Burned, decaying flesh hung on top of a brittle frame. Deeply sunken, bloodshot eyes recessed into a malformed skull playing host to a long-destroyed brain stared blankly ahead. Yellow, rotten teeth sat among taut gums exposed to the elements. A torso lined with bony ribs like piano keys rested above a stomach unnaturally turned inward.

A distant cough jolted the body to the side, throwing a splatter of blood across a nearby car.

"Good hit." Jack lowered his binoculars as Nat racked another round. He looked at Ronny and nodded, peering through the looking glass again as Ronny slid off the edge of the perch and quietly moved toward the building. He slinked from cover to cover, knife drawn with his fist held overhanded around the hilt.

"Target on the parking garage, left side railing."

"Got it." Another shot.

"Good hit." He shifted left. "One just stood up, blue car at 150 yards.

She fired, sending the corpse to the ground.

"Good hit. By the main door, crouched."

Nat's gun danced, and the body fell.

Jack directed his attention to Ronny, who plunged his knife down into the skull of a ghoul in the guard shack. The body slumped, and Ronny slowly guided it to the ground.

Nat pulled the bolt back and slid a new magazine into the rifle. "Give me a challenge."

He smirked, not taking his eyes off the Medford building. "Third story window, south corner, walking left to right. About to lose line of sight—"

The ghoul jerked to the side as its blood coated the lab table next to it.

"Alright then."

Jack found his friend again, just as another ghoul outside the shack met the serrated edge. Ronny looked around twice and, once satisfied, stared in the direction of the binoculars. He pulled a flashlight from his belt, flashing it twice at them. Nat returned the signal, and Ronny put the tool back, exchanging it for a piece of rubble on the ground and slinking back into the guard shack. Jack shifted his weight and drew his sighted rifle.

Ronny cocked his arm back and tossed the rock toward a collection of rusted out cars. Several loud bangs echoed throughout the courtyard as they were struck by the rubble and Ronny picked up his short shotgun.

Nothing happened.

Ronny looked around with tentative hesitation etched on his face. He peered back to his comrades on the hill and slowly made his way out of the shack to pick up another rock. His hip bumped the trunk of the nearest car as he leaned down to pick up the rubble.

Multiple guttural screeches bellowed from the surrounding area. A gangrenous hand shot out from under the car next to Ronny and grabbed for his arm. He yelped and stomped his boot on the ghoul's hand, then directed a shotgun shell into its now-exposed head. As if a switch had been flipped, long-decayed windows covered in hundreds of years' worth of dust shattered, ghouls leaping and falling from the floors above. Wet footsteps sloshed across the broken-up tarmac as the horde raced toward Ronny, as he crouched to ready himself with a wall to his back.

"I'll take right." Jack spoke as he turned the fire selector to single.

Ghouls fell with each crack of rifle fire, stumbling and slamming into objects as they sprinted into the sunlight. Lead met them to the chorus of destructive gunfire and knocked them down like dominos. Four, five, six — Jack could only keep count from the number of times the stock kicked against his shoulder. He saw Ronny rolling away from the lunge of a glowing one. It smashed into the wall, drawing a sickening crunch from the grossly malformed creature. Ronny grunted and kicked at the back of its leg, and his knife made quick work of the creature. As he pried the blade from it, the sound of another ghoul sprinting at his back forced him to frantically spin around and raise the blade to strike back.

A final shot tore through the air, screaming across the expanse between the rifle's muzzle and its target. The bullet buried itself in the ghoul's streaking body, blowing apart its head in the process. The corpse flopped haphazardly aside as blood splattered onto Ronny's face. He stood, paralyzed with a permanent expression of disgust, eyes tightly screwed shut.

"This is really goddamn gross!" Ronny yelled, wiping at the hot liquid with the back of his hand. He gagged and spat, whining each time. His knife found its sheath and he took to wiping off as much of the blood as he could.

Jack lifted his head away from the scope and looked over at Nat. "Did you do that on purpose?

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Uh-huh. Come on, let's go."

They swapped their magazines before standing up and slinging their rifles on their backs. They jogged down the hill, dodging brush and fallen trees and stepping around the fallen corpses before stopping in front of Ronny. They both wore amused smirks, Jack with his arms crossed and Nat with a hand on her cocked hip.

"What happened, sport, did you fall in something?" Nat asked in a sing song voice.

Ronny scowled. "If I can't get this out, you're buying me a new one."

"I could've just let it eat you."

"You ever had this bullshit in your nose? How about in your mouth? Death might've been better. And my gear…!"

She hummed, face unchanging. "I'd just burn it."

"Yeah that jacket is a definite goner. Anyway, looks like we're clear. Once you're done taking the world's most disgusting shower, meet us in the lobby." Jack said.

"I hate you both."

Nat walked up to the passageway as Jack opened the door, and she recoiled violently as she was hit with a wave of stench like a brick wall.

"Oh dear God, my lunch is threatening to come back up…" She turned and winced through tears, but continued inside. The sight before her did little to ease the feeling. "…And it's not better further inside."

Jack and Ronny followed suit, the former wincing as his friend doubled over and wretched. Jack held his nose and stepped through the open door, surveying the lobby of the decrepit hospital and taking stock of all he could see from the dimly lit entrance. It wasn't the first time he'd been inside Medford Memorial Hospital, but it was very much the goriest scene he'd ever witnessed in the facility. It never ceased to amaze and disappoint him how reliably new wasteland mutants would always reoccupy locations previously cleared by past explorers, like they grew out of the mold every night.

He turned back to see Ronny swiping at his mouth with his hand, breathing heavily but otherwise composed. Jack tapped him and Nat on their shoulders, gesturing for them to stay quiet and move slow. Carefully the trio traversed the lobby, avoiding bags filled with viscera and unidentifiable remains. Every step was accompanied by a wet plop as Jack couldn't find one spot of floor free from blood.

The group scanned all the doors and corridors they could see as they moved, fingers on the triggers. A map of the building came into view as they reached the front desk, highlighting the patient care areas, medical labs, and even an operating theater. Jack did a double take at that, very few hospitals from before the Great War could say they housed an operating theater. Jack pointed to a floor above them, on the opposite side of the mezzanine, and his party nodded.

A lone echo sounded from a room behind them, and Jack's hand flew to his sidearm holster. The three of them shared a look. Then it happened again, and a third time. He raised his rifle and crept into the adjoining hallway with Nat and Ronny. The echoes grew louder and more pronounced, until they made Jack's ears ring. They ducked into a right-side door to find a nurse's locker room and a shower head leaking drop after drop of irradiated water. Jack approached the knobs on the wall and twisted them to the left, a screech preceding the final splash of water on the tile floor. He turned to his friends, and Nat shrugged.

As the group returned to the front desk, it became apparent to Jack just how deathly quiet the building had become. The sensation that he was being watched wormed into his brain; it made his skin crawl. The weathered vase on the counter next to him shattered the next moment, signaling a hail of bullets flying at the group. They dropped to the floor and took cover behind the desk.

"Son of a bitch! Of course there's greenskins in this fucking place!" Ronny yelled over the gunfire and maniacal laughter from above. Bullets embedded themselves in the counter above their heads. As was typically the case with run-ins with super mutants, the sheer volume of shots fired made up for the questionable accuracy of the shooters. Dust and debris showered down on them with each displaced chunk of marble.

A stray bullet knocked the building map off the wall and sending it plummeting onto Jack's head. He brushed it aside, but a feature highlighted in red caught his eye – a staircase in the hallway behind them leading directly to the third floor. He looked up, toward the door. It was an eight-foot run from where he was, eight feet of open ground with plenty of space to get shot.

"The next time there's a break in their fire, I need you guys to suppress them as much as you can! I'm gonna flank them!"

"They're super mutants, Jack! They absorb bullets like a sponge!" Nat flinched as a shot punched through the backing of the counter.

"And what am I supposed to do, throw my shotgun?!" Ronny yelled over the commotion.

Jack flicked the leather strap from his sidearm and pulled it from the holster before placing it on the ground and sliding it to his friend. "Aim for something important!" At that moment, Jack heard grunts of annoyance and no guns firing. He scrambled into a run and made for the doorway and heard Ronny and Nat sending lead back at the mutants. He flipped the fire selector automatic and sprinted through the hallway.

Jack took the stairs two at a time and stacked up against the doorway at the top. A subtle peer around the corner showed no enemies, so he adopted as quick a crouched run as he could manage, praying no mutants were in the rooms he had only a split second to examine as he moved. The next twist in the hallway was the last before the uppermost mezzanine, it had to be. The sounds from several rifles he couldn't count were closer than ever, so he steeled himself, back to the wall. He spun and faced the opening to see the hulking bodies of seven mutants in front of him. He pulled the trigger with no intention of letting go.

"If he doesn't hurry up we're gonna have a lot more holes than we came in with real soon!" Ronny shouted.

Nat didn't answer him, but with every fiber of her being shared the same sentiment. With each passing second, more of their cover was torn away by gunfire, and she was certain that more than one shot had come close enough to singe the hair off her head. She pulled the brim of her hat down as marble dust fell over her head and grit her teeth. With the near-constant stream of lead pelting her and Ronnie, they couldn't return any kind of meaningful counterattack. Ronnie blindly fired the pistol over the counter and muttered to himself about how he would kill Jack if they died. They both jerked their heads to the side as a grenade bounced off the countertop and onto the floor next to them amidst the crazed laughter.

"Fuck, Nat get down!" Ronnie scampered forward and kicked out his foot hard at the grenade and jumped to cover Nat's body. They shut their eyes and curled up as the explosive bounced off a Nuka Cola machine and rocked the lobby with its detonation. The resulting ringing in Nat's ears threatened to drive her mad and she clutched at her head at the loss of general faculties.

Ronnie shook his head vigorously and tried to pull Nat back to her senses, but his words were lost to the droning in her ears. She blinked her eyes and sat up, still bracing her head with one arm. When her hearing slowly returned, the first thing she heard were shouts of anger, along with the bullets of the owners of the voices. The four mutants they could see had shifted their focus. Nat reached over to grab her rifle and rested it against the desk to take aim. Her arm was shaky and her vision unstable, but her first shot caught a mutant in its neck regardless, and a flurry of shots from Ronny's handgun caused the next to collapse in a bloody mess. The split focus of the two remaining lumbering creatures was their downfall; as Nat and Ronny incapacitated the mutants on the right side of the platform, sustained gunfire from Jack's direction took care of the ones out of sight. Several thumps from falling bodies later, the room was quiet again, aside from the labored breathing of Nat and Ronny. He finally slumped back down and let the handgun clatter to the floor, slide locked back.

"Everything dead up there?" Ronny yelled upwards.

"Everything except me, somehow…" Jack's response was small, the strain in his voice telling just how close the situation had been to disaster. Ronny was the first to shakily push himself up before offering a hand to Nat. Once standing, they skirted around the counter and came to a stop in the center of the room, looking up at Jack. He was leaning over the third-floor railing with his rifle on his back, sucking wind just as much as they were.

"Good thinkin' there, Blackjack. You alright?" Nat asked with a hand on her hip.

Jack flipped his wrist over and back again. "Didn't get shot, at least."

"Hey bro, you got a little—" Ronny gestured in a circle around his face, "—on ya."

"Yeah one of 'em got a little close and sort of… bled on me. A lot." He frowned. "You two alright? I heard the explosion."

Ronny cracked his neck and rotated a shoulder. "Rang the ol' bell pretty good, but we're still kickin'."

Nat slung her rifle over her shoulder and dusted herself down, wondering how long it would take to get her clothes clean again. "So, it looks like we're clear. Did you see anything on your way up there worth checking out?

Jack titled his chin toward the door he'd come from. "A couple labs over there, not sure what's inside but hell, this whole place is at least worth a look. I bet I could even strip that first aid robot for parts."

"Sweet. There's not much to speak of down here other than the cafeteria, so unless either of you wants a two-hundred-year-old mystery meat sandwich, we should just start upstairs. "

Jack nodded. "Head on up, then, we'll search down from here—"

He stopped at the sound of heavy paws with sickly overgrown talons thundering across the floor behind him and reached for his rifle. The beast slammed into Jack before he could retaliate, and they both went tumbling over the banister. Nat and Ronny gasped, fearful adrenaline rushing through their systems as Jack hurtled down. The two bodies hit floor with a sickening crack that sent Jack bouncing off to the side, and his rifle went bouncing and skidding across the tile floor. He groaned and writhed as Ronny delivered a shotgun shell into the hound's head before dropping the weapon and rushing to Jack's side.

"Jesus, Jack, fuck… Are you alright, is anything broken?"

"I have… no idea…" Broken wheezes were all he could muster as he let his limbs go limp; the energy to do anything else was too great. "Just let me lie here for a couple years."

Nat patted down Jack's extremities and pushed out a shaky sigh of relief. "You'll be OK. Thank god… If I had to tell Piper that you died during a milk run, she would've skinned me alive."

Ronny glanced at her. "She might've done that anyway."

Jack rolled and pushed himself up with the arm not recently involved with a botched base jump and rested in a sitting position. "I think she probably would've killed me for getting killed." He looked at his hand resting in the remains of the mutant hound. "This is really goddamn gross."

Ronny scoffed. "Now you know how I felt. Come on, man, let's get what we came for and get gone." He held out a hand and pulled Jack to his feet.

Nat moved to the staircase in the lobby. "I'll scout the second-floor rooms. Take your time, Jack."

He nodded and leaned against a wall. Ronny handed him his canteen.

"Hold still." As Jack was gulping down the contents of the container, Ronny stuck his shoulder with a stimpak. Jack released a drawn-out sigh through his nose as the combination of cold water and numbing agents flooded his body. He returned the canteen to his friend and stretched. "I'm good, thanks Ron."

Ronny bumped his other shoulder. "No worries, my man. Now come on, let's catch up with Nat."

The two men trudged up the stairs and through the door Nat had used. They found her digging through a medical cart, pulling out drawers and examining the contents. At the sound of footsteps, she pointed to a side table next to a bed.

"Doc said she wanted a respirator, right? That one looks relatively not broken. Ronny, you wanna check the next room?"

Ronny wordlessly complied, and Jack removed his backpack to fit the equipment inside. He helped Nat strip the rest of the room of its goods before the two linked up with Ronny. Room by room they cleared the rest of the floor, finding the occasional dose of Rad-X or Med-X, or a stimpak, along with valuable scrap. If someone had asked Jack if the juice had been worth the squeeze, he wasn't sure he would say yes.

The third floor yielded more interesting results. Jack yanked open a stuck cabinet door sealed shut from years of disuse to find several small bottles with instructions to administer in cases of poisoning. The labels, even if he could read the entire things, did not appear to indicate which toxins it was meant to combat. Beyond that, Jack was certain he wouldn't know the difference anyway. "Hey guys, jackpot! I think…"

Nat and Ronny jogged into the room and examined Jack's finding. "Looks like the best thing we're gonna find, especially if we don't really know what those people are sick with." Nat dug into her bag. "I also took some of the empty IV bags I found, and some isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. All this shit is definitely way past its expiration date, but it's better than nothing."

Ronny yawned. "Sweet. Can we get out of here, then? If we stay in this hospital too much longer, I don't think I'll ever stop smelling nasty blood and guts."

Jack nodded. "Yeah, I've had enough of this place."

Nat shifted her body to accommodate the extra weight in her pack, grunting as the straps slid into the crooks of her neck. She looked up. The sun was starting to set; she knew that between hiking back to Country Crossing and having an extra twenty pounds worth of gear, she'd need two showers when she finally got to rest again.

Jack zipped up the main compartment of her bag. "You sure you'll be alright?"

She waved him off. "I'll be fine, Jack. There's plenty of daylight for me to make it back. It's you that I'm worried about. How's your arm?"

He rubbed at his bicep with his fingers. "Better. Gonna be sore for a bit, but it'll be OK. I've got Ronny here in case I need someone to use as bait, too."

Ronny punched his shoulder with a smirk. "Asshole."

Nat smiled at her nephew and his friend. They were pains in the ass, but they were good kids, and a good team. She had faith in them. "Where are you guys planning on stopping?"

Jack shrugged. "Depends how far we got before nightfall, and even then, if the conditions are good, we might keep going."

"Alright, I'm going to head out, then." She enveloped Jack in a hug. "Stay safe, Jacky. And say hi to our friend for me, and that I'm sorry I couldn't make it!"

"He might be pretty disappointed, but he'll understand."

"You still haven't told me who this guy is, Jack." Ronny cut in.

Nat chuckled. "You'll see. He's a real sweetheart once you get to know him."

Ronny deadpanned. "Does he got a name?"

"He'll make sure you know it as soon as you meet him, trust me. Just make sure Jack doesn't let him kill ya, and you'll be fine."

"Uhm… alright, I guess…"

Jack rolled his eyes. "He won't kill Ronny."

Nat shrugged. "If you say so, Jack. Just make sure he knows what he's in for at some point." She turned to leave, casting a wave back at them. "Till next time, boys!"

Jack turned to his friend. "We've probably got two or three hours till it gets dark. You ready?"

"Always."

They started on the road northwest, leaving behind the decrepit hospital newly christened with death to sit idle once more. The automated light over the front entrance, not sensing any more motion, turned off, leaving the area as quiet as it had been when they'd arrived.

A/N: I'm never sure how well my action scenes come across, so let me know what you thought!