Hero

by Mike Lupica

  “I’m just curious about where the curiosity is coming from today?” his mom said.

  “I’m just like you, Mom. I never pressed him enough when I had the chance. So now I’m pressing you.”

  “I’ll answer you this way,” she said. “I guess I never thought he was doing anything out of the ordinary because he was so extraordinary at everything.”

  One last shot, like he was heaving a half-court shot before the horn sounded.

  “No magic?” he said.

  It made his mom laugh.

  “Magic? Your dad couldn’t even do a decent card trick.”

  Over the next few days he was barely able to focus on school or basketball or anything. All he could think about was what had happened in that field.

  The field where his dad’s plane had crashed had changed everything for him. Twice.

  Zach went through the motions in his classes and with his homework. He and Kate even pulled off an A on the Addison-FDR project. And he managed not to suck in basketball, shooting the ball a little better and playing some decent defense. Maybe because he wasn’t trying so hard, or maybe because it didn’t matter as much as it had when practice had started.

  He was even managing to stay off Spence Warren’s smack list. Both physical and mental. His father had told him once that bullies the world over had one thing in common: they hated people standing up to them. Maybe that’s what finally got Spence off his back—that fight in the park, even though Zach hadn’t given him much of a fight.

  At least he’d felt like fighting. Finally fighting back.

  No matter where he was or what he was doing, though, he kept waiting for that feeling to come over him again, the crazy one that had him thinking he was about to turn into a werewolf.

  Waiting and wondering what would happen to him the next time.

  Could he fly? Make himself invisible again? Could he take Spence Warren in a fair fight? Could he turn these powers, whatever they were, on and off, as easily as if he were putting his laptop to sleep?

  Yet nothing new happened. Just the regulation Zach Harriman. No old wizards jumping out of the weeds like grasshoppers. No weird trips into the park at night. No urge to pick a fight with a wall, or with Spence, or scare off muggers hiding in the bushes.

  “I feel like I’m in an elevator,” he said to Kate. A full week had now passed between meeting Mr. Herbert and today. They were walking home from a movie. “Stuck between floors. Not even knowing if I’m going up or down.”

  She giggled. “Sounds like your normal state, if you ask me.”

  “That’s supposed to be helpful?”

  “Not to you, maybe. But it makes me happy.”

  “Seriously,” he said, “does this make any sense to you?”

  “Seriously? Yeah, I get it. You feel like your life went to a commercial break and you’re waiting for the show to come back on. Only it won’t. This whole week . . . you haven’t been able to do anything like you did getting home from Montauk? Anything out of, like, Smallville, Superboy?”

  Zach shook his head. “The only thing out of the ordinary was staying awake for a whole science class.”

  “My God, man, you are superhuman!ʺ

  “Do you think I should head out to that field again?”

  “Not really. I mean, if this really is your life now, then it’s going to happen wherever you are. Right?”

  Zach nodded.

  They had entered Central Park by now and were walking around the reservoir. It was starting to get dark, and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees since they’d left the movie theater.

  “Sometimes I think I imagined the whole thing.”

  “But that would mean I imagined it, too,” Kate said.

  “That would be some hallucination, Harriman. Two for the price of one.”

  Zach casually reached into his pocket, felt for his dad’s Morgan. He kept it with him all the time, except when he was at basketball practice.

  It felt warm, the way it had in Montauk.

  Not good, Zach thought.

  Not good at all.

  17

  ZACH could swear there had been plenty of joggers in the park only a moment before. Some of them had even passed him and Kate. Yet now he couldn’t see any of them as they came around to the west side of the reservoir. It was as if somebody had waved them off the running track all at once.

  Now it was just Zach and Kate.

  And the three guys blocking their way.

  Zach and Kate stopped. Instinctively, Kate reached for his hand. There was no mistaking what was about to happen with the three guys.

  Trouble.

  Two of them casually moved behind Zach and Kate.

  The one in front said to Zach, “Empty your pockets.”

  Zach said, “I know you.”

  He was sure he did, sure that the face underneath the black knit cap was the same one he’d seen the other night in the park.

  Staring at him now, Zach said, “You were going to jump that woman that night, weren’t you?”

  Kate said, “What night?”

  Zach ignored her. “I’m right, aren’t I?” he said to Knit Cap.

  “Shut up, kid,” the guy said.

  “All I’ve got in my pocket is about four dollars and change,” Zach said.

  “I don’t want the four dollars, and I don’t want the chump change,” he said. “I want the coin.”

  “The Morgan? How do you know . . . ?”

  The guy looked at his two buddies and said, “I told you. Kid’s clueless.”

  “Well, I know I am,” Kate said, trying to sound normal, Zach knowing better, hearing the change in her voice.

  Hearing how scared she was.

  “I know this,” Zach said. “My dad gave me this coin and there’s no way I’m handing it over to some scrub like you.”

  And just like that, he started to feel it.

  Not the fear he knew Kate was feeling.

  The other feeling.

  A roar inside his head. Inside him.

  “Zach?” Kate said.

  “It’s okay, Kate.”

  “Don’t,” she said in a small voice. “Just give them what they want and let’s get out of here.”

  He turned to her, smiling now, actually enjoying himself. “See, their problem is, they don’t know how badly I’ve got them outnumbered.”

  A lot happened then, seemingly all at once.

  Someone reached for Kate’s arms, but she wheeled and dove away from him, off the track and onto the grass, rolling as she landed.

  Leaving Zach and the three men.

  Not really knowing how to do what he wanted to do, Zach wheeled and hit the guy who had reached for Kate with an elbow that caught him cleanly on the jaw. Direct hit. Zach heard a sound that reminded him of the crack of a bat in baseball. The guy staggered back but didn’t go down, gave his head a quick shake and started to raise his fists.

  Too late.

  Without even feeling himself make the move, Zach was behind him, reaching up, putting his hand on the guy’s neck, knowing exactly what to do, finding the pressure point like it had an X drawn on it. He squeezed hard and put him out.

  One against two now.

  The odds getting worse for them by the minute.

  He was about to go for Knit Cap when he heard Kate yell, “Watch out!” Out of the corner of his eye he saw the other guy, the widest of the three, circling to the right, holding a metal pipe in his hand.

  Zach covered the distance between them with the kind of blinding first step he wished he had in hoops. He took the pipe out of the guy’s hand like he was taking a pacifier away from a baby.

  Then Zach drop-stepped away, giving himself just enough room to jump and spin and take him down with the kind of move that would have made Jackie Chan proud.

  Now it was just him and Knit Cap.

  Zach was anxious to finish this, knowing it had started that night when Knit Cap was in the bushes, waiting for the woman jogger.
r />   Zach dropped the metal pipe at his feet. He didn’t need it.

  “How did you know about the coin?” Zach said, taking a step forward.

  Knit Cap shook his head.

  “Not today, kid. Maybe another time. But not today.”

  Then instead of moving on Zach, he turned and ran in the other direction, went up and over the tall iron fence in one move, like someone in a highlight reel slam dunk, and dove into the water of the reservoir.

  Zach ran to the fence, waiting to see the guy come up.

  Only he didn’t. The water was completely still, without even the kind of ripple you got when you threw a stone into it.

  He waited for what felt like a long time and then walked back to the track. Confused.

  Kate was on her knees in the grass, staring at him.

  “Zach?” she said in a quiet voice, his name like a question to her.

  Zach said, “The other two . . . they ran off?”

  Kate shook her head. Somehow Zach had known she would.

  “No,” she said. Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

  “Where are they then?”

  “They disappeared,” she said.

  Her eyes were wide, frightened.

  “Like they were . . . deleted,” she said.

  18

  KATE Paredes considered herself a brave girl.

  She didn’t wander all over the city by herself, but neither was she easily intimidated by it. Her mother, her wonderful mother, Alba, the giver of the best advice in two languages, had once told her something she never forgot:

  “If you think you’re in the wrong place, you probably are.”

  Kate didn’t take silly chances, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like to test herself occasionally. Get out of her comfort zone. The summer before, despite all the kidding she got from Zach, she’d signed up for Outward Bound, putting herself out there in the woods of Maine for a couple of weeks. And she’d liked that more than she thought she would, relying on herself, being strong and resourceful and using common sense.

  From the start, she’d understood that when it came to her and Zach, she was the stronger one. It wasn’t as though she thought he was some kind of wimp. Just that if one of them was going to lean on the other, Zach was going to be the leaner.

  Not anymore.

  Not after what she’d seen today, with her own eyes. This wasn’t Zach telling her about the old man, about the way he’d gotten back to the city.

  This time it was right in front of her.

  The Zach she’d seen at the reservoir, the Zach she’d seen take down two men . . . she didn’t know that Zach Harriman.

  Spins and kicks and jumps and . . . fearlessness. The weird calm, the confident way he took on those guys. Like he knew he could take them.

  This Zach had scared the brave girl.

  He scared her and so did this new world of his, the one with the magic in it, with bad guys who disappeared into thin air, with danger, and Kate somehow knew this wasn’t going to be the last violence in it.

  Kate lay in the dark that night and kept replaying what had happened, a much scarier version of counting sheep. And even when she finally fell asleep, there were nightmares that she would still remember, much too vividly, in the morning.

  Nightmares about men disappearing every time she tried to get a good look at them. And about someone she felt should be a friend, but who had the face of a stranger.

  She woke up early on Sunday morning, happy not to be sleeping anymore. She was up before her mother, something that hardly ever happened, and felt like the first person awake in the whole city of New York.

  She felt trapped in her room, time moving way too slowly. She needed a way to breathe again. So even though it was a few minutes before six, she decided to get dressed and go out for a walk. Maybe stop at Starbucks and buy herself a hot chocolate. Extra whipped cream.

  She put on her absolute favorite ball cap, the Knicks cap that Zach had bought her, and a Parker hoodie, went down the elevator and out past Mitch, one of the weekend doormen, with a big smile and wave.

  “I’d say top of the mornin’, missy, but it’s more like the bottom of the night,” Mitch said. “Where you off to?”

  “I want to be the first person in Manhattan to get a hot chocolate at Starbucks today,” she said.

  “Ah yes, the breakfast of champions.”

  “Maybe the Knicks should try some,” Kate said. “With extra whipped cream.”

  “Sometimes they’re about as tough as whipped cream,” Mitch said.

  “’Cept for David Lee.”

  Mitch winked at her. “’Cept for him. Think they’ll let him go?”

  “They better not.”

  She walked north on Fifth Avenue for a while and then cut over to Madison and what she knew would be the first Starbucks she’d come to. Went big today—a venti.

  The hot chocolate felt comforting, the large cup solid and warm in her hands. After a few sips she left and, instead of heading back home, she walked to Fifth Avenue and turned north again. The wall to Central Park was on her left.

  She told herself she hadn’t planned to end up here. Yet Kate knew she was kidding herself. She knew exactly what her destination was from the moment she’d left her bedroom. She was walking back up to the reservoir, back to where it had happened. Maybe just to see some sign that it had all been real, that it hadn’t been part of one long nightmare.

  She cut into the park past the Metropolitan Museum of Art and made her way up some steps to the running track. The sun still wasn’t up yet, but there were already a few stray joggers.

  She finished her hot chocolate and dropped the cup in a waste bin, all the while waiting for her cell to ring, waiting for her mother to be calling.

  Silence.

  She walked until she got to the old brick maintenance building. She looked behind her and could see only one jogger, all the way at the far end of the water, coming up the same stairs she had just climbed a few minutes before.

  Kate stopped, making sure she was in the right spot. She knelt in the grass, getting up and making a wider circle, thinking that maybe the metal pipe the one guy had been carrying would be around here somewhere.

  Something she could put her hands on.

  Nothing.

  Somehow she knew there wouldn’t be.

  A voice in her head told her to leave, that this was all bigger than her.

  Kate ignored it.

  She closed her eyes and saw it all happening again, pictured the guy in the knit cap going over the fence as easily as if he were hopping a footstool and then disappearing into the water, not making a ripple or a sound.

  She had watched him do it. When she turned back around, the other two men had vanished. Could they have just run toward Central Park West while she wasn’t looking instead of disappearing completely?

  No.

  “You came back. I knew you would.”

  In the quiet of the morning, the emptiness of this part of the park, it was as if the words came out of a loudspeaker.

  Kate screamed, couldn’t help it, whipped her head around.

  Knit Cap, dressed exactly the same.

  Kate opened her mouth again, ready to scream for help . . . only this time nothing came out.

  He smiled at her. But this wasn’t a friendly smile; there was nothing good behind his eyes, nothing good inside him at all.

  “But what was she thinking?” he said, circling her. “I mean, coming back here all alone?”

  “Stay away from me,” Kate said, knowing as soon as she did how pathetic that sounded.

  She added: “What do you want from me?”

  “From you?” he said. “Nothing. I want your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Kate said.

  Even here, even like this, there was something that made her want to set the record straight.

  “Right.”

  “Why don’t you just swim away like you did the last time and leave me alon
e?”

  The brave girl trying one last time to sound brave, even if she wasn’t.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said, stopping in front of her, leaning down, his face only inches from hers. “I think I have other plans.”

  She tried to look past him, down the track, wondering where the jogger had gone.

  “There’s no one around to help you,” he said. “Look around all you want.”

  “I’m going now,” Kate said, trying to make her voice sound steady.

  He reached for her.

  19

  KATE tried to duck away. No good. The man just grabbed the back of her hoodie.

  She tried to scream. Same as before: nothing came out. Knit Cap pulled harder on the hoodie, spun her around toward him.

  That’s when Kate saw the jogger reappear around the corner.

  Only he wasn’t jogging. You couldn’t even call this running. He was moving way too fast.

  Kate tried to look away, didn’t want Knit Cap to see her staring, didn’t want him to know they were no longer alone. Knowing there was only one person this could be.

  Zach hadn’t told Kate about all of his new powers, mainly because he was still figuring them out.

  One thing he had definitely noticed, though: his senses had suddenly been jacked up.

  Jacked up a lot.

  His eyesight, which had always been solid when he was reading an eye chart, was off the charts now, sharper than hi-def. He was sure that was why his jump shot was suddenly better than ever in basketball.

  But this morning it had been his hearing that had gotten him going. Zach had heard Kate on the stairs, even though she had done an expert job of sneaking down. He’d also heard the elevator opening and closing, as though the door were right next to his bed.

  He saw the time in the glowing numbers of his clock radio and wondered where she could be going at six a.m. He didn’t like it.

  He went to the balcony and saw her with Mitch the doorman.

  Saw her head up Fifth Avenue.

  Zach didn’t wait. He threw on his jeans and fleece jacket and sneaks, not even waiting for the elevator, taking the back stairs and taking them fast.