Moonshiners' Hollow

Chapter One

It was odd to him: being in a wheelchair when he didn't need to be. It was a kind of superficial helplessness, but it was strictly enforced by the pretty nurse looming over him. Tyler felt the weight of her gaze as he shifted around in the vinyl seat to talk to her.

"I'm sure they'll be here any minute," he said, cutting off the words that she had begun to form when he moved. After her mouth closed, her reaction was a delayed customer-service smile—lips curling too far upward to truly be genuine. The wrinkles from her tight-lipped smile gathered around her deep-set eyes, drawing attention to the dark circles surrounding them.

"S'fine, Hun," she said. She sounded tired. "I know how family can be."

"Yeah," Tyler said, rolling his eyes and punctuating the word with a chuckle-like exhalation from his nose. "Mine's pretty... disorganized, to say the least."

Her smile tightened, the strain on the corners of her mouth causing her makeup to crack.

Fifteen minutes prior, Tyler had informed her that his family was "almost here" after he had received a message from his sister that they had arrived in Beckley. The nurse—Heather, maybe—had wheeled him outside despite his thousandth insistence that he could, indeed, walk; and, for the thousandth time on her part, Heather had patiently explained it was just hospital policy as they had stepped from the cool interior of the heat of the West Virginian summer.

In that time, Tyler had tried to pull more conversation out of the woman, but she wore her exhaustion like a Halloween mask. After their most recent exchange, he readjusted himself back into a front-facing position; Heather's face held the type of "no-bullshit" expression that only someone who had been told that their shift relief called off at the last minute could hold. He had seen it many times and worn it often himself. He pulled down on his phone's text messages again, hoping to get them to reload a message that had failed to come through.

Nothing.

He frowned, then turned the phone's screen off and turned it over on his leg, diverting his attention past the white square pillars of the monolithic concrete awning to the mature trees along the hospital drive. The heat had wilted the trees' leaves, giving them a sickly look uncharacteristic of the well-manicured lawn around them. Cars drove leisurely along the road beyond the white curved sign that the trees were planted near, filling the hot, stagnant air around them with the sounds of machine-made breezes and tires rolling along asphalt.

There was something about the mountains—tree-covered, green—on the horizon that caused his stomach to churn with unease. The heat and humidity was just like he was used to in other states he had lived in in the same area, but the air was so laden with the scent of childhood summertimes that it caused a deep pit of dread-filled nostalgia in his body. There was something sickly about home.

Tyler clicked his phone back on, looking for a text message from Kat. She still hadn't sent anything beyond that they had arrived in town.

He ran his fingers along the surface of the black cast wrapped around the entirety of his right leg, frowning at the coarse texture. He had had casts before, as a child, but it had been so long ago that he forgot what it was like to be forced to wear one. The pain was easier to ignore than the immobility of his limb, although the dull, radiating discomfort from below his knee could become unbearable after hours of its throbbing.

He didn't even know what happened. He was on the barge, then he was in the hospital.

The doctor said it was his tibia, that it was broke real bad, and something about splintering and bone fragments. It all was too medical and complicated, especially with how disorienting everything had been, that when the doctor informed him that they would need to place a metal rod inside his leg so he had hope of walking again, Tyler was quick to sign the papers.