the dead dog. Behind her, Vic’s Jag turned into the Cambers’ driveway.
He didn’t know what he had expected, but it hadn’t been this. He had been afraid, but the sight of his wife—could that really be Donna?—standing over the twisted and smashed thing in the driveway, striking it again and again with something that looked like a caveman’s club . . . that turned his fear to a bright, silvery panic that almost precluded thought. For one infinite moment, which he would never admit to himself later, he felt an impulse to throw the Jag in reverse and drive away . . . to drive forever. What was going on in this still and sunny dooryard was monstrous.
Instead, he turned off the engine and leaped out. “Donna! Donna!”
She appeared not to hear him or to even realize that he was there. Her cheeks and forehead were savagely welted with sunburn. The left leg of her slacks were shredded and soaked with blood. And her belly looked . . . it looked gored.
The baseball bat rose and fell, rose and fell. She made harsh cawing sounds. Blood flew up from the dog’s limp carcass.
“Donna!”
He got hold of the baseball bat on the backswing and wrenched it out of her hands. He threw it away and grabbed her naked shoulder. She turned to face him, her eyes blank and hazed, her hair straggling, witchlike, any way. She stared at him . . . shook her head . . . and stepped away.
“Donna, honey, my Jesus,” he said softly.
It was Vic, but Vie couldn’t be here. It was a mirage. It was the dog’s sickening disease at work in her, making her hallucinate. She stepped away . . . rubbed her eyes . . . and he was still there. She stretched out one trembling hand, and the mirage folded strong brown hands over it That was good. Her hands hurt dreadfully.
“Vuh?” she croaked in a whisper. “Vuh—Vuh—Vic?”
“Yes, honey. It’s me. Where’s Tad?”
The mirage was real. It was really him. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. Her eyes only moved in their sockets like overheated hall bearings.
“Vic? vic?”
He put an arm around her. “Where’s Tad, Donna?”
“Car. Car. Sick. Hospital.” She could now barely whisper, and even that was failing her. Soon she would be able to do no more than mouth words. But it didn’t matter, did it? Vic was here. She and Tad were saved.
He left her and went to the car. She stood where he had left her, looking fixedly down at the dog’s battered body. At the end, it hadn’t been so bad, had it? When there was nothing left but survival, when you were right down to the strings and nap and ticking of yourself, you survived or you died and that seemed perfectly all right. The blood didn’t seem so bad now, nor the brains that were leaking out of Cujo’s cloven head. Nothing seemed so bad now. Vic was here and they were saved.
“Oh, my God,” Vic said, his voice rising thinly in the stillness.
She looked over and saw him taking something out of the back of her Pinto. A sack of something. Potatoes? Oranges? What? Had she been shopping before all this happened? Yes, but she had taken the groceries into the house. She and Tad had taken them in. They used his wagon. So what—
Tad! she tried to say, and ran to him.
Vic carried Tad into the thin shade at the side of the house and laid him down. Tad’s face was very white. His hair lay like straw on his fragile skull. His hands lay on the grass, seemingly without enough weight to crush the stems beneath their backs.
Vic put his head on Tad’s chest. He looked up at Donna. His face was white but calm enough.
“How long has he been dead, Donna?”
Dead? she tried to scream at him. Her mouth moved like the mouth of a figure on a TV set the volume control of which has been turned all the way down. He’s not dead, he wasn’t dead when I put him in the hatchback, what are you telling me, he’s dead? What are you telling me, you bastard?
She tried to say those things in her voiceless voice. Had Tad’s life slid away at the same time the dog’s life had slid away? It was impossible. No God, no fate, could be so monstrously cruel.
She ran at her husband and shoved him. Vic, expecting anything but that, fell over on