Cujo (45 page)

He was very uneasy now.

He left Tad's room, went downstairs, and sat on the back steps. He lit a cigarette with a hand that shook slightly and looked at the gunmetal sky, feeling the sense of unease grow. Something had happened in Tad's room. He wasn't sure what it had been, but it had been something. Yeah. Something.

Monsters and dogs and closets and garages and dead-end roads.

Do we add these up, teacher? Subtract them? Divide? Fractionate?

He threw his cigarette away.

He did believe it was Kemp, didn't he? Kemp had been responsible for everything. Kemp had wrecked the house. Kemp had damn near wrecked his marriage. Kemp had gone upstairs and shot his semen onto the bed Vic and his wife had slept in for the last three years. Kemp had torn a great big hole in the mostly comfortable fabric of Vic Trenton's life.

Kemp. Kemp. All Steve Kemp's fault. Let's blame the Cold War and the hostage situation in Iran and the depletion of the ozone layer on Kemp.

Stupid. Because not everything was Kemp's fault, now, was it? The Zingers business, for instance; Kemp had had nothing to do with
that.
And Kemp could hardly be blamed for the bad needle valve on Donna's Pinto.

He looked at his old Jag. He was going to go somewhere in it. He couldn't stay here; he would go crazy if he stayed here. He should get in the car and beat it down to Scarborough. Grab hold of Kemp and shake him until it came out, until he told what he had done with Donna and Tad. Except by then his lawyer would have arrived, and, incredible as it seemed, the lawyer might even have sprung him.

Spring. It was a spring that held the needle valve in place. If the spring was bad, the valve could freeze and choke off the flow of gasoline to the carb.

Vic went down to the Jag and got in, wincing at the hot leather seat. Get rolling quick. Get some cool in here.

Get rolling where?

Camber's Garage,
his mind answered immediately.

But that was stupid, wasn't it? Masen had sent Sheriff Bannerman up there with instructions to report immediately if anything was wrong and the cop hadn't reported back so that meant—

(that the monster got him)

Well, it wouldn't hurt to go up there, would it? And it was something to do.

He started the Jag up and headed down the hill toward Route 117, still not entirely sure if he was going to turn left toward I-95 and Scarborough or right toward Town Road No. 3.

He paused at the stop sign until someone in back gave him the horn. Then, abruptly, he turned right. It wouldn't hurt to take a quick run up to Joe Camber's. He could be there in fifteen minutes. He checked his watch and saw that it was twenty past twelve.

•  •  •

The time had come, and Donna knew it.

The time might also have gone, but she would have to live with that—and perhaps die with it. No one was going to come. There was going to be no knight on a silver steed riding up Town Road No. 3—Travis McGee was apparently otherwise engaged.

Tad was dying.

She made herself repeat it aloud in a husky, choked whisper: “Tad's dying.”

She had not been able to create any breeze through the car this morning. Her window would no longer go down, and Tad's window let in nothing but more heat. The one time she had tried to unroll it more than a quarter of the way, Cujo had left his place in the shade of the garage and had come around to Tad's side as fast as he could, growling eagerly.

The sweat had now stopped rolling down Tad's face and neck. There was no more sweat left. His skin was dry and hot. His tongue, swelled and dead-looking, protruded over his bottom lip. His breathing had grown so faint that she could barely hear it. Twice she had had to put her head against his chest to make sure that he still breathed at all.

Her condition was bad. The car was a blast furnace. The metalwork was now too hot to touch, and so was the plastic wheel. Her leg was a steady, throbbing ache, and she no longer doubted that the dog's bite had infected her with something. Perhaps it was too early for rabies—she prayed to God it was—but the bites were red and inflamed.

Cujo was not in much better shape. The big dog seemed to have shrunk inside his matted and blood-streaked coat. His
eyes were hazy and nearly vacant, the eyes of an old man stricken with cataracts. Like some old engine of destruction, now gradually beating itself to death but still terribly dangerous, he kept his watch. He was no longer foaming; his muzzle was a dried and lacerated horror. It looked like a gouged chunk of igneous rock that had been coughed out of the hotbed of an old volcano.

The old monster,
she thought incoherently,
keeps his watch still.

Had this terrible vigil been only a matter of hours, or had it been her whole life? Surely everything that had gone before had been a dream, little more than a short wait in the wings? The mother who had seemed to be disgusted and repulsed by all those around her, the well-meaning but ineffectual father, the schools, the friends, the dates and dances—they were all a dream to her now, as youth must seem to the old. Nothing mattered, nothing
was
but this silent and sunstruck dooryard where death had been dealt and yet more death waited in the cards, as sure as aces and eights. The old monster kept his watch still, and her son was slipping, slipping, slipping away.

The baseball bat. That was all that remained to her now.

The baseball bat and maybe, if she could get there, something in the dead man's police car. Something like a shotgun.

She began to shift Tad into the back, grunting and puffing, fighting the waves of dizziness that made her sight gray over. Finally he was in the hatchback, as silent and still as a sack of grain.

She looked out his window, saw the baseball bat lying in the high grass, and opened the door.

In the dark mouth of the garage, Cujo stood up and began to advance slowly, head lowered, down the crushed gravel toward her.

It was twelve thirty when Donna Trenton stepped out of her Pinto for the last time.

•  •  •

Vic turned off the Maple Sugar Road and onto Town Road No. 3 just as his wife was going for Brett Camber's old Hillerich & Bradsby in the weeds. He was driving fast, intent on getting up to Camber's so he could turn around and go to Scarborough, some fifty miles away. Perversely, as soon as he had made his decision to come out here first, his mind began
dolefully telling him that he was on a wild goosechase. On the whole, he had never felt so impotent in his life.

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—the bloated, green smell of corruption. It had been a hot two days. There was something halfway down the hall that looked like 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. There 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
held in her hands, afraid she might lose her balance again. If she had had time to look a little farther—just a little—she would have seen George Bannerman's service pistol lying 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 Black 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 Mickey 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 scream 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. She swung the bat and heard that heavy, whacking thud 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, then!”
she shrieked.

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.

“Stop!”
she screamed.
“Oh stop, won't you ever stop? Please! Please! Please!”

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 Cambers' driveway.