He was moving the jag along at better than sixty, so intent on the road that he was past Gary Pervier's before he realized that Joe Camber's station wagon had been parked there. He slammed on the jag's brakes, burning twenty feet of rubber. The jag's nose dipped toward the road. The cop might have gone up to Camber's and found nobody home because Camber was down here.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw the road was empty, and backed up quickly. He wheeled the jag into Pervier's driveway and got out.
His feelings were remarkably like those of Joe Camber himself when, two days before, Joe had discovered the splatters of blood (only now these were dried and maroon-colored) and the smashed bottom panel of the screen door. A foul, metallic taste flooded Vic's mouth. This was all a part of it. Somehow it was all a part of Tad's and Donna's disappearance.
He let himself in and the smell hit him at once - be bloated, green smell of corruption. It had been a hot two days. There was something halfway down the hall that looked Iike a knocked-over endtable, except that Vic was mortally sure that it wasn't an endtable. Because of the smell. He went down to the thing in the hall and it wasn't an endtable. It was a man. The man appeared to have had his throat cut with an extremely dull blade.
Vic stepped back. A dry gagging sound came from his throat. The telephone. He had to call someone about this.
He started for the kitchen and then stopped. Suddenly everything came together in his mind. Them was an instant of crushing revelation; it was like two half pictures coming together to make a three-dimensional whole.
The dog. The dog had done this.
The Pinto was at Joe Camber's. The Pinto had been there all along. The Pinto and
'Oh my God, Donna -'
Vic turned and ran for the door and his car.
Donna almost went sprawling; that was how bad her legs were. She caught herself and grabbed for the baseball bat, not daring to look around for Cujo until she had it tightly in her hands, afraid she might lose her balance again. If she had had time to look a little further - just a little - she would have seen George Bannerman's service pistol laying in the grass. But she did not.
She turned unsteadily and Cujo was running at her.
She thrust the heavy end of the baseball bat at the Saint Bernard, and her heart sank at the unsteady way the thing wiggled in her hand - the handle was badly splintered, then. The Saint Bernard shied away, growling. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly in the white cotton bra. The cups were blood streaked; she had wiped her hands on them after clearing Tad's mouth.
They stood staring at each other, measuring each other, in the still summer sunlight. The only sounds were her low rapid breathing, the sound of Cujo growling deep in his chest, and the bright squawk of a sparrow somewhere near. Their shadows were short, shapeless things at their feet.
Cujo began to move to his left. Donna moved right. They circled. She held the bat at the point where she believed the split in the wood to be the deepest, her palms tight on the rough texture of the BIack Cat friction tape the handle had been wrapped with.
Cujo tensed down.
'Come on, then!' she screamed at him, and Cujo leaped.
She swung the bat like Micky Mantle going after a high fastball. She missed Cujo's head but the bat struck him in the ribs. There was a heavy, dull thump and a snapping sound from somewhere inside Cujo. The dog uttered a sound like a screarn and went sprawling in the gravel. She felt the bat give sickeningly under the friction tape - but for the moment it still held.
Donna cried out in a high, breaking voice and brought the bat down on Cujo's hindquarters. Something else broke. She heard it. The dog bellowed and tried to scramble away but she was on it again, swinging. pounding, screaming. Her head was high wine and deep iron. The world danced. She was the harpies, the Weird Sisters, she was all vengeance not for herself. but for what had been done to her boy. The splintered handle of the bat bulged and pumped like a racing heart beneath her hands and beneath its binding of friction tape.
The bat was bloody now. Cujo was still trying to get away, but his movements had slowed. He ducked one blow - the head of the bat skittered through the gravel but the next one struck him midway on his back, driving him to his rear legs.
She thought he was done; she even backed off a step or two, her breath screaming in and out of her lungs like some hot liquid. Then he uttered a deep snarl of rage and leaped at her again ... but as Cujo went rolling in the gravel, the old bat finally split in two. The fat part flew away and struck the right front hubcap of the Pinto with a musical bong! She was left with a splintered eighteen-inch wand in her hand.
Cujo was getting to his feet again ... dragging himself to his feet. Blood poured down his sides. His eyes flickered like lights on a defective pinball machine.
And still it seemed to her that he was grinning.
'Come on,
For the last time the dying ruin that had been Brett Camber's good dog Cujo leaped at THE WOMAN that had caused all his misery. Donna lunged forward with the remains of the baseball bat, and a long, sharp hickory splinter plunged deep into Cujo's right eye and then into his brain. There was a small and unimportant popping sound – the sound a grape might make when squeezed suddenly between the fingers. Cujo's forward motion carried him into her and knocked her sprawling. His teeth now snapped and snarled bare inches from her neck. She put her arm up as Cujo crawled farther on top of her. His eye was now oozing down the side of his face. His breath was hideous. She tried to push his muzzle up, and his jaws clamped on her forearm.
Blood was flowing down onto her face in a sticky drizzle -her blood, the dog's blood. The pain in her arm was a sheeting flare that seemed to fill the whole world ... and little by little he was forcing it down. The splintered handle of the bat wavered and jiggled grotesquely, seeming to grow from his head where his eye had been.
He went for her neck.
Donna felt his teeth there and with a final wavering cry she pistoned her arms out and pushed him aside. Cujo thudded heavily to the ground.
His rear legs scratched at the gravel. They slowed ... slowed ... stopped. His remaining eye glared up at the hot summer sky. His tail lay across her shins, as heavy as a Turkish rug runner. He pulled in a breath and let it out. He took another. He made a thick snorting sound, and suddenly a rill of blood ran from his mouth. Then he died.
Donna Trenton howled her triumph. She got halfway to her feet, fell down, and managed to get up again. She took two shuffling steps and stumbled over the dog's body, scoring her knees with scrapes. She crawled to where the heavy end of the baseball bat lay, its far end streaked with gore. She picked it up and gained her feet again by holding on to the hood of the Pinto. She tottered back to where Cujo lay. She began to pound him with the baseball bat. Each downward swing ended with a heavy meat thud. Black strips of friction tape danced and flew in the hot air. Splinters gouged into the soft pads of her palms, and blood ran down her wrists and forearms. She was still screaming, but her voice had broken with that first howl of triumph and all that came out now was a series of growling croaks; she sounded as Cujo himself had near the end. The bat rose and fell. She bludgeoned the dead dog. Behind her, Vic's jag turned into the Camber's driveway.
He didn't know what he had expected, but it hadn't been this. Fie had been afraid, but the sight of his wife - could that
