The Yellow Pine

Chapter 1 - The New Gatlinburg

Grayson Alexander Estero reviewed the thick file that his secretary had recently dropped on his desk. It described a tract of undeveloped land in a newly accessible region of Southeastern KY, prime real estate for a resort community. The region was notoriously backwards and financially bankrupt. The newly built Black Mountain Parkway, connecting I75 at Corbin to I64/I77 at Sophia, West Virginia, swept through the secluded region, which had previously only been accessible by way of long, winding mountain roads, and opened up opportunities not seen in nearly a hundred years. It was exactly the sort of project that Estero Appalachian Development, LLC thrived on.

For the past thirty years, Grayson Estero had worked hard to provide new growth to the area he loved. Born to a coal miner father and a barely-literate mother twenty miles south of Pikeville, Estero knew first-hand the difficulties the region had faced. Growing up, he'd watched his parents work themselves down to mere skeletons in thin flesh, and still they suffered from debilitating poverty. His classmates had mostly become miners themselves, going on to perpetuate the cycle that had ruled generations of Appalachian men and women for decades. Grayson wanted out. He was desperate to get away from the ignorance, the depressing circumstances, the hard manual labor and the lack of options. The day he turned eighteen, he walked into the nearest Marine recruiting station, and walked out a soldier. Within a year, he was deep in an Asian jungle, and spent the next twenty years in Special Operations.

During one otherwise routine tour, everything Grayson thought he knew about the world at large was changed. His troop had met up with a band of mercenaries working the same region that his platoon were ordered to clear. Over cups of a strong, homebrewed alcohol that the locals called Lao-Lao, Grayson listened as the mercenaries spun unbelievable tales of the strange creatures that they claimed beset this region. They called them Mi-Go, and described them as "lobster-lizard hybrids, with balls of tentacles in place of a head". He laughed at the absurdity of it, but the men were oddly adamant, and insisted that the tales were true. They urged the Marines to leave, but of course, orders are orders, and Uncle Sam's Misguided Children would never be scared off by ghost tales.

The mercenaries did not laugh or give up their insistence that the stories were true. They gathered their things with a few grim looks and went back to their own camp, sullenly. As the blackness of a clouded night settled over the jungle, an eerie feeling swept over the military camp. The soldiers were hyper alert and vigilant, and had learned to obey their hunches from years of fighting in the wilds of Asia and elsewhere. Each man silently and efficiently assembled his gear and took up his assigned watch position. The great, dark palm trees swayed overhead in silence. No birds, no frogs, no insects; not one of the myriad creatures that called this region home made a single peep or movement of any kind. It was as if the entire population of wildlife had suddenly dropped dead where they sat. For what seemed like hours, the men sat alert, scanning the bushes and trees around them for anything unusual. Suddenly, the sound of gunfire reached their ears from the direction of the mercenary camp. Grayson took point of a group of four other men, and the rest stayed behind to guard the camp. Before they were halfway there, the gunshots had stopped, and the oppressive atmosphere that had permeated the jungle all night suddenly lifted. As though a plug had been removed from their ears, the men were suddenly assaulted by the return of the normal sounds of the jungle. After the long silence, the animal's normally soothing songs sounded more like screaming. It felt like walking out of a cave and into bright sunlight.

Reaching the mercenaries camp, the men were assaulted by an odor that Grayson would later describe as "mushrooms soaked in battery acid". On the ground lay the bodies of four of the strangest creatures they had ever seen. They were rapidly decomposing, almost melting into the ground in a sickly green pool of ooze. The only recognizable features were something like a great, fleshy-pink lobster tail with a pair of dragon-like legs. What appeared to serve as the creatures' arms looked like a cross between a lizard's forearms and a crab claw. A squishy, fungoid ball stood in for a head, and burst forth a confusion of spongy tentacles, some of which still twitched weakly even as they dissolved. Oddly-placed, delicate, filigree wings flaked apart and drifted to the ground in small bits like confetti. While two of his men puked in the bushes, the rest stood around in shock.