I radioed Ben again and found out which parking garage they were stuck in. It was only about three blocks away. We sped off in their direction. The dead were all around us. Stephanie and I were both hanging out the top shooting like crazy as we sped through the streets. Chuck was leaning out the passenger side blasting the heads off of anything that came close to us. The dead wouldn’t stop coming at us. They were tearing at the sides of the truck as we passed their rotting corpses.
BW was driving like a champ. He kept us upright and away from the thick crowds, while making sure to run over a few. I wasn’t even afraid any more. I was totally caught up in the action. We had to stop and back up for a second and a couple of them climbed back into the bed. I blew both of their brains out at the same time. Stephanie was blasting a path in front of us so wide we could have driven a tank through. Although, I would have rather been in a tank. After taking out a ton of them, we finally made it to the garage. The place was in bad shape. It was crumbling from underneath and didn’t look like it would last another five minutes. The dead were trying to crawl over the debris, struggling to find their meal at the top.
We pulled the truck into the parking garage directly across the street. The dead kept coming, but we could hold them long enough to do what we had to do. We went up to the fifth floor and stopped on the side facing the other garage. It was still about two floors beneath the other garage’s roof. Chuck pulled a crazy looking crossbow out of his backpack. He fired the arrow into the wall, just below the edge of the other roof. Good thing he came prepared, attached to the arrow was a thin steel cable. He secured it around one of the concrete beams and I called Ben again.
“Guys, we’ve attached a line to your building. All you have to do is find something to latch onto it and slide down.”
Ben promptly answered, “Sounds good. It’s about time you guys made it here. We’ll be right down.”
Jeff was the first one to come across. He slung a chain over the cable and slid down while holding on. The guy was happy to see us. He joined BW and Stephanie in holding off the dead. Next came Steffanie, she slid down the same way as Jeff. Then Ben got ready to slide down. He slung his chain over and started to slide just as the building started to give way.
The lower structure went first, throwing dust and debris across the street. As Ben slid down we could see the whole thing drop to the ground. The cable went slack and he started to fall quickly into the crowd of ghouls. As the building collapsed into a heap of rubble, we looked down to see Ben dangling from the cable. He was trying to climb up, but wasn’t getting very far. He was only about ten feet off of the ground. There was no way he was going to make it. Any other day he could just drop and easily survive, but not with a crowd of hungry corpses below.
We all piled into the truck and sped down the ramp to rescue him. BW came pretty close to trashing the thing on every corner. If it wasn’t enough to dodge the deadly concrete beams, there were dead everywhere. As the truck smashed its way through the crowd of dead at the bottom, we could see Ben swinging helplessly from the line. We blasted our way through the crowd and stopped just underneath him. Guns blazing, I yelled for him to drop down. He crashed down into the bed of the pickup just as BW pulled away, crunching the rotting bones of a few people in the way.
We kept firing and cleared a path back to our hideout. The dead were surrounding the building once again. They were completely blocking the entrance we left ourselves. BW pulled around and saw that the other entrance was only partially blocked by a small car. He steered directly into it and we slammed through, bouncing our way up the ramp. Sparks flew as we took out one of the side mirrors on the empty ticket booth. We sped up the first and second ramp, but BW took the third one too fast and the truck started to roll. We flipped sideways one, two, three times when the back end caught on a parked minivan.
The crash sent the car flipping end over end and as we landed I saw the windshield shatter. I heard an awful crunch and felt myself hurdling through the air. I felt the cold, hard concrete floor on my face and could hear the truck sputtering to a stop. Then everything went black.
Chapter 20
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