Read Human Extinction Level Loss (Book 3): Liberation for Free Online

with the occasional rock formation. Running from the road into the field were two figures, a woman and a child. At first Jacob thought they were the advance of the Dead, but they didn’t look like any of the Dead he had seen. These looked too alive. They had looked terrified, something else the Dead didn’t ever do. He stared transfixed at the two running specs in the valley below.
    If they were running, then something was chasing them!
    The thought hurled to the forefront of Jacob’s mind and he looked again through his scope. Moving off the road and giving chase were the runners, tightly packed. Jacob moved the rifle rapidly between the pack and the woman and her child. They were ahead of the Dead, but the Dead were closing the gap. Jacob looked up a final time to confirm that what was happening was not just happening in his scope. He did not give further investigation to the vision before him. Abandoning his position, he grabbed his rifle and ran to the Jeep.
     
    Beverly gripped Tommy’s small hand and pulled him after her. She could hear him breathing and knew that he would not last much longer at this pace. Her own breath crashed in and out of her lungs like the waves in a storm surge. It was her own grief and sense of loss that had kept her looking behind them, back the way they had come. She knew Mark was gone, but some part of her wanted to believe, like her son, that Mark had survived and was catching up. Something was catching up to them, but it wasn’t her husband. Beverly and Tommy ran from the road and across the rock strewn field, hoping that the Dead would not follow, that she and Tommy might hide among the boulders and not be seen. As she and Tommy ran, the Dead followed and she knew that her hope was in vain.
    She turned her head and looked back. Her worst fears were confirmed as she saw the Runners behind her, closer now than on the road. She cried out as she looked forward. Her cries turned into screams as she dug her feet into the ground and tried to stop. Tommy’s momentum brought him crashing into her and threatened to send them both toppling over the edge of a steep drop-off and to the rocks below. She scanned left and right, but the ledge continued in both directions.
    “Nooooo!” she screamed as she turned and looked back towards the road.
    The Dead propelled themselves at her and her son. Beverly grabbed Tommy and pressed him against her, turning his face into her side. She took one step, then two, back towards the ledge. She probed the icy depths of her fear for enough courage to do what she had to do, to make sure that neither she nor her son ever became one of them. She could feel the updraft from the canyon below and knew she was close. Buried against her side, she could hear the frenzied whimpers of Tommy. It was then that she heard another noise, the drawn out whine of a vehicle’s engine.
     
    Jacob knew that the thirty Dead chasing the woman and child across the field were the vanguard of the massive horde, a horde that even now pushed themselves through the tunnel. Down in the valley was not somewhere he wanted to be. When he had seen the two figures run off the road, he knew they were not like the others. He did not consider that what he had seen might not be real, his delusions gaining strength. As he drove across the highway and out into the field, the thought began to gnaw at him. Was he chasing ghosts, and would those ghosts, like the Sirens calling to Odysseus lead him to his destruction?
    He saw the Dead in the distance, running towards the cliffs. Between the edge of the cliff and the Dead was a rock formation jutting from the earth like a stone finger. A plan sprang to his mind and Jacob raced ahead of the pack, to the spire, bringing the truck to a skidding halt in the dirt. He jumped from the truck and ran to the front. Grabbing the large metal hook, Jacob pulled several lengths of steel cable from the winch. He wrapped a loop around the spire and secured the hook to the