Chapter Eleven
“I want to go home.”
“I know it can be overwhelming, but I promise we won’t lose you,” Pax said.
“There are miles of corridors here and everyone looks miserable and confused, it’s loud and cold and…oh, look. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of duct tape.”
Delighted, Joey Z. ran over to a display of duct tape right inside the entrance of Home Depot, his initial panic subsiding thanks to the marvels of plastics and the promise of candy at the end of the trip. Pax only hoped Joey could keep his body parts intact for the length of the visit.
“There are no homes,” Denis was saying to Maddy, oblivious to the stares he attracted, mostly from children, due to his size—or to his headwear.
Miss Nekesa, Head Librarian at the Oracle of the Public Library, and Guardian of both the Bathroom Key and Computer Time, was attending a conference this week.
Without her vigilance, Denis had circumvented the computer time limit and overdosed on the YouTube.
He’d come back to Number Five yesterday babbling about conspiracies and lasers, trading in his standard gnomic red cap for a similar cap made of tinfoil.
“Why is it named a depository of homes if there are no homes?” Denis asked. “Doesn’t that sound like something the Freemasons might have a hand in?”
Maddy failed to answer him, having caught sight of a vast wall of drawers housing screws, nails, bolts, and other small fasteners.
“Someone put 2d finishing nails into the same box as 4d box nails!” she exclaimed, one hand over her heart in an expression of horror.
“Who would do—oh, Hera, they’ve mis-shelved a box of drywall nails next to the framing nails.
I cannot let this stand.” Maddy left the group for the hundreds of small boxes containing what seemed to be every conceivable nail one might need in this world and a few Pax suspected no one would ever need, but they would be bought just in case.
This emporium obviously catered to the male of the species.
“Why don’t we keep going?” Pax asked Josie. “They’ll catch up, I’m sure.”
Josie watched Joey duct-tape two of his fingers together as Denis disappeared somewhere in the bathroom fixtures department.
“I honestly thought this would be a good idea, but now I’m having second thoughts,” she said. “It’s odd. They act like they’ve never been in a Home Depot.”
Josie was exactly right. The residents of Number Five had agreed only a select few of them would be allowed outside of the building. Those who most resembled humans had ventured as far as the library, Wegmans, and of course, Donuts Delite. None had ever been in anything like the Home Depot.
There were emporiums on other worlds, of course: labyrinthian markets made up of individual stalls, entire sections of cities given over to commerce.
Near Pax’s last encampment, wares were sold in an ocean of brightly colored tents covering the savanna.
Women with skin wrinkled by an ambivalent sun would sit cross-legged on straw mats and sing out obscene taunts if folks passed by without stopping.
By afternoon the sun had sapped the men and animals of energy, but the women never ceased in their loud speculations of whether a soldier might have testicles large enough to handle their fermented goat’s milk or pungent cheese.
Other than a whiff of something almost like fermented cheese, this place was nothing like the stinking, loud, and enormously entertaining markets where Pax felt most comfortable.
So many things in one place. At first, the bright shiny labels and attractive pictures fooled him into reaching out, but Pax shook off the spells easily enough.
He could read this world’s script, and no amount of packaging could disguise the sheer superfluousness of the products for sale.
An entire shelf full of gardening gloves?
What did it matter if the rubber hands were blue or gold, or how much longer would one pair last than another if they were all manufactured in the same country—identical except for the logo?
And why would one need a package of twenty gloves? Of twenty anything?
None of the other humans in the store seemed concerned with these questions. They lurched about like ghouls, blind to everything but the tiny devices in their hands leading them to this sale or that bargain.
Amos sat in the front of a wheeled cart and swung his legs back and forth, mouth open as he gazed up at the expansive roof, laughing whenever he saw a bird make its way from orange-colored beam to orange-colored beam far overhead.
“Be happy at us, Mr. Pax,” Amos said.
Pax looked to Josie for a translation.
“He means, don’t be mad at us,” Josie said and pointed to Pax’s face. “You’re looking a little, uh, grim. I take it you don’t like shopping.”
“I don’t,” Pax said.
He, Josie, and the six others were the pre-garden planting subcommittee, a position none of them had asked for but Maddy had assigned them anyway.
They had already lost one committee member, Princess Naliti, who had walked past the Depot without even turning her head and sailed into a store called Marshalls.
Maddy’s resulting scowl had given Pax goose bumps, but a faery’s urge to shop rivaled the pull of the moon for a werewolf.
When they reached the garden portion of the Depot, Josie pulled Amos from the cart and let him loose among the towers of plastic bags filled with soil. He’d recently learned to count—sort of—and occupied himself with counting how many bags there were on each shelf.
“One hundredy-two, one hundredy-five…”
This was the first moment Pax had alone—alone-ish—with Josie since their kiss last weekend and he was at a loss. Should he bring it up? Josie hadn’t mentioned it. Had she forgotten?
Should he kiss her again?
Pax had considered asking Raphe for advice.
The vampire was the object of amorous attention from all manner of species and genders, and must have a wealth of experience, but Raphe still wasn’t convinced Josie and Amos were the cure to Number Five’s illness.
What if he gave bad information, scaring Josie off?
Perhaps Pax should try kissing her again?
“What was the square footage of the space we’re setting aside for the patio?” Josie asked.
Pax told her and she bent over her phone again, then looked up suddenly.
“That’s per square foot, not square meter, right?” she asked.
“Per square foot,” he assured her. “I’ve seen the meemees. The metric system is a tool of the devil.”
Josie’s mouth fell open.
Maybe she wanted him to kiss her again?
“Was that…did you make a Simpsons joke?” she asked.
“No,” Pax said quickly.
Wait. Had he made a joke?
Her blue knit cap was slightly too large and fell to her eyebrows, which were raised in surprise. A fluttering sensation filled his belly and he forgot for the moment the universe was in existential danger and lives depended on him and instead lost himself in the spiral of her animated gray eyes.
“Yes?” he said, stupid from the dizziness of desire. “I am not good at them. Jokes.”
At his admission, the promise of a smile hovering at the corner of her lips turned to something else Pax couldn’t interpret. A grimace?
Dammit. He should have just kissed her.
“Don’t they tell lots of jokes in the army?” she asked.
The faint scent of blood and smoke made his eyes water, and for the first time in decades, Pax wondered who he would be if he’d been born into a family, like Amos. If his life hadn’t been an unending march toward violence.
“They did tell jokes,” Pax admitted. “I grew up in an orphanage, and there wasn’t any…” He searched for an analogy that would make sense to Josie. “…any television or computers at the orphanage.”
Josie’s eyes went wide, and her mouth shaped a pretty, round O.
“You’re kidding me,” she said, clearly horrified.
Although Pax had discovered the charm of black-and-white movie musicals and Sesame Street, his childhood wouldn’t have been bettered by something like television. If anything, it would have made his deprivation more difficult.
He could not covet what he didn’t know existed.
“Because my upbringing was different, most of my soldiers’ jokes made little sense.
” He spread his hands out before him, as though presenting himself to her.
Nothing shiny or special here. Just a man who knows how to fight and yet craves a life of peace.
A man without charm who wishes desperately he could make her laugh.
“You have a sense of humor, even if you aren’t especially good at telling jokes, though,” Josie said.
Pax scanned the garden department, but aside from Amos now counting the rocks in a cardboard box labeled River Stones, he and Josie were alone. He stepped close enough to see that the freckle next to the corner of her mouth was in the shape of a heart.
“I’ve never been accused of having a sense of humor,” Pax said happily.
The corners of Josie’s mouth twisted like the tails of a lingerfisk as though she fought her smile. “I don’t know if you remember, but the first day I met you, you were giving a tour to a pale gentleman—”
“Ugh,” Pax shivered. “Pasty-Faced Man.”
Her smile jerked and shimmied, not fully loosed yet.
“Your reaction to Pasty-Faced Man is how I knew you had a sense of humor.”
“There was nothing humorous about that man,” Pax insisted. “His company was torturous.”
Josie put her hand over her mouth to hide the smile.
“However, I am grateful if my suffering was what convinced you to trust me,” he said.
Her hand dropped and revealed the absence of a smile.
Dammit.
He shouldn’t have tried to be humorous.
Jokes were a stupid way to hold a woman’s attention.
He should have stuck something on a sword.
Or punched something. Common wisdom held that women were impressed by men who punched things.
“I trusted you because you asked me if I felt comfortable following you,” Josie said seriously. “It meant you cared about how I felt, even though we didn’t know each other.”
Oh.
This was a good reaction.