Johnny ran alongside the machine and shouted, ‘Oi!’

The engine stopped.

‘Run away!’ hissed Johnny to Yo-less. ‘Go on! Tell someone what’s happening!’

A man unfolded himself from the cab and jumped down. He advanced towards the boys, waving a finger.

‘You kids,’ he said, ‘are in real trouble.’

Johnny backed away, and someone grabbed his shoulders.

‘You heard the man,’ said a voice by his ear. ‘It’s your fault, this. So you’d better not have seen anything, right? Because we know where you live— Oh, no you don’t.’ A hand shot out and grabbed Yo-less as he tried to back away.

‘Know what I think?’ said the man who had been driving the bulldozer. ‘I think it’s lucky we happened to be passing and found ’em messing around, eh? Shame they’d driven it right through the place already, eh? Kids today, eh?’

A half-brick sailed past Johnny’s face and hit the man beside him on the shoulder.

‘What the—’

‘I’ll smash your head in! I’ll smash your head in!’

Bigmac emerged from the fog. He looked terrifying. He reached beside him, yanked a railing from the broken wall and started to whirl it round his head as he advanced.

‘You what? You what? You what? I’m MENTAL, me!’

Then he started to run forward.

‘Aaaaaaarrrrrr—’

And it dawned on all four people at once that he wasn’t going to stop.

Chapter 10

Bigmac bounded over the rubble, an enraged skin head skeleton.

‘Get him!’

‘You get him!’

The railing smacked into the side of the bulldozer, and Bigmac leapt.

Even fighting mad, he was still Bigmac, and the driver was a large man. But what Bigmac had going for him was that he was, just for a few seconds, unstoppable. If the man had managed to get one good punch in that would have been it, but there seemed to be too many arms and legs in the way, and also Bigmac was trying to bite his ear.

Even so—

But a pair of headlights appeared near the gate and started to bounce up and down in a way that suggested a car being driven at high speed across rough ground.

The man holding Johnny let go and vanished into the fog. The other one thumped Bigmac hard in the stomach and followed him.

The car skidded to a halt and a fat vampire leapt out, shouting ‘Make my night, make my night!’

Mr Atterbury unfolded himself a little more sedately from the driver’s seat.

‘It’s all right, they’re gone,’ said Johnny. ‘We’ll never find them in this fog.

There was the sound of an engine starting somewhere in the distance, and then wheels skidded out on to the unseen road.

‘But I got the number!’ shouted Wobbler, hopping from foot to foot. ‘I dint have a pen so I huffed on the window and wrote it in the huff!’