Hero (18 page)

“You really think the old man is that dangerous?”

“And so should you.” Uncle John leaned close as he opened the doors. “The one who’s coming after you is him,” he said. “The evil is already here.”

ONE
of them is lying to you,” Kate said.

“Brilliant deduction,” he said. “Do you want to be Sherlock Holmes or the other guy?”

Kate had heard everything. Now they were going over all of it, like spreading the pieces of a big puzzle out on a table, trying to match parts together.

“Mr. Herbert is so convincing,” Zach said.

“So is your Uncle John,” Kate answered. “By the time he finished, he had me scared that I’d even been around that old man.”

“But if the old man is the one who’s telling the truth,” Zach said, “if he’s one of the good guys . . .”

Kate looked sideways at him. “It means your Uncle John isn’t.”

Now that was on the table, too.

“What do I do?” he said.

Kate said, “You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you.”

They were out walking again, on East Broadway, heading toward the East Side. A light rain began falling.

Zach waited.

“You’re going to have to treat your Uncle John like a suspect for the time being,” she said.

“I can’t!”
he said.

“You have to,” Kate said. “They’re each giving you a different version, but for now, Uncle John is the only one around.”

Zach said, “I feel guilty even having this conversation. Even talking about not trusting him.”

“It’s not like it’s a ton of fun for me, either. Don’t forget, I’ve grown up with him, too.”

“He’s Uncle
John
,” Zach said. “Not only was he my dad’s best friend, now he’s my
mom’s
best friend.”

“But what if
he’s
the one who’s the mischief maker?” Kate said. “I know you don’t want to think about this—but what if the evil has been right in front of you your whole life?”

Zach had no answer for that. And Kate was right: he didn’t want to think about that. So he put up his hand and said he’d spring for the cab fare home.

“My hero,” Kate said.

He sure didn’t feel like one today.

 

Another night lying in the dark in bed, staring at the ceiling, laptop finally turned off, everybody else in the apartment asleep. Zach unable to.

Again.

He thought about all the trips his dad had taken over the years. Had they all been top-secret missions? Had they all been about capturing Bads, about good conquering evil? If so, did it matter who Tom Harriman had really worked for—the president or the old man?

Zach’s mission was different and hadn’t changed from the moment he’d decided that his dad’s death had not been an accident. He was trying to catch bad guys, too. The bad guys who’d killed his dad.

And no matter how confused he felt sometimes, no matter how many times he got turned around, Zach knew he was getting closer.

Either Uncle John or Mr. Herbert was lying to him, that much was certain. Both were doing whatever they could to win his trust and discredit the other. One of them knew a lot more about his dad’s death than he was saying . . . maybe even both.

Zach couldn’t think about it any longer. He needed to move, needed to get out. He could feel the anger rising up in him at two-fifteen in the morning, surrounded by the silence in the apartment.

He put on a gray hoodie, jeans and sneakers. Went through the kitchen, flying down the back stairs in a way he never had before, but a way that felt perfectly natural now—going from landing to landing, feeling as light as air. When he got to the lobby, he peeked out and saw the front door open as Ziggy, one of the night doormen, went outside for a smoke. Zach was through the lobby and through the door, invisible until he was two blocks up, out of Ziggy’s sight.

Fresh,
he thought.

The old man had said Zach was better when he was angry, had told him to use his anger, and tonight he was going to use it to blow around the city. A different kind of knock-around day, at a new speed.

He headed over to the West Side, down to Greenwich Village, and then all the way downtown to the Financial District. Wall Street, the old buildings regal and gleaming against the darkness. The hole in the ground, filled for now with iron girders and construction cranes, that used to be the Twin Towers, another scorched piece of earth caused by the Bads. Then up to 42nd Street, all the way to the top of the Chrysler Building, the entire city visible beneath like some high-def video game. Shouting at the top of his lungs at invisible opponents, telling them to come out and fight.

He didn’t know what time it was or where he was going next, he just knew that this feeling wouldn’t leave him, that he wasn’t nearly ready to go back home.

No sleep tonight.

When he was tired of being up above the city, he went underneath it, rode the Lexington Avenue subway back downtown and then right back uptown, passing through Grand Central on the return trip, knowing he had to think about getting home. It was five o’clock by now, and he didn’t want to be sneaking back into his room as Alba was getting up.

He got out of the subway and came up the steps outside the 68th Street station.

“You lost, little dude?” he heard a voice say.

It belonged to a guy at the top of the steps. Black T-shirt, black jeans, spiky hair. A young guy, his eyes looking a little unfocused, like he was on his way home from some club, like he might be a little spaced out.

He looked almost as jittery as Zach felt.

Zach ignored him, took the last two steps in a little hop. The guy stepped in front of him, smiling.

One more test?
Zach wondered.

One more game organized by the old man?

Was the old man watching from somewhere, wanting to see how Zach would handle this?

Or was this threat real?

Zach didn’t care.

He grabbed the guy before he knew what was happening, lifted him off the ground, had him backed up into an alley before the guy could say another word.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey, relax, dude, I was just messin’ with you.”

Eyes focused just fine now. On Zach’s.

Clearly scared by what they saw.

Zach said, “What’s the matter? You don’t want to talk anymore?”

He bounced him hard against the side of the building.

“Come on,” Zach said. “Let’s talk. Ask me another question.”

“Let me go, man. Please. Let me go.”

The air came out of Zach then, like the whole night coming out of him, hearing the guy beg to be let go.

Zach released him, the guy afraid to move at first, not sure what Zach was going to do. Then he ran out of the alley, disappearing toward Third Avenue, giving one last look over his shoulder.

Zach unclenched his fists, put his own back against the brick wall and slowly slid down it.

When his breathing was back to normal, he stood up, still not sure how he’d stopped himself from giving the guy a beating,
why
he’d stopped himself. Just glad that he had. Maybe it was hearing something in the guy’s voice he used to hear from kids at school when guys like Spence would bully them.

In that moment, Zach saw more than he had all night, even from the top of the Chrysler Building. He recognized the dark side of what he could do now. Of what he’d become.

No matter how much he’d scared the guy, Zach Harriman had scared himself more.

IN
sports, they talked about shutting players down when they got hurt.

Shutting them down for a game or two, or even for the rest of the season.

Zach shut himself down after that night outside the subway. He wondered if his dad’s powers had ever scared him like this, if he’d ever had to fight to keep the dark side of himself under control. Zach had never imagined his dad having anything close to a dark side. He was too good for that.
Wasn’t he?

But maybe I’m not,
he thought.

Not because of what he did to that guy by the subway. Because of what he’d
wanted
to do to him. What he was
capable
of doing now. Now not only was Zach afraid of trusting Mr. Herbert and Uncle John . . . he was afraid of trusting himself.

Trust no one,
the message had said.

Was it right?

What if Mr. Herbert had been telling the truth about the trouble headed Zach’s way? Didn’t he need to be prepared just in case?

He hadn’t told Kate what happened that night, because he was ashamed of the way he’d acted and what he’d felt. He didn’t like the Zach in the alley, and he was pretty sure Kate wouldn’t like him, either.

So he kept getting up and going to school and trying to act normal, wondering what was going to happen next.

And when he would figure out who to trust.

He missed his dad now more than ever.

 

It was a Wednesday afternoon and Kate had a student council meeting after school, so Zach decided to take his reading homework with him to Central Park.

It was one of those days in the place his mom called “the dream New York.” No clouds in the sky. Temperature around seventy degrees. The park alive with colors. He had just a few more of Hemingway’s short stories to read, his teacher having told the class to save the best until last, one called “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

So he took his book to one of his favorite corners of the park, close to the apartment, a rock formation in the trees above Conservatory Pond. It was one more thing he knew about the park that he wasn’t sure how many New Yorkers did—how much water was scattered throughout the place.

Eight hundred and forty-three acres in all in Central Park, and this place up in the rocks was one of his favorites, beautiful and peaceful and quiet. Nothing like the other places that had become battlegrounds for him, with Spence and Knit Cap and the giant.

He opened up his book and was alone with Hemingway, trying to make sense of what the man in the story was really talking about.

“Hello, kid.”

Somehow Zach wasn’t surprised or even startled to see Mr. Herbert sitting there next to him on the rock.

“Miss me?” the old man said.

“Actually, I did,” Zach said. “But it’s not as if I can call you on your cell or text you. Where
do
you live, by the way? Or do you just hang upside down at night?”

“I move around,” the old man said. “I make it my business to be hard to find and harder to reach. It’s safer for me that way.”

“Whatever,” Zach said, promising himself he wasn’t going to let the old man get under his skin today, no matter how exasperated he got.

The old man leaned back, letting his face take the sun. “Nice spot,” he said.

Zach said, “My Uncle John calls you the mischief maker.”

He decided not to waste time today, to put Uncle John right in the old man’s face and see how he reacted. His dad always used to tell him that you didn’t want to be the guy who joined the debate, you wanted to be the guy who set it.

Mr. Herbert laughed. “Probably said a lot worse about me than that, knowing John Marshall.”

“As a matter of fact, he did.”

“He and I have never seen eye to eye, about your dad or anything else. From the beginning, we just seemed to rub each other the wrong way.”

“He also said that I don’t have to wait for the bad stuff that’s coming my way; he said it’s already here.”

“How’s that?”

“He says it’s you.”

The old man laughed again. “Just trying to scare you, kid. Was a time when I had my own powers. Real powers. Now I’m just a shell of what I used to be. No, your Uncle John’s just trying to keep you out of the line of fire. He was always trying to get your dad to quit, especially at the end. He thought the world had gotten too dangerous for him. And that he’d lost a step. Not physically. Mentally, he meant. It wasn’t easy having to be him.”

“But my dad wouldn’t quit.”

“No,” the old man said, “he certainly would not.” There was a part of Zach that wanted to just get up and leave, get away from this old man who’d already caused him so much grief, who’d said he’d purposely tested him, all in the name of helping him be his father’s son.

It sounded ridiculous.

But if they hadn’t been tests . . . then what? That giant could have done a lot more than just put Zach in the hospital with some busted ribs if he’d wanted to. And who really knew how hard Knit Cap and his friends had been trying?

Zach knew that if Mr. Herbert wanted to cause him real harm, he could have done it a long time ago.

So he stayed right where he was.

“You don’t hate Uncle John the way he does you?” he said.

“I don’t hate people just because I disagree with them,” Mr. Herbert said.

“I listen to you,” Zach said, “and then I listen to him and have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“I explained this already, boy. You just need to be ready. Because if there’s a way to stop them when the time comes, you’re going to be right in the thick of it.”

“How can you know some disaster is coming and not know what kind? Or where?”

“Who said I didn’t know where?”

“Here we go again,” Zach said.

The old man put up a hand. “Hear me out,” he said. “Did you know what or where that morning you followed Kate?”

Zach thought a second. “No,” he said. “I just had a feeling.”

Mr. Herbert nodded. “My point,” he said. “Sometimes you know without really knowing. Sometimes we know just enough to get the jump on the bad guys.”

He winked at Zach.

“Sometimes we sit around waiting for something that takes a long time arriving. If we don’t, or if we’re wrong, then the Bads win the battle. Bridges get blown up. Buildings topple.” He sighed and in that moment looked older than ever to Zach. “Planes crash. People die. But we keep fighting.”