The signs along the road to the Gates of Hell told the story of the crater. It was a good story, all about some Soviet screwups who thought they could fix a problem by lighting it on fire. Silly Soviets, always doing stuff like that.
The signs had been re-written just last year, after Taco Bell had acquired the land from the Turkmenistan government. They’d haggled hard, for over two years, to get their hands on that piece of desert. They wanted the hole in the ground in all its burning glory. The Gates of Hell would be great advertising, they’d told their investors, as they expanded their restaurant empire into Central Asia.
The road to Taco Hell had not been re-paved. Instead, there were new pit stops every two kilometres, complete with popup food vans and mock hellholes, really just metal bins sunk into the ground with stuff lit on fire. Get out, take a pic of the desolate landscape, buy a chalupa from the food van guy who knows three words of Spanglish, pretend to read a sign about the Soviets, or the Turkmen, or the great history of Taco Bell. Herd the whining kids back into the car, bump along again for another ten minutes avoiding any inquisitive goats. Rinse, repeat.
Taco Hell emerged out of the rippling mirages in the desert, appearing on top of the heat haze coming out of the ever-burning pit in the ground. It was a monument to ingenuity and the persistence of capitalism, a Jetsons-era building lined in Kevlar and old rocket ship panels, which looked like it was hovering above the hole. To get to the top, tourists had to park their car or camel and walk the last three hundred metres, breathing through their mouths to mask the gas smell, and sweating as the heat climbed on the approach to the Gate. Tourists said quiet prayers to their favourite gods as they entered the heat-safe glass elevator, and hoped that nothing would go wrong while crossing the twenty millimetre-thick glass bridge. There was a clean-up crew always on standby, for the pukers. The view from above was hellish.
And then there was the food. Also hellish because it was, after all, Taco Bell. But there was the excitement of the kitchen which used the heat from the hellhole to cook. The bosses called it renewable, and no one thought to correct them except for some lefty newspapers, who reminded everyone that the hellhole was actually a pit of gas that some idiots had lit on fire.
The Turkmenistani locals were unimpressed. They didn’t mind the tourists, as such. Dervaza had drawn travellers for decades, and they were used to it. What they did mind was the smell coming out of the great tortilla-cooker in the ground. Oily, with a side note of despair. They said it made their skin feel tacky when the wind blew wrong.
Also, they got pretty hacked off when a truck full of hot sauce took a turn around a narrow corner too fast in the small, nearby village, and tipped over. That would have been bad enough, the truck on its side leaking diablo hot sauce from the industrial size catering containers out into the street. But the smell attracted the village goats, who decided that this was the holiday they’d been waiting for their whole lives.
After that, no one could keep the goats away. They broke into houses, waylaid trucks, blockaded the road, looking for another hot sauce hit. The stink and mess from the output end of the hot sauce addicts was smeared all over the village. The villagers were almost relieved when the goats refused to stay tied up anymore, chewing through ropes in their desperation for a hot sauce hit.
Within a week, the goats had deserted the village and started a colony near the Taco Hell. They camped out near the waste collection facilities, and figured out how to climb onto each other to get inside the oversized bins. Sometimes one or two ended up incinerated, when the waste collectors tipped into the hellhole. Sometimes one or two of them ended up in the gordita. The villagers grumbled about the loss of the goats, but the milk had gotten too spicy, anyway. And at least the streets were clean again, and the houses safe.
Then there was the new mini-hospital, which had been set up near the crater. It was mostly due to the minor explosion that happened while they were building Taco Hell, just a small miscalculation about the heat above the pit, and whether gas cookers could be installed in the new building. That was when they reverted to cooking entirely using the hellhole’s heat. Plus, there had been that paraglider who had missed their mark. And a few protesters who had tried climbing the outside of the building, planning to wave banners in demonstration against global fast food hegemonies. Two of them had nearly been rescued. The emergency responders were mostly there for show, but they’d started living in the village. Some of them petitioned the local council to put camel crossing signs along the roads. The locals grumbled that their new neigbours weren’t a good replacement for the goats, and they seemed to need an awful lot of burn cream.
Five years into its mission to expand into the Asian market, Taco Bell sold the Taco Hell enterprise. They didn’t say exactly why, but it might have had something to do with the giant scorpions. Exterminators had been called in, and some locals made jokes about the free protein. But the scorpions had gotten bigger and fatter and more aggressive, breaking into the kitchens and some tourists’ cars, and eventually moving on to the hot sauce addict goats. A travel documentary team from Beijing had caught them on camera, and it hadn’t been great publicity. Taco Bell decided it might be easier to just go with bog standard franchises in Singapore and New Delhi and a few other places that some head honcho in California pointed to on a map.
Taco Hell belongs to TurkmeniFried Chicken now. The staff have learned a few chicken jokes, and the goats decided they didn’t like the new sauces and eventually moved back into the village. After a minor civil war, the remaining scorpions moved to a nearby crater filled with water, and have launched a new hot springs enterprise. It pulls in a steady trade.
The food at the ever-burning crater still tastes like it was cooked over a hellhole.
