by Jason Starr
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
NATURAL
ENEMY
AN ORIGINAL NOVEL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE
NATURAL
ENEMY
AN ORIGINAL NOVEL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE
JASON STARR
TITAN BOOKS
Ant-Man: Natural Enemy
Print edition ISBN: 9781785659881
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659898
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First Titan edition: July 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© 2018 MARVEL
Ant-Man Created By Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby
Stuart Moore, Editor
Interior Design by Amanda Scurti
Cover Art by Greg Horn
VP, Production and Special Projects: Jeff Youngquist
Assistant Editors: Sarah Brunstad and Caitlin O'Connell
Manager, Licensed Publishing: Jeff Reingold
Director, Licensed Publishing: Sven Larsen
SVP Print, Sales & Marketing: David Gabriel
Editor in Chief: C.B. Cebulski
Chief Creative Officer: Joe Quesada
President, Marvel Entertainment: Dan Buckley
Executive Producer: Alan Fine
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For Chynna Skye Starr
NATURAL
ENEMY
AN ORIGINAL NOVEL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE
JASON STARR
“The world flatters the elephant and tramples on the ant.”
— Indian proverb
PROLOGUE
WILLIE DUGAN was crawling in the dark tunnel— on his way to escaping from Attica State Prison in upstate New York, where he’d been holed up for nine years—when Keith, one of the guys busting out with him, said, “I’m stuck, bro.”
“What?” Willie had heard him—just didn’t want to believe it.
“I said I’m stuck,” Keith said. “I can’t move at all.”
“Try, man,” Willie said.
“I am trying, bro. I can’t move. I can’t, I can’t.”
Willie tried to push him forward, but it was so cramped in the tunnel that he couldn’t get much leverage. Something had to have happened to the roof; it must’ve caved in. Keith was a big guy—six-two, maybe two-twenty—but he wasn’t fat. He should’ve fit through the tunnel easy.
“You gotta move,” Willie said. “Dig into the ground, make more space.”
“Tryin’, bro. But the ground’s like steel here.”
“Try harder.”
Willie counted to ten in his head, trying not to panic or think of worst-case scenarios. Then he said, “Okay, try again.”
“I still can’t move, Willie.” Keith sounded like he was crying. “I’m sorry, bro, I’m sorry.”
“Just shut up and try,” Willie said.
“I can’t. I can’t, man, I can’t.”
“Try, goddamn it.” Willie summoned up all his strength to push. “Move, come on, dig!” he kept saying, but Keith didn’t budge.
Now the worst-case scenario was hitting Willie. There wasn’t much air in the tunnel, especially with Keith clogging it up, so there was a chance Willie would suffocate to death. Or worse: What if they found him here alive and dragged him back to prison? They’d put him in max solitary for organizing the break, and he’d have zero chance of ever getting out.
This was it, his one chance—do or die. If he didn’t escape tonight, his life would be over; he’d die in jail an old man, unless he figured out a way to kill himself.
Yeah, if they brought him back alive, suicide would definitely be his only way out.
Willie tried to shove Keith again. Then Willie felt something hit his head—a chunk of dirt from the roof of the tunnel.
Keith said the words that could’ve been Willie’s own thoughts: “It’s caving, it’s caving!”
Was this how Willie was going to die? God’s last laugh? Given the choice between getting buried alive or going back to jail, Willie would’ve taken buried alive. But he wasn’t planning to have to choose either of those options yet.
He hadn’t spent nine years on that tunnel—all that planning, all that work—to go down like this. He used all his strength to somehow shove Keith forward.
“Go! Faster!” Willie shouted.
The tunnel was crumbling; there must’ve been an inch of dirt on his head. Willie had no idea how much farther they had to go. If they were a minute away, maybe they had a chance. Maybe. The tunnel was caving so fast now, he could hear it, like the beginning of an avalanche. Then the crash came, behind him, where Keith had been stuck just moments earlier. They’d be buried now if they’d stayed there, but Willie wasn’t thinking about that. He was just thinking about moving ahead, getting out of the darkness.
“Faster!” he shouted again. “Come on!”
There was more crashing behind them. The whole tunnel was caving now. There was dirt everywhere— all over his body, in his mouth, in his eyes. And then he felt the ground beneath him begin sloping upward.
He kept clawing at the dirt. If he could still claw, that meant he was still alive.
And then, as the tunnel collapsed, he felt something different—grass, actual grass. The hole was about four feet wide, a bigger version of a groundhog’s hole. His hands slipped on the dew a couple of times, but finally he was able to hoist himself up and out. He ignored the stinging in his eyes and saw light: It was coming from a lamppost, maybe fifty yards away. He didn’t stop to marvel over his close call. Although his body was stiff as hell and he could barely see in front of him, he knew he couldn’t waste any time. He spotted Keith and the other three guys scattering ahead of him, and he took his pre-planned route: He ran along the road for about a quarter mile, then made a left down a narrow street and a right two blocks later. Finally he reached the corner and waited.
Two minutes later, he saw the headlights of a car approaching, right on schedule. After the near-disaster in the tunnel, everything was working out. He had plenty of money put away—money he could live on for the rest of his life. It would be about five hours till wakeup time, when the guards would find out about the break. He had time to get to Canada, then use a fake Canadian passport to fly to Belize, then Kuwait, and then to that island in the South Pacific.
He could do all this, but he wouldn’t. He’d spent too much energy over the past nine years dreaming about this day. Freedom
was great, but there was one thing that would make everything right, that would give him real happiness.
Yeah, it was time to get some payback.
ANTHONY HAWKINS, twenty-two years old, in a black ski mask with one wide slit for his eyes, entered the bodega on Third Avenue and 128th Street, took out his piece—a nine-millimeter Glock, same gun he’d used during his entire spree of holdups in the New York City area—aimed it at the old guy behind the counter, and said, “Give it up, yo.”
“Come on, kid,” the guy—Spanish accent, sounding tired—said. “You ain’t gonna get rich off me.”
Anthony noticed the camera, aiming right at him from the corner near the door. He shot at it, missed. He shot again, hit it this time, and the camera shattered.
A woman in the back—he didn’t know anybody else was in the store—screamed.
Anthony, nervous, shouted down the aisle, “Hey, you come out here now!”
The scared, crying Asian lady walked toward the front of the store with her hands up. Then Anthony thought he saw the old man reach for something behind the counter—maybe a gun.
Anthony aimed the Glock at him and yelled, “The register! Clean it out right now, or I’ll kill both of you, I swear I will!”
Then Anthony heard, “Drop the gun, Anthony!”
The voice was loud and clear, but where had it come from? Still aiming the gun at the guy behind the counter, Anthony’s eyes shifted toward the door. He expected to see a cop, but there was nobody there.
“Who said that?” he shouted. Then to the old man, “There somebody else here in the store?”
“No, I swear,” the old man said.
“Well, somebody’s talkin’ to me,” Anthony said. “Somebody who knows my name.”
“Leave them alone, Anthony,” the voice said. “Put the gun down, let the man call the cops, and you won’t get hurt. That’s your best option right now. Actually, that’s your only option.”
The voice sounded closer now, a few feet away, but there was still nobody near him. What the hell? Now Anthony was scared, his gun arm shaking.
“What’s goin’ on, yo?” Anthony asked. “Somebody else in here? You hidin’ someplace?”
“This is the last time I’ll ask you.” The voice was even closer now. “Put the gun down, and you can go back to jail and serve the time you deserve to serve. Don’t put the gun down, and you’re still going back to jail, but you may spend a couple of weeks in the hospital.”
Anthony was thinking, So this is what being crazy’s like? He was hearing voices. What the hell else could be happening? They were gonna lock him up—not in jail this time, in a mental home.
“Shut up!” Anthony screamed, maybe at himself.
The old man and Asian woman were staring at Anthony like he was crazy.
“What you lookin’ at?” Anthony said to them. Then his mask suddenly came off his head, as if somebody had pulled it off—but nobody was there. Anthony, shocked and confused, said, “What the—” as he felt a pain in his face, like he’d just been sucker punched. And then he was tumbling back into the shelf, cans of food falling on his head and to the floor.
He had dropped the gun. When he tried to reach for it, it slid away from his hand, all the way toward the entrance to the store—as if somebody had kicked it. But nobody was there.
So it wasn’t just voices anymore. Now things were moving on their own, and he was imagining getting hit in the face? But if he was just imagining things, how come it hurt so bad? And, damn, why was his nose bleeding?
“Hey, I gave you a chance,” the voice said, “but you wanted to do it the hard way, so you’re getting the hard way.”
“Who—who said that?” Anthony asked, his voice trembling. Then his head jerked to the right, as if somebody had just shot his left cheek with a BB gun at close range.
“Hey, over here,” the voice said. It sounded like it had come from near his stomach.
Anthony looked down, and something hit his chin. His head snapped back into the cans again.
“I mean over here,” the voice said from—it sounded like an inch in front of his face. Then something hit his forehead, and he felt dazed, the whole bodega spinning.
“This was what you asked for,” the voice said.
Anthony wanted to say, “I didn’t ask for nothin’,” but he couldn’t get his lips to move.
Every time Anthony tried to get up, something hit him and he fell back down again. Then he heard sirens, getting louder and louder.
“I’d love to stick around,” the voice said, “but I have another date downtown.”
* * *
LEAVING the bodega, Scott Lang—from his perspective as a half-inch-tall man—saw the police cars pulling up to the curb. As the cops rushed out, Scott darted across the sidewalk, which, from his tiny perspective, was the size of a large plaza. Then he jumped off the curb, which felt like jumping from a second-story window. He landed on his feet and continued, passing between two humongous parked cars.
Scott had promised Hank Pym that he wouldn’t abuse the Ant-Man technology—which meant not using it for trivial reasons, like to beat the evening rush. But once in a while, when he was in a hurry, why not?
When a cab approached, Scott leaped onto its front end and held on with his super-strong hands and feet. Hopping from car to car as Ant-Man was the fastest way to get anywhere. He clung to the roof of the cab until it started to make a right onto 125th Street, and then he leapt onto the windshield of another car—a white SUV. He stared right at the huge, angry face of the driver, who thought a bug had just landed in front of him. It was always dangerous for Scott to remain so close at another person’s eye level for too long—the person might notice that he wasn’t in fact a bug, but a miniature human being in a red-and-gray suit. He heard a loud squeaking noise and turned to see the tremendous blade of the windshield wiper heading right for him. Just before it could reach him, he jumped up and landed on the SUV’s roof.
He rode on the SUV to 116th, and then jumped on a car headed east toward FDR Drive. There was no traffic. The car took him all the way downtown to the East Village. Then, jumping along the tops of cars, trucks, and buses, he made his way to the Starbucks on Astor and Lafayette.
Although he’d made great time, he was still running late. He couldn’t resume normal size in public, so he ran into the coffee shop, dodging the oncoming shoes, sneakers, and boots like a real-life game of Frogger. There was a line for the customers’ bathroom, so he darted under the door of the bathroom labeled “Employees Only.”
He had a set of clothes, pre-shrunk, in a pouch attached to the Ant-Man suit. He put on his jeans, workboots, and flannel shirt, then activated the Pym expanding gas. Soon he was back to human size.
A Starbucks barista—a young Asian woman— entered the bathroom and did a double-take.
“How’d you get in here?” she asked.
“Uh, the door was unlocked,” Scott said.
“Customers can’t use this bathroom,” she said.
“Sorry, won’t happen again,” Scott said.
He rushed out to meet his date.
AT A TABLE up front near the windows facing Astor, Scott’s date said, “My name’s Anne with an e, but my friends call me Annie.”
Scott had met her on Tinder—yep, super heroes were dating online, too, nowadays. How else was a busy single dad supposed make a connection in the big city? Scott had liked Anne’s pics—she looked hip, in a not-trying-too-hard kind of way, with dark hair, short bangs, big, trendy glasses from Warby Parker—and they seemed to be at a similar place in life. She was recently divorced, had a twelve-year-old son—two years younger than Scott’s daughter Cassie—and she had written in her profile that she was looking for “something light, yet meaningful,” which pretty much summed up Scott’s idea of the perfect relationship. It had been a few months since Scott’s last relationship—with Regina, the manic-depressive hypnotherapist—had ended, and now he was getting back out there, trying to meet some new peop
le.
Scott was happy that Anne had a strong resemblance to her photos, which wasn’t always the case with Internet dating. Since his divorce, Scott had gone on dates with women who’d claimed to be around his age, but turned out to be older than his mother. Things took a sharp turn for the worse when Anne spent the first ten minutes of the date taking about her bad divorce and how much she hated her ex-husband, and the next ten minutes going on about the businesses she was planning to go into “someday”—jewelry design, real estate, Reiki—and of course how she wanted to write a memoir of her divorce because she had “so many crazy stories to tell.” Currently, despite all of her grand plans, she didn’t seem to be doing much of anything— well, except hating her ex.
Scott had barely said anything about himself. He was trying to come up with a good excuse to get away, but she was only halfway through her iced coffee. He thought it would be rude to make some excuse and leave now, but it would be so easy. He had his Ant-Man suit on under his clothes, which gave him the perfect date-going-bad escape hatch: He could activate the suit’s Pym Particles and poof, practically disappear.
“Okay, biggest fears,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Scott asked.
“What’s your biggest fear?” she said. “Go first.”
Scott didn’t feel like playing this game—he just wanted to get home, hang with his daughter. But at least they weren’t talking about Anne’s divorce anymore.
“Hmm, that’s a tough one,” he said. “I guess you don’t want to hear the obvious ones like death, nuclear holocausts, alien invasions.”
“Are you afraid of those things?”
“No, not really.”
Scott smiled, but she remained serious. Apparently, she didn’t get sarcasm—strike two. He took a big sip of his coffee, hoping it would encourage her to drink hers faster, but her coffee was stuck at the same level like a clogged hourglass.
“Then what are you afraid of?” she asked.
“Okay, failing,” Scott said. “I’m afraid of failing.”