Johnny Came Home: A John Lazarus Adventure - excerpt

Chapter 2 - Casting Stones

Under the shadow of the bridge, a stare-down was in full effect.

Weasel Hopkins sat on the still warm hood of the Plymouth, his cigarette hanging precariously from the corner of his mouth. Though the stinging smoke curled irreverently into his left eye, he seemed determined not to blink. Johnny held his gaze with those unshakable amber eyes, waiting until the cigarette smoke forced the issue. "Are you in? Or not?" Johnny asked, taking advantage of the other’s loss of face to push his point.

"No, no. Let's think this out a bit, shall we? You want to break into your old house – the house you burnt down, mind you! And, by the way, does anyone else know you're an arsonist?"

Johnny turned away, pretending to examine the graffiti tagged on the bridge’s concrete pylons. One message, spray-painted in tall, hot pink letters, caught his eye instantly: "Titan Lies!" His dad had warned him about Titan Biotech the night of the fire. He couldn’t help but wonder who else suspected there was something amiss up at Titan.

"Well?" Weasel asked.

Johnny picked up a rock and casually turned toward the river. His eyes darted self-consciously to the graffiti before responding. "No, everybody thinks I'm dead." He attempted to skip the stone across the waters. Plunk! Too bulky. He cast about for something more suitable.

"Yeah, what's up with that exactly? No offense, buddy, but you just burn your house down and what? Let everyone think you went up with it? You let them live with that while you just went off –"

"Nobody cared, alright." He knew that now. He was different and they hated him for it. It wasn't until shortly before the fire that he realized why. He’d thought it had something to do with the color of his skin, or that he’d been adopted by a white couple, or that his girlfriend was the prettiest, most popular white girl in town. But it was definitely more than skin deep. You hate what you fear. You fear what you can’t control. He blinked away the past, forcing himself to concentrate on the present. The ice shield slipped back over his eyes. "Just trust me on that one."

"Fine, I'm sure you had a perfectly good reason for burning down your house. Some of us would've liked to have had a big house to burn down. Burning down a real nice trailer home just doesn't have the same ring to it."

Johnny tried to suppress a grin. He flicked a rock towards the river. It skipped twice before it dove beneath the surface. Encouraged by his success, he looked around for a better stone to throw.

"But if nobody cared, why come back at all? And this better not have anything to do with that fortune teller we saw last night, dude."

"It's hard to explain, Weez."

Johnny had let Weasel know some of his story over the years. He’d told him about the house and the fire, how he’d lost his folks. He’d clued him in on the fact that the town was pretty much Big Brother. And given the effort he took to assure that they stayed off the grid, Weasel probably at least suspected that not everyone thought Johnny was dead. It looked like Weasel was beginning to resent being on a need-to-know basis. Yet how did one go about explaining that he’d made certain decisions in his life, ever since the night of the fire, based simply on a gut feeling that choosing otherwise would result in his untimely death? Call them premonitions, all he knew is that sometimes he came to a crossroads and when he considered one option against another, he could see his own death in one of them. These death visions came in quick, stabbing flashes, much too intense to ignore. How did one explain that from the moment he’d visited that fortune teller last night, he’d known he had to come to Midwich or die?

"So try me," Weasel said. "Use little words if you have to, but at least tell your best friend – your future accessory to breaking and entering, for crying out loud – what the devil is going on."