Road Dogs

Road Dog: A common slang term for any of thousands of contract employees that do travelling maintenance work in the power production industry, among others. Also known as road whore, road tech, or simply contractor.

“Shiiiit.”
Tony stopped in his tracks as the metal detector alarmed and lit up, the lights tracking low on the detector. The god damn thing was alarming on his reconstructed knee. His watch was in his lunchbox, his boots were full composite, it had to be his knee. Welcome back to fucking SeaGate, he fumed as one of the security guards stepped over and gave him a look.
“Do your boots have metal shanks?”
“No sir, it’s my left knee.” He replied wearily, rubbing his eyes, the line in security dodging around him to get into the plant on time.
“Alright, just step over here.”
He stepped over to a booth in the wall where a rubber mat with footprints were, stepping on them and assuming the position, trying to be patient as he was wanded. The bitch of it was that if it rang this time, it would ring every goddamn day he came into the plant, and he’d have to be wanded and patted down every day. In his experience metal detectors varied in sensitivity. Sometimes you could walk through in steeltoes and not alarm the damn things, sometimes they threw conniptions about reconstructed joints. Clearly SeaGate’s detectors fell on the sensitive end. What a perfect goddamn way to start an outage…
Not that he’d wanted to come here in the first place. He’d been here once, a decade ago, and like many outage workers had said fuck that not going back. And with his many years in the radiation protection contracting business, he had no problem finding work in the other over a hundred reactors running during the outage seasons. Until this year, when his company had told him that if he wanted to go to Oak Water and WhiteHead, he’d have to do SeaGate. From what he heard, he was far from alone in this railroading technique: it was the only way SeaGate could get contractors in. Though a battered and beleaguered radiation protection manager had promised them they were better during the talking heads review of training. Personally he decided he’d see for himself and this wasn’t a great way to start, especially after driving his RV trailer down on very short notice, bouncing through training and quals in three days then coming on shift the day of shutdown.
“Alright sir, you can go.” Said the guard, having confirmed by wand and patdown that the metal detector had indeed alarmed on his knee.
“Thank you. See you tomorrow.” Tony replied dryly, collecting his cooler lunch box and hard hat from the xray conveyer belt and stepping over to the turnstiles. A swipe of his newly minted ID badge, a press of his hand to the palm reader, and the turnstile clunked open, letting him through and into the plant proper.
The plant loomed over him in the dusk like a black stained cement monolith, the giant rounded containment squatting among the square auxiliary buildings and cooling towers. SeaGate was a boiling water reactor and one of the more recent generations before plant construction had stopped for a while, and to that end it sprawled like a demented radioactive labyrinth. Early on in its life, they’d had bad fuel integrity (manufacturer induced), which meant the plant a decade ago had been a hot spot for dose, contamination, and fuel fleas. He’d heard they had been working on cleaning up, but the plant was still notorious for a lot of dose and a lot of contaminated personnel events.
Tony himself was weathered nearly as bad as SeaGate. He was 54 years old, and had come into the industry from plant construction when he was young, not the Navy like many others. He was tall, broad shouldered, some muscle but also a touch heavier than he should be. Forty pounds overweight according to his doctor, which wasn’t surprising. Most contractors were overweight because on twelve hour shifts six or seven days a week the thing that kept you going was food and liberal amounts of coffee. Like many veterans of the field, he’d given up and shaved nearly all his fur off, including his tail, and being mainly of malamute descent meant he was a bit strange looking but he weathered heat better.
He grunted, finding his way to the radiation protection office half by memory and half by instinct, greeted by the sight of day shift leaving and night shift trying to figure out its ass from a hole in the ground. A flatscreen on the back wall displayed plant status, and someone had taped a sign to it that said shut down would start in four hours and SCRAM would happen at midnight. Nodding vaguely, he collapsed into someone else’s chair in someone else’s cubicle, setting the sticker-plastered lunchbox down and watching the chaos.
“TONY!”
He looked up and grinned in spite of himself when a slightly younger figure fought through the crowd, standing to clap hands with the new arrival. “Steve, man! Fuck I haven’t seen you since what, Pine Grove?”
“Yeah that sounds right, what was that three years ago?” Steve laughed. A gregarious ram with close sheered wool, Steve was former Navy, a former diver, former damn near everything and in Tony’s humble opinion a damn good RP tech.
“Yeah just about.”
“What the fuck are you doing here? I thought you weren’t coming here if you could help it. Did you get forced into it too?”
“Yeah that’s about the fucking size of things. Were you here last outage? How was it?”
“I was and it’s… arguably better. They’ve started pulling a lot of the heavily dose loaded components and some more will come out this time.”
“Oh, fuck, that sounds like fun. Tell me they have a small army of teletectors.”
“If the shippers got off their ass, yes.”
“Well, we’re fucked then. Hey how’s the grandbaby?”
Steve sat in the chair next to him as Tony sat back down. “Got three now! Daughter had twins, and she married a tiger so they are the most hilarious thing in existence right now. Hey, I heard you got divorced? No shit?”
He made a face. “Yeah, about a year and a half ago. She was apparently sick of me travelling and I didn’t want to go in house you know? She got the house and the dog, I got the truck, trailer, and cat.”
“Holy crap man, sorry to hear.”
“Ehh. She didn’t go for my cash at least.” He shrugged, trying to brush it off. Honestly not having a house to return to in the off season was jarring in a lot of ways, but the travel trailer was a huge gooseneck rig that he moved around with his duely pickup.
“Alright, alright, everyone shut up for a while!” Thundered a voice, and well over two dozen RP tech heads poked up over and around cubicle walls at the supervisor that was standing roughly in the middle, holding a printout. “Plant status. We’re currently at full power and we’ll start downpower soon enough. That means we’ll be doing initials before midnight, people! In case no one told you we are doing a power upgrade so there will be large components moving in about a week and we will be starting setup for that tonight.”
“This is going to be fun.” Observed another contractor nearby, a woman in her forties named Candace.
Meanwhile the supervisor had told the other lead techs to grab their assigned people, and Tony found himself joining a group and being tossed a new hardhat light, one of the new models with about a dozen more brilliant white LEDs then were really necessary. You could spotlight deer with the damn things, let alone other technicians (and the reaction was usually the same).
“Tony, man, glad to have you here. I need you to do initial steam tunnel entry with the operators when we’re at about ten percent.” Said the lead. “Nothing you haven’t done a hundred times, but keep in mind nothing’s routine.”
“Right. There any light in there?”
“No, we’ll have to set up some once fully shut down. So you know it’s a hundred and twenty fuckin degrees in there. Do you want an ice vest?”
He shook his head. “In that heat an ice vest will last ten minutes and will just be weight after that. Best not. Tell me we have enough dose rate meters.”
“Hey, Rachel! You’re on instruments right?” The lead called in the general direction of the back of the offices.
A young RP tech, likely a junior, poked her head around a door. Medical scrubs, Tony noticed, but she’d been bright enough to buzz most of her fur as well. Forward thinking for a junior, he guessed. “Yeah, I am, what do you need?”
“What do our teletectors look like?”
“Long with a box attached. But seriously there are eighteen in service and another six in the wings. If you guys burn through those we’re all screwed so don’t go poking crap with them.”
“Understood.”
Tony himself nodded. Having enough teletectors through an outage was like finding a unicorn, but that sounded like it’d last a while. “Alright, I’d like one of those.”
“Done and done.”

Six and a half hours later Tony sank into a chair and groaned. The steamtunnels had been dark, hot, and generally not easy to navigate, but the operators were satisfied as there didn’t seem to be any leaks this round. And Tony was satisfied because he’d been able to write up a rough initial survey for the region… a more detailed one would have to wait until full shutdown and some goddamn temporary lighting.
Even as he thought that the plant loudspeakers counted down and he saw the monitor on the wall kick down to zero percent power. SCRAM done, then. Knowing more initials were to come, he opened his lunch box, and smiled.
It was packed neatly and tightly, and included several Tupperware containers, a napkin, and a Ziploc bag of tear-open Airborne foil packs. Sitting on top of it all was a note that said “Tony” with a heart drawn under it, and a small handful of Andes mint candies. Feeling his mediocre mood lift a bit and some of his soreness leave him, he stood and drug the lunchbox to the RP kitchen, seeing about microwaving some of his lunch. He wasn’t sure of the name, but he knew it was probably Cuban or Caribbean in origin, and included chicken, rice, and fried plantains.
“Holy shit, man. Where the hell did you buy that?” Steve wanted to know, coming in laden with prepackaged ramen bowls. The good kind, Tony noted, he’d ate a lot of them and they were pretty damn good though they’d put your blood pressure through a skyscraper roof if you ate too many. The spicy ones were actually spicy, how often did you find that in prepackaged food?
He had to grin at this, loading two containers into one of the microwaves and pushing a button to put two minutes on the timer. “That’s my secret.”

The rest of the night went by just as he expected it to, and toward the end a gaggle of green hats showed up with expectant gazes and a seavan full of scaffolding, the first of many. Some scaffolding had already been started of course but now they could do more work, since surveys had been completed on the turbine deck. Which was currently clean, having had the unholy crap decontaminated out of it before the outage. Carpenters, Tony thought with amusement. Like most people, the color of the hardhat was an indicator of job or company, and green meant carpenters, steel workers, laborers, and some RPs even. Typically fully half had never been on a nuclear outage and the other half had done enough to sleepwalk through the usual routine. Still that left a lot of people standing at the login terminals staring baffled at their electric dosimetry and the touch screens, consulting with each other. Tony couldn’t even say he remembered those days, the industry had been a lot different when he’d started.
“These guys going in now aren’t going to make it out easy.” Observed a nearby junior, a hyped up younger guy, a toothpick thin opossum. “Gas is bad, will be for days.”
“Naturally but they have the necessary weapon to deal with it.” Namely the large fans on the other side of the access point, which was currently host to some annoyed security guards, trying to get rid of gas so they could leave. “You herding these cats?”
“Yeah, helping at least.” The junior replied.
“Make’em roll around in bounce sheets before coming out or something.”
“Where I come from having this many bounce sheets makes you a meth lab.” The instrument tech from earlier observed. “Point taken though.”
“Rolling in bounce sheets should be mandatory anyway. Especially for pipe fitters getting dressed out.” Observed another tech, shelving EDs that were being taken just as quickly.
Tony settled for an eyeroll. Just another day in paradise.

Tony leaned back, closing his eyes and listening to the comforting dakkadakkadakka of his truck’s diesel engine warming up. The night had gone off without anyone hurt or crapped up so by SeaGate standards things had improved somewhat. Feeling ready for bed, he hung his badge lanyard off the stand for his GPS, putting the truck in gear and rolling out of the contractor parking lot.
He’d been lucky and found a good RV parking ground only twenty minutes from the plant. Pristine even by his standards, hell they had free wireless if you were paying to park. And so it was a bit more than twenty minutes later he pulled the truck up alongside his trailer, shutting it off and clambering out, straggling up to the door and grinning in spite of himself when it opened for him. “Morning Esteban.”
Esteban offered him a cheery grin, his fat old Persian cat in the younger man’s arms. A skinny, femmy crossbreed of Chihuahua and red fox, Esteban described himself as “four mothers Cuban” and was very much not someone Tony had ever thought he’d add to his travel trailer. They’d met in a bar in Florida about six months ago, where Tony had been having a well-deserved drink after a prolonged outage had wrapped up.
Tony had never thought of himself as gay, or bi, or anything other than straight. Still didn’t because damn Esteban was such a girl. He’d actually had to take a few minutes in the bar to properly figure out the other’s gender. He’d been drinking alone and the younger man, damn near still a pup really, had joined him uninvited, apparently attracted to his age and size. Hungry for the company, they’d gotten to talking and Esteban had been fascinated with his life. To be paid to travel the States? He’d tried to explain that really, he barely saw anything but the power plants, but it hadn’t done anything to dissuade the younger man.
And so, Esteban had invaded his life, and his trailer. He hadn’t trusted the situation at first but had been won over by the younger man’s excellent cooking, which was mainly Cuban but was starting to branch out into Spanish and oriental styles. He worked the trailer’s limited kitchen like a pro, did their laundry without complaint, and generally brightened the place up. Hell Tony hadn’t even argued when he’d started waking up to Esteban cuddled against him in bed. It’d been weird at first, but it was body heat, another breathing body, and after years of only intermittent contact he’d come to enjoy it.
“How was the first night?” Esteban was asking, setting Flower the cat down and dragging Tony to the trailer’s table, where more food was waiting. Ham croquetas, tostada, and café con leche.
Tony flopped and dug in happily. “’Bout as I figured honestly. Plant seems cleaner but I’m not sure how long it’ll last.”
“That’s good at least.” Though not of the industry Esteban had been listening to him long enough he’d started learning by osmosis.
“Metal detector alarmed on my knee though.” He sighed and rubbed the joint, letting his eyes lull a bit when Esteban’s hands pushed his away, rubbing over it. Yet another thing that had endeared the younger man to him: massage. He was getting old, and he ached sometimes, and those skinny young hands had become proficient at helping ease the soreness away. “So I’ll have to make sure to arrive maybe ten minutes earlier so I get in on time.”
“Mm. How is the food?”
“Why do you even ask anymore?” He snickered, having cleared the croquetas and working on dipping the tostada in the milk-laden coffee. “I do hope this is decaf.”
“Of course. You showered at work?”
“Yeah. One good thing… they did overhaul their main bathrooms by the access so there’s showers and lockers. And trust me I needed that shower.” He looked across the trailer, where Flower had sacked out on Esteban’s laptop. “How is that going?”
“My classes? They are going well I think. I finished my paper.”
“That’s good. I know you were worried about that.” He slugged down the remains of the coffee, feeling weariness overtake him and his ability to carry on conversation. “I need to sleep. Will you get me up?”
“Oh yes of course. I’ll be going grocery shopping in a few hours but I will be back.”
He nodded, hefting himself to his feet and heading to the RV’s bathroom to brush his teeth before retreating to bed. He barely felt himself hit the mattress, sprawling on his stomach and relaxing out. He was vaguely aware of background noise, Esteban typing on his laptop and leaving a bit later, Flower jumping up to sleep in the small of his back. And for a while, Esteban joined him in bed, offering a surprised affectionate squeak when he only grunted and tugged the smaller man in close with one arm before passing back out.

Tony climbed the stairs up to the RP offices, feeling smug for the first time in a week. The wonks in control of security had figured out that the metal detectors were a bit on the sharp side, and had changed the settings, letting Tony walk on through without setting off the alarms. The smugness lasted about thirty seconds though because upon walking in, he saw a cluster of people intensely talking in the center of the room. In his experience, this was never a good sign.
“They dropped a fuel bundle.” Another old outage worker told him, a guy named Adam if memory served. “Not bad, the bundle seems alright, but they crudbursted the goddamn pool in the process.”
Tony facepalmed slowly. “Shit.”
“They’ve got the crane out because it’s now suspect and they figure it’ll be days before they hook it back up.” Adam was saying, draining coffee, then looking at Tony oddly. “You seem oddly cheerful in spite of this.”
Tony offered him a smile, knowing only that his lunchbox was full of good food, the oh-shit was being taken care of, and that someone would be glad to see him in the morning. “Hey, man. Just another beautiful nuclear day.”


_____

The plants and people of this story are fictional, but the industry is very real.
Loosely inspired by the works of Whyteyote: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/whyteyote/