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 his 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.