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.”

This gave Scott an idea. He’d forced Yellowjacket to shrink. He had some of the blue discs left. “Yeah, I agree,” he said, and spun one in Cross’s direction.

Cross batted it aside and the disc hit one of the bullet ants on the rug. It chittered—and all of a sudden it was the size of a dog. A big dog. Whoa, Scott thought. He threw another one and again Cross deflected it. Bam! The train engine expanded, punching out the window and part of the wall of Cassie’s bedroom, its painted-on face looking out over the astonished cops in the street with a smile. The train tipped out over the yard and crushed one of the squad cars.

Paxton had seen enough. “Cassie!” he yelled out, and charged into the house and up the stairs.

In Cassie’s room, Yellowjacket was blasting apart everything Scott threw at him. “Let me show you just how insignificant you are,” he gloated.

As Paxton ran up the stairs, he smacked right into an ant the size of a Saint Bernard. It knocked him back down the stairs and ran outside, chittering the whole way. Gale and Maggie watched it go by. “That’s a messed-up-looking dog,” Gale said.

“I’m going to destroy everything you love,” Cross said, still blasting away at the miniaturized Ant-Man. Then he spun around as Paxton shouted, “Freeze!”

Cross swatted the gun from Paxton’s hand and stood, enjoying Paxton’s sudden confusion. Scott jumped up on Yellowjacket’s back and tried to pry the cover off the blasters’ power source. “I can’t break through,” he said to himself.

But Cross heard. “It’s titanium, you idiot.” He reached back and squeezed Scott between his palms. Scott flashed to full-size and belted him in the face. “Get her out of here!” he shouted at Paxton. Cassie was hiding behind his legs.

“Come on,” Paxton said—but Yellowjacket stepped between them and the door. “Sorry, sweetheart,” Cross said, almost gently. “You have to help Daddy pay for his mistakes.”

“You stay behind me, okay?” Paxton said. Scott gave him all the credit in the world. He was laying his life on the line for Cassie.

“I’m going to have to shrink between the molecules to get in there,” Scott said. He’d always talked to himself while on a job, and it was the same now. He remembered Hank’s story about the titanium missile housing, and how Hank’s wife had disappeared into the quantum realm to disarm the warhead.

“Daddy, help!” Cassie screamed. Yellowjacket’s blasters powered up again.

Leaping toward the power unit on Yellowjacket’s back, Scott said, “I love you, Cassie.” He punched a button to override the regulator and vanished into the spaces between the titanium atoms. He fell through the power unit, shattering links and circuits on the way. He could hear Cross screaming in frustration as his systems went offline and he lost control of the suit—and then Scott shattered the matrix of Pym Particles at the core of the power unit, and everything changed.

Paxton saw the yellow-and-black armored suit start to crackle and shut down. The man inside thrashed around, trying to get control of it. Then things got even stranger than they already had been. The suit started to crumple in on itself, like all the air was being sucked out of it. It crumpled and shrank, sparks shooting out of it… and then, just like Pym Tech, the entire suit and the man inside shrank into a brilliant glowing speck. It hung in the air for a few seconds, slowly dimming, and then it was gone.

“Daddy, where are you?” Cassie said.

Scott fell through the subatomic realm. He got smaller and smaller. When he’d started falling, he’d seen dust motes the size of houses. Now he was seeing atoms themselves, tracing the patterns of the electrons that orbited each one. Ahead, he thought he could start to see the quantum realm that lay under the material universe. It was… there was no way to describe it, but he was pretty sure that if he got there, it was going to be a one-way trip.

He tried punching buttons to make himself grow again. Nothing happened. “Oh no,” he said, remembering more about what Pym had said.

You would enter a reality where all concepts of time and space become irrelevant. And as you shrink… for all eternity… everything that you know… and love… gone forever.

He heard Cassie’s voice echoing from somewhere far away.

“Daddy!”

He was becoming part of it. He couldn’t turn around, couldn’t grow… “Cassie,” he said. Still he heard her voice. “Come on, Daddy…”

And Pym’s voice again: “Do not mess with the regulator.”

That was it. Scott fumbled at his belt, looking around at the endless emptiness. He still had a blue disc. Blue for expansion. If he could connect it to the regulator…

He popped open the regulator housing. There was no time for fancy engineering. He held the disc in place, forced the housing shut again, and took a deep breath. Then he punched the button to return to normal size.

The entire universe seemed to heave around him. He felt his growth accelerate and go on and on. He wasn’t growing or shrinking by a factor of a thousand. He was becoming a billion times bigger, or a trillion.

Cassie’s bedroom coalesced around him and Scott dropped to his knees. He’d done it.

“Daddy!” Cassie shouted. She ran to him and jumped into his arms. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too,” he said. That was the only important thing. “So much.”

Paxton gave them a moment and then he cleared his throat. Scott looked over at him, wondering if he was about to be under arrest again. But Paxton pointed up and said, “There’s a big hole in the roof.”

Scott looked up, too. There sure was. “Sorry,” he said.

When Gale and the SWAT team came pounding up the stairs into Cassie’s bedroom, with Maggie right in the middle of them, they found Paxton holding Cassie. “Is she all right?” Maggie asked.

Paxton nodded. “She’s fine.”

“Mommy,” Cassie said. As Paxton handed her over to Maggie, Cassie—and only Cassie—saw the tiny shadow of her father waving good-bye to her from the edge of her nightstand. He leaped away and was gone.

But she knew he would be back.