CHAPTER 19

But the Yellowjacket suit wasn’t there! The pod was empty, and a port in the bottom of it was just irising shut. “What? What?” Scott looked around, dangling at the end of the line.

There was a knock at the window. “Hey, little guy,” Darren Cross said. He chuckled and held up a tiny glass case holding the Yellowjacket suit.

“Oh sh—gah!” The laser grid came back on and cut the line. Scott fell to the bottom of the pod chamber with a thump.

Outside, Cross turned away from the pod, reveling in the way he’d outsmarted the mighty Hank Pym.

“I always suspected you had a suit stored away somewhere,” he said, playing to the room. “Which begs the question: Who is the new Ant-Man? Who is the man that my beloved mentor trusted even more than me?”

Screens in the room flickered to life, displaying Scott’s mug shot from when he’d been arrested after the Vista job went wrong. “Scott Lang,” Cross said. “The martyr. He took on the system and paid the price, losing his family and his only daughter in the process. Exactly your kind of guy, Hank.”

The screen now showed a picture of Cassie. Scott scrambled to the window, frantically trying to figure out how he could escape. He threw himself against the glass, but it held.

Cross put the Yellowjacket suit in a secure padded case and continued his story. “He escapes his jail cell without leaving any clue as to how, and then he disappears magically, despite having no money to his name, and now he brings me the Ant-Man suit, the only thing that can rival my creation.” Cross had a look on his face like a man who had just won the lottery without even knowing he had entered.

“Darren, don’t do this,” Pym said. “If you sell to these men, it’s going to be chaos.”

“I already have, and for twice the price, thanks to you,” Cross said. “It’s not easy to successfully infiltrate an Avengers facility. Thankfully, word travels fast. Oh, I’ll sell them the Yellowjacket, but I’m keeping the particle to myself.”

Mitchell Carson’s head snapped around. Apparently this was news to him.

“They don’t run on diesel,” Cross said to Carson. “If you want the fuel, you’ll have to come to me.” Cross handed the vial of Yellowjacket fluid to one of his bodyguards, looking back to Pym. “What do you call the only man who can arm the most powerful weapon in the world?”

“The most powerful man in the world,” Hank said, because he knew that’s what Cross wanted to hear. He was trying to keep Cross talking while he figured out some way to stop him.

Cross nodded. “You proud of me yet?”

Hank wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. “You can stop this, Darren. It’s not too late.”

“It’s been too late for a long time now,” Cross said, and his bodyguards drew their guns.

“Darren!” Hope said. “What are you doing?”

“He wasn’t any more capable of caring for you than he was for me,” Cross said to her. Now he was dead serious.

“This is not who you are,” she said. “It’s the particles altering your brain chemistry.”

He seemed to think about this for a moment. Then he waved his arms. “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You’re right.” He held out a hand for one of the bodyguards’ guns. “I have to be the one to do it.”

That was the last straw. As Cross leveled the gun at Hank Pym, Hope snapped an elbow back into the face of the nearest guard and ripped the gun from his hand as he fell. She pointed it at Cross.

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.