Spoiler warning: If you haven't finished the game yet, don't read any further.


So I finished Base Chochise, but accidentally got my characters irradiated in one of the final rooms. I thought I'd have plenty of time to get out and make it to a doc to heal up. Nope. At the last set of doors out of the base, I figure my characters all went UNC and the base went Kaboom with them in it. I get the ending scene with the heartwarming "you gave your lives to defeat blah blah".

Now if I reload the saved game, it goes to the desert outside of Vegas and the game freezes up hard. Can't move the mouse, issue commands, anything. I tried using a character editor on my guys and all it shows is 7 characters all named VAX with the same stats.

Any way to pull these guys out of the void? Or are they gone for good?

From what i played so far if you get stuck you stay stuck with the current save model.
And from what i gathered VAX is a recruitable NPC? http://wasteland.wikia.com/wiki/Vax
Maybe the guys at the Inxile forum know more about it.

The game appears to automatically save every time you change locations. I've found this to be an annoying anachronism that I have to always keep in mind while playing.

What I think might have happened is that it saved, but not just with the status of my characters set to "dead' but that it may have actually deleted them before saving, making them irretrievable.

No big deal, I had a backup of my save files from before I entered the Vegas sewers, so I just picked up from there.