Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 37

(1)

“Dear God!” gasped Crow as he climbed to his feet. Tears streaked his cheeks, but not just from the cordite. “Dear sweet Jesus God.”

Beside him, LaMastra was furiously reloading his shotgun, flicking frequent nervous glances around at the shadows as he worked. The vampires were sprawled like dolls knocked off a shelf by an earthquake, their white faces strangely empty of malevolence. Kneeling, Crow peered in wonder at the face of Jimmy Castle.

“He doesn’t have any fangs,” he said softly. LaMastra looked up from his shotgun. “They must have gone away after he died. Anyone finds these bodies it’ll just look like we murdered them all.”

“I don’t care,” LaMastra said, and Crow turned and gave him a sharper look. The big man’s eyes were twitching and jumping, and he had a nervous tic that made it look like he kept trying to smile.

Christ, thought Crow, don’t wig out on me now. But then LaMastra’s eyes hardened. “Hey…reload, damn it! Get your head out of your ass.”

“Right, sorry…” He dug in his pockets for shells.

Slotting the last shell into his shotgun, LaMastra said, “We have to get out of this place.” He picked up the fallen Maglite. His own flash had shattered when they fell through the floor, but Crow’s sturdy little flash was still working. LaMastra held it above him as they began to explore the cellar.

Crow looked around at the walls, trying not to look at the bodies. “These old farmhouses usually have a yard entrance to the cellar. I saw one outside, but it was chained shut just like the front door.”

“Good call,” said LaMastra. “So let’s find it, blow the lock, and get the hell out of here.”

“Works for me.”

The cellar was a thirty-by-eighty-foot oblong with a seven-foot-high unfinished ceiling and a badly poured concrete floor. Five doors were set into the walls, ostensibly leading to storerooms. A set of rickety wooden stairs bisected the basement, but they ignored them—upstairs held nothing but traps and frustration.

“The cellar door has to be behind one of these,” Crow said.

“Shit.”

The awareness of what could be behind any one of those doors was daunting and they were both sweating badly despite the deep cold of the room. The fact that there was no sound other than what they made and no movement other than their own was no comfort. The basement had a sneaky, crouching, waiting feel to it.

None of the cellar doors had locks, though they were all closed. Three of the doors were hinged to open out; the others opened in. Before they approached them they shone the light on the ceiling and all around the frames, looking for trip wires, but they could see nothing.

“Vince…I’ll grab the handle and pull, you get ready to shoot anything that so much as twitches, okay?”

LaMastra wiped sweat from his face on a hunched shoulder and nodded. He set himself and aimed the shotgun at the center of the first door. Licking his lips, Crow reached out for the handle, took a breath, and then turned the knob and pulled the handle as he stepped back to yank the door open.

LaMastra almost fired just from sheer nerves, but Crow shined the light inside and they were looking at a filthy but empty toilet stall.

Neither sighed in relief; there were still four to go. They moved eight feet to their right and stopped before one of the two doors that opened inward.

“I’ll kick it,” LaMastra said and gave it such a massive stamp that the door crashed inward and off its hinges and fell flat, sending up clouds of dust. They sprang into the room and instantly LaMastra saw a figure lunging at him with the same speed and aggression. He fired without thinking and there was a boom and the sharp crash of shattering glass.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” Crow said. “You just killed a mirror.”

“Shit.”

The room was cluttered with old chairs, wardrobes, tables, and boxes of bric-a-brac. “Nothing,” Crow concluded. “Just Griswold’s old junk.”

They exited and crossed the cellar to the far end where the last three small rooms were.

“Your turn,” LaMastra said, shifting to a flanking position, gun ready. Crow nodded and braced himself for the kick, but just as he raised his leg the door was whipped open and children poured out of the shadows, laughing insanely and reaching for them with black-taloned hands.

(2)

Vic saw the three ATVs and immediately jammed on his brakes, bringing the pickup to a screeching stop. Dust plumed up from his tires and panic leapt up in his chest.

The Man’s in danger! The thought was like a hot wire in his brain.

He was out of the truck and running, low and fast, making maximum use of the tall grass, toward the house, his Luger in his hand, eyes cutting back and forth across the field for signs of movement. He couldn’t see anyone, but just one glance at the house told him there was trouble. One of the plywood sheets was down, exposing the red brick he’d laid.

As he drew closer he could see that the front door was open.

“Shit!” he hissed, then changed his angle of approach so that he came at the house obliquely. It had to be Crow—they used ATVs at that stupid Hayride—but who was with him?

Crow being here could be very bad or very damn good, especially if he was actually inside. Vic had rigged the place pretty well last time he was here. He crabbed sideways from where he was squatting and tried to get a clearer look at the front of the house. The pile of debris from the fallen porch roof hid most of his view of the door.

He heard a sound and froze, listened. Heard it again. A kind of moan. Definitely human. By now he knew the sounds the Dead Heads made and the Fangers didn’t moan. Vic rose to three-quarters of his height, just enough to see over the pile of debris. What he saw made him smile.

There was a man lying on the porch at the top of the steps. Even from where Vic stood he could see that the man was covered in blood. Vic felt a flush of pride at knowing that at least one of his little booby traps had worked. Still cautious, he moved closer, though he knew that if a man that badly injured had been left to lie there and bleed, then his companions were in no position to help.

Vic didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, because the wounded man had a landscaper’s insecticide sprayer on his back, but then he got a whiff of gasoline and he understood. His smile faded slightly. The presence of the gas confirmed the fact that these intruders understood something of the nature of the problem. Not good, he thought, but at least the problem appeared to be contained for the moment.

He stood over the bloody man and admired the effects of his little booby trap. The nails of the trapdoor had caught him good; one had even punched right through his skull. Vic nodded in satisfaction at that. It had taken a lot of hard work to rig that trap; nice to know it had worked as planned.

He climbed onto the porch and pushed on the front door, but the panel was as solid as a rock. Good. Crow and whoever else came with him were probably trapped inside.

He turned looked down again at the corpse. The man had obviously crawled out of the vestibule, trailing blood and piss and gasoline all the way, leaving a slimy trail like a slug. Blood was still mostly wet. Vic figured the guy hadn’t been dead long.

Even with all the blood Vic recognized the dead man. Frank Ferro, the black cop from Philly who’d been hunting Ruger. Vic chuckled. Well, this wasn’t the first spook he’d killed over the years. He saw a bulge in the man’s rear pants pocket and was reaching for the wallet when the dead man moaned.

Startled, Vic jerked his hand back and brought up the pistol. The man reached out one feeble hand and fumbled at the edge of the top step, closed his fingers around it, and then tried to pull himself forward. Vic was impressed. Hole in the back of his head and the son of a bitch was still trying. He took a wooden kitchen match from his shirt pocket and put it between his teeth.

“Howdy, partner,” Vic said. “Having a little trouble there?”

The bleeding man slowly turned his head. His eyes were half-closed and crusted with blood, but Vic could see one brown eye come slowly into focus as stare at him. The man struggled to speak, and managed it only marginally. “H…help…”

Vic laughed. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” He lowered his pistol. “Christ, you are one sorry-looking nigger. That hole in your head’s gotta hurt.”

“Help…me…”

“Nope, can’t do that. Tell you what, why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re doing here. Or should I guess?” He bent close and sniffed. “Doing a little vampire hunting, are we?”

Ferro’s eye gave a slow blink. “You…you’re part…of it.”

“Yeah, you could say that, but don’t worry, I don’t bite. Even if I did I wouldn’t bite dark meat. Eww.” He sat down on a broken porch beam. “No, I’m what those boys call the Foreman. If you know about the Fang Gang, then you probably know about the Man, about Ubel Griswold. Yeah, I can see it on your face that you know. Well, I’m his right hand, you see. He’s always said so.”

“Why?” Ferro croaked. His voice was almost nonexistent.

For a moment Vic’s eyes shone with a different kind of light. “For reasons you would never understand, not if you lived a million freaking years.” He glanced at the house. “Your friends are probably dead, you know. No one’s coming to help you. I planned for everything.”

“Kiss…my ass…” Ferro breathed.

“Suit yourself.” He stood up and walked down off the porch and went over to examine the ATVs. “Wow, you guys brought a lot of nice toys. Too bad you’re all shitheads.”

As soon as Vic’s back was turned Ferro used all of his strength to shift position, tucking one hand under his body and straining with the other to reach his fallen pistol that lay among the rubble.

Vic finished examining the bikes and climbed back up onto the porch, saw Ferro’s reach, and plucked the pistol out of reach. “Nice try, Bojangles,” he said with a grin and kicked Ferro in the ribs.

Ferro’s body constricted into a ball; his cry of pain instantly turned into a string of wet coughs that misted the floorboards with red.

Vic chewed on his match, smiling with real pleasure as he watched Ferro die moment by moment; but that smile was immediately wiped off his face by the distinctive sound of a shotgun blast.

He leapt to his feet, pistol in a two-hand grip, head cocked to listen. The sound had come from inside. He was sure of it, but from where inside? After almost a full minute he heard another shotgun blast, and another. There was a barrage of blasts, and now he knew that they had to be coming from beneath the house. In the cellar. It worried him that there were so many shots. They should have been able to rip the intruders to shreds after the first shot, but the blasts went on. And there were pistol shots, too. Then silence. He waited it out and there were no more sounds from beneath the house.

It worried him that it had taken them so long to bring down two men, but he had no doubt that it was now a feeding frenzy in there. He relaxed slowly, lowering the pistol.

“Serves ’em right, the dumb shits.” He turned back to Ferro, who was trying to use the side of a clenched fist to raise himself off the floor. “You guys should have stayed out of the Man’s business, you know that? You think I put in thirty frigging years of hard work to have that jackass Crow and a dumb-shit nigger like you just muck things up? You can’t be that stupid, even for a jig.” He gave Ferro another vicious kick.

Ferro felt his ribs explode. Breathing became suddenly impossible as the fragments of shattered ribs tore gashes in his lungs. Ferro could feel himself beginning to drown as his lungs filled with blood.

But he felt his mouth twisting upward into a savage smile as he looked down at the object he held, the small bright blue thing he’d managed to claw out of his pants pocket while Vic was rooting through the duffel bags on the ATVs.

Vic kicked him once more, and the lights of the world began going out in Frank Ferro’s mind. He could not feel the blows any more. He was drowning in the blood that clogged his throat. He wanted to say something: a prayer, a curse, anything. He wanted to mock the man who was killing him, to tell him that he was not going to kill anyone ever again; but there was just not enough life left in him to do it. All he had left was the strength to roll back the striker-wheel with the pad of his thumb. The motion pressed the lighter’s tiny valve and the spark ignited into a small blue flame.

Poised in midkick Vic looked down in overwhelming horror as Frank Ferro plunged the lighter down into the pool of garlic oil, blood, urine, and high-octane gasoline.

(3)

Crow fired the shotgun even as he stumbled backward, shouting a warning to LaMastra, but the sergeant was already in trouble as two slender forms leapt at him and bore him down. There were a dozen of the children. The oldest were twins who looked to be around twelve or thirteen, and the youngest, Crow saw to his absolute horror, was a baby who crawled as quickly as a scuttling beetle, its angelic face split to reveal only two needle-sharp fangs protruding from otherwise smooth gums. The sight of the children almost froze Crow and LaMastra into fatal immobility, but their fingers were already on their triggers and as the creatures swarmed at them they fired out of reflex. After that it was easier to shoot, their hands working in mechanical independence from their stunned minds.

Crow’s first shot caught a little girl in the chest and she just flew apart into red rags. The sight of her just exploding like that nearly drove him mad. It was too horrible, too impossible a thing to be allowed. As the shotgun pellets tore her apart it was as if the blast ripped open the fabric of all reality and everything from here on would be nightmares and insanity.

Then another creature lunged at him—a Chinese boy of about ten, who dodged the falling body parts and leapt at Crow, hissing like a rat. Crow barely had time to work the pump and so fired the blast an inch away from the child’s throat. The decapitated head spun away into shadows, but the body kept falling forward to strike Crow’s chest; as it collapsed down in death the monster’s talons slashed down the front of Crow’s trousers, opening two deep gashes.

The smell of fresh blood drove the others insane and two of the smaller creatures dove in, straining to be first at the open wounds. Crow hammered down on the back of a seven-year-old little girl with the stock of the shotgun and kicked the other, a ten-year-old boy, forcefully in the face. Both fell away, driven back only by Crow’s greater weight, but neither was injured. The girl had been driven to her elbows and knees by Crow’s shotgun stock, and from that position she leapt like a cat at his leg. He screamed as her spiked nails sunk into the back of his thigh and then there was a searing burst of white-hot agony as she drove her tiny fangs into the bleeding wound. Crow hammered at her twice more with the stock as he lumbered back to dodge another attack by a reedy black boy in a Cub Scout uniform.

“GET OFF!” Crow screamed as he jammed the barrel of the shotgun down against the top of the little girl’s head and pulled the trigger. Her head exploded, and the force of the blast drove a handful of the pellets down through her body, where they erupted from just below her shoulder blades. She flopped away and Crow turned to see the Cub Scout leap at him. The boy, though small and slightly built, caught him unawares and collided with Crow’s head and shoulders. They went down in a churning heap.

Closer to the door of the utility room, LaMastra was still struggling with the twin vampires. They were good-looking kids with luminous green eyes and angelic faces, and LaMastra could not make himself accept that these lovely kids were monsters. Then they snarled at him, showing their fangs and their flickering tongues, and as they did this their eyes flared from green to an unholy red. They fanned out on either side of LaMastra; he fired and missed, fired and missed, and each time the twins mocked him with high-pitched laughter. They were incredibly fast, but then LaMastra faked toward one of them and pivoted to fire point-blank at the other. The vampire twisted out of the way so that only a third of the pellets tore through his hip and upper thigh, but it was enough to make the boy pirouette like a dancer in some macabre ballet.

The other twin watched, startled for a moment, and then dodged in at LaMastra and with one extended hand slashed him from shoulder bone to hip, tearing open the Kevlar vest and most of the shirt beneath. The injured twin screamed like a banshee as the garlic worked like poison to burn its way through his veins. His heart exploded in his chest, ripping out through his breastbone in a spray of blood and bone.

The sight of this jolted the other twin, who stopped and stared at his brother and at the bloody ruin of his chest. LaMastra took that moment to step forward and ram him in the stomach with the wide barrel of the Roadblocker and then hoist him up into the air, using the shotgun like a tent-peg to pin the vampire hard against the cellar ceiling. The boy writhed and spat and then LaMastra pulled the trigger. The full blast of the ten-gauge weapon blew a fist-sized hole through the thin body and punched a hole in the ceiling so that blood and bits of vertebrae geysered into the room upstairs.

LaMastra reeled back from the falling corpse and the rain of blood.

“God!” he cried as the thought that he had just killed two children stabbed him through the heart.

A second later something hit him between the shoulder blades and he fell; the shotgun flew from his hands and went spinning off into the shadows. He landed hard on his knees, the concrete shooting pain up through his kneecaps; but even as he landed he reached over and back to grab a handful of hair in his fist, then with a growl of mad fury dashed a red-haired boy of eight or nine onto the floor in front of him. The impact flattened the back of the child’s skull, but did not stop him from immediately whipping around onto all fours and baring his teeth. The boy lunged again, and LaMastra used the side of his left fist to parry the biting mouth away from his inner thigh as he drew his Sig Sauer with his right. He racked the slide and as the child flew at him again he fired twice. Two black holes appeared in the child’s chest as the body flew backward, arms and legs swinging brokenly.

LaMastra dodged another small scuttling form and saw that it was a toddler, no more than two or three. Its mouth was smeared with day-old blood and it had red rat-eyes. The tiny hands clawed the air as it waddled toward him. Vince shot it once in the head and spun away, vomiting onto the wall. But as he turned he had a brief, fleeting image of something black floating toward his head and then there was an explosion of pain and stinging lights and he could feel his body falling. Small, sharp fingers clutched at him as he fell hard. Instantly he felt tiny teeth bite deep into the soft flesh at the crook of his arm, and another bite on his inner thigh. He was helpless, dazed by the fall, and they were feeding on him. He could hear the slurping sounds as tiny mouths drank his precious blood.

Crow rolled over and over with the Cub Scout on his back, the creature’s arms and legs wrapped around him like steel bands. Crow’s samurai sword impeded the roll and with each ungainly revolution it pressed painfully into his floating ribs; his shotgun was gone. The child couldn’t have been more than nine years old and yet was immensely strong. The vampire tore at Crow’s shirt collar, trying to get at his neck—then suddenly stopped, gagging as he encountered the smears of garlic oil on Crow’s skin. Undeterred, the little creature started ripping at the softer flesh of Crow’s armpit. Crow managed to fight his way back onto his knees and then threw his weight backward into the boiler. The metal cylinder made a huge hollow booming sound and Crow felt the pressure release just for a second; he took that second. He slid his hand up between his body and the child’s forearm, wrapped fingers around the thin wrist, and then bent forward sharply and flipped the child off with great force, using the grip on the child’s arm to snap him all the way forward like cracking a whip, and at the end of the movement he yanked back with a sudden jerk. He could feel and hear the bones and tendons of the child’s arm tear and break, and the extended feet of the Cub Scout caught another vampire, a fat boy of twelve, right in the face. The fat vampire fell back and Crow released the Cub Scout’s forearm.

The child’s arm was unnaturally distended, but his face showed no trace of pain, only an intensified hatred. He scrambled back to his feet and ran at Crow, but Crow dodged to one side, diving toward his fallen shotgun. He did a complete roll and came lightly back onto the balls of his feet, shotgun in hand, jacking a round into the breech as he turned. His first blast caught the Cub Scout in the stomach, tearing him into two parts.

Crow heard a cry behind him and saw LaMastra on the ground with two small creatures kneeling on him—feeding on him! With an inarticulate cry of disgust, Crow waded in, clubbing the small bodies aside with the shotgun. One, a pretty little girl with blond braids, hissed at him with a mouth filled with LaMastra’s steaming blood. Crow shot her in the face.

Wheeling, Crow saw that the other vampire, a small olive-skinned boy with a yarmulke bobby-pinned to his hair, was already creeping back toward the dazed sergeant. Crow kicked the vampire in the ribs to knock him back against the wall and shot him in the chest.

Crow wanted to check LaMastra, to see how bad he was, but there was still the fat kid. Crow turned quickly and saw that the child was advancing on him, holding a shovel in two hands. Crow had no way of knowing that it was the same shovel that had been used to knock LaMastra to near-unconsciousness. The boy lunged forward, swinging the long-bladed weapon clumsily but with great force. Crow dodged back, sucking in his gut and evading the shovel’s blade by less than an inch.

As he dodged, Crow caught sight of the kid’s face in the glow of the flare and realized that he knew the kid, knew him well. It was Kurt Bernhardt, the son of Chief Gus Bernhardt. Crow had seen the kid just two days ago in the Crow’s Nest when the boy had come in to buy a Hunchback of Notre Dame costume for Halloween. He opened his mouth to say something, to try to make the kid understand, but the kid swung the shovel again and knocked the shotgun out of his hands.

Crow backpedaled as he clawed his clawed his Beretta out of his shoulder rig. He had to lunge backward to dodge the next swing of the shovel—a slicing blow that would have torn his throat out—and he saw the murderous delight on Kurt Bernhardt’s face as he advanced, swinging the shovel like the Grim Reaper’s scythe.

“I’m sorry,” Crow said and put three rounds into the kid’s head.

Before the kid was even down Crow whirled around, then the world froze in horror as he saw a sight that would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. The big sergeant lay sprawled in the same position as before, with his arms and legs thrown wide and his limbs streaked with blood. A creature knelt on his chest and was tearing at the stitches on the detective’s jaw. Blood welled and the little thing began sucking at it with desperate greed, then it must have heard Crow’s moan of horror and it raised its head to stare at him with baleful, inhuman eyes. It was the infant who had come crawling out of the utility room with its bloodstained diaper drooping from its desiccated little body, and its two needlelike fangs sprouting from the otherwise toothless mouth. Blood was smeared on its lips and dripped thickly from the fangs as it stared at Crow. The infant could not have been more than a few months old. Just a baby, and they had done this to him. They had corrupted the innocent flesh of an infant and made it into a monster more horrible than anything Crow had ever imagined. The baby lowered its head again to the wound and began drinking.

A sound—a mingled cry of horror, disgust, and appalling sadness—burned its way out of Crow’s chest as he heaved himself back to his feet. He kicked the creature away from LaMastra’s chest and it fell roughly onto the ground, where it landed on its back, arms and legs wriggling. Crow staggered after it, holstering his pistol and then drawing his sword. As the little creature struggled to turn over, Crow braced his legs and raised his sword

“God forgive me,” he said and sank to his knees. The sword fell, and his heart fell with it. He could hear it fall, feel it drop from the anchors in his chest. It toppled down into a lower, darker place, and there it would remain.

Crow heard LaMastra moan and he turned away to see that the detective had managed to get into a sitting position. He was covered in blood and breathing heavily. LaMastra looked around the cellar…at the bodies, adult and children, littered like trash. The violence that had been forced out of both men was humiliating and dehumanizing. LaMastra put his head in his palms and began to cry.

Crow stood in the center of the cellar, feeling the grief twist in him, but they were still trapped in the land of the dead, and neither of them knew what other dreadful things they would have to do in order to escape.

(4)

A moment later the cellar was rocked by a BOOM! as something outside exploded.

It jolted them both back into the moment, and Crow grabbed LaMastra and hauled him to his feet.

“What the hell was that?” LaMastra demanded.

Their eyes met.

“Frank!” LaMastra said, a smile leaping onto his face. “He’s still alive and he’s trying to get us out of here.”

“Goddamn!” Crow said. “But let’s not sit here and wait. There has to be a way out of here.”

Shaky and sick to their stomachs, they nonetheless picked up their guns—careful not to look too closely at the bodies—and reloaded. They went over to the fourth door, braced it, opened it…and saw the short flight of stone steps leading up to the yard. Crow used his flash to find the lock and LaMastra blasted it apart. The cellar doors flew open and a waft of fresh air buffeted them.

They stumbled up out of the darkness and collapsed with weary gratitude on the withered brown grass behind the house. The wind was cool and damp and the stormy clouds above looked ready to open. They heard a sound and looked up to see hands of flame reach up from the roof of the house, and a great column of smoke twisted its way into the sky.

“Jesus Christ!” LaMastra yelled. “Frank’s torched the place. Is he out of his mind?”

Crow scrambled to his feet, pulling LaMastra, and together they raced along the side of the burning house and then slid to a halt a dozen feet from the porch, stopped by a wall of intense heat. The entire front of the house was ablaze; sheets of flame raced up the wooden columns, eating the timbers and blackening the bricks. The big pile of rubble that had been the porch roof was a bonfire, and lying next to that mass was a single blackened form, wrapped in a cocoon of orange flame.

They stared in horror. The figure was completely burned, the skin charred to a withered skeleton. On its back was the ruptured and melted remains of a garden tank sprayer.

“Oh, no,” said Crow. “No…please no…don’t do this….”

“FRANK!” Vince LaMastra screamed. “Frank….” He sank slowly down to his knees and beat his big fists on the hard earth, calling his friend’s name over and over again.

Crow stood by helpless and appalled.

There was a roar of a truck engine and Crow spun around to see a battered Ford pickup racing away from the burning house. Crow bolted and ran, cutting across the field in a direct line toward the small gap in the trees toward which the truck was heading. If he had had another three or four seconds he might have made it in time, but the pickup was gathering speed as the driver pushed it beyond all sense, driving with reckless abandon over the lumpy earth. Crow screamed at the driver to stop, but the truck rolled on, gaining the entrance to a road Crow had never known existed. The truck spun and jolted onto the road and in seconds it was gone, lost in a cloud of dust.

Crow fired three shots after the truck, hitting it once and obliterating the left taillight, but then the truck was out of range behind trees. LaMastra came pounding up behind him, shotgun at port arms, eyes fierce with the need to kill, to avenge his friend, but Crow shook his head.

“He’s gone.”

“Shit! Who was it?”

Crow had only gotten one good look at the driver’s face, but it was taking him a few seconds to work out who it was. The man had been horribly burned and covered in soot, most of his head hair was gone, melted by the heat of the fire, and one eye was nearly closed, but Crow was almost positive that he knew the man.

“That was Vic Wingate,” he said.

LaMastra ground his teeth. “He killed Frank!”

“I think so…and I’ll bet he’s the one who rigged the house, too. I think we know who Griswold’s human helper is. Goddamn it. I should have seen this.”

LaMastra wheeled on Crow, chest heaving as if he’d just run a mile. “We have to find him. We have to find him and then I want him. For what he did to Frank, for what he put us through in there…I want him. I want to find that bastard and cut his heart out.”

“I’ll hold him down for you.”

They turned and sprinted back to the ATVs.