Short chapter. I really wanted to move on to Junktown and leave behind that rather dark chapter a wrote just before this. But, of course, it wouldn't have made sense to just jump back into lighter things. So this chapter is aimed at having the characters deal with some of those demons, post-gunfight.

Chapter Seven: Reflections

Albert found her where he had left her. She hadn't moved an inch. The gun was still held tightly in her hands as if rigor mortis had set in. Her arms were caked in blood and her face was stained with tears but she was too far in shock to actually cry. Albert pushed the mattress aside and sat down on the ground next to her. He took out a spare set of bandages from his utility belt, poured some of Garl's whiskey onto it and proceeded to clean the blood from her arms, hands, fingertips. She neither helped nor hindered him.

Albert cursed himself for not having seen this coming. Unlike himself and Stone, she had never gotten that initial emotionally traumatic experience to galvanize her resolve against the raiders. Albert and Stone had gotten the best aide of all: they had witnessed the dehumanizing acts committed by Garl and endorsed by his fellow raiders. That had made payback not easy but entirely doable – frighteningly so, Albert realized in retrospect. He knew his own personal time for brooding over what he had seen and experienced was just around the corner. But for now, the sight of the feisty, precocious, intelligent, gifted young woman reduced to a petrified young girl shocked out of her mind reminded him of just how young she was. Then again, he wondered if he would have been able to kill the raider in the same way she had. Pulling a trigger was one thing. Sawing through a person's neck while she struggled with every remaining ounce of strength to fight you off was something else entirely.

Reaching his arm around her shoulder, Albert pulled Natalia toward him and allowed her to lean her head against his chest. They sat like that for what seemed like at least a half hour while Stone and Ian helped secure the area surrounding the camp and liaised with the scouts from the Shady Sands patrols whom they had found and helped liberate from a makeshift prison the Khans had constructed in the nearby settlement beside the road.

'I was an idiot,' Albert said eventually, both to her and himself. 'I should never have brought you along. You didn't even want to come. All I was thinking about was making Garl and his raiders pay for what he had done. It wasn't even really about Shady Sands. I convinced myself it was but it wasn't. Not really. I wanted Garl to pay, and I stupidly got all of you involved in order to do it.'

'I want to go home,' she said in a small voice.

Albert closed his eyes. They needed her on the team. While he was more learned and well-read, there was little doubt in his mind that she was the brains and intuition of the group. But this had been his fault and now it was up to him to set things right… at least as far as it was within his control. He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze.

'We'll do that,' he said. 'Once we've restocked our supplies at Shady Sands, we'll head back to Vault-13.'

In his mind, Albert's prospects for the mission for the water chip took a sudden plunge. Only now did he realize just how much he valued an informed and intelligent second opinion to decisions he had made for the group thus far. If they lost her, he would be on his own. Ian didn't know enough about the Vault and its needs to advise him on those matters. Stone could provide the muscle but Albert couldn't count on him for tactical appraisal.

Somehow, he said to himself. Somehow they would have to manage without her. Albert lifted his PIPBoy and brought up the map of California and Nevada. He highlighted the two locations of Shady Sands and Junktown and requested a distance mapping. The shortest route by road, it seemed, would be via a zigzagging pass that ran through the mountains northwest of Death Valley: 176 miles. Then he added an extra detour point to Vault-13. To his surprise, the distance with the detour only increased by fifteen miles. He realized it was the because of all the meandering in the route from Shady Sands to Junktown that the difference wasn't all that great.

Fifteen miles was less than a day's worth of extra travel. The realization didn't give him any extra hope of finding other locations that might have spare water purification chips nor did it lessen the impact that they were about to lose a vital asset to their team, but at least it helped mitigate the worry that a detour would have robbed them of precious time.


Once Ian, Stone, and the scouts had made sure that there were no other stragglers, the entire lot of them began scavenging the raiders' camp for everything usable that they could take with them on the journey back to Shady Sands. Aside from the weaponry, most of the other things in the raiders' camp had once belonged to the people of Shady Sands anyway. As the ones responsible for the successful attack on the Khans, the vault dwellers and Ian got first pick of the equipment. While Ian preferred to stick with his submachine gun and claimed payment mainly in the form of caps accumulated from the pockets of most of the raiders' bodies and extra ammunition for the SMG, the rest replaced their 10mm Colts with the few Desert Eagles they found. Their old weapons they handed over to the people of Shady Sands. In an old refrigerator that had long since run out of coolant, Stone even found a double-barreled 12-gauge Winchester Widowmaker shotgun which he readily added to his arsenal.

There were also enough minimally damaged suits of leather armor to go around between them. Garl's metal armor was too good to pass up and Ian recommended Albert wear it since, above all, it seemed to fit him the best, and, second, as the rest of the group decided unanimously, he was to be the spokesperson for the rest in future group-related issues, and that meant looking as physically imposing as possible. The suit was too bulky to carry around, so it had to be worn. Reluctantly Albert donned Garl's armor, but despite his self-consciousness, no one could deny that it performed its task well. While crudely formed, the upper-body suit of armor immediately granted to Albert the same kind of imposing quality it had given Garl. In addition to catching the glint of the sun, it had wide shoulder pads with a row of three wicked looking spikes jutting out from one of them. It was slightly ostentatious and would attract attention but everyone agreed that if there ever were to be a time when Albert needed to assert himself in a negotiation, the armor could only help his chances. Then of course there was the more obvious defensive benefit it provided which even Albert could not deny, having conducted a personal firing test on it while it had still been on Garl.

Aside from the equipment, they also found the bodies of those whom Garl had executed lumped unceremoniously together in a large grave some distance from the main camp, including the woman he had killed in front of Albert and Stone. In their current state, it would be impossible to carry several more bodies all the way back to Shady Sands between the lot of them, so the group of vault dwellers and Shady Sands scouts cleaned the bodies as best they could and interred them in separate, freshly dug graves. One of the scouting party who had some Hindu background but whose ancestors had lived in America for generations gave a short syncretic eulogy that combined traditional Western-Christian burial service procedures with Hindu content. No one seemed to mind. Then the graves were filled with dirt and the vault dwellers, Ian, and the villagers of Shady Sands prepared to leave the camp.

With each person carrying as much as he or she could, the three vault dwellers, Ian, and the remainder of the scouts began the trek back to Shady Sands. Of the three scouting parties sent out from Shady Sands, about half of them (including the women Garl had abused and then killed) had been executed by the Khans. Another half of the remainder had suffered some kind of torture, meaning that the journey back to Shady Sands would be significantly slower and more arduous than the one from it had been.

When they were almost a day-and-a-half's' journey from the village, they were met by none other than another party sent from Shady Sands, this time larger than any one of the scouting parties sent before and led by Seth. Tandi, it appeared, had succeeded in convincing her father and Seth to send aid. While the reinforcements weren't needed to storm the camp thanks to the thorough work the vault dwellers and Ian had done on it, the extra manpower afforded and equipment provided by this second party meant that makeshift stretchers could be constructed for the most seriously injured and the journey back to Shady Sands could be expedited.

They finally arrived back at Shady Sands just after noon the next day. There was an undeniable surge of relief, gratefulness, and even astonishment at the news that the Khans had been effectively wiped off the map. The news of the deaths was devastating and even the usually sprightly Tandi was sobered for the rest of the day by the knowledge that many of those who had lost their lives had done so in the search for her.

Aradesh, of course, was unashamedly grateful for their success in bringing his daughter back, though he was disturbed by the knowledge of what had happened and of his mistake in sending women along in the scouting parties. How he would deal with the notion that many of the scouts who had lost their lives did so on account of his and Seth's commands, the vault dwellers would never know, but, at least concerning themselves, he was more than ready to reward their "courage and bravery" (as he kept repeating about them over dinner) with more logistical supplies for their trip, first to Vault-13, then to Junktown.

The ransom that the vault dwellers had retrieved from Garl was turned over to them instead by Aradesh who felt that they deserved all of it. After all, they had not only rescued Tandi where his own poor and desperate decision-making had failed but had also eliminated one of the three primary human threats to Shady Sands. Never in his entire life had he ever thought the Khans would completely cease to be a threat to his village. Now it was not only a conceivable possibility but a reality.

At his insistence, the vault dwellers agreed to stay another day to allow Ian and Stone a little more time to recuperate from their physical injuries before setting off for Vault-13.


The next day saw Natalia wandering through the crop fields, lost in thought. It was hours before Ian found her sitting by the town well, staring blankly over the acres of farmland and the villagers busy harvesting. It was strange for her, seeing maize getting harvested in December, but apparently these mutated cornstalks had different harvest cycles than the pre-War ones.

Ian sat down beside Natalia by the well and handed her her Desert Eagle.

'You left it at home again,' he said.

'I don't want it,' she said without shifting her gaze. 'I just want to go home.'

'Natalia, you may not realize it yet, but you did a good thing. You helped save a lot of lives that day. You saved that second girl from a life of sexual abuse. And from what I hear, you saved Albert's life as well.'

'If it's so good, why does it feel so bad?' Natalia replied, turning her face to Ian. Her voice was steady but her eyes looked haunted. 'I…' she stopped to give a short self-derisive laugh, 'I shot a woman in the back, and then I slaughtered another one like I would have a chicken.'

'Listen. Those raiders had no honor. They would have done the same or worse to you.'

'Does that make it right?'

'Natalia, in this world, there is no right. There is only the living and the dead. You did what anyone interested in survival would have done given the same situation. These are the rules of the world we live in.'

'The rules you live in,' Natalia corrected. 'I want no part of it.'

Ian was silent.

'I'm sorry,' she corrected herself. 'That came out mean.'

Ian shook his head, dismissing the need for an apology. 'I understand what you're going through. I was brought up in the wasteland, but even then I still had my share of issues when I was first forced to kill a person.'

'Can we…. Can we not talk about killing?' said Natalia.

'Alright. But know this. You may have done things you're not proud of and even feel terrible about right now. But there are people who owe their lives to you because of it. Good people. Not raiders who prey on defenseless people but hardworking villagers trying to make a living for themselves out here in the wasteland. And not just them but Albert, and Stone, and myself. We worked as a team. If any one of us had faltered, we could all have been dead now. I don't begrudge your desire to go back to your vault, but let me provide you with this perspective: it's the actions of people like you, not always done willingly or even by choice, that makes this wasteland livable by people who can't fight as well for themselves. If you go back to your vault and choose to stay, this new world, that's struggling to build itself up from the ashes of war, loses one more good thing about it.'


While Natalia was wandering through the cornfields, Albert and Stone sat by the brahma pens, each with a bottle of whiskey in hand. While Albert had never really had much of a conversation with Stone before, nor were they having one now, their common traumatic experience at the Khans' base had developed an unspoken sense of solidarity between them. They had gone into the belly of the beast together, seen its innards, escaped together, and then come back to rip the creature's head off its body. It was a bonding experience if nothing else.

They weren't sitting for long when they were shortly joined by Tandi who had just returned with a herd of brahma she had taken out for grazing. She threw herself down on the dusty ground beside them.

'Hi. I was afraid that you had all left and I wasn't going to get a chance to thank you properly for rescuing me.'

'You're welcome,' said Albert. He stopped there as the memories of both the fight and the events that had led up to it replayed in his mind. He was sure all three of them were thinking about the same thing.

'Could I have some of that?' Tandi said to break the silence, nodding at their bottles.

'Aren't you a little young for that?' Albert asked.

'No such rule here,' she said.

'Your dad probably wouldn't be too happy if he found out we were getting drunk with his daughter… uh, no innuendo intended.'

'Are you kidding? You guys have been immortalized in my dad's eyes. If he could build a shrine, he'd probably do it. Besides, I need it as much as you do.'

'Not quite as much,' said Albert, wincing almost visibly at the memory of the girl who had died at the hands of Garl.

'Her name was Moira,' said Tandi, guessing Albert's thoughts. 'She was orphaned years ago when raiders attacked her family not too far from Shady Sands. Seth's guards drove them off but it was too late for the rest of her family. Look, I didn't see the same things you did, but I heard what was going on, and I can guess what happened. How do you think I feel, knowing that more than half a dozen people died because they were out trying to rescue me?'

'You seem to be taking it well,' Albert observed.

'There's two ways to go about looking at it that I can see,' she replied. 'Either I can kill myself with guilt over something that none of us had any control over, or I can see their sacrifice as giving me a second chance to make a difference. Those people died because they believed in community and the importance and value of its members. I can make sure their sacrifice wasn't in vain.'

'How?' Stone asked.

'I'm going to help my dad build up this place. I've been around his work long enough to know the various things that go on in this village. And I've spoken to practically every merchant who's ever visited Shady Sands. I know what it could take for us to grow as a community and I can make sure that it happens. I'm going to turn this village into a city where people will no longer have to worry about things like radscorpions and raiders and food shortages.'

'That's quite an ambitious goal,' Albert commented.

'I think that earns her a drink,' said Stone. Tandi smiled gratefully at him.

'Here.' Albert handed her his bottle. 'At least one of us came out the better from all this.' With that, he got up, dusted the sand from his back, and turned to depart, leaving Stone and Tandi to themselves. They watched him depart, knowing something was on his mind but deciding not to pressure him about it.

Left to himself, Albert wandered aimlessly around the outskirts of Shady Sands. He was still waiting for any kind of emotional reaction to the notion that he had executed six people during that attack on the Khan camp that night. He had walked up to six injured people, and put six bullets into six heads. He was still surprised how he had managed to do it so mechanically and coldly. Yet they had all deserved it. The memory of the woman named Moira kept replaying itself in his mind, and every time it did, even the prospect of feeling remorse for the six people he had killed fled like the remnants of a dream. That wasn't what troubled him.

His issue was a different one from Natalia's. Garl had done things Albert had never in his wildest imagination thought he would ever encounter in the wasteland. Separately, they were all despicable things – theft, kidnap, rape, murder – but they were all notions with which Albert was familiar. Put together, they made Garl out to be the monster he really was. And all that was terrible. But, ultimately, it still made sense. What gnawed at Albert was, instead, the transition between the rape and the murder. There was no rational sense to that. Even from the standpoint of a sex-starved rapist it made no sense. There was only one answer Albert could come up with and it was one that left him feeling deeply uneasy: Garl had killed Moira simply because Albert and Stone had been there while he was in the middle of the act. There was no other reason Albert could think of. Garl had simply wanted to make a statement to his "guests", whether to live up to his reputation or to send a message to them. But either way, it made no logical sense to Albert and that shook him to his very core. Was Garl mad? Or was this what post-nuclear life would do to a person? And was executing people the first step down that path?

Albert ran his fingers down the side of the Desert Eagle holstered at his hip. It felt so natural sitting there now, so much so that he was surprised just how easily he had been ignoring the weight. He remembered what it had been like two weeks ago when they had first left Vault-13. Back then he hadn't even known how to put on a holster. Now the five-pound sidearm felt like a part of his body.

He stopped in mid-walk to get his bearings. A short way's away, he spotted some of the people of Shady Sands tending to the crop fields. These people lived in a world where violence visited them every other day. If it wasn't food shortages, it was radscorpions. If it wasn't radscorpions, it was raiders. Violence was a part of their lives that they seemed to have come to terms with. Maybe this really was what post-nuclear life was like. And yet… Albert paused as the realization hit him. The people of Shady Sands now had two problems less – two big problems less – and it was all because of what he and the other vault dwellers and Ian had done. That added a whole new complication into the already unmanageable jumble of thoughts that spiraled through his confused mind. What was right and what was wrong? Was there even a way to evaluate them? Albert didn't know how to deal with it all. With or without the whiskey, he was at a loss.

He sighed. Today's walk wasn't going to be enough to help him work out his problems but at least there was one thing that he could count on for certain. They were all going home.