The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  Which meant that their presence here, outside an official military depot, was very, very illegal. Like, capital-punishment-level-treason-against-the-state illegal. There was no way this was a legitimate shipment. With a shaky, nervous sensation in her stomach, Joy realized why those Triad thugs had been so confrontational and eager to drive her off. It was to keep her from finding this. And, in doing so, they’d driven her right to it. Lir’s balls, she’d come here to do a silly puff piece. Why was that so hard to understand?

  Joy felt the solid, lethal weight of Manticore, the black metal cold in her hands somehow, despite the stuffy heat inside the container. This was a serious weapon. And this was serious news. The type of story she’d dreamed of breaking open back as a student in Professor Gelfland’s classes. But it was easier to sit in a safe, comfortable classroom and read about heroic acts of journalism than it was to be faced with the reality. Telling anybody about this would make some dangerous and powerful people very angry with her.

  Joy held the stock of the Manticore up to her shoulder, braced against it like she’d been trained to, and sighted down the barrel. She remembered what had happened to the targets when she fired. Cheap planks of wood, painted black and shaped like rough silhouettes of people, with concentric white ovals on them to track shot accuracy. The Manticore would tear huge chunks out of them. With a little practice, you could even saw them in half with a constant stream of bullets. Joy shuddered. No way could she stand by while a criminal organization like the Triads gained access to this kind of firepower. She had to do whatever she could to stop them.

  She needed a full inventory of this whole container. How many guns were we talking about here? She pulled out her compact, using the mirror to reflect the beams of sunlight where she needed them. Finally, she got a good look at the sigil, and recognized it immediately. It was the same as the design on Madame Zenovia’s trinket, of the octopus-headed man-thing. Joy still had the amulet, so she double-checked it to be sure. The amulet was more ornately detailed, but it was the same design.

  So, was this a Triad symbol, then. Or maybe a personal symbol of Benny the Shark. He’d started his career as a pirate, after all, and this was a nautically-themed deity. Was this what Madame Zenovia had stumbled onto on her ‘spirit walk?’ Something to do with illegal arms deals? Amazing that she was alive, then. Or maybe her incoherence had saved her—she was too crazy to take seriously, so “disappearing” her would’ve have drawn more attention than quietly subduing her and sending her home. Joy didn’t think she’d be able to act crazy enough to get the same treatment, not at this point.

  Joy started tearing her way through the various crates, using the tip of the Manticore gun as a crude wedge until she found an entrenching tool in one of the crates that worked better. Why the Triads were stocking up on entrenching tools was beyond her, but that was the least disturbing discovery she made in her little inventory sweep. Lever-action repeating rifles, more Manticores, pistols, cases of ammunition, rockets, mortars, land mines, bayonets, machetes, grenades, and dynamite. Lots and lots of dynamite. Joy tried to picture what might happen if this crate managed to catch fire. There’d be nothing left save for a smoking crater in the ground, for sure, but how big would that crater be? The blast would send deadly flaming shrapnel flying off in all directions. There’d be a larger fire, and what if there were more cargo containers carrying explosives?

  The more Joy thought about it, the more likely that option sounded. What were the odds that a cat would randomly lead her to the one single container holding illegal contraband? An image popped up in her mind of a chain reaction of multiple dynamite crates in the cargo maze going up one after each other, all throughout the huge cargo maze, obliterating everything and everyone. It was horrifying.

  Joy felt her knees shaking and had to sit down. Momma cat turned her head, keeping an eye out for any funny business. But don’t worry, Momma, Joy thought. No funny business from me here. Right now I’m the least of your worries. I just want to look at your babies for a few minutes. Kitties were calming. Kitties were relaxing. Nothing could be too horribly wrong in a world that also contained cute kitties. She had to remember that. It helped her deal with the fact that she’d stumbled into the most insane situation she could imagine.

  This weapons cache was ridiculous. She had no idea what the Triads were plotting, but it was something huge. Pimping, selling drugs, shaking down shopkeepers for protection money—none of those things required this kind of firepower. This was like a preparation for an armed takeover. Did the Triads plan to overthrow the government? She’d say that was insane, except for the fact that she was sitting smack in the middle of the evidence for it. Whatever it was, there was no way she could ignore this now. She had a duty to report this to the authorities straightaway, no matter what the consequences were. It was settled.

  A high-pitched mewing snapped her out of her reverie. Two of the bolder kittens had wandered up to investigate her. Joy took a short glance at Momma, who seemed pretty nonchalant about things, and slowly extended her hand for the little guys to check out. They darted away at first, but returned to sniff and bump their little heads against her nails. That progressed to attacking her fingers with their claws and she got one of them comfy enough to sit in her lap, which her skirt could turn into a kitty trampoline, such that the other mewed at her until she brought it up to join her sibling. It was remarkable how calming this was. Joy sent a sincere thank you to whatever god had created kittens and small furry animals in general. The kittens did wonders for her sanity, playing with her for a good long while until they finally got bored and wandered back to Momma.

  Joy stood up to do one final sweep, not that she really needed to find any more weapons to know this place was awful. But maybe she could find something like an invoice or inventory list that she could show to the authorities. She picked her way over to the far end of the shipping container, where she hadn’t checked yet. There was another empty space back there where it looked like some crates had been shifted over. It could be another major find. She squeezed through the aisle to shine her mirror into the alcove.

  A person was in there. They shrank back and cowered from the light. “No,” she said, “Please don’t hurt me,” followed by a high-pitched babble that Joy couldn’t quite make out.

  Chapter 31

  Missing Person

  Joy jerked back and managed to swallow a yelp of surprise. This had to be the busiest shipping crate in the whole docks.

  The girl huddled against the wall of the shipping container, curled into a little ball. She flinched as the light from Joy’s compact hit her, and there was a metallic clinking as she did. Her eyes peered out from beneath a black curtain of long, dirty, stringy hair. They were wide with terror, and the contrast of the whites of her eyes with her black hair and grubby skin made them look huge.

  When she spoke, it was in halting Wuyu Xiaish, but with an odd rustic accent that Joy had a hard time parsing. “Please. Don’t take me back to the Triad. They’ll punish me for leaving. Please don’t take me back.”

  Joy felt her fingers clench around the edge of her compact so hard that for a second she thought it might shatter. No, now wasn’t the time for that. Anger would only frighten this girl. She had to remain calm.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t take you back to them. I’m a friend. I want to help you,” she said in Xiaish, picking short, simple sentences to prevent any miscommunication, while smiling and putting as much reassurance into her voice as possible.

  “Help me?” The girl eyed her warily. “Why would you help me?”

  “Because if I was in your place, I’d want someone to help me,” said Joy. “And besides, that’s what people do.”

  The girl just stared at her, still wary, though she relaxed her huddled stance, opening up just a tiny bit. As she did Joy caught a bright reflection from her compact light. The girl had a thick collar of some type around her neck and matching cuffs around her wrists. When the girl caught her staring at them, s
he turned away, and Joy heard metal clinking again. This time she recognized it as the chains connecting the collar to the shackles. Joy could practically hear the unspoken rebuke: If people are so good about helping each other, how did this happen?

  Time to take a different tack. “Oh, but please, excuse my manners. I was so startled, I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Fan Joy Song. What’s yours?”

  More staring, but Joy forced herself to be patient and keep smiling. This girl had to want help. Eventually, that need would overpower her fear. That’s what she hoped anyway. The silence stretched on until Joy decided to try saying something else, but that’s when the girl murmured something. Joy asked her to repeat it.

  “I am Wong Hsiu Mei,” she said.

  Hsiu Mei, which sounded like Sue May to the Guardsmen. Just as Joy had suspected, this was the runaway they were looking for—and she’d definitely gotten into some trouble.

  “Well, Hsiu Mei, lots of people are very worried about you. Your family wants you to come home.”

  The fugitive girl narrowed her eyes. “You’re lying. My parents are dead, and my grandparents too. I have no home to come back to.”

  Joy blinked. “What?” she said. The guards hadn’t mentioned that. They’d said… wait, what had they actually said? Joy could have sworn they’d said that Hsiu Mei’s parents had been looking for her, but maybe they’d actually said “family,” and she was misremembering it.

  “Do you have other family besides your parents and grandparents, who might want to look for you? Uncles, aunts, cousins—that sort of thing?”

  “All dead in the Barbarian Uprising,” she said, using the Albion term for the Great War, “except for…” And then she raised her head for a second, before shaking it in denial. “No, that’s impossible.”

  “What’s impossible? What is it?” It had only been a second, but Joy had seen just a flash of something wonderful on Hsiu Mei’s face: hope. She had to keep that going.

  “My aunt and uncle—well, the brother of the man my mother’s youngest sister married. Uncle Tan is a scholar in Genyen Province. I heard there was no fighting there. But that is so far away.”

  “Genyen might be far, but it’s not too far,” said Joy. “Not in the world of steamships, railroad, and telegraph.”

  “But he barely knows me. I was four the last time he saw me. He couldn’t—“

  “Doesn’t matter. All family is precious, especially in hard times,” said Joy, and something else occurred to her. “And by ‘scholar’ do you mean, ‘Scholar of the Celestial Empire?”

  Hsiu Mei nodded, so Joy continued. “Impressive. You know a Celestial Scholar is not allowed to neglect his filial duties, right? Doesn’t it make sense that he’d want to make sure all of his family is taken care of?”

  Hsiu Mei blinked. She started to straighten up a little. “M… Maybe? But it’s been years—”

  "The Great War caused all sorts of chaos. They might have had a rough time sorting things out, but most of the Celestial Scholars retained their positions in areas that surrendered peacefully. It might’ve taken a while, but if I were in your Uncle's place, I'd be moving heaven and earth to find you."

  "Really?" she said, hesitant, the voice of someone afraid to hope again.

  "Absolutely," said Joy, and climbed up into the little crate alcove so she could look Hsiu Mei in the eye. "I don't know what you've been through, but I know this—you are a very brave young woman, and you are going to be just fine."

  For a second, Hsiu Mei just looked shocked, then she scrunched her face up and buried it in her hands. Joy closed the distance between them, managed to get her arms around her. The girl stiffened for a second, then crumpled against her and started sobbing. Belatedly, Joy remembered how the Fan family could freak out her Mom’s relatives with how huggy they were, but this was a barbarian custom they stood by. Everyone needed hugs sometimes, and this was definitely one of those time. Joy let Hsiu Mei stay like that a while, until she calmed down, and pulled back again.

  Hsiu Mei looked back at her, then ducked her head and mumbled. "I made a mess on your nice clothes. I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. You are more important than clothes," she said, and besides which, after squeezing through the rough edges of the shipping container's secret entrance and busting open a bunch of grimy weapons crates, this outfit was basically ruined anyway. But never mind that.

  “And speaking of which, are you injured anywhere? Can you walk okay, chains aside?”

  Hsiu Mei nodded, "Yes--they had orders not to ‘ruin the goods’ in any way before sale. If they did, they would have their heads cut off and be thrown in the sea."

  "Oh. Well, good," said Joy, breathing a sigh of relief, glad that the runaway had been spared at least a little trauma. Those chains had made her worry. Then the rest of that sentence caught up to her. "Wait, they were going to ship you off and sell you?"

  "They were going to sell me here," said Hsiu Mei.

  "Here? Really?" Joy felt her mouth drop open. This story kept getting crazier and crazier the more she dug into it. She couldn't believe this was all going on in modern-day Dodona.

  "Yes. They were going to show me to the buyer first. As a preview. But there was some kind of fight, and I escaped instead."

  "A fight?" Joy repeated. "Wait, did this all happen three nights ago?"

  Hsiu Mei nodded, and Joy couldn't stop herself from pressing further. "Did you see the fight? Or hear anything?"

  "It was too dark to see much. I was on the boat and the fight was on the docks."

  "What did you see? Actually, just tell me what happened from the beginning. In your own words."

  Hsiu Mei took a deep breath, gathering her thoughts. "Three nights ago, they took me from the cell where they kept us and brought me down to the dock."

  Joy had her notepad out. "Where was this cell?"

  "On the boat."

  "Which boat?"

  "I don't—I could not understand the name." Hsiu Mei flushed a bit.

  "That's okay. What did the boat look like?"

  "It was big and red. With wheels on the side."

  "Was it docked near a huge machine with giant metal arms?"

  Hsiu Mei nodded vigorously. "Yes, that's right."

  "Thought so. So, what happened next?"

  "Well, we waited until the buyer showed up."

  "Did you see him? Did you get his name?"

  The girl shook her head. "They did not bother to tell us much, generally. They only told me that this was an important buyer, and I should behave myself, or I would be punished. I should smile and look pretty, and consider myself honored that I was being shown first."

  Joy took another careful look at Hsiu Mei. Get the girl some rest and a nice hot shower, and she could be a model. Made sense they'd use her to sell the rest. "How many other girls were they going to sell?" she asked.

  Hsiu Mei snapped her head up in surprise, "What?"

  "You said they were showing you first, and before that you said they took you out of a cell where the others were, so I figured that meant they'd taken a bunch of you. Is that wrong?"

  Hsiu Mei stared down at her fingers in her lap, while she twisted and twined them together. "No," she mumbled. "There were six others besides me."

  "Mm-hmm," Joy said, trying to keep her tone encouraging. Hsiu Mei didn't like this subject for some reason. They could go back over it later. "Did the buyer show up? Did you get a good look at him?"

  "I saw him from far away. The men were all talking there, before they would give him a good look at me. But he looked anyway. He kept staring and staring. I did not like it."

  Hsiu Mei shuddered and hugged herself, and Joy felt her own skin shudder in sympathy. She knew that feeling, but the thought of poor Hsiu Mei having to go through it made her grit her teeth, and had a sudden vision of tracking down that fucking creep and putting an end to his staring with her entrenching tool, just swinging it over and over and over...

  Whoa! Joy tamped down her rage and t
ried to breathe deep. That wasn't what anyone needed right now.

  "What did he look like?" she said instead.

  "He was not Xia. He was one of the barbarians. Big eyes and nose. Hair like wet straw."

  "Do you think you would know him if you saw him again?"

  Hsiu Mei nodded. "I would not forget that man. Ever."

  Joy hoped that wasn't true. That soon enough she could reunite Hsiu Mei with her uncle and they could live happily and forget any of this ever happened.

  "But you escaped, right?" Joy said. "How did you do it?"

  "The men were interrupted before they finished talking. There was a strange voice in the night. It was a woman's voice, I think. But it was strange. It droned on and on, like it was coming from far away, and it kept getting louder. I did not understand anything it said. Some of the men went off, to check on it, I think. Then the drone of the voice became a screech. It was so loud, all the men went off towards it, except one remained to watch me. Then the men started shouting as well, and there were loud bangs, and the sounds of things breaking. And the shrieking continued, getting louder. Some of the men shouted things I didn't understand, but then someone yelled out in Xiaish, and they repeated it: 'Red face ghost.'"

  Joy gaped at her. "They said what?"

  "Red face ghost."

  "They really said that? You're sure that's what they said?"

  Hsiu Mei nodded. "Yes, because when the man guarding me heard it, he got scared. His face went white and he ran away. I was standing all by myself. At first I was scared to run, because I thought, 'If I run and they catch me again, they will be angry and they will do horrible things to me.' But then I remembered the way that barbarian was looking at me and I decided that I will try to run anyway. I ran into the piles of cargo where I thought they wouldn't see me so easily. I ran and ran, looking for a safe place. Then I hear a meow by my feet, and I see a cat, and--"

  "And followed it in here," Joy finished. "Hsiu Mei, while you were running, you didn't happen to see anything of the fight, or who was doing all the screaming, or anything that looked like a ghost?"