I was working the early-morning shift at the gas station. It’s one of those large kinds of gas stations that sells some hot food along with beer and lighter fluid and bags of salty chips. You might not think anyone would want to buy a slice of pizza or a grilled cheese sandwich from a gas station, but you would be wrong. In reality, a lot of people want to buy those things from a place like this. The result of this is that the gas station has two registers instead of one with a big long counter in between them, so that the lines don’t get too long for the people who just want to buy gas because of all the people who want to buy hot food. The manager here, I would tell you his name but it’s one of those consonant-heavy Hungarian ones I can never get straight in my head, he worries a lot about the lines being too long, so he almost always has two of us working, even shifts like this one, the early-morning one, where there’s almost never enough people coming in for it to be a problem. You might think we would get a lot of commuters filling up and grabbing a cup of coffee before work, but that’s not the case. People don’t really commute to or from here, and anyway, we aren’t known for our coffee. The consensus seems to be, if you want a good cup of coffee, you should go to a different gas station. And people do.
Anyway, it was the early-morning shift, and my coworker and I were just standing around. Then this guy comes in and goes over to the register closer to the door, which is the one my coworker was at, not me. So I wasn’t really a participant in what happened next, just a witness.
Let me tell you about this guy: he was a kind of small guy. He had freckles all over his face and a hole in his head. I don’t mean one of those holes that everyone has in their heads, like a mouth or an ear or a nostril, I mean a different kind of hole that was totally synthetic and artificial. It was an unusual hole, and it was right there in the side of his head. Of course, he wasn’t the first guy I’ve seen with a hole in his head, and I’m sure he won’t be the last, but it was still a bit shocking. You don’t expect to see that sort of thing during the early-morning shift.
“I need a lot of ammunition,” said the guy to my coworker.