A Walk in the Woods

"So….how did you meet the Vault Dweller?" asked Veronica.

I didn't hear her, not really. I was looking on the road, and more than a little past it. We were on Highway 95, about ready to turn onto Route 157, the road to Mt. Charleston. I'd been on that road many times, both before the war and after it. Las Vegas looked mostly intact if you went to places like Westside, but I could remember and knew the truth: big portions of the suburbs burned to the ground in the last hundred years. Some fire were set deliberately, some were accidents, and some were lighting strikes from the occasional shower. But all in all, vast portions of housing and strip malls were burned away. Development used to run all the way to the 157 interchange. Now, there was nothing but sand and rocks, and lots of conifers sticking out of the dirt. These were the gene-edited conifers to be as water efficient as cactuses, with brown clumps of grass.

"I don't think she's thinking about the Vault Dweller," said Arcade. Did I mention we'd been ordered to take Arcade?

Wait, no. Let me back up, I skipped all the introductions, because it's boring and getting a caravan together is boring, so I skipped it. Here's the short version: we got everyone up, Merriweather introduced herself, most of us were more impressed by the power armor than the woman, but that's because it was early. ED-E was still in the shop, and Julie Farkas ordered me to take Arcade with us to brief Doctor Henry about Rex. Besides, we were searching for hunters and we might need a doctor. Delilah let us use her truck, Niner was on his bike with Willow, Merriweather was in her own car, and I was driving the truck at the head of this caravan with Veronica, Arcade and Rex crammed into the single large seat of the truck.

"Wait, wha?" I asked, coming to my senses.

"How'd you meet the 'Vault Dweller?'" she was using it as a title.

"Ah…." I tried to shake some of the sleepiness out of my system "We met on an expedition to Zion. Not a well-organized one either. It took us a month to get to Zion on what should have been a 14-day journey if we'd just walked the 15 and shot any raider that got in our way. We had a fucking US Marshall in power armor and all my bots hauling supplies, but no! Jed had to take us on a journey through the mountains."

"What's Zion?" asked Veronica.

"It's an old National Park in Utah," said Arcade.

"And for good reason, I might add. It's…it's breathtaking to see. You have to see it to believe it. Trust me. And if you have a straight shot on the 15, which would never happen, you could be there in three hours by vehicle."

I turned the car off the interchange onto 155. In the old days we'd be going 65 but given the state of the roads, we weren't going any faster than 30 and 30 was pushing it.

"NCR cracked the Big Empty," said Arcade.

"Where'd that come from?" I asked.

"I just realized, 95 has just been repaved. It was really smooth getting out of the city and I didn't know why, but it has to be NCR repaved the road. And Highway 95 doesn't lead anywhere north of Vegas expect through the pulse field from the Big Empty. So they had to have cracked the big Empty and they expect to send supplies through 95."

Veronica said, "Hmm that makes sense."

I could feel Arcade looking at me, although I couldn't see him as I was focusing on the road and any damaging potholes I might encounter.

"Did you have anything to do with that, our ever so glorious courier?"

"Me? No. I had nothing to do with that. I wish I had, there's a fuckton of technology there."

"So you've been?"

Ah shit. "Ah, I'm not allowed to talk about it..." ah fuck it I thought. "Yes, but only for the cleanup. That place is tainted. Too valuable to be left to rot, but it's tainted with suffering and hubris and death. I was happy to leave."

"That's a surprising attitude," said Veronica. "Why do you feel that way?"

I inhaled, and looked over at Veronica briefly before turning my attention back to the road "You know what happens when there's a bunker full of tech, but the nuclear shocks made the security bots go haywire? That's a tragedy. You cremate the bones, you salvage the tech, and if someone is willing to buy it, you get bots to refurbish the facility. Then there are things, well like Rex. Look at Rex. What do you call something like that?"

"A…cyberdog?"

"A mutilated horrorshow. They could have augmented Rex in a lot of ways, ways that were respectful to his body. Instead, they cut half of his legs off and then put metal bits in whilly nilly until he was more machine than dog. Granted, he's lived a lot longer, but they could have done that without making him freak. I saw it done. But they didn't give a shit."

"And that's what the Big Empty is, a place where deeply amoral, fucked up people, who had no respect for anything, not even their own bodies, decided to play God until they literally lobotomized themselves. In the name of science. Bullshit, Mengele science. Crimes against Humanity were committed there. No crime was too great, no threshold to disgusting to cross. And I was only contracted to get the bots up and running again. Except the Robobrains, we installed runner chips on those and buried the brains, because those weren't chimp brains in there like they're supposed to be. No, these were human brains, harvested from Chinese internees. They were shelled like nuts, for parts."

"There's a difference between a tragedy and altar for human sacrifice, ok? When Cortez conquered the Aztecs, he didn't try and convert their temples to churches, he destroyed them. Because they had been defiled. So thoroughly, in fact that the only thing to do was destroy them completely. Morally speaking, the NCR would be justified nuking that place into oblivion. No tech, nothing, just gone. It's fucking evil. And you can feel it too. I was so happy to get out of that place. I'll never go back."

Veronica didn't say anything for several seconds. "Wow"

"The America that got nuked was so terrible we kinda deserved it. Not even going to lie about that. I didn't think so at the time, but you know what? A hundred years of distance can change your perspective. Yeah, it was terrible, and it's better there's a wasteland than that America."

"That's what the Brotherhood teaches."

"Yeah….but let me back up there. The wasteland is better than THAT America. Not America in general. I'm a big fan of America, I consider myself to be an American. But not that America."

There was an uncomfortable silence in the cabin after that. Finally, Veronica said "OK, so….what are we going to do about the Vault Dweller?"

We were starting to climb higher, the ascent wasn't very noticeable for now but it would be rather quickly. I answered "Well, we ain't killing her. She's my friend. Kind of, and it's never good to kill a Marshal. So we're going to keep low and do what she asks until she gets bored with us."

"And when, pray tell, is that going to be?" asked Arcade. "I know Doc Henry, and he knows me, and if she gets wind he used to be in the Enclave…"

"OK, OK, Arcade," I said, "how do you know him?"

"He….he helped raised me after my father died."

"Were they squadmates or something?"

"Um, yeah…..kinda." Arcade was very nervous, and this was the first time he'd ever opened up to me about his past, so I was counting it a bonding experience "Doc Henry was normally assigned to my father's squad, but he left just before the oil rig went up. He...found us after Navarro was overrun, helped me and my mom get papers to stay in NCR."

"OK, so what's the problem?" I asked.

"Theresa, she has full power to arrest me, at any time."

I sighed. "Look, both of you. Look outside, it's getting pretty." And this was true. The grass clumps had given way to green grass and deciduous trees. "I want to you look and relax. Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. Just breathe." All of us took a deep breath, including me. "It's going to be fine. Now, Arcade?"

"Yes?"

"All you have to do is brief Doc Henry on Rex's condition and you're done. Veronica, Merriweather doesn't know a thing about you, and you can leave at any time. In fact, I'd recommend it."

"Really? Why does everyone always say that?" She was whining, and I wasn't sure if she was being sarcastic or not. So I asked, and she continued, "Well….I dunno. We just met, you told me about great opportunities-"

"And that's before Merriweather requisitioned my services. She's paying me a shitload of money to help her unfuck the Mojave before the Legion crashes onto Hoover Dam again. So I'm up to my neck in shit to do, and I won't hold it against you if you don't want to risk being taken in by one of NCR's top agents. She's dangerous, she's real goddamned dangerous and she'd be dangerous even without wearing a goddamned suit of T-51b. On the other hand, if you do stick around we're going to fight convicts and you might get to punch a Deatchclaw to death."

Oh I shouldn't have said that. Because Veronica's chocolate brown eyes flashed at me, "Really?"

"If you really want to try and bludgeon a giant rape lizard with a power fist…I won't stop you. You're a big girl."

"Oh boy! Really?!"

Arcade looked at her and sneered "Are you out of your mind?!'

"No! I…I have a stealth boy for just such occasions. And I've trained a lot for this in VR. It's...a real bragging rights award. The trick is to sneak up on them, and then punch their leg so hard you break the bone clear through the skin. Then they're in so much pain they physically can't stand and then 'BAM,' right in the skull. And then…glory."

I laughed low and sinister. "Psycho lesbian…my favorite kind."

Veronica took what I can only describe as a sitting bow. "Why thank you."

I can't describe exactly what Arcade did with his face, but he was taking note of what I'd just said.

The marker on my internal HUD was shifting, so I knew we were almost at the campsite. I pulled over to the side of the road. "Now remember, no Brotherhood or Enclave talk. You never heard of them. Either of you."

"Um, OK, I was kind of doing that already…"

"Lie better Arcade."

Now, something you don't often hear about in stories and or see in videogames. Having a large group sounds great. More firepower. However, someone has to watch the supply wagons. It's not glamorous, but none of us wanted to walk back to Vegas. In this case, only I and Merriweather and Arcade were going to find the campsite. Well, there was Rex too. I was in lead with Rex and Merriweather was taking up the rear. The grass here was tall, I had to pet it down like a small dog at my hip. None of us had our weapons out, that's a good way to get shot when meeting strange groups. Still, up in the hills, my right hand was itching for my sidearm tucked away on left hip.

Birds were chirping, and I could hear the buzzing of insects in the background. Indistinct, but enough to suspect they were regular insects and not say, giant mantises. Here there were enough deciduous trees for me to take in Fall color. I tried not to be distracted by the golds and reds of the trees spanning over me, but they reminded me of home….well, they reminded me of Ohio in ways that normally the Mojave just didn't. Of course, because I have a motion tracker implant, I could see there wasn't anything human sized within 500 yards, and snipers were almost unheard of in the post-apocalypse. Well, good ones anyway.

Very rapidly, the trees gave way to a campsite perched under a large boulder. The blue tarp tents were all torn up and the black ashes from the campfire were spread all around the edges of the fire pit. I thought I could smell blood. I heard Merriweather reach for her piece, a 5.56 pistol most people referred to 'That Gun,' but which Merriweather referred to as Adolf. As to why she calls it Adolf, I will let her explain when the time comes, because apparently, she's really proud of how she named it. Considers it very witty. She never tires of telling new people either. But then I also held the soft whirring of a ripper being put in standby mode. Yes, Arcade, the gentle Followers doctor, carries a one-handed chainsaw as his close quarters defense weapon.

I commanded Rex to search, and enhanced dog that he was, he instantly knew and obeyed. He ran right past the fire pit, past the second of the tents and started whimpering at something behind it out of view.

I moved as quickly as I could without giving up sure footing, but Arcade and Merriweather caught up to me as we all drew weapons, only to see there were two people, a man in a woman, bloody mangled laid on their backs. Flies were everywhere, and the blood looked like it had been congealed for some time. They were obviously dead, but Merriweather told Arcade to check on one and she on the other, just in case.

Rex continued to paw the ground and whimper, his nose pointing at the two, both in heavy clothing. Well, that was two of the three people I was looking for, although if the man was Anson's brother or Anson's brother's friend, I hadn't the slightest clue. What I did do was holster my sidearm and detach my rifle, VATS scanning everything in sight in case the attacker was nearby.

"I got nothing," I announced, and I put my gun down from my face. Arcade and Merriweather were talking with each other. I'll spare you the medical speak. They'd been beaten to death, probably with someone's s bare hands and the size of the bruises and such lent itself to it being a supermutant. I was really, really hoping the worst case scenario didn't come to pass, but it did. The only way this could get worse is if it wasn't some shit for brains 2nd generation supermutant, but a schizo Nightkin claiming he was speaking with Ganglion, the tentacled space horror or some other Lovecraftian shit.

I bent down to look at Rex, more or less at eye level for him and said "Good boy Rex." I patted his head. Then he looked at me and growled.

I forgot, I had a hat. "Cut that out or I'll turn you into a hat!"

Rex whimpered.

I offered him my left hand, palm upwards, fingers limp. He sniffed my hand then licked the glove around it as a sign of submission.

"That's better. Now, can you smell who did this?"

Rex barked. I was sure it was an affirmative.

"Can you tell where he went?"

Rex whimpered and shook his head, very human like. It was uncanny. But I couldn't dwell on it.

"There was a third person here. Can you find him?"

The dog sniffed the air. He went down and started sniffing the ground of the campsite. I stood up as I saw him make his way over to the sleeping rolls (what a smart dog!) and sniff them up and down. Finally, he started barking.

"You found him? I mean, his scent?"

Rex gave a very crisp bark.

By this time Arcade and Merriweather had stood up and all of us were looking at Rex.

"Well, come on guys!" I said, "He's got the scent!"

At my command, off went Rex, who stopped every couple of yards to make sure we were still in sight range. It was uneven terrain, with little streams of water and ferns, The forest was very thick now, with light streaming in through the changing leaves. It was obvious to me at least that the body had been dragged, there were intermittent blood stains and the plants were disheveled in a way that I could probably have tracked the target myself if I had to. This wasn't good though because even a dumb supermutant would probably try and cover its tracks. Really dumb and violent supermutants tended to get dead a long time ago, and basically there was no more FEV to turn people into more dumb violent supermutants. This had crazy ass Nightkin written all over it.

Finally, we came to a cave, or burrow of some kind, just big enough for one of us to scramble in at a time. I volunteered as I had a plan.

"Keep it down!" snapped Merriweather in a whisper. "It probably knows we're here now."

"It could smell coming from a mile away," whispered Arcade. "They were designed to do that."

"Yeah, only one of us can get in at a time. I have a plan."

"What's the plan?" asked Merriweather.

"Just trust me, if I told you, it would ruin the surprise."

"That's not a plan Miller."

"Ah, look, I'm superstitious about these things. Just trust me. You've both trusted me before, and it's always worked out."

Merriweather looked at Arcade and Arcade at Merriweather.

Arcade said "Yeah, she's right. And she's always got a stealth boy, and I don't have one of those."

"Fine, but I hear gunshot going off and I'm coming in."

I thought about this "You might hear one gunshot. If you hear a second one, then yeah, I'm in trouble. But I think I can get the mutant alive."

Merriweather grumbled, "Just go."

I activated my stealth boy and night vision implant and went inside. It got dark very quickly.

It was a small cave, one room, basically made into a doughnut by a large, worn rock in the middle of the chamber. I smeIled the blood intensely. However, I was looking for was dead and bled out. I had my .45 ready and crept a lightly as a could. I didn't have to worry about shadows and shadowplay because it was more or less pitch dark in there. Still, I couldn't see anyone. I looked for the telltale shimmers that come off a stealth boy field, but given how much false color was being put in my vision by the implant, I'd be lucky to see something that subtle if I were right in front of the beast.

I took the counterclockwise route, and I got to about the 10 o clock position in the room when I saw the body. Not only was this man dead, but he was stripped and mostly eaten. His arms and legs were ripped off, leaving only a torso bled out with a head thoroughly bashed. The corpse didn't stink, but I gasped and nearly gaged on the intensity of the blood-smell and the fact that this human being smelled like meat.

"I can sense you, little one," came a deep, very much supermutant voice behind me. "I smell your fear. Cimbon smells it too. Cimbon says you're here to steal my earlobes, WELL THEY"RE MY EARLOBES AND YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM!" I could hear the voice getting closer, but I couldn't see where and moving would make a sound that would give me away. Come ooout, I need food. Cimbon needs blood. It won't hurt at all, Cimbon makes sure there's never any….pain."

Faster than my mind could register I dove forward in a somersault and onto my back as I heard a "ghaah!" and a massive hand slam onto the ground behind me. Well, not actually ground, actually that fist slammed into the torso with a sickening crunch and bits of blood went everywhere. Not gobs, just little drops.

The mutant screamed and torso went flying off the ground, hovering in midair at an angle that the remains of the left leg were pointing directly at the ground and everything else was diagonal. It jerked and jerked again before flying off towards the back of the cave. It was at this point there was too much movement stealth boy to handle and in a blueish flash, the mutant appears in all its eight-foot glory. Blue skinned, with recessed ears and bulging muscles, it was ugly. And absolutely naked except for its crude wrapped cloth boots. The human penis doesn't grow or shrink due to FEV exposure, so the dangly bits were almost comically undersized, which was exacerbated by the lack of pubic hair, or much hair else on the body. But at least I knew it was a male. Its right hand was bloody.

I had my shot, and I took it. Right into his nose. Now in normal humans, a wildcat round from a 45 would more or less shatter the skull and blow brains, nose and a good chunk of the skull out the back, but all it did here was bloody the nose into a glibbing mess.

Let it never be said I'm not compassionate, because I had aimed for the middle of his forehead, which would have stunned him and not made such an awful mess, and to be safe I should have fired again to summon my companions. But this poor sonovabitch was a schizophrenic. In my eyes, down on your luck is no excuse, but crazy kinda is, at least insofar that you don't automatically kill people for it. The beast screamed and screamed in pain. He was still pretty stunned by the shot, to the point that after two deep breaths to scream he sneezed a torrent of blood directly into my face as I was in the middle of lunging at him. I would have been blinded if I wasn't wearing those all-encompassing sunglasses. Knocked him over with my weight, then did my level best to throw myself off of him before he had a chance to counter and grab me. In those giant hands, I stood no chance. His left hand still flung me off balance and I landed on my face in the dirt and scraped my chin really hard.

At Big Mountain, I had been paid in implants, and one them was called GRX. I have no idea what it stands for, but I felt the adrenaline kick in and time slowed to a crawl. This would only last a few seconds, so I reached into my belt as felt for one of the hypos I'd taken from the Fort; the sedatives for supermutants. These were oversized, almost as round as a milliliter….the thing….cylinder that kids use to measure milliliters in school. Very thick. So I only had three of them. I fumbled a bit because I was wearing gloves, but I got it in my right hand and waited as my slow ass left hand reached over and took the cap off so the needle was ready to go. I struggled to my feet.

I saw the mutant on the ground. He was screaming in pain, but the sound was distorted time slowing effect to a low and discordant moan. His arms were straight up in the air as though a small baby waiting to be picked up. I had just enough time to feel bad for the guy as grabbed his left arm with both hands at the wrist and kicked the base of his shoulder as hard as I could. I was wearing steel toed boots, and I'm sure that kick hurt him a lot more than me, but I still wondered if I'd broken a few toes for my trouble. I gasped in pain as the time slow effect stopped. Not got weaker, it just fucking quit, leaving me feeling woozy.

I had about three letters out of a four letter word as I started to roll my eyes and gurgle a little bit. Now if I was taking turbo instead, which has a similar effect, I'd probably lose my balance, but whatever GRX was, it was a combat drug and the feeling would pass quickly.

I staggered for a few seconds, but fortunately, the mutant was in worse shape than I. I was still holding his wrist, and his arm was both stiff and limp. In the best case, I'd dislocated his shoulder, in the worst, I'd broken it. Considering the alternative was blowing his brains out, still compassionate right?

I threw the arm behind me and fell on the mutant's hip, using the weight of my body to puncture the bullet resistant skin. That's actually the way the Followers have to treat the rare Supermutant who comes in for treatment. They're designed to be tough. I think I hit bone the way he threw his pelvis up in the air and screamed in agony. But the scream only lasted for a few seconds I felt his body go limp.

Fun fact: in humans, or animals for that matter, you never, EVER go for an instant tranquilization. It can work, but you're also very likely to kill the recipient. With them, you need to shoot at a distance and wait a couple of minutes until they wind down and pass out. But with Supermutants and their super healing factor, you can basically put VX in their mouth and they'll take a little nap and be fine. So it's OK to overdose Supermutants.

I was breathing very hard and I hadn't realized it. Breath after ragged breath started entering me like I'd been choked. Pain also entered my consciousness. First in my jaw and then in my toes. I pulled my foot up for a second to see how much it hurt when the toes were merely dangling and from that I could tell I hadn't actually broken anything. My jaw was another matter. I'd scrapped my left jaw and it burned, but it was the teeth on my right side that hurt. I put fingertips to the scrape and when I pulled away there was blood on my glove. It was a flesh wound, but nothing more.

I looked at the mutant, who was now passed out. He wasn't snoring, or snorting or talking in his sleep, he looked every bit like he'd just gotten his ass kicked. Now came the tricky part: I pulled off my gloves and sat them on the ground. I sat crosslegged behind the mutant's skull. I placed my first two fingers on the temples of the beast….on the man….and I began to concentrate, trying to empty my mind. I felt a burning in the middle of my forehead.

I began to use a technique I'd learned long ago from a sage called Mens Sana. It's….it's a vampire power. A power no one should ever be able to access again. But I felt it, I had felt magic reenter the world as my plane went down so long ago. That hideous, evil thing that corrupted the world. Magic itself is awful, it shouldn't exist. But there are some skills and some applications that are intensely beneficial. I'll just say it: Ghouls are magic. If you've ever seen a Ghoul, you've seen it. Radiation doesn't do that to people. It doesn't make them go feral, it doesn't make them immortal. It doesn't make their noses fall off or their eyes turn black. They get sick, they lay down, and they die. There were no Ghouls at Hiroshima, no Ghouls at Nagasaki, there were no Ghouls at Chernobyl and none in a thousand other industrial accidents involving massive radiation. Ghouls exist because people think they should. They think that's how the world works, and this ignorance is made manifest. This can be very good, but because man is a fearful creature, it is almost always bad. I fear the vampires will come back. I try not to think about lest my fear be made manifest.

I rubbed the man's temples circularly and began to enter his mind. I was trying to get a feel for how evil he was, versus how crazy. I can't really describe what it's like going into a mind, except, maybe if you've ever seen a picture of a tooth x-ray. The enamel of the tooth isn't the conscious mind, but the most recent memories, so there are by volume, the most of them, although they don't mean all that much.

In a normal person's mind, the mind is a shaft that goes deep into the subconscious, becoming denser and thicker and narrower as you move back to earlier experiences. In a supermutant's mind, there's a distinct tapering, a real culling at the moment, or probably days and weeks after FEV exposure. Mutants are famous for wholesale personality changes, memory loss, and loss of intelligence if the process isn't carefully controlled.

This was a Nightkin, which meant that by definition there had been no loss of intelligence because the Master did not use damaged good to become his elite. But I wasn't interested in that so much: I was descending the order of his memories, ultimately heading to what he had been right before his transformation. But I got a good whiff, a good sense of what this man had been as a Nightkin as passed down the shaft, and what I got was the impression that this fellow wasn't evil exactly, but highly unpleasant, deeply alienated, full of dispair. Also, the schizophenia had been a long time coming but had overtaken him completely relatively recently. Kind of like how in an algea bloom, a pond will look fine one day and two weeks later the entire surface will be covered in pond scum.

I remember a thing called root canals. Now, in primitive conditions, when a tooth goes bad, you either have it removed entirely or if you have an autodoc, you remove the tooth and slather on some stem cells and treat the area with growth lasers and the tooth regrows. Before all of this, there was a very nasty technique dentists had of drilling into a tooth and removing an infected or inflamed nerve inside the tooth, thus removing the source of the pain. I say this because this Nightkin's whole memory chain was inflamed and more or less swollen. His schizophrenia was out of control, and he had given in entirely to the madness.

I had to make sure he wouldn't become violent, but the truth is that now, I'm trying to justify what I did far more than when I did it. I decided for my own safety and for his survival, that getting rid of the worst of the schizophrenia, was going to require wiping his mind. It's sorta like...say you have a hair chain in your bathtub. You have to pull the chain completely out of the pipe in order to get to all the hair it's trapped and kept from clogging up the pipe. Only, in this case, pulling up the chain to get the hair out was going to make the chain disappear. This was a drastic step, and it wouldn't even cure the schizophrenia entirely, as I had discovered from previous experience. It would, however, break the delusion train; whatever his 'friend' was, the one that wanted my blood, that would disappear. Still, even with systemic brain structure problems, I could free him for several weeks. Still, it's not a proper cure, and the price is often far too high.

He tensed as I focused. I felt the burning in my forehead go higher, in fact, I could now see the room from its brightness. See, Mens Sana is part of a 'Discipline,' a track of power called Path of the Healer. The problem with this track is learning it causes you to get a third eye. Not a physical eye in your forehead, but when you do Salubri magic it 'opens' and glows very brightly.

Luckily the process is quick, and within a minute, that bright glow dissipated. It was done. I scurried outside and informed my companions. I didn't tell them I used magic, of course, I brought out an optical flash device with the capacity to erase memories, something I always carried with me as cover and as a backup, in case I ever needed it. It would have done the job too, in theory, but erased far more and not necessarily made the Nightkin one wit less violent. It also made a bright flash when used so I was covering my ass that way too.

Now began the very boring, and much longer part. Merriweather called in the coroner and the Clark County Sherrif's Office, which was NCR's civilian law arm in these parts.

I felt very bad for everyone. The hunters were dead, Anson was without a brother, realistically, I wasn't going to accept his pay, and that poor Nightkin was going to wake up and not understand he wasn't quite human anymore. Scared, in custody, and probably having his last functional memory being dragged off from whatever Vault he probably came from. Then he's going to be in a world of pain, being charged with murder, and then the schizophrenia was going to hit him like a freight truck before the end of the year.

And this was about as happy an ending as anyone could salvage.