watched from the closet door.

  “Not just me,” Scott said as he burst out of the rug—flanked by an army of ants. They swarmed up and over the train, harrying Yellowjacket. That gave Scott time to get onto the train. He picked up the caboose and flung it at Cross, who blew it apart in midair. Scott tried again, with the next-to-last car, with the same result. The ants kept attacking Yellowjacket, sacrificing themselves to give Scott more time. Scott threw a train bridge at Yellowjacket, knocking him off and onto the tracks. The train hit him and derailed… but Yellowjacket was unharmed. Scott was keeping him away from Cassie, but he wasn’t any closer to putting Yellowjacket out of commission.

  Outside, Dave drove the van toward the cop’s house. “Scotty needs us, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us,” Luis said as they came down the block—and saw what looked like every cop car in San Francisco blocking the street. A bunch of cops looked at them.

  Luis changed his mind. They couldn’t help Scotty from jail, now, could they?

  “Back it up. Back it up slow,” he said.

  Dave nodded. “Yeah.” He dropped the van in reverse and they went back up the block, hoping none of the cops would recognize them. But still, they wanted to help Scotty. What could they do?

  The problem was the Yellowjacket suit could fly and had weapons. That put Scott at a serious disadvantage. How was he going to get around that?

  Yellowjacket flew up into the air, barraging Scott with energy blasts. “You insult me, Scott,” Cross said. “Your very existence is insulting to me.” Getting frustrated because he couldn’t get a good bead on Scott, he growled, “You know, it would be much easier to hit you if you were bigger.”