Donna shifted into neutral and let what was left of the Pinto's forward motion carry them toward the big barn doors, which stood half open on their tracks. As soon as her foot left the accelerator pedal to tap the brake and stop them, the motor began to hitch again ... but feebly this time. The AMP light pulsed like a slow heartbeat, then brightened. The Pinto stalled.
Tad looked at Donna.
She grinned at him. 'Tad, ole buddy,' she said, 'we have arrived.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'But is anybody home?'
There was a dark green pickup truck parked beside the barn. That was Camber's truck, all right, not someone else's waiting to be fixed. She remembered it from last time. But the lights were off inside. She craned her neck to the left and saw they were off in the house too. And there had been a package hung over the mailbox lid.
The return address on the package had been J. C. Whitney & Co. She knew what that was; her brother had gotten their catalogue in the mail when he was a teenager. They sold auto parts, accessories, customizing equipment. A package for Joe Camber from J. C. Whitney was the most natural thing in the world. But if he was here, he surely would have gotten his mail by now.
'Well, let's go see, anyhow,' she said, opening her door.
'I can't get my seatbelt unhooked,' Tad said, scratching futilely at the buckle release.
'Okay, don't have a hemorrhage, Tad. I'll come around and let you out.'
She got out, slammed her door, and took two steps toward the front of the car, intending to cross in front of the hood to the passenger side and let Tad out of his harness. It would give Camber a chance to come out and see who his. company was, if he was here. She somehow didn't relish poking her head in on him unannounced. It was probably foolish, but since that ugly and frightening scene with Steve Kemp in her kitchen, she had become more aware of what it was to be an unprotected woman than she had since she was sixteen and her mother and father had let her begin dating.
The quiet struck her at once. It was hot and so quiet that it was somehow unnerving. There were sounds, of course, but even after several years in Castle Rock, the most she could say about her ears was that they had slowly adapted from 'city ears' to 'town ears'. They were by no means 'country cars' . . . and this was the real country.
She heard birdsong, and the harsher music of a crow somewhere in the long field which stretched down the flank of the hill they had just climbed. There was the sigh of a light breeze, and the oaks that lined the driveway made moving patterns of shadow around her feet. But she could not hear a single car engine, not even the faraway burp of a tractor or a baling machine. City ears and town ears are most closely attuned to man-made sounds; those that nature makes tend to fall outside the tightly drawn net of selective perception. A total lack of such sounds makes for unease.
She reached the front of the hood and started to cross in front of the Pinto, and that was when she heard a new sound. A low, thick growling.
She stopped, her head coming up at once, trying to pinpoint the source of that sound. For a moment she couldn't and she was suddenly terrified, not by the sound itself but by its seeming directionlessness. It was nowhere. It was everywhere. And then some internal radar - survival equipment, perhaps -turned on all the way, and she understood that the growling was coming from inside the garage.
'Mommy?' Tad poked his head out his open window as far as the seatbelt harness would allow. 'I can't get this damn old -~
She took a tentative step backward, her right hand resting lightly on the Pinto's low hood, her nerves on tripwires as thin as filaments, not panicked but in a state of heightened alertness, thinking:
Cujo came out of Joe Camber's garage. Donna stared at him, feeling her breath come to a painless and yet complete stop in her throat. It was the same dog. It was Cujo. But
The dog's eyes settled on hers. They were red and rheumy. They were leaking some viscous substance. The dog seemed to be weeping gummy tears. His tawny coat was caked and matted with mud and
She couldn't seem to move. No breath. Dead low tide in her lungs. She had heard about being paralyzed with fear but had never realized it could happen with such totality. There was no contact between her brain and her legs. That twisted gray filament running down the core of her spine had shut off the signals. Her hands were stupid blocks of flesh south of her wrists with no feeling in them. Her urine went. She was unaware of it save for some vague sensation of distant warmth. -
And the dog seemed to know. His terrible, thoughtless eyes never left Donna Trenton's wide blue ones. He paced forward slowly, almost languidly. Now he was standing on the barnboards at the mouth of the garage. Now he was on the crushed gravel twentyfive feet away. He never stopped growling. It was a low, purring sound, soothing in its menace. Foam dropped from Cujo's snout. And she couldn't move, not at all.
Then Tad saw the dog, recognized the blood which streaked its fur, and shrieked - a high piercing sound that made Cujo shift his eyes. And that was what seemed to free her.
She turned in a great shambling drunk's pivot, slamming her lower leg against the Pinto's fender and sending a steely bolt of pain up to her hip. She ran back around the hood of the car. Cujo's growl rose to a shattering roar of rage and he charged at her. Her feet almost skidded out from under her in the loose gravel, and she was only able to recover by slamming her arm down on the Pinto's hood. She hit her crazybone and uttered a thin shriek of pain.
The car door was shut. She had shut it herself, automatically, after getting out. The chromed button below the handle suddenly seemed dazzlingly bright, winking arrows of sun into her eyes. I'll
realization that she might be about to die rose up in her.
She raked the door open. She could hear her breath sobbing in and out of her throat. Tad screamed again, a shrill, breaking sound.
She sat down, almost falling into the driver's seat. She got a glimpse of Cujo coming at her, hindquarters tensing down for the leap that would bring all two hundred pounds of him right into her lap.
She yanked the Pinto's door shut with both hands, reaching over the steering wheel with her right arm, honking the horn with her shoulder. She was just in time. A split second after the door slammed closed there was a heavy, solid thud, as if someone had swung a chunk of stovewood against the side of the car. The dog's barking roars of rage were cut off cleanly, and there was silence.
