Outbreak Chapter 32

After about a mile the state penitentiary came up on their left hand side. Most of the perimeter was surrounded by thirty foot tall stone walls with enclosed guard towers overlooking the courtyard. Brendon spotted a number of the prison guards posted on the walls and in the towers all armed with rifles and shotguns but today they were all facing outwards away from the prison instead of inwards. As they passed the northern part of the penitentiary the stone walls were replaced by multiple chain link fences with rows of razor wire in between, the fences didn't look as impressive as the stone walls but they were sturdy and he was sure it would take hundreds of ghouls to take down the fence. There were a handful of bodies laying near the outside of the fence that Brendon assumed had been taken down by the guards on the walls. There were no signs of the inmates in the courtyard which made sense, if the inmates were kept locked up in their cells it would free up more guards to keep an eye on the perimeter. Brendon had to contain his laughter when he realized that ironically the safest people in the entire city were probably the inmates at the penitentiary.
After passing the pen they turned off on a highway that moved to the west but quickly looped back to the north and turned into a three lane one-way street leading through a residential area. The street was well traveled since it lead directly to downtown, the university campus, the interstate, and a highway that traveled out of the city to the northwest. A number of people must have thought to use the street to get out of the city because it was littered with accidents that slowed their progress. The area was thick with undead and on numerous occasions Brendon and the others on top of the vehicles were forced to fire on zeds that swarmed them when they had to slow to navigate through crashed and abandoned vehicles. There were a handful of times that some of the zombies managed to get close enough to pound on the windows of the Explorer but they didn't seem to have the strength to break the windows in small numbers.
Eventually they hit an open spot on the road and were able to pick up enough speed that they didn't have to worry about the zombies that were pouring out of the neighborhoods on either side of the road. Brendon looked down into the cab and saw that both Rebecca and Leslie were loading more rounds into the magazines they had emptied during their escape from the apartment. Aidan and Brendon didn't have to worry about reloading mags during the trip since they both had over a dozen magazines for their rifles but the other two didn't have near as many magazines so he had instructed them to top them off during the trip.
"Looks like we may have a problem up front," came Wiggins' voice over the radio. Brendon looked up and saw a large accident had clogged the entire road preventing them from getting through. There had to be close to ten vehicles piled up, some were abandoned but others had ghouls inside clawing at the windows trying to get out.
The accident was still about a hundred yards away but he could tell already they weren't going to be able to make it through. He hit the transmit button on his radio and spoke into the mic that was hanging down from the earpiece to the side of his mouth. "Pull off onto one of the side streets and see if you can find us a route through the residential area, try not to slow down too much I don't want to get swarmed." He saw Wiggins lean down and shout into the cab and the Tacoma pulled off onto one of the side streets. Brendon had always hated traveling through residential areas, their curved streets and dead ends made navigating through unfamiliar neighborhoods similar to going through a maze.