Orders and Ghosts

The plan had been simple. In and out before anyone noticed. Seth, Garret and I moved through the trees like we’d done it a dozen times. The Syndicate courier was supposed to be alone.

He wasn’t.

We found him in the barn, using the place as cover. A family was still living there – father, mother, and a boy no older than fourteen. They froze when we came through the door.

“Stay quiet and nobody gets hurt,” Seth said, low and calm. He kept his crossbow pointed at the courier.

The boy didn’t listen.

He grabbed a pitchfork from the wall and lunged. Seth moved fast – too fast for the kid to react. The crossbow butt caught him across the temple and he went down hard, blood already running into his eye.

The father shouted and started forward. Garret stepped in front of him with a knife out.

“Enough,” Garret said. Not loud. Just final.

The mother was crying. The courier tried to run for the back door. I caught him before he made it two steps and slammed him into the wall. He dropped the satchel. Papers scattered across the straw.

Seth picked them up without a word. Checked them. Nodded once.

“We’re done here,” he said.

On the way out, the father was still shouting after us. The boy was sitting up now, dazed, holding his head. The mother just stared at us like we were something that had crawled out of a nightmare.

None of us looked back.

We rode hard for an hour before we stopped in a small clearing. Seth handed the papers to Garret without looking at them.

“Clean job,” he said. Like that made it better.

Garret didn’t answer right away. He was staring at the blood on his sleeve – not his.

“Kid was just scared,” he muttered finally.

Seth’s jaw tightened.

“Scared gets people killed. Same as brave.” He glanced at me. “You did good, Willers. Kept your head.”

I didn’t feel like I’d done good. I felt like I’d just helped rob a family of whatever peace they had left.

Garret caught my eye. He didn’t say anything, but he gave a small shake of the head. Like he knew exactly what I was thinking.

We didn’t talk much on the ride back. The papers were in Seth’s pack. The courier was tied up and gagged behind Garret’s saddle. And somewhere back at that farm, a boy was probably still bleeding into the straw while his mother tried to explain to him why the world had just kicked in their door.

I kept seeing his face every time I blinked.