crushed glass. He looked at the dead car. Inside, he could see the unmoving outline of THE WOMAN’S head. Before, Cujo had been able to look right through the glass and see her, but THE WOMAN had done something to the glass that made it hard to see. It didn’t matter what she did to the windows. She couldn’t get out. Nor THE BOY, either.
The drone was closer now. The car was coming up the hill, but . . . was it a car? Or a giant bee or wasp come to batten on him, to sting him, to make his pain even worse?
Better wait and see.
Cujo slunk under the porch, where he had often spent hot summer days in the past. It was drifted deep with the decaying autumn leaves of other years, leaves which released a smell he had thought incredibly sweet and pleasant in those same other years. Now the smell seemed immense and cloying, suffocating and well-nigh unbearable. He growled at the smell and began to slobber foam again. If a dog could kill a scent, Cujo would have killed this one.
The drone was very close now. And then a car was turning into the driveway. A car with blue sides and a white roof and lights on the top.
The one thing George Bannerman had been least prepared to see when he turned into Joe Camber’s dooryard was the Pinto belonging to the missing woman. He was not a stupid man, and while he would have been impatient with Andy Masen’s point-to-point kind of logic (he had dealt with the horror of Frank Dodd and understood that sometimes there was no logic), he arrived at his own mostly solid conclusions in much the same way, if on a more subconscious level. And he agreed with Masen’s belief that it was highly unlikely the Trenton woman and her son would be here. But the car was here, anyway.
Bannerman grabbed for the mike hung under his dashboard and then decided to check the car first. From this angle; directly behind the Pinto, it was impossible to see if anyone was in there or not. The backs of the bucket seats were a bit too high, and both Tad and Donna had slumped down in their sleep.
Bannerman got out of the cruiser and slammed the door behind him. Before he had gotten two steps, he saw that the entire driver’s side window was a buckled mass of shatter-shot cracks. His heart began to beat harder, and his hand went to the butt of his .38 Police Special
Cujo stared out at THE MAN from the blue car with rising hate. It was this MAN who had caused all his pain; he felt sure of it. THE MAN had caused the pain in his joints and the high, rotten singing in his head; it was THE MAN’S fault that the drift of old leaves here beneath the porch now smelled putrescent; it was THE MAN’S fault that he could not look at water without whining and shrinking away and wanting to kill it in spite of his great thirst.
A growl began somewhere deep in his heavy chest as his legs coiled beneath him. He could smell THE MAN, his oil of sweat and excitement, the heavy meat set against his bones. The growl deepened, then rose to a great and shattering cry of fury. He sprang out from beneath the porch and charged at this awful MAN who had caused his pain.
During that first crucial moment, Bannerman didn’t even hear Cujo’s low, rising growl. He had approached the Pinto closely enough to see a mass of hair lying against the driver’s side window. His first thought was that the woman must have been shot to death, but where was the bullet hole? The glass looked as if it had been bludgeoned, not shot.
Then he saw the head move. Not much—only slight—but it had moved. The woman was alive. He stepped forward . . . and that was when Cujo’s roar, followed by a volley of snarling barks came. His first thought
(Rusty?) was of his Irish setter, but he’d had Rusty put down four years ago, not long after the Frank Dodd thing. And Rusty had never sounded like this, and for a second crucial moment, Bannerman was frozen in his tracks with a terrible, atavistic horror.
He turned then, pulling his gun, and caught just a blurred glimpse of a dog—an incredibly big dog—launching itself into the air at him. It struck