They dragged Carrick into court the very next morning. The courthouse was small, dark, and imperious. It did not need to be large, for the town was small. It sat in the downtown district, and other, more ordinary businesses rose up around it. It looked out of place.

Inside, the courthouse seemed almost as a dingy as the holding cell had been. Oily dust covered the floor, and the folding chairs upon which the officers of the court set had seen better days.

Four cases were tried before Carrick’s came up, and each was dismissed quickly and roughly. Finally, two constables took Carrick’s elbows and dragged him before the judge. They were not the constables who had interrogated him. These were stony-faced and impartial. Carrick likewise kept a still expression. He prided himself on this. It was a matter of professionalism for a member of the Family who came before the court. Despite the throbbing pain in his face and all throughout his body, he maintained dignity.

The judge looked down at Carrick over a pair of wormy lips and a very short nose. He recognized Carrick, as any judge would. Carrick did not recognize him, though. He had come before the courts three times previously in his life for much less severe charges. Those judges had all been quietly paid off, and Carrick had never spent more than a month at a time in community service. That would not be the case now.

The court crier announced the case. “Carrick of no family name comes before the court accused of accessory to the murder of a prominent business owner, his wife, and the constable who investigated the crime. Carrick of no family name is the known associate and protégé of the head of the Kingfisher crime family.”

Carrick returned the judge’s gaze coolly. His heart shuddered in his chest.

The judge opened his mouth to speak, his dry lips peeling apart disgustingly. “He does not stand accused of the crime of murder itself?”

The constable at Carrick’s left spoke. “No, your honor. We have no reason to believe the defendant committed the crime itself.”

The judge now spoke to Carrick himself. “It is the duty of every citizen to assist law enforcement in the prevention and punishment of all crime,” he said. “If it was within your power to stop this crime, and you did not do so, you are indeed guilty of being an accomplice to murder, aggravated by the fact that one victim was a constable. How do you plead, Carrick of no family name?”

Carrick did not answer. He had no defense. The crime was one he was certainly guilty of. He sat and took his medicine.

Though he knew there was no chance of it, Carrick imagined that the Family stood among the crowd and watched the proceedings, giving him support. That was what real families did when one of their sons was arrested.

Seeing that Carrick did not speak, neither to defend himself or to confess to his crime, the judge sighed and waved a hand in the air. “I sentence Carrick of no family name to that which is required by law. He has been found an accomplice to murder in two counts and to aggravated murder in one count. He will spend the rest of his life serving the society he has scorned in the Wasteland.”

The judge rapped his gavel against on the striking block, and Carrick was immediately pulled away as the next defendant moved up to fill his place, a young boy with a scabbed-over gash across one eyebrow. He looked as though he was about to wet himself.

Carrick did not hear the outcome of that case. The two constables immediately dragged him out a back door and shoved him into the back of a transport van. Two other prisoners already sat inside it, their legs strapped to bars that ran alongside the bottom of the van, their wrists shackled to rings in the roof. They were completely unremarkable. Whatever the men had been sentenced for, it must have been something terrible, but they certainly didn't look like the rapists or murderers who merited such a punishment as exile to the Wasteland. For that matter, Carrick didn't either. If he’d been well-dressed and well-washed and had walked down Main Street with a spring in his step and a jovial grin on his face, he would have looked like nothing else than a tall young man with sharp cheekbones and a thick head of golden hair, perhaps a young banker or the son of a politician.

Carrick saw his current reflection in the safety glass window directly across from him. No prisoner sat across from him, allowing him a good view of what the officers had done to him during interrogation. Both of Carrick’s eyes were swollen. There were small cuts and gashes across his face and head, and dried blood plastered his blond hair to his head in places. His lip was split and fat, and several days’ worth of stubble sprouted up in patches across his face. He had slumped over in exhaustion and pain, and seeing this, he raised himself up as best as he could. The way Carrick’s arms were suspended above his head and shackled to the ceiling of the van put intense pain on his bruised shoulders, but he made no sound.

Within the next hour, the constables brought only one more prisoner into the van. She was an ancient woman with a face contorted by rage. She screamed and spat at the constables as they dragged her into the seat across from Carrick. The woman seemed to have fewer than half her teeth, and her hair appeared to be pulled out in patches from her head.

“He deserved it!” she screeched. “Anyone who thinks otherwise can live with him for fifty years and try to tell me he doesn't deserve it!”

Carrick had the feeling that whoever “he” was, it would be impossible for anyone to live with him now.

Shortly after they added the woman to the van, its engine ignited, and the vehicle’s antigrav modules lifted them, wobbling, about a foot off the ground. For a few moments, the van shook though the whole thing would immediately fall apart, but eventually the engine warmed up. When the van finally moved, the trip was relatively smooth.

Of the four prisoners inside the back of the van, only the woman ever spoke. She kept screaming in short bursts about how “he” had deserved it, how if he had caught her sleeping with a man in their bed and had murdered them both, he would have gotten away with it, but even though her life was on the line every day, just because she hadn't killed him at the moment he was beating her, she was going to die in the wastes.

At some point the woman started laughing instead of screaming, explaining to no one in particular that he had finally killed her, as he had always said he would. Now she would die, and it would make him happy in Hell.

Carrick tried to block it all out.

That night the prisoners were allowed, one by one, to step out, quickly eat a protein bar, drink some warm water from a barrel attached to the top of the van, and stretch their legs for a few minutes before being ushered back inside. They had to sleep chained to their seats, and Carrick found this impossible. The pain in his arms and shoulders was far too great.

They traveled for a good seven hours longer the next day, stopping only for one more rest. They traveled through winding country where the roads were old and poorly maintained, where there was not a building in sight. It was not until only a few hours before they arrived to that Carrick saw signs of civilization again. Situated as he was in the van, he could not see directly in the direction the van traveled, so he could not see the buildings of the camp before they approached them, but he did see the warning signs which told civilians to turn back, that they were approaching government territory, that there were land mines planted all around the road. Carrick didn't know what a buried land mine looks like. He wondered if it was all a bluff.

Eventually they passed through a thick metal fence with jagged barbs sticking out on either side of it. Weathered signs at regular distances warned that the fence was electrified.

Shortly thereafter, the vehicle stopped and settled onto the ground, and guards threw open the van’s cargo door and started hauling the four prisoners out. These guards were thinner and meaner-looking than the constables back in town. They seemed malnourished and exhausted. This struck terror into Carrick's heart. If the Wasteland guards looked like beleaguered prisoners, how would the prisoners themselves look?