The Super-Duper Mart at Lexington was a pesky problem for the raiders of Corvega. While under Jared's command, dealing with the ghouls in Lexington near the factory was the only priority. With food and chems coming from raided farmsteads that paid tribute along with caravans from Bunker Hill, the need to scavenge for food was virtually non-existent. If an individual was hungry and felt like wandering around Lexington, there was never any need to go out and scavenge, but with things changing too quickly and unexpectedly for the remaining Corvega raiders, then with only chems and diminishing stocks of food and ammo, the necessity for scavenging ruins in the area became apparent.

Lonnie spearheaded Trevor's group to assist her, even after losing members of his team to the Super Mutant Behemoth. Sending Trevor was important to show the durability of them to bounce back after taking a heavy loss.

The third raiding party leader, Jupiter, voiced her displeasure of taking on the stress and pressures of being the boss of a fledgling gang, leaving Marin to keep everyone's heads cool at the Corvega factory. No one else was allowed to jump ship and leave like so many others did in the last week. It showed weakness and cowardice, but those who remained were rallied into being the new core members of the gang, and then everyone who stayed was promoted.

After leaving early that morning, with their destination well known to the rest of the gang at Corvega, they promised to return soon with food.

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The raiders looked up to the sign above the twin-sliding doors, 'Super Duper Mart', and then to the faded, water damaged, molded, and sun-bleached cartoon cut-out posted in the window of a smiling brunette with a white blouse - yellowed by age - holding up a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, with a baguette, celery, and glass carton of milk sticking out of a grocery basket cradled on her elbow, and wearing a yellow skirt with pink flannel patterns.

The difference from the laser rifle and pistol-toting, patchwork armor-wearing, spiked leg guards and shoulder pauldrons, frazzled hair, and starve-faced raiders didn't nearly match what was being advertised.

Passing through the door, one needed to be dragged open, while the other was pushed wide enough for them to pass through. Rusted shopping carts were still in rows, but the building was looted and scavenged many times over the centuries. The air was stagnant and they could see the dust floating in the air through the light that came through the pollen and dirt-covered windows.

Lonnie swallowed, thinking only of food. "Noah, Badmaw, sweep the building for anything else roaming around here, you're not picking up anything, you're searching beneath counters, behind stalls, in the back for ghouls and nested insects. Trinket, Devon, Parkin, grab carts and fill them with whatever you can find on the main floor. Trevor, Duke, you're with me as we check the pharmacy and storage rooms.

Noah and Badmaw broke right from the group, heading to the back wall when a series of howling ghouls cried out, like dominoes, one cried out, then two more, then five all aware of Noah and Badmaw's presence.

"How many?" Lonnie yelled to get their attention.

"Eight ghouls!" Noah shouted, drawing a machete from a loop on his belt and a handgun stuffed into his pocket. He fired seven rounds before the gun was empty, but by that time the ghouls were on them. Badmaw charged forward, knocking three ghouls down, as the five ghouls surrounded Noah and beat on him. Trinket, Devon, and Parkin all ran for Noah and Badmaw when more ghouls shouted, crawling up to their feet, or emerging from the back storage room.

Four more feral ghouls came from the check out lanes, all their ragged clothes hanging onto them by bare threads, and some of their muscles were locked up, lacking the circulation to move them properly.

Lonnie and Trevor used their assault rifles to fire at the four ghouls, as one ghoul bit down into Noah's ear, another bit at his armpit.

Trinket and Devon crushed the ghoul's heads with brute force, bashing them in with metal pipes. Parkin broke the downed ghouls' legs, but they still crawled at Noah, Trinket, and Devon, grasping onto their legs and pulling themselves closer to bite. Simple metal plates worn over Trinket and Noah's pant legs, but Devon only didn't have any leg protection on his left leg, and then cried out in pain as the feral ghoul's teeth ripped through his pants and into his quadriceps. As Trinket and Noah killed their first two ghouls, Devon struggled to tear the ghoul free and finish it off.

Kicking the ghouls off only made Devon trip backward, allowing the ghouls to crawl up over him as he tried to scurry away. They dug their finger bones into his chest, lacking nails and skin, the bones jabbed into his chest and scraped away flesh.

Badmaw killed the three downed ghouls, then rushed to fling the ghouls off Devon, but then was knocked down by two ghouls coming from behind.

Devon shook free his monkey wrench, and swung it ferociously at ghouls, breaking their arms and shoulders, ultimately aiming for their heads. Trinket stomped at the ghouls around her legs, hacking them to pieces with a meat cleaver.

Ghouls from the restrooms and back-office lumbered out, making their way towards the gunfire, but Lonnie and Trevor both realized they were about to run out of ammo very quickly.

"Everyone! Back to the front doors!" But the command was only partially heard, as everyone was busy with three ghouls to every one of them. Duke and Trevor moved with Lonnie towards the rest of the gang, firing only single shots now to conserve ammo.

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Sully Mathis lead fifteen gang members to Lexington, the Corvega factory was never more under-protected than before. Their scout Cray told them a decent-sized group departed North, leaving around thirty raiders left inside the factory. They were moving as one tight group, arm's length apart from each other, moving up as quickly as possible and not making any noise.

Where two days ago ten raiders were manning the ramparts and catwalks above the Corvega factory, now there were only three. The number of lookouts in the apartment buildings was down from seven to three as well. Approaching from the North-East, they used the apartment buildings to block their approach, staying out of the line of sight from the one lookout in this area.

These apartments gave the Corvega raiders an excellent viewpoint of the front doors to the factory, as well as a sweeping view of everything in Lexington.

Five raiders were set to run up into the apartment but waited for the other ten to make it to the container yard. They killed three Corvega raiders as they went up the catwalks into a small office that connected to the factory by a suspended walkway. Once they were in the walkway, the five raiders went up into apartments.

There were seven raiders in the apartment building, but they were grouped and weren't expecting any hostile raiders to come storming in. They were confused at first, looking to their armor and trying to discern who they were, where they knew them from, but they were all gunned down in ten seconds, leaving only the lookout at the top of the building to hear the gunshots from below. There was no barred door the lookout could use to block off the raiders from coming up, armed with only a scoped rifle, she turned it to the stairway, and waited.

No one came calling her name, no panicked footsteps rushing up the stairs, she could only assume everyone in the apartments below was dead. Setting her rifle aimed at the staircase coming up, she crouched down low and watched as the first of Sully's raiders came up the staircase. Firing off one round, she killed the first raider but was gunned down in between loading another round into the chamber.

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Lonnie, Trevor, Duke, Noah, Badmaw, Trinket, Devon, and Parkin were all fighting by the open produce coolers, the interiors were scavenged and filled with settled dust and ceiling debris, by the front store windows along the first aisle.

A ghoul grabbed hold of Noah's neck with its sharp fingers and tore off a piece of his muscle. The painful harrowing scream was loud enough in the Super Duper Mart to make everyone lose focus for a moment. As he tried to put both hands to his neck, he was knocked down again and swarmed by two other ghouls that slashed at his forearms and broke his right hand. Bleeding out, he survived another seven painful minutes, but no one had any stimpaks, bandages, or rags at the ready to bind up his wounds. The fighting would continue for another five minutes, but by then, Noah would be passed out.

The death of one of their own made everyone else fight harder, only because they were scared that they might be the next to die. Badmaw heaved a ghoul towards an empty shelf, pummeling the feral into submission and knocking the stand over.

Devon drew closer to Lonnie, Trevor, and Duke, who were now in the single digits for remaining ammo, ready with knives in their free-hand while their shooting-hand was still wrapped around the trigger.

Parkin ravaged two ghouls, taking Noah's machete and slicing apart their torsos, arms, and legs. When they were on the ground, he swung the machete like a hammer and hacked at the back of their necks to kill them.

Trevor ran to a ghoul attacking Trinket, stabbing down and lodging the knife in the spine, then yanking the hilt down to tear through the muscle and bone in the back. The ghoul's face rose to the ceiling in a contorted scream, roaring at the pain. Trinket grabbed the ghoul by the arms and kicked in its chest, yanking the arms out of the sockets with two pops until they hung loosely.

Duke jumped on another ghoul, colliding with the floor and quickly pressing a gun to the temple, then finally pulling the trigger with a loud 'bang'. Helped back unto his feet by Parkin, they stood close together and fought off four more ghouls that tried swarming them.

Badmaw grabbed a ghoul's arms from behind, and pulled them back, allowing Lonnie to slice the neck from ear to ear, and spend the blackish-green gore spilling onto her arm, down the ghoul's chest, and onto the floor.

Devon swung his monkey wrench at a feral ghoul and missed, opening himself up to be scratched down the side of his chest and arms by the ghoul. Elbowing it in the stomach, the ghoul doubled-over, and Devon swung again, bashing it in the side of the head, then again and again until the skull plate broke open.

As one ghoul struck Trevor in the chest, the feral ghoul's arm was so rotten that the force made it break off. The skin was worn away, the tendons and ligaments were eroded, and the bone was hollowed thin. Only the blood veins lasted long enough before snapping away like a frayed bungee cord. Trevor turned to shoot the ghoul, but his gun was empty, then he turned the assault rifle around and clubbed the ghoul with it.

The swarm was whittled and beaten down to a bloody paste. The ghouls that were still alive, but barely moving, were finished off by Trinket and Devon as they went around and cracked or bashed their skulls in against the faded brownish-red and white linoleum.

Lonnie went aisle to aisle, doing a fast full perimeter sweep of the main floor before regrouping with the rest of Trevor's team.

"Who's hurt?" She asked, only taking bruises during the fight. Right now her mind was aching for some Jet, that would be the only thing that she felt would make her happy right now.

"Noah's dead." Trinket pointed to his body, his gaping neck wound, and pooling blood. He was still alive, but no one thought to check beyond looking at his ravaged body and would then die two minutes later.

"Who else?" Trevor asked.

"Cuts and bites on my legs and arms," Devon said, blood trails running down his arms.

"Arms bruised. I think I fractured my pinkie finger." Trinket said, tenderly pinching her left hand with her right.

"Ankle's hurt bad." Badmaw listed off, leaning against a row of shelves, and rolling his ankle, trying to soothe the muscles.

"I'll live," Parkin said, only taking a light beating from the ghouls.

"Same," Duke said, his knuckles were bloody, and his arms were shaking, but that was more due to the adrenaline than anything else.

"Better red than dead. We're all going to suck it up and sweep this market for food and whatever else we can find. Badmaw, can you walk?"

"Yeah, kinda tender though."

"Watch the front and shout if anything comes for the front door. Trinket, Devon, grab a cart and start going up and down the aisles. Take everything. Parkin, Duke, check the bathrooms and pharmacy, Trevor and I will check the diner in the back, and then once your done, reconvene with us to go into the storage room and loading bay. Let's move, we just made a whole bunch of noise, and there's plenty of ghouls in the parking garage next door that could be moving this way."

"Right." Came most of the responses, everyone else nodded.

"Badmaw, see if you can get Noah's body loaded into a cart, we'll take him back and burn him. When we're through." Lonnie said.

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Sully Mathis let nine of his people go first through the upper floors of the Corvega factory, even moving past a break room without any alarm being raised. The factory was divided into three sections, the assembly line, parts manufacturing, and the assembly area, each section was connected by catwalks above or corridors between rooms with three staircases at the end of each hallway. Only one staircase could lead to the basement, while the other staircase leading down was collapsed.

Coming in from the top of the factory, the ten raiders from Thicket Excavations were able to branch out and catch the Corvega raiders unaware and flush out the rest to the front doors where they were gunned down out front.

The only saving grace was that the front entrance consisting of the car displays, offices, and a path to the corridors was also the most heavily fortified, where most of the groups dumped their raided loot from the Commonwealth.

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"What did you find?" Lonnie asks, shouting over the aisles to Trevor. His blonde hair was just visible over the tops of the rows as he and his group wheel rusted shopping carts down the aisles, emptying the shelves of all available food.

"Not enough," Duke replied.

"Keep checking!"

"We're going in-" Parkin stepped on a land mine set by a previous scavenger, a former Minuteman laying half-eaten and decomposing on the pharmacy counter. The trap was laid right by the door, but the ghouls that were now dead opted to crawl over the counter, rather than go through the door.

The explosion rattled the back half of the Super Duper Mart, and the explosive blast didn't leave anything of Parkin left to find except for the splatter of blood across Duke standing behind him when it happened. Duke was knocked back and deafened, he couldn't hear in his left ear, leg broken, and partially blinded. His agonized screams were wails that brought everyone running, except for Badmaw who only leaned forward enough to see down the rows of aisles to the pharmacy where everyone else was running.

"Duke!" Trevor shouted, running to his side. "Just hold on! Just hold on! We're gonna get you back to the factory and get you fixed up!"

Duke couldn't stop screaming, he tried to get his pain under control, but it was so hard to see and hear, the pain only added onto his disorientation.

"What happened to Parkin?!" Lonnie asked, but it was then she saw the blood spray and the remains of an exploded corpse decorating the walls of the pharmacy.

"Fuck!" She yelled. "Trevor, Trinket! Let's load Duke into a shopping cart and push his ass back! We need whatever's left in that pharmacy." Watchful of landmines and any other traps left behind, there were none, but that left the drawers to be rooted through for medicine, and enough supplies to put together a first aid kit for Duke.

The leg was braced with an actual leg brace from the pharmacy shelves. The bone was forced back into position, making the man cry out in pain and agony, but the straps kept the bone from moving. Stimpaks were used to help Duke heal his wounds, but his eyes, ears, and leg would need a doctor.

Set inside a shopping cart, Devon volunteered to push the cart with Trevor back to Corvega, and they took off running as the rest of the gang would follow behind as they gathered the last of scavenged supplies from Super Duper Mart.

The dead Minuteman left a box of ammo and a laser musket, along with a 10mm pistol. The diner was host to canned goods, the storage room contained a decent amount of canned goods as well as more ammo that was left by a previous group years ago, before succumbing to radiation sickness and turning into the ghouls which were fought today. Between the pharmacy and the diner was an enrollment station, where a skeleton holding a .22 caliber pistol still had five rounds left in the gun, which they took and let the skeleton hit the floor.

The last area left of Super Duper Mart was the loading bay. A cargo truck was sitting with its hatch doors still closed. The pallets inside were still preserved in time by completely binding the outside with plastic wrap. Any grains were molded or eaten by cockroaches long ago, but there was enough packaged and canned food in the entire cargo truck to fill another rusted shopping cart that creaked and squealed with every turn of the wheel.

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Pushing the rusted shopping cart down a bumpy cracked street, marred with potholes and hitting every bump along the way, Trevor and Devon were running with Duke in the cart as fast as they could. From the factory to Super-Duper mart was nineteen blocks, going from the north end of Lexington to the south end, their frantic pace through the streets attracted the attention of two ghouls that they shoved down and kept running, knowing they were already getting back up moments after they passed by.

They knew they could outrun them, but Devon was the first person to be shot in the chest as one of the four Thicket raiders shot at them from their nest in the apartment buildings.

Devon clutched his chest, it burned like a heartache, and it felt like he was punched in the chest by a hundred fists all at once. The painful unease of every heart palpitation making it harder to move and both hands let go of the cart. He stumbled over his own feet and fell to the ground, clutching his chest, but then it dawned on him that he was shot.

When he hit the ground, he rolled and somersaulted, but died looking up at the sky.

The other three Thicket raiders were all aiming at Duke, Trevor, and Devon as well, and now with four guns aiming down at the street, they all fired.

Duke and Devon's bodies were torn up in the short hail of gunfire. Trevor gained a sense of the situation when Devon hit the ground, about to stop and go back, but he ducked his head and sprinted for a storefront, sprinting straight for a wall to hug as more bullets ripped into Duke and Devon.

Duke wasn't even able to raise a fist to stop them, or even move left or right. Stuck in the shopping cart and gunned down, he was the third person to die on what should've been an easy food run.

The storefront he put his back to had a large awning that hung over the sidewalk. Capable of hiding him from the sniper's vantage point, but the apartment buildings connected through torn down walls and makeshift bridges on the upper levels, meaning he would need to move before one of them took a new vantage point.

The ground around his feet cracked open as three bullets tore up the concrete, trying to flush him out. His mind went to running back towards the Super Duper Mart, but there were now five ghouls shambling down the road, the two they shoved down making their way closer and closer.

Trevor prayed if he stayed still, they wouldn't see him, but he knew that wasn't going to save him. His heart hammered as a bullet struck the ground less than a meter away from the tip of his shoes, skipping down the road. He shimmied left towards the storefront door he stood in front of and felt his way towards the handle.

The doorknob lurched quarter rotations at a time, but the door was locked. Looking down towards the feral ghouls shambling down the street, he weighed his chances with the undead or the living trying to kill him. After one ghoul was past him, he waited as the second was a few paces past him, when Trevor decided to bolt.

Hugging the wall and with his eyes only on the opposite side of the street. There was not a single thing for cover, if he was caught thirty feet up or down the street, there would've been piles of rubble and concrete to duck behind, where the least he would be able to get a running start.

But, putting one foot to the wall, and pushing himself off, Trevor made it three-quarters of the way across the street before the Thicket Raiders fired at him.

They were only able to get one shot off, but it was the ghouls seeing and hearing him run and pass by that drew their attention. Never looking back, he was sure from the number of snarls and coughs from the ferals, that there were at least seven ghouls behind him.

Trevor's mind went back to the only safe place he could reach right now and turned right around the corner at the end of the next block, still being chased by a pack of ghouls. Super-Duper Mart was three blocks away, and the route Trevor was taking would also lead him right past the parking garage where he could see into the covered structure, with over a dozen ghouls, and one glowing one, all banging and pounding on the sliding glass double doors. There was rubble in the way keeping the doors from opening, but these former-humans were determined and could hear the humans moving around making noise inside, meaning that they were determined.

One ghoul was already forcing itself in through a hole punched through the glass, cutting long streaks down the arms, chest, and legs.

Trevor almost slowed, but instead of running to the main front doors, he gambled on the idea that most of the ghouls were all gathered in one part of the garage around the doors, that the rest of the parking structure was empty aside from a few sleeper ghouls who wouldn't move until you were on top of them.

Yelling at the pack of ghouls, he ran at two near the back, knocking them down and gaining the attention of the dozen feral ghouls gathered there. All of them were vicious and agitated, ready to take a bite out of anything that moved. When Trevor presented himself as a target, he didn't waste a step as the number of ghouls chasing him swarmed even higher.

Angling himself towards the ramp to the second level, the pounding of the feet chasing him echoed in the concrete complex, until they were all out on the top, exposed to the sunlight bearing down on them.

There were patches in the roof where water accumulation or rust bored holes or wore out entire sections of the rebar and concrete rooftop. Trevor made it around the final turn, avoiding a hole in the ground, and sprinting the last hundred feet leading back towards the Super-Duper Mart. The only part in this plan of his that required any sort of dexterity was the five-foot gap between the parking garage and the Super-Duper Mart.

Jumping, he launched himself farther than he needed to, knowing the further he jumped, the better the chance he would make the gap. The effort only made him lead with his chest forward, making him land on his chest, then momentum cartwheeled his legs up, rolling to a crash on top of the Super-Duper Mart.

The nineteen feral ghouls that were chasing him were lost over the edge of the second-floor parking garage. Several feral ghouls leading the chase went right over the edge, headfirst back down into the pavement below where they picked themselves up, shook themselves off, then scrambled to search in every direction. As the rest of the pack howled and snarled from the second story, Trevor moved away from the roof's edge and looked for a way down into the supermarket.

There were sunken spots where water tainted with fallout accumulated, then burned straight down through the roof. All the rust in the new world, wasn't so much as water in the air and natural corrosion from the elements, it was that, but also the atomic-sized fallout particles constantly radiating energy. Like a red-hot sun, shrunk to the size of an atom, then multiplied by the number of stars in the universe, all burning away at the surface of everything fallout dust touches.

Trevor went to a larger hole in the roof and dropped down.

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I enjoyed writing this chapter, and the next one as well, but they were challenging because of how many names used and being able to coordinate all their movements to make the chapter flow.