Hero (18 page)

remains of her own. And one by one, the children in the unit linked up, drawn to each other's hands. Children calmly emerged from their rooms and wandered over in our direction, like they'd heard there was cake in the playroom, irresistibly drawn to the heat pumping in and out of my own hands.

I wanted to scream in agony each time another kid joined hands. The charge it sent through me was incredible, and I wanted to flail wildly on the ground. All I could feel were thou¬sands of scorching flames licking at every inch of my body, my skin melting away cell by cell. My big left toe began to twitch. I knew in a second either the heat would overwhelm me, or a seizure would.

Both my legs were trembling now, and the nurses had noticed the unbreakable chain of melting kids attached to me. They ran in all directions for security guards, a doctor, or any¬one to pull us apart. My vision grew dim, the edges of my sight cloudy and dark. I could just make out the line of scarred chil¬dren joined hand to hand as it extended down the hall.

And then my body went numb. I crossed a threshold, and the pain suddenly didn't bother me anymore. I only wanted one thing. I looked at the Wrecking Balls across the way, and I prayed they wouldn't throw the machinery at us. I prayed they'd just leave us alone and go away. I prayed that any great power, anywhere in the universe, would come down and stop them in any way possible.

My eyes fluttered up into my head so far I thought I'd be able to see my brain, and then all of a sudden I felt an explosion somewhere deep inside me, like all my organs had burst with joy and anguish and happiness and pain, like I'd ripped all the ligaments in my body in half and the pain was amplified to infinity.

And that's all I remembered.

"Well, it could have been worse." Larry said, and dabbed his leaky nose with a frayed tissue.

Each of us fired looks at each other. Kevin at Scarlett, Ruth at Kevin, Scarlett at me, me at Ruth, then all of us at Larry with one question on our lips.

"How?"

Apparently I knocked out the power a whole half mile in diameter. Of course the cameras and news crews carried their own power and recorded everything, and I do mean everything. From The Wrecking Ball's escape to Miss Scarlett's infamous slap—the one she gave local award-winning news reporter Bruce Barry from Channel Four's Eyewitness News.

"Look, my jacket was unbuttoned and God knows what they could see, and there I was passed out on the ground with a camera up in my face. Sorry, but he deserved it." Miss Scarlett fastened the top button of her delivery jacket. "Is it cold in here?"

"You left a second-degree burn on his cheek," Golden Boy said.

"So, he can grow a beard," Scarlett said. "He should have thought about that before he started poking around my pri¬vates." She pulled out a thin bottle of nail polish remover from her utility belt and dabbed a cotton ball with the liquid. The acrid smell filled the room, and she rubbed the chipped paint off her nails. "I don't know why you're on my case anyway. Thorn's the one who screwed up."

All eyes turned to me.

No one understood how I was able to absorb all that hurt at once and incapacitate everyone around me with it. If I could have controlled the outburst and confined it to only the Wrecking Balls, it would have been a clean capture. Instead I'd knocked everyone out and given some people seizures. Thank God I'd been in the hospital, because if the reporters had got my face on camera, Dad would have found out about my new extracurricular activities in an instant. I'd have to be more careful in the future. Maybe I needed a mask.

"If you can't stand the heat," Scarlett said to me, "stay out of the steam room." She tossed a dirty, red cotton ball over her shoulder and smeared her nails with a clean one.

"Let's try to keep this constructive," Golden Boy said. "We all could have done better. Larry, what did you give them, any¬way?"

"Diverticulitis." Larry bit the inside of his cheek. "It can be very painful once it sets in." Scarlett rolled her eyes.

"Once it sets in isn't really good enough in a fight scenario," Golden Boy said. "They gave us a good thrashing."

"Hey, if Thorn had been where he was supposed to be—" Larry held his hands up, innocent, and he was right. For all the minor contingencies that occur in a fight, after months of train¬ing I knew better than to let my guard down and abandon my post, no matter what the circumstance. I should have been there to help them.

Everyone looked at me again, and I didn't know what to say. I couldn't lie. Everyone had seen I wasn't where I was supposed to be.

"Well, Thom, we're now a full two hundred points behind all the other tryout groups." Golden Boy read from the incident form. "All our faces, except yours since you were conveniently out of the battle by that point, have been plastered all over the local news as the losers who bungled the capture. Have anything to say for yourself?"

I'd been throwing up at regular intervals since the incident. I'd never used my powers that way, and I had what could only be described as the world's most wicked hangover from doing so. I really didn't want to have this conversation now, while I was still recovering from the rebound effect of my powers. I belched and held my lips together and fought off the urge to barf. To add insult to injury, we were the laughingstock of the League and it was all my fault. What do you say?

Out of the blue, Ruth blew her rape whistle. Loud. I could hear Silver Fox and the Sonic Ear howl in pain three whole floors above us.

"Maybe you all didn't notice, but when that hospital was about to crumble with all those innocent people inside, Thom was the only one who stopped the Wrecking Balls. The only fin¬ger I feel like pointing right now is my middle one, at all of you, bunch of ungrateful wretches, if you ask me." Ruth struck a match off the bottom of her heel and lit a cigarette.

"Now, maybe he doesn't fully know how to use his powers yet, sure. Maybe he should have found a way to stop them without blacking out half the city, without sending everyone into convulsions. But the point is, all those people lived because he stopped the Wrecking Balls. So let's suck it up and give a little credit where credit's due. I mean, diverticulitis? Seriously, Larry,

what were you thinking? Why not just give them a real bad case of dandruff? Scarlett, you dropped the kid three stories into a crowded hospital. You're lucky no one was killed. And Golden Boy, if you weren't so busy trying to be a one-man rescue machine . . . Well, there may be no T in team, but apparently there's a real big one in 'Kevin.' If you're so goddamned worried about our PR then go get a job on Entertainment Tonight, because last I checked this gig was about helping people, not helping our image. By the way, all those kids in the burn ward have been making remarkable recoveries, up to seventy-five percent in some cases, nothing short of a miracle in my humble opinion. If you ask me, you're all just pissed off 'cause you had to change into a new pair of pants when you woke up aftet the seizures. Welcome to my world. I have to do that every time I laugh real hard at a good episode of Jake and the Fatman."

Wow.

That actually shut the rest of the group up, and I wanted to kiss Ruth right then and there.

"I didn't see you do anything, either," Scarlett said under her breath.

Ruth whipped around.

"What did you say to me?"

"I said I didn't see you do much of anything, either."

Ruth exhaled cigarette smoke and a sly grin crept over her face.

"That's because I knew we'd win."

After the meeting wrapped, Golden Boy offered Scarlett a fast ride to work. He said if he really turned it on, she'd make her shift on time. She thanked him without any hint of real gratitude, and when he scooped her up for the ride, she checked to make sure the buttons of her jacket were fastened tightly and warned him that if he copped any sort of cheap feel, she'd roast his ass. And then they were gone.

I waited for Ruth by her car in the parking lot and looked at my watch. It was late, and Dad was going to ask about bas¬ketball. Summer League was almost over, so I was going to have to come with a new excuse soon anyway. Ruth limped with a sore hip over to the door of her car and fumbled for the keys with crooked, arthritic fingers.

We got in and drove without a word for a long time.

"Hey, Ruth," I said finally, "why were you arguing with that one guy, the old Wrecking Ball?"

Ruth didn't take her eyes off the road.

"I used to work with him."

I thought about it for a second and it didn't make a lot of sense to me.

"He used to be one of the good guys?"

Ruth took a long drag on her cigarette.

"No." She exhaled smoke through her nose. "He didn't used to be one of the good guys."

Oh. If he hadn't been one of the good guys, then she must have been—

"It was a long time ago, and I don't want to talk about it."

So we didn't. We didn't say another word the whole way home.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"DO YOU EVER HAVE that one asshole on your team that just hates you for no other reason than you're you?"

God, did I ever. I wanted to tell him all about Scarlett.

"Remember that short kid?" Goran dribbled the ball in perfect figure eights between his legs. I thought he was trying to distract me by talking. "The one who called you a homo?"

Yeah, I think I could dig that one up from somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory.

"Little guy? Looks like Gary Coleman?"

"Yeah, that's him. I think he hates me because I'm white." Goran chuckled and shot the ball. "Which is a real laugh, because where I'm from no one thinks we're white."

The way Goran sneered gave off the impression that he didn't have a whole lot of respect for most of his teammates.

"You Americans," he said, "think you have some sort of patent on poverty if you're not an NBA pro or some rap star by age twenty."

Goran shot a three-pointer. "If he thinks it's so tough, he should try growing up in a country where genocide is still in full swing." The ball swished.

Goran and I had been meeting every morning at the rec center ever since I joined the League tryouts. We'd push each other through drills, wind sprints, and lots of punching-bag work. He was even teaching me how to spar with boxing gloves. You'd think with my secret League hand-to-hand combat training that I'd have been able to take him pretty easy, but he always knocked me on my tail by the end of every session. It was like he wasn't even trying that hard to win; he was mostly amused by my efforts to go after him. Then when it was getting time for me to leave for work, he'd read my balance during a lunge and somehow kick my feet out from under me. And the next thing I'd know I'd be flat on my back looking up at his nostrils, which weren't even flaring because he wasn't breathing that hard. Me, on the other hand, I was always drenched with sweat by that point. And no matter what kind of workout we did, we always ended with a little one-on-one.

"Sometimes you have to be your own best friend," he said as he sank another three-pointer.

"Some team player you are," I said, and dribbled between his legs and drove for the basket.

"Better to work alone," he said, and blocked my shot with his fingertips. "You're the only one who has absolute control over your own actions."

I snatched the rebound and dribbled it back up to the top

of the key. I bounced the ball and tried to figure out how I'd pass him on my next run to the basket.

"You sound like my dad." I faked a hard drive to the left, spun right, then pulled up short at the foul line to sink an easy two. "I guess that's what happens when you become a dad. You get all bitter, have to be the family martyr at all times. Can't ask for anyone's help."

Goran took the ball and stopped. He didn't turn around, but looked far off down the hallway for something I couldn't see.

"Yeah," he said. "Dads are weird."

Goran's brother suddenly bounded onto the court in his karate uniform and stole the ball. Goran broke into a broad smile and chased the kid around the court. The little guy squealed the whole time, until Goran caught up with him. Then Goran picked him up and held him above his head and threatened to dunk him with a maniacal grin. The kid howled and laughed, and Goran swung him around like a sack of potatoes and pretended he was going to toss him into the basket until the kid just couldn't laugh anymore. When Goran put him back on the ground, his brother was so dizzy that he had to drop to one knee to keep from falling over.

"Go get your lunch box and I'll walk you to camp," Goran told him. "I'm still down two points."

His little brother scampered off in a zigzag, still dizzy, and Goran took the ball at the top of the key.

"So you really think that guy hates you because you're white?" I asked him as he dribbled.

"That's part of it." Goran faked and spun right, but I was there. He dribbled another few steps, faked and spun left, but I was there, too.

"That's what he says, at least. The real reason he hates me"—Goran bounced the ball through the space between my legs, picked it up behind me, and sprinted to the basket—"is because he thinks I stole his girlfriend."

He dunked the ball and smacked the ground when he landed. Like he'd been waiting to do that all game.

He looked up and saw my back as I headed for the door.

"Hey!"

I called out "I gotta go," gave him a half-assed wave over my shoulder, and left him there alone in the gym with the basketball still bouncing.

I ran down the hall, past the Student Life Center where I tutored, out into the parking lot. I couldn't turn around, I couldn't do anything but run. I sprinted the entire way home, but this time I wasn't soaring.

I hadn't realized it would bother me that much to hear him say the word girlfriend.

"You don't belong here," Warrior Woman said to me, her fists propped on her golden girdle.

"I was just studying," I said. "I thought it would be okay."

"Do that on your own time. Headquarters is off limits after hours. Your presence here is a privilege, not a right."

Thank you, Ilsa the Super Nazi.