Hero Read online

  The speed of me.

  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.

  32

  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.

  Maybe I’m not worthy of these powers.

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.”

  People die.

  Like all those people in the Twin Towers.

  Like Zach’s dad.

  “You’re still the best chance I have to find out who killed my dad,” Zach said. “And I am gonna find out.”

  “But even if you don’t, you still gotta keep fighting.”

  There was the sound of sirens in the distance.

  Zach said, “So why did you drop in on me this time?”

  “I have some new information,” the old man said. “When it does happen, it’s going to be in New York.”

  “Here?” Zach said.

  “Here,” Mr. Herbert said. “C’mon. It’s time for class to begin.”

  “What,” Zach said, “now you’re my teacher?”

  The old man winked at him again.

  “Think of me as Yoda,” he said, “just with an edge.”

  They spent the next hour looking for secluded areas of the park, something that wasn’t so easy to do on a beautiful day.

  “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Zach said.

  “Because you still don’t know how good you are,” the old man said. “Or bad.”

  Zach thought about the guy outside the subway station, wondering if the old man knew about him.

  “What does that mean?” Zach asked.

  “You’re both, Zacman. And you’ve got to use both, just the way your father did. It’s part of the deal.”

  They found an empty spot in the woods behind a statue of a sled dog named Balto. They worked on the East Green, a huge lawn up near 72nd Street and Fifth.

  At one point, Mr. Herbert disappeared into the woods near the Navy Terrace, which overlooked another one of Central Park’s ponds.

  “Where are you going?” Zach said.

  “You’ll find me.”

  “I haven’t played hide-and-seek in a long time,” Zach said.

  “Imagine your friend Kate needs you,” the old man said. “Imagine that up good.”

  Zach closed his eyes and remembered that morning Kate went by herself to the park. He felt something inside him focus.

  He opened his eyes. Zach was able to look across the water and into the woods and spot Mr. Herbert immediately, like he had x-ray vision.

  When the old man came back, he said to Zach, “Next time it might not be a game.”

  They practiced a few more times, Zach acing every test. It got to the point where Zach could hone in on Mr. Herbert from anywhere. Once he figured out how to do it, how to focus his energy, it was almost too easy.

  Finally, they ended up near Bethesda Fountain, another rock formation.

  “Are we done?” Zach asked.

  Mr. Herbert said, “For today.”

  “Good,” Zach said, and stretched out on his back, suddenly exhausted by everything.

  But he was excited, too; he couldn’t help it.

  He was smiling.

  “What’s good?” the old man said.

  “Just thinking of something one of my friends said at school today.”

  It was a lie. Maybe Mr. Herbert knew. If he did, Zach didn’t care.

  He was smiling because something Mr. Herbert had said before turned out to be right on the money, not that Zach would ever admit that to him:

  Zach hadn’t known how good he was.

  Not even close.

  The old man stared at Zach as though he could see right through him. Then he, too, smiled.

  “You may just be ready, Zacman.”

  33

  THE rally for Senator Kerrigan was scheduled for the last weekend in June, in the famous section of Central Park between 79th and 85th known as the Great Lawn.

  Zach’s mom told him she had been a teenager when the singing team of Simon and Garfunkel had given a free outdoor concert on the Great Lawn. She and her girlfriends had gone and felt as if most of the city went with them that night.

  “They said it was half a million people in the crowd,” Elizabeth Harriman said.

  “To see two guys sing?”

  “It was a big deal at the time because it was a reunion concert.”

  “New York makes everything bigger,” Zach said.

  “Paul Simon has agreed to sing before Senator Kerrigan speaks in June,” his mom said. “It’s that big of a deal.”

  “You think he can help you pull half a mil this time?” Zach said.

  “Oh, Lord no,” she said. “But we think there might be a couple hundred thousand. That’s how much momentum the campaign has picked up over the last month.”

  Zach high-fived her. “That’s my mom right there, ladies and gentlemen, talking about the big ‘Mo.’”

  “C’mon, you know it’s happening,” she said. “I’ll bet kids are talking about the campaign in your school.”

  “Actually, they are,” Zach said. “Most kids think Senator Kerrigan is cool. And the political geeks who are really following it talk about Vice President Boras like he’s Darth Vader.”

  “Good,” his mom said. “It’s nice to hear they totally get it at the Parker School.”

  Zach was a week from the end of school, two more finals to go. But he’d done his studying before he came home today, so now in the early evening they were waiting for Uncle John to come over for dinner, the first time he’d been to the apartment in a few weeks. As usual, he’d been traveling.

  And for the first time in his life, Zach had been glad about Uncle John’s absence. There was something between them now, some barrier, whether it belonged or not.

  Tonight, though, was different, from the time Uncle John stepped out of the elevator. Tonight it was as if he was determined to be the old Uncle John, being funny about all the candidates in the campaign, smiling through the dining table debates with Zach’s mom about Senator Kerrigan and Dick Boras, maintaining that Boras was better qualified to be president.

  “Maybe you should go work for the man,” Zach’s mom said.

  “And risk the wrath of Elizabeth Townsend Harriman?” Uncle John said. “I am stubborn, mada
m, but not stupid.”

  “I was watching you when Bob Kerrigan spoke here,” she said. “You were as engaged by him as anybody else in the room.”

  Zach was sitting next to Uncle John, who poked him lightly with an elbow now and winked. “Nobody fakes sincerity better than I do,” he said.

  “Except Dick Boras,” she said. “The man’s a menace.”

  “No, he’s a realist,” Uncle John said. “Of all the candidates, he’s the one who truly understands best how dangerous the world has become, even better than his boss in the White House. Not just a dangerous world, but fragile at the same time.” He looked at Zach and said, “It’s like a ball game, where you’re always one play away from winning or losing.”

  Zach’s mom hung with him. “You’re saying Bob Kerrigan is somehow oblivious to how dangerous things are?”

  “Dick Boras wants to win for the good of this country. That’s not enough for Bob Kerrigan. He’s more concerned that people like him. He’s desperate for it. Dick Boras doesn’t care if you like him or not. He doesn’t particularly care if you love America. He just wants things to work better. He gets things done.”

  “Are you saying he wants to get the trains to run on time?” she said. “Isn’t that how dictators used to sell themselves?”

  Uncle John laughed, waved his napkin like a white flag. “I give up,” he said. “I’m the lawyer, but every time we have this conversation, I feel as if I’m the one on trial.”

  “And at least you’re not being an old crab about things this time,” Zach’s mom said.

  “At least I’m consistent,” he said. “You know I used to have this same argument with your husband all the time.”

  Zach didn’t know if Uncle John knew about his dad being Senator Kerrigan’s running mate, even though he acted like he knew everything. But Zach wasn’t about to bring it up.

  Zach’s mom asked Uncle John if he had time for coffee and he said no, it was such a nice night he was actually hoping he and Zach could go for a walk.

  “I’ve been an absentee uncle way too much lately,” he said. He looked at Zach and said, “So, you up for it? Could be some kind of mondo banana split at the end of it.”