Searching for James

Chapter 4

"Alex! Come out! We need to get going." I yelled while searching the bedroom. 

I looked under the bed lifeless old bed where I had put her down to sleep a little while ago. She just seemed to have disappeared into thin air and I didn't have any clue where she could even be. Many of the good hiding places in the squeaky house were too hard to get into even for her or were too heavy to move such as the solid oak wood dresser that I checked behind many different times. We couldn't seem to uncover places where she could have hidden in this one story apartment because It had very few small rooms and little furniture.

"Alex please!" I screamed with one last push of effort to figure out where she had run off to while we weren't watching her. 

I turned toward Bruce with a somber plastered across my face. Searching anymore would prove to be useless. She just wasn't inside of the building anymore. "Maybe she didn't really understand what was happening and went out to look for her parents. She is quite young to be experiencing things like this." I said doubting myself with every word that uttered from my mouth. She would have to be blind to not understand what was happening to our ever precious world. Everyone who was left knew that Mother Nature was trying to reclaim what was rightfully hers and we weren't letting her. 

"Yeah. Sure," Bruce replied just as doubtful.

I walked over to the intricately designed wooden table where my bag was sitting and picked it up moving the table away from in front of the door in the process.

I pushed the door with little effort letting it slowly squeak open and in the process I was somehow hoping that Alex would just come running over to us. 

"I think we should go now. No use in staying. I just wish we knew where she was."

"Me too," he replied. 

I moved my feet so that I was no longer in the house and was on an old sidewalk. When I moved my eyes upward from their former position of downward, I gasped in surprise. Alex was sitting on the curb looking out into the streets at nothing in particular. 

"ALEX!" I screamed in a mixture of joy, shock, and anger. 

She moved her head toward the sound of my voice and ran over on her short legs. "Hi," she said in a high-pitched squeaky voice. 

"Don't ever do that again!" I said pulling her into a hug. I grabber her shoulders and held her out in front of me ready to lecture her.

"We have to go. Look," said Bruce. 

I followed the direction that his finger was pointing in and saw the herd of zombies. I wasn't positive if that's what a group of them is called but it seems close enough. They had come out of the woods and gone over the curb. 

I scooped Alex up into my arms and started to sprint in the opposite direction of the danger at a slow pace. The extra weight of Alex in my arms wasn't helping. I saw Bruce running beside me out of the corner of my eye. We had to just get out of their sight and find a safe place to stay for a while while we find some more supplies to keep us going.

After two hours of traveling, I decided that we had covered enough ground. The amount of time I kept us going seemed a little extensive and I knew we had to take a break and rest our legs. None of the biters could catch up to us now though.

I stopped from jogging the last little stretch to the road and suddenly could faintly hear a sound that terrified me; an engine of a car. It was slowly making it's way down the road, but it was too far away to see it yet. It was always silent on back roads and in the country when no one was even there anymore. Biters tended to migrate to the cities because of all of the explosions that had happened when it first went down. The government attempted to blow up bigger groups of them, so they targeted almost every major city except Atlanta because they needed the CDC. Sadly, people aren't as nice as they were before this whole thing started. It seemed that as the world went to shit, people did too.