“Cool it, honcho. We’re just gettin smokes an fillin up the tank.”

“Oh, is that right?”

It’s the hitchhiker’s turn. “Listen, Bluto. You should consider wearin a helmet. A few less hits ta the head, an maybe you wouldn go round askin so many questions.”

If the pudgy, whiskered face hadn’t already been red, it would certainly have flared a dangerous scarlet in anger.

“D’ja hear what this shrimp said ta you, Nado? He thinks you’re slow or somthin.”
This biker doesn’t do much to lend confidence in his friend’s intelligence. The man named Nado -short for Tornado, which is itself a stand-in for a more conventional birth name, like Jonas or Petey- is still registering his insult, though his body would seem to have long responded with a puff in the chest and drawing back on a flab-hidden neck.

“Let’s getum,” declares the one biker who had theretofore remained silent. He, too, had a gang name, Bison, but it never caught on. His fellow bikers continue to call him by his birth name, which happened to be Petey.

The three rush the counter as a single wall of denim and fat-coated muscle. The hitchhiker and driver have to hurdle over the Formica slab, without any regard for the poor cashier woman behind it. She shrieks as an avalanche of tobacco pouches and snuff tins showers her, along with the hitchhiker and the driver. The three bikers briefly try to get a trunk-sized leg up before deciding it to be easier to simply pile out the front door.

The hitchhiker and the driver exit through a rear office. It leads to the area behind the front desk, where a bewildered clerk and phone operator cower, looking like cornered animals. They two spotted by Nado, Petey, and the instigator, named Choke, who are standing in the middle of the lobby.

The two follow through to some sort of mail-sorting room. They overturn the long tables in their way and paper flies up like a Fifth Avenue parade. The adjoining room is very bright and sterile. It too has long tables, but they are completely clear and shine like a polished bumper.

From the looks of the linen-stuffed shelves running the length of the walls, they have come to a laundry storage room. From here, the only other door leads, presumably, into the main hallway connecting off the lobby. The thuds of boots on carpet grow louder and shake the fixture suspended from the ceiling.