Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

On the morning of the third day, out past Kingdom Come, Kath brings Roy the bad news. “Survey flags disappeared last night, boss.” Roy has been expecting trouble since the moment they started the project; he is almost relieved that something definite has finally happened so his stomach can stop winding itself in knots. This problem will be easy to solve; he expects more serious attempts at delay to follow.

“Get Jorge and his crew out there with the transit. And Kath-set guards tonight.” She nods and goes off to rouse the surveyors and to unlock the armory.

The heat mounts by the hour, and by noon it is unbelievable. Roy makes sure his people have plenty to drink, but most shrug off the temperature. No es nada, they say, and work on stoically. Felipe pushes back his Stetson and spits into the dust. “This is nothin’, Jefe. El Paso in July-now that’s muy caliente.”

The afternoon brings a spot of good news. Roy’s nephew, Ramón Benitez, brings him a sample of a new slurry. Ramón is Roy’s sister’s son, the first in the extended Sandoval familia to get a college degree. At Texas A &M University he studied chemical engineering and agronomy, and he is fond of saying “El Dios never made a better chemical engineering factory than the brown Jersey cow.” His great ambition is to own a small dairy herd of his own; for now he makes Roy’s job easier by constant tinkering with the many surfacing, binding, and weather-proofing chemicals used in paving operations.

He shows Roy a capped jar of thick, gray sludge, and a chunk of sulfurous, flaking rock. “It’s this local brimstone, Tío Roy, from Hell’s Half Acre. We can crush it and use it instead of fly ash. It saves us a lot of money, the slurry spreads easier, and sets up faster and harder.” Roy examines the test plot. The reformulated slurry has set up into a smooth, hard surface full of tiny glittering flakes. “¿Qué es?” he asks.

“Iron pyrite, Tío. Fool’s gold,” Ramón answers. Roy okays the change. It will save them more than money; it will save time they would have had to spend trucking in the fly ash from power plants back in East Texas. They start spreading the new slurry that afternoon. The first section will be ready to tar by the next morning.

That night only a few survey flags disappear. Guards with rifles patrol the route, setting off road flares every few hundred feet. They report vague shapes skulking in the darkness just outside the circles of light, but only one sharpshooter connects with a target, and a skull-jangling howl greets his success. Morning reveals the corpse of a wolf-like creature four times the size of a Great Dane. “Hellhound,” Kath says, pushing the animal’s lip back with the barrel of her rifle to show a fang as long as her hand.

Kath brings the news to Roy, who is watching his tar boss roll on the first layer of asphalt sealer. Roy is an asphaltenophile, a connoisseur of heavy hydrocarbons. He knows his tars, from Athabascan bitumen to Trinidadian pitch. “I love the smell of asphalt in the morning,” he tells Kath. “It smells like… progress.” He is in too good a humor to be dismayed by Kath’s report of the Hellhound. He agrees with her plan to handle the beasts if they return.

Roy has been running his crews in shifts from first light in the morning until full dark. He knows that toward the end, his people will have to work all night, under lights, but in these first days, he has let them get as much rest as possible for the sprint to come. It is during second shift lunch, right at noon on the fourth day, when the plague of snakes arrives.

They are rattlesnakes, sidewinders as long as gravel trucks and with hides armored like a Caterpillar. They bite two lunching workers and an assistant cook, while bullets from side arms and rifles bounce off harmlessly. The toll would be higher, but for their habit of coiling before a strike. As one huge head, jaws agape and fangs dripping corrosive venom, weaves back and forth above her, Kath pitches a lit stick of dynamite into the gullet. BLAM! When the smoke and the rain of snake parts clears away, so have the snakes. Deep scores in the rock show the fleeing trails. Roy sends scouts armed with RPGs after the surviving snakes. They destroy two more and report the rest have vanished.

Quick action in the emergency RV saves the workers’ lives. Roy has had his medics stock up on Holy Water as well as antivenom for just such contingencies. He directs the cleanup of the site and the careful butchering of the remains of the snakes. That evening the workers feast on rattlesnake fajitas, with mounds of corn tortillas and roasted chiles. “¡Delicioso!” They salute the cooks. “¡Tastes like pollo!”

That night the Hellhounds return, but this time Kath has sent her teams out equipped with night-vision goggles, laser sights, and teflon-coated bullets. All night long Roy’s dreams are punctuated with the crack of rifle fire, and in the morning he swings up the side of a dump truck to view a reeking pile of carcasses. “Treat them like el coyote,” he tells Kath.

Ramón has come to report on the progress of his asphalt crews and overhears Roy’s instruction. “What is she going to do with them, Tío Roy?”

“Wait and see, nephew.”

A few hours later, Roy stops his pickup beside the canopy where Ramón has set up his headquarters for the day. As the radio dispatcher coordinates asphalt spreaders and rollers, Roy opens the truck door and motions Ramón inside. “Come, nephew. Let us ride the route and see how work is progressing.”

Behind the asphalt team, at the beginning of the route, crews are already building forms for the concrete, while at the far end of the route, the slurry teams are finishing the road base. Every few miles, Kath’s hunters have hung up a Hellhound carcass beside the roadway. “Is that what you meant, Tío?”

“Sí. With el coyote, you kill one and hang him up in the yard to warn the others. Figure it will work with Hellhounds, too. Remember this, nephew, for when you run the company-though let us hope you never have a project like this.” Roy grins at his nephew, then turns serious.

“Ramón, even if we survive this, your mother my sister may never speak to me again for bringing you onto this project. If we fail, we lose everything-not just our lives, but our very hope of Paraíso.”

Ramón squints into the sun dazzle out the windshield. “We won’t fail, Tío Roy. This is the best road-building crew ever assembled, and they know what we stand to win. We won’t fail you.”

Roy drops Ramón back at his dispatch hut. “We work the night through, nephew. Tell your people.”

“Sí, Tío Roy.”

That night, as the asphalt crews hasten to seal the road base ahead of the form construction teams, swarms of vampire bats, so thick they blot out the stars, swoop down to feast. But the cooks have been adding bushels of garlic to the daily menudo and posole, and the bats flutter away in confusion. The ultrasonic cries of so many might have damaged the workers’ hearing, but Roy has told his bosses to enforce the rule requiring earplugs on the job. At the height of the attack, Felipe turns on the ultrahigh-frequency broadcaster. Stunned bats rain from the sky; the crews kick them off the roadway and work on.

Ramón asks Roy, “Why didn’t Felipe turn the power high enough to kill them, Tío?”

Roy sips his coffee and smiles. “Think, nephew. Where do we get most of our paving contracts? From the Legislature in Austin. We don’t need to acquire a bad reputation with those bat-huggers.”

Just before dawn, Roy sends everyone but the forms construction teams for a few hours’ sleep. As the sun rises he sees maroon and purple clouds massing overhead. He tells the foremen to mount rain canopies over the RVs and heavy equipment and to move all other vehicles and tools under shelter. Then he turns in for a few hours of sleep himself.