Johnny Came Home: A John Lazarus Adventure - excerpt

Chapter 1 - Johnny Came Home

Johnny always said he’d rather die than come back to Midwich, but he’d never counted on having to make that very choice.

When it came down to it, he found himself driving his maroon 1987 Plymouth Reliant with its Mustard Yellow front passenger fender in the only direction that offered a chance at life. Eventually, he pulled off the interstate onto a paved country road. The two lane highway degenerated into a single lane of cracked, lumpy asphalt guaranteed to give you motion sickness. Only poor farms and the occasional house trailer broke the monotony of the drive. At long last, he came to an opening in the trees on a high ridge. Midwich appeared below on the banks of a wide river, an improbably mid-sized city with a prominent downtown. Johnny stopped briefly at a scenic overlook.

It was almost exactly as he remembered it. The city was laid out before him like a map, bisected by the river. Off to the right of his view, the river spilled from the locks of a local dam. The dam powered the city itself and the surrounding area. Kaukasos College was nestled on a hilltop on the banks of a man-made lake, also the result of the dam. Across the valley from the college, he could see Titan Biotech’s imposing complex.

The locals thought Titan was a Godsend. Titan’s charismatic CEO, Charles Huxley, had made good on his promise to transform the economy of once-rural Midwich. He built the research complex, the dam and the power station. Then he brought in Titan-owned businesses like Argus Information Systems, Mnemosyne Marketing, and Gaia Biofarms. These jobs attracted more jobs and investors – and the poor people of Appalachia practically worshipped jobs. Anyone who’d seen the commercials knew that Titan hoped to usher in a better tomorrow through aggressive research into green power, genetically-engineered crops, pharmaceuticals, gene therapies, and better healthcare.

Johnny sighed, took note of the fact that his passenger was still asleep, and decided not to wake him until later. Weasel would have a thousand questions that he wasn’t prepared to answer just yet. He headed toward town.

Though he hadn’t really intended to, he found himself passing through the downtown district. Maybe it was out of morbid curiosity. They’d only just broke ground for Titan Tower when he left. Now it reached into the heavens like Babel, lording over Founder’s Plaza and every other building in Midwich. Its top floors were still under construction, including an unfinished steel-and-girder statue of Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders.

Titan’s downtown blossomed with skyscrapers, but these economic changes were still too new for Midwich’s original residents. As a result, the area was an uneasy conglomerate of metropolitan newcomers and redneck tradition.

He passed the old comics shop on his way out of Founder’s Plaza. The very last time he’d seen Emily was at that shop. He’d wanted to tell her about the strange things that were happening to him, but then chickened out. Black Ear Comics was closed, abandoned.

He headed for his old neighborhood. When he came to Archer Lane, he slowed down to take everything in. Despite himself, he admired the massive columns of oak that stood sentry on either side. Serpentine roots churned up the sidewalks, forcing children to take their bikes and wagons to the streets. Arching branches formed a near-perfect cathedral overhead, except for a thin center line of cloud-strewn blue sky. The site filled him with an unbidden sense of nostalgia. He suppressed it immediately. His childhood was a lie.

The houses were nearly identical, save one.

Each two-story structure sported a different hue of pastel homogeneity. Powder blues. Pale greens. Faded citrus. Ghostly yellows. Mellencamp pinks. All had big picture windows, where you could see the family gathered around the dinner table each afternoon. Each sported a two-car garage with a basketball hoop between the doors, whether the owner had more than one vehicle or not. Not one lacked a spacious, inviting porch with the prerequisite porch swing and a pair of old rockers. All had well-trimmed front lawns bounded by darling picket fences and big backyards rimmed with tall privacy hedges. Each backyard was guaranteed to have a grand shade tree big enough to support a good-sized tree house or an old tire swing. A storage shed stood sentry over a rustic gate that led to a gravel alley. In short, they were all picture perfect.