Episode 83: Field Training

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Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror anthology podcast and therefore may contain material not suitable for all audiences.

So, listener discretion is advised.

Vincent Albright,

please call me Vince, was very good at his job.

He worked in the legal department of the Cumberland Valley Authority, an entity which, while technically owned by the federal government, enjoyed little oversight by that body and operated for all intents and purposes as a private for-profit corporation.

It had originally been established in the 1930s as a means of lifting Appalachia's great unwashed up from poverty through the transformative power of work.

Thousands of men were hired to begin construction on numerous projects that would harness the power of the region's waterways to bring electricity to its rural population, control flooding, expand roadways and bridges, and numerous other ventures that could, more or less, be deemed economic development.

If the realization of those ventures required the displacement of equal numbers of the area's residents, well,

that was simply the price of progress, friend.

Vince had not come from Appalachia.

He had been born and bred amidst the hustle and bustle of the great city of Chicago, a far cry from the picturesque backwater where he eventually found employment.

The middle son of a middle-class family in a sleepy neighborhood where nothing of much interest had ever happened, Vince had earned average grades in school, good enough to ensure his entry into a decent college where he earned a law degree.

He managed to pass the bar exam on his third try,

after which he had found himself at something of a loss.

Vince had anticipated joining his grandfather's law firm once he finally managed to obtain his license to practice, but as luck would have it, the old man passed away the day before he received the letter notifying him he would now be eligible to be admitted to the Illinois State Bar.

His grandfather's legal partners would be taking over the practice, and there was no position waiting for young Vince to simply walk into.

Frustrated at this unexpected misfortune, but certain he would have no trouble finding work elsewhere, Vince assembled a resume and began applying with other firms.

As it turns out, however, A city the size of Chicago has no shortage of fresh-faced, eager young law school graduates looking for work, many of whom possessed far more impressive credentials credentials than Vincent Albright.

While his transcripts were adequate, he hadn't been an honored student,

and while the school he attended was respectable, it was far from Ivy League.

His older brother advised him to apply to work for the county, perhaps with the district attorney or in the public defender's office.

What about legal aid?

His youngest sister suggested.

Those folks were always looking for competent lawyers to assist the less fortunate.

Vince had nodded and acknowledged that he had not yet explored those options, though privately he scoffed at the idea.

He was young, but he wasn't stupid.

The real money was in private practice.

And that's what interested Vince.

Money.

Position.

Power.

His family just didn't get it.

They'd never understood him, never bothered to try, truth be told.

His older brother was their pride and joy, the heir and namesake destined to carry on the family line, and his younger sister was the apple of his father's eye, beautiful, charming, and funny, destined to make a good match and raise adorable grandchildren for his parents to spoil.

Vince was

little more than an afterthought, he had often mused bitterly.

The spare conceived in case some tragedy should befall his elder brother.

A year after Vince passed the bar exam, his father retired and his parents announced their plans to sell the family home and use the proceeds to move to a warmer climate, somewhere down south, where the weather would be kinder to their joints in their old age.

Vince, who was still living at home at the time, was at first flabbergasted.

Did they plan to simply throw him out on the street?

Their own son, banished from the only home he'd ever known?

His parents had exchanged a look, and then his mother suggested gently that perhaps a change of scenery would do him some good.

He should come with them, try looking for work elsewhere.

In truth, Vince had been furious, but with no job and nowhere else to go once the house sold, he felt he had little choice in the matter, so he reluctantly agreed.

He packed his meagre possessions into the moving van his father had hired and rode in sullen silence most of the way to Tennessee in the back of his mother's station wagon.

Had he known what awaited him at the end of the road, it would have been a very different journey.

One of anticipation, even, dare he say it,

joy.

For not long after the family's relocation, Vincent Albright would be hired by the Cumberland Valley Authority, and all his dreams would come true.

When the walls close in

and the light gets swallowed

and there ain't no place that feels like home

The ones you love

concerning the strangers

And you cast your eyes through the winding road

Keep your foot on the gas your eyes straight forward Clear your heart and mind

Best leave them ghosts ghosts behind

when the hearth grows cold and home is nowhere,

then you might as well

when darkness calls, run like hell.

It was his father who saw the notice in the local newspaper regarding openings in the legal department of the CVA not long after Vince had successfully been admitted to the bar in their new state.

Vince had been more than a bit skeptical.

I told you, Dad,

I have no interest in working for the government.

I know that, Vincent, but this isn't uh criminal law.

The notice says the work involves drafting legal contracts which seem more in line with what you want to do.

Might be a way for you to get your foot in the door, add something solid to your resume.

If his father's tone was clear, the look in his eye was unmistakable.

It was time for Vince to resume his search for employment in earnest.

He would not be afforded much more time on the family teat, as it were.

So he donned his best suit and presented himself at the historic building that housed the corporate headquarters of the cumberland valley authority in downtown knoxville tennessee vince's practiced smile and midwestern accent did little to impress folks in the personnel office but his law degree was enough to land him an entry-level position amongst the organization's legions of attorneys

vince worked in acquisitions a department that might be dubbed mergers and acquisitions in another sort of business The term merger refers to the process of combining two entities in order to create something new.

It implies a certain level of give and take, that each individual has a level of influence, if not necessarily equal influence on the outcome.

The CVA did not merge.

The CVA acquired.

And it was his responsibility to obtain the land required for its various projects, hydroelectric dams power plants or its more specialized facilities about which the legal team was encouraged not to ask too many questions by any means necessary vince quickly learned that in central appalachia land was more than just acreage and mineral rights the land came with people

attached people who had worked scraped and in some cases bled or or even killed for it.

Family land might be another name for theft and murder in the annals of history, but in rural mountain life, land stayed in the family unless worst truly came to worst.

While the desired territory cared little for its own bloody history, the people who called it home cared very much for their good names and reputations.

If a family's land was precious, its name was sacred.

These silly little backwood nobodies would rather throw themselves off the nearest trip job highwall than have their dirty laundry aired out for their friends and neighbors.

So, Vince and the discreet investigator he employed for such tasks went looking for the stains that would never wash out.

Affairs, shady business dealings, bad debts, these and more provided all he needed to get the CVA what it wanted.

Pay off mamma's hospital bill in exchange for the back 40 of a family farm that hadn't turned a profit in 25 years?

You look like a hero.

Agree not to send the blurry black and white 8x10s of a local electrician and his mistress to the man's wife in exchange for accepting a low-ball offer on your pathetic ancestral home, and you're a son of a bitch.

It was all the same in the end to Vincent Albright.

The son of a bitch who got the job done and one whose bosses were starting to notice.

He'd successfully closed deals for every piece of property that came across his desk.

Some had required more time and leverage than he preferred, but at the end of the day he got the job done and the scope of the CVA continued to grow.

After years of loyal service, Vince had eagerly anticipated the assignment which would finally carry him out of the realm of single homesteads and fallow pastures into what the agency referred to as classified acquisitions.

He had no idea what made them classified, nor did anyone else in his department.

When he reported to to administration for the task that would secure this promotion, he was notified that a hold had been placed on the file.

Classified cases required special clearance from management, as well as field training.

The offices of Vince's division were located in the basement of the historic building on the corner of Market and Hill that had once served as the area's post office.

From the outside, the corporate headquarters appeared a monolith of bureaucracy.

Sheathed in East Tennessee marble, the old Italianate-style building was at once beautiful and all but invisible.

The kind of place that faded into the background unless one had reason to set foot inside its hallowed halls.

Within its confines, however,

the offices of the Cumberland Valley Authority buzzed with activity.

Workplace morale was very important to the CVA, and the organization fostered a culture of devotion approaching zealotry.

The busy little bees that worked within its labyrinth halls lived to serve their hive.

On the lower level, lawyers hustled between their offices and the courthouse, drafting contracts and filing paperwork that would further the organization's goals.

Accountants, bookkeepers, the typing pool, and other administrative staff organized and filed, drafted memos and correspondences, and otherwise ensured the apparatus of bureaucracy kept running on the fuel that fed its engines.

Paperwork.

On the ground level, managers in neat and well-tailored suits negotiated deals and wrote checks to fund initiatives that would shape central Appalachia for generations.

Public relations staff welcomed the general public to press conferences and town hall meetings convened in stately rooms featuring marble floors and darkwood paneling.

The second and third floors, well.

Those were the exclusive domain of the board of directors.

From the lowest mailroom attendant to the president of the board, they worked not not for themselves, but in service to the hive.

Vince had never set foot on the staircase that led beyond the first floor until the day he was summoned to the second floor to meet his new supervisor and classified acquisitions, Miss Elmore.

For such a monumental step in his career, he

remembered little of it.

He recalled thinking that the staff on the second floor were very different from his co-workers downstairs.

Their clothing was immaculately tailored and looked expensive.

Their grooming was impeccable.

No stray hairs or shirts dotted with crumbs from a hastily consumed lunch.

They were, for lack of a better word,

beautiful.

When he sat down with Miss Elmore, she had offered him tea.

He knew he had accepted, but from there his memory grew a bit hazy.

He had a vague recollection of filling out and signing what seemed like reams of forms, and the next thing he knew, the workday was over and he found himself sitting in his car.

His dreams that night

had been strange.

Shifting shapes pursued him through dense and tangled underbrush.

He had run and run and then tripped and he had tried to seek shelter in an old house that loomed before him, but the front door was locked.

He pounded on the door, begging for shelter to no avail, and he looked up in horror as something something massive and amorphous buzzed above his head and then swooped down to devour him.

Vince woke up with a gasp.

Soaked in cold sweat, his heart pounded with lingering terror.

He shivered, mentally admonishing himself it was just a dream.

It was just a dream.

A good hot shower and a cup of coffee would put it out of his mind.

When he arrived at the office, he found his desk had been cleared, his personal belongings carefully boxed up.

A terse note rested on top which congratulated him on his acceptance to the classified acquisitions team and informed him that his new office on the second floor wouldn't be ready until tomorrow.

Today, he would complete his field training, which would be conducted by one of Miss Elmore's assistants, a man by the name of Sawyer.

Now Vince had anticipated a test of the skills he had demonstrated over the years.

He expected he would be presented with a case file to work his way through, demonstrating the ruthless precision that had been his call-in card throughout his career at the CVA.

What he did not expect was to be driven to an old house located in a coal camp an hour and a half north of the city across the Kentucky state line.

Sawyer had little to say on their drive into the hills.

When asked about their destination, he responded with only a non-committal grunt.

Trying another attack, Vince wondered aloud what his training would be like, and the man only chuckled.

If you're as ready as Miss L thinks you are, you'll know what to do when you get there.

Everybody works upstairs has passed the test, so just trust your gut and remember what brought you here.

You'll be fine.

The coal camp known as Red Rust was less than a ghost town.

No self-respecting spirit would waste their afterlife haunting such a shabby place.

Any remnant of the actual mining operation had long since been looted or collapsed into dust.

A few rotting houses stared sightless from the edge of the road, their windows like the empty sockets of a skull.

They turned onto a muddy back road and drove further into the woods than Vincent Albright had ever been.

He'd heard the jokes about places so far back in the hills they had to pop in sunlight, but until now,

He'd never fully understood.

These were the sort of places that gave rise to tales of lost children and breadcrumb trails of gingerbread houses constructed by mysterious old crones to lure those children to their deaths, of murderous hunters and ravening wolves.

When Sawyer pulled to a stop, Vince began to sweat.

The slump-shouldered, decaying old relic that stood before them was the house from his dream.

Somewhere at the edge of his hearing,

something with skittering legs and a hundred thousand wings

buzzed.

We're here.

Welcome to your field training, Mr.

Albright.

What is this?

A joke?

No joke, son.

Working on classified cases requires a certain level of uh

internal fortitude.

You won't just be dealing with stubborn hillbillies who won't let go of dear old Granny's homestead.

There are certain properties the agency wishes to obtain that require a

different approach, yeah.

Miss L believes you have the stomach for such things, and she's rarely misjudged a candidate.

Just get out of the truck and go knock on the door, son.

Vince eyed the rotting structure nervously.

If you don't want to, I can drive us back to the office and you can collect your things, but uh, I'm afraid your previous position has already been filled.

Go on, kid.

You can do it.

Vince swallowed and climbed out of the truck.

His heart pounded in his chest as he slowly approached the mouldering old ruin, and buzzing in his ears growing ever louder.

The whole house seemed to groan underfoot as he stepped onto the sagging front porch.

He glanced back at Sawyer, who had emerged from the truck to light a cigarette.

He made a gentle shoeing motion with his hands, clear message to get on with it.

Vince turned back to the house and raised his hand to knock.

But before his knuckles could strike the rotting wood, the front door flew open.

Without any conscious decision on his part, he felt his legs begin to move and he stepped inside.

Behind him, the door swung quietly shut.

Vince didn't even notice.

He was too busy fighting the urge to gag as he stared around the room before him.

Everything.

the floors, walls, ceilings, furniture, was covered in a foul black sludge

upon which writhed a legion of insects.

There were too many wings, too many eyes, too many pinching mouths, too many of

everything.

Something long and many jointed crawled across his shoe and he startled looking down to see millipedes the length of black snakes, scurrying through the inky substance.

That buzzing sound came to him again, this time not faint, but close, much too close.

Vince raised his eyes to the ceiling in mounting horror as the sword descended, filling the air with a sound like a hundred chainsaws whirring to life at once.

He opened his mouth to scream, but before he could make a sound, they were on him, and Vincent Albright's training began

in earnest.

Hours later, he emerged from the house to find Sawyer still waiting by the truck, smoking another cigarette.

A tidy pile of butts rested on the ground near the pickup's front fender.

See, now, wasn't so hard, was it?

You ready to head back to town now, Mr.

Albright?

What gazed back at Sawyer was still Vincent Albright,

but more.

So much more now.

He had finally found a place where he was understood, a place where he belonged.

He was part of something now, something bigger and better than he could have ever dreamed.

A shape squirmed under his left eye, the outline of something small and skittering and terrible just under the surface of his skin.

A wide smile spread across his face and he stuck out his hand.

Please,

call me Vince.

Sawyer had returned the smile and shaken his hand.

Welcome to the team, Vince.

That day still ranked amongst the proudest moments of Vince Albright's life, though there had been many triumphs in the years since.

His achievements garnered praise from his superiors, and he had risen steadily through the ranks of the classified acquisitions branch of the CBA.

He now directed a small but well-respected team within the department, all of whom he had personally trained.

They, like he, were well known for successfully persuading even the most reluctant sellers to part with their properties that the hive deemed essential to its proliferation.

He was known as a problem solver, the man to whom cases were frequently transferred when others failed.

The Mavisdale assignment had landed on his desk after a handful of his co-workers had been unsuccessful in obtaining the property.

The current owner, Mr.

Collins

Raj, had decided he wanted to be a problem.

He wanted to be a pain.

Vince's research into Raj's background had unearthed no hidden skulls in the man's closet.

There was that incident with the client he had assaulted while employed by the county's Department of Social Services, but that had been a messy and very public incident that everyone knew about and most sympathized with.

The report did indicate that he had recently divorced, so Vince had first directed one of his subordinates, Miss Thompson, to reach out to the man.

Luella Thompson could be very persuasive.

When circumstances warranted, she was vivacious and pretty, and above all, adaptable.

The woman had a knack for recognizing exactly what sort of girl appealed to a man and inhabiting the role with all the skill of a Broadway actress.

Her talents had proved invaluable in acquiring signatures from lonely gentlemen who had otherwise declined to part with their possessions.

Raj had proved immune to her charms.

Hell, Luella hadn't even had the opportunity to employ her many whiles.

He wouldn't even have a conversation with her.

He just hung up whenever she called.

It was rude, and Vince couldn't abide rudeness.

It was unnecessary.

It was uncouth.

It was infuriating.

So Vince had paid the man a personal visit.

While Miss Thompson had her place, she was only one of the many tools he could bring to bear.

The first among these being his own formidable skills at persuasion,

or failing that,

Compulsion.

But Chip Collins had proved recalcitrant.

That was less than ideal.

But it was certainly well within the scope of Vince's capabilities to handle.

You want to play hardball, Raj?

Okay, then.

Game on.

Well, hey there, family.

I know y'all love to speculate, but I bet you weren't expecting that one were you?

Well if you were gold star for you I wonder what the swarm has in store for poor old chip.

Guess you'll have to come back next time and find out.

Y'all, we are less than a week away from hitting the road for our 2025 tour dates.

Friendly reminder family that we are only performing a handful of live shows this year.

So if you want to see us, you better get those tickets now.

Head on over to old godsofappalach.com slash tour to secure your seat today.

And this is your good lord.

Vince was bad enough before he got to How Does Cam Make Character So Despicable A Reminder that Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of Deep Nerve Media and distributed by Rusty Quill.

Today's story was written and produced by Cam Collins and Steve Schell.

Our theme song is by Brother Land and Blood, and our new outro music is Stone's Throw by John Charles Dwyer.

We'll talk to you soon, family.

Talk to you real soon.

Same questions could have carried my whole life, and I lost how I get here.

But always know I'm I'm a stone's throw to the window The person I'm trying to be

I'm trying to be

I'm trying to be good

I'm not sure if I need a smaller heart

or thicker skin Cause I'm tearing apart.

I've choked down so much blood to make myself worth it that I don't know the difference in hunger and purpose anymore.

So I'm finding myself

outside at midnight with all the same questions that I've carried my whole life.

And I lost how I get here.

But I always know, I always know.

From a stone's throw to the window.

The person I'm trying to be,

I'm trying to be,

I'm trying to be,

I'm trying to be good.

I'm trying to be,

I'm trying to be,

I'm trying to be good.

All that I want is to fade with grace.

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