AN: Thanks to Marvel-Tolkien Fangirl and Qweb for reviewing the last chapter. Yeah, Hammer's the bad guy… again. I realized partway through writing this one that Hammer's the villain in 3 of my 5 stories so far. But don't worry; he doesn't show up again (that I envision, anyways). As far as my portrayal of him in this story, this is a year before Iron Man 2, and we're really meeting him near the end of his attempt to steal something from Stark Industries. All of the humorous parts we saw of him in that movie were earlier on, while he was "courting" Vanko to assist him; we saw a darker side when things didn't go his way. Hence he's a lot less friendly and more aggressive.
Right after I posted Chapter 23, I saw an article on Yahoo! about a possible upcoming announcement regarding Vin Diesel and Marvel. The article suggested that he might be cast as Hank Pym in the upcoming Ant-Man movie. I don't know how I feel about that, especially since I envision Pym as more like Bruce Banner: genius scientist first of all, and only later (reluctantly) becoming a superhero. Should Pym be buff? Maybe a few years into his Ant Man career, but certainly not right away. Plus, Pym may not have much of an action role in the movies set in the present day.
But that's just my musings. Feel free to comment in a review. But now on to Scott.
"Hello? Is someone there?" a woman's voice asked from the chair in the middle of the room. She strained her neck to look around the back of the chair at the window where Scott had just appeared. Scoot could see her squinting her eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of him in the poor lighting coming through the slit in the window through which Scott had entered.
"Shh…" Scott cautioned her, putting a finger over his lips and creeping closer to the chair. "My name's 'Ant-Man,'" he added. "I'm here to rescue you."
"'Ant-Man'?" the voice asked dubiously, more quietly this time. She stopped struggling against the ropes and trying to see him, and instead leaned back against the back of the chair. She observed, "I read about Ant-Man in the papers. He's been around for decades. You sound a little too young for Ant-Man."
"Um… yeah," Scott replied, reaching the chair. "It's a long story. You're Dr. Erica Sondheim, right?"
"Yes," Dr. Sondheim replied. "How'd you—?"
"Long story," Scott told her quickly. "But it's not important right now. Right now, I've got to get you out of here."
Scott pulled his knife out of the sheath on his belt and quickly cut through the rope binding her wrists together. Next he leaned down and cut through the ropes tying her ankles to the chair. Despite the gloom, Scott could see that the doctor was older, in her sixties, with a well-lined face. The deep bruising under her eyes testified to the little sleep she had gotten since her abduction. Her clothing was dirty and torn, suggesting that she had not changed clothes in a couple weeks. Her already-slender form looked like it had suffered malnutrition for longer than the two weeks which she had been in the abductors' hands, though she had eaten even less during that time. The doctor slowly and gingerly pushed herself to her feet, massaging her wrists as she did so.
"So what's the plan now?" Dr. Sondheim asked, straining her eyes to see Scott in the gloom. Scott could tell the minute she got a decent look at the outline of his head; she flinched visibly when she saw the bulbous, alien-head shape of his helmet.
"Give me a minute," Scott told her, ignoring the flinch. The doctor started quietly pacing around the room, trying to restore the blood flow to her feet. Scott sat down in the chair, the only piece of furniture in the room, and pulled his tablet out of its compartment on his belt. He also rummaged around until he found a shape he recognized as a 100-GB external hard drive. He pulled the external hard drive out, pulled the size manipulating leads out of their compartment, attached them to the tablet and external hard drive, and expanded both back to normal size. He plugged the hard drive into the tablet and quickly copied all the surveillance data he'd gathered onto it: the cloned hard drive and bugs he'd planted in the apartment, the phone tap on the two gunmen, and everything he'd found over the internet regarding the doctor's abduction and the identities and location of the abductors. He also created additional access codes for all of the bugs he had planted and included those codes on the hard drive. He quickly typed his own observations and notes on the events of the previous few days into a document and saved it on the hard drive. Once he was done, he detached the hard drive from his tablet and shrank the tablet down again. He detached the leads and stowed them and the tablet in the appropriate compartments on his utility belt.
"Doctor," Scott said, turning to Dr. Sondheim and handing her the external hard drive, "I'm going to create a distraction so you can escape. Hide in the corner until I give you a signal, and then run out of here, make a right, and run straight out the warehouse door. Do not look back and do not stop until you reach the street. Go straight to the police and hand them this hard drive. Tell them exactly what happened to you and where this warehouse is; hopefully they'll be able to do something with all this information."
"Okay," Dr. Sondheim answered with a nod, slipping the hard drive into one of her jeans pockets.
Scott moved to the door and got ready to throw it open. Before he could, however, Dr. Sondheim put a hand on his forearm and asked, "Wait, how can I repay you for saving me?"
Scott was quiet for a minute. Finally he sighed and told her, "There's a little girl in LA named Cassandra Lang who's been suffering from childhood leukemia for almost six years, ever since she was a year old. None of the treatments have been able to help her, but supposedly yours can. You can repay me by treating her and saving her life."
"I will do what I can," Dr. Sondheim said earnestly.
"Good, now hide in this corner and keep your head down," Scott said, indicating the corner near the door.
"Hang on. What's the signal?"
"A swarm of hornets flying into this room through the door."
Without waiting for a response, Scott pulled out a lock pick set and quickly picked his way through the cheap lock on the door. As silently as possible he turned the knob and opened the door a crack. Looking out, he saw that the two men were still standing there with their M-4s held at waist level and staring out toward the middle of the warehouse. They did not seem to have noticed that the door had slid open a crack.
Scott glanced around, taking in as much of the warehouse as he could see, trying to memorize the layout. He saw a support beam near the main warehouse door with a couple buttons on it. From the snatches of conversation he could catch, Scott determined that the crowd of gunmen must still be gathered in the middle of the warehouse floor, though his view of them was obstructed by a large piece of machinery about ten feet in front of the door. With a deep breath to calm his nerves, Scott leapt into action.
He flung the door wide open and stepped out into the opening. Before the two guards could react, Scott chopped out his right hand and caught the guard on that side of the door square in the neck just under the chin. The man coughed and brought one hand up to clutch his throat, just as the other guard reacted by raising his M-4 to point it at Scott's chest.
Before the man could fire, however, Scott kicked out with his left leg as hard as he could, catching the guard in the right side just under the ribs. The man groaned and lost his grip on the M-4, which Scott caught in his left hand before it could hit the ground. While that man crumpled to the ground with a groan, Scott spun the gun around and struck the other guard in the side of the head with the butt of the gun. That man slid soundlessly to the ground. Scott pulled one guard into the room and then the other, hoping that no one had noticed.
As soon as the two men were inside the room, Scott quickly pulled out a length of rope and used it to hog-tie the two gunmen together with their arms and legs tied together behind their backs. He tore off a couple strips from a blanket, shoved one in each man's mouth, and put a piece of duct-tape over their mouths to keep them quiet. Once they were tied securely and couldn't move, he pushed them over to the opposite wall. When he was finally satisfied with his work, he pulled out the leads, shrank one M-4 down and put it and the leads in his utility belt, and slid the shoulder strap of the other gun over his own shoulder.
Scott slipped out the door again, careful to stay low so he could hide behind the piece of machinery in front of the door. He fell to his knees with his back to the machine, and carefully looked up over the top. He counted about fifty men, most armed with M-4s, though he noticed a few with handguns only. He saw that the men who had been standing in the middle of the warehouse were no longer clustered in a circle; instead, they seemed to be milling around. Several were looking over at the machine where Scott was hiding. A couple were walking in that direction. They hadn't noticed that the guards were missing yet, but it was only a matter of moments before they would.
Scott slipped the M-4's strap off his shoulder and rested the barrel on the top of the machinery behind which he was hiding. He quickly flipped the safety off and let off a spray of bullets into the middle of the warehouse.
Scott heard a chorus of surprised shouts as all the men dove for cover. He ducked back down when he saw several guns starting to come up and point at his makeshift cover.
"What the hell's going on?" he heard someone shout from across the warehouse. He thought it sounded like the leader, the man in all-black combat gear.
A few voices started yelling at once. Finally, he heard one call out, "No clue. One minute everything's normal; the next someone's shooting from over there!"
"Just one person?"
"Maybe!"
"Well, there's fifty of you. Figure it out!" the leader ordered.
Scott heard the sound of fifty guns cocking or chambering rounds. He quickly shrank down, pulled out the leads, attached them to the M-4, and shrank the gun down, as well. He looked around until he saw another piece of machinery that could serve as cover from which to shoot, about ten feet to his right. Without hesitating, he ran out from his cover, directly to the other piece of machinery. The gunmen opened fire on his previous location a moment after he ran out from behind it.
Scott heard a massive explosion, followed by a scream of surprise and pain, an instant after the gunmen opened fire. He chanced a look over his left shoulder in the direction the sound had come from. He saw that Ralph, the man in whose pocket he had stowed away, had just dropped the remains of his revolver and fallen to his knees. He was cradling his right hand in his left elbow, grimacing in pain. It looked like tiny shards of metal had dug cuts into his face, which were oozing blood. A couple of the men standing near him were also bleeding from small cuts in their arms and faces.
As soon as he reached his new location, Scott twisted the dial on his suit, simultaneously pressing the button in the compartment at the small of his back to return the M-4 to normal size. The moment he and the gun had both returned to normal size, he swung the M-4 barrel up to rest on top of the machine and let out another spray of bullets. He ducked just before the gunmen returned fire at his new location. A minute later, the men stopped firing, and Scott let off another burst over the top of the machine he was using for cover.
In the space created by his second burst while the men searched for cover, Scott quickly surveyed the scene in the warehouse. Other than Ralph's injuries, the enemies seemed largely uninjured, though Scott had hit a couple of them, one in the arm and another in the leg. He noted that they had spread out to try to surround his new position and his old position, careful to stay behind cover as much as possible. With dismay, Scott realized that they were cutting him off from both the exits and the office where he had left Dr. Sondheim.