After many years as Jack-in-the-Box, Zachary was led to reassess his priorities and heroic career by his wife's pregnancy, coupled with visitations from the Box, the Jackson and Jerome Johnson, three alternate future versions of the child she might bear. Zachary's visitors indicated that he was soon to be killed in action, leaving his infant son to grow up fatherless as he had, but with far more tragic results. In two of the possible futures they represent, the boy becomes an insane super-vigilante; in the third, the "best" alternative, a lonely, emotionally crippled college professor. Zachary, unwilling to subject his family to a fate similar to what he had endured, ultimately decided to give up his role as Jack-in-the-Box. Equally unwilling to leave society defenseless against the threats from which he protected it, he simultaneously groomed Roscoe James, founder of the Trouble Boys, as his protégé to take over from him and become the third Jack-in-the-Box.