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