of a light breeze, and the oaks that lined the driveway made moving patterns of shadow around her feet. But she could not hear a single car engine, not even the faraway burp of a tractor or a baling machine. City ears and town ears are more closely attuned to man-made sounds; those that nature makes tend to fall outside the tightly drawn net of selective perception. A total lack of such sounds makes for unease.
I’d hear him if he was working in the barn, Donna thought. But the only sounds that registered were her own crunching footfalls on the crushed gravel of the driveway and a low humming sound, barely audible—with no conscious thought at all, her mind placed it as the hum of a power transformer on one of the poles back by the road.
She reached the front of the hood and started to cross in front of the Pinto, and that was when she heard a new sound. A low, thick growling.
She stopped, her head coming up at once, trying to pinpoint the source of that sound. For a moment she couldn’t, and she was suddenly terrified, not by the sound itself but by its seeming directionlessness. It was nowhere. It was everywhere. And then some internal radar—survival equipment, perhaps—turned on all the way, and she understood that the growling was coming from inside the garage.
“Mommy?” Tad poked his head out his open window as far as the seatbelt harness would allow. “I can’t get this damn old—”
“Shhh!”
(growling)
She took a tentative step backward, her right hand resting lightly on the Pinto’s low hood, her nerves on tripwires as thin as filaments, not panicked but in a state of heightened alertness, thinking: It didn’t growl before.
Cujo came out of Joe Camber’s garage. Donna stared at him, feeling her breath come to a painless and yet complete stop in her throat. It was the same dog. It was Cujo. But—
But oh my
(oh my God)
The dog’s eyes settled on hers. They were red and rheumy. They were leaking some viscous substance. The dog seemed to be weeping gummy tears. His tawny coat was caked and matted with mud and—
Blood, is that
(it is it’s blood Christ Christ)
She couldn’t seem to move. No breath. Dead low tide in her lungs. She had heard about being paralyzed with fear but had never realized it could happen with such totality. There was no contact between her brain and her legs. That twisted gray filament running down the core of her spine had shut off the signals. Her hands were stupid blocks of flesh south of her wrists with no feeling in them. Her urine went. She was unaware of it save for some vague sensation of distant warmth.
And the dog seemed to know. His terrible, thoughtless eyes never left Donna Trenton’s wide blue ones. He paced forward slowly, almost languidly. Now he was standing on the barnboards at the mouth of the garage. Now he was on the crushed gravel twenty-five feet away. He never stopped growling. It was a low, purring sound, soothing in its menace. Foam dropped from Cujo’s snout. And she couldn’t move, not at all.
Then Tad saw the dog, recognized the blood which streaked its fur, and shrieked—a high piercing sound that made Cujo shift his eyes. And that was what seemed to free her.
She turned in a great shambling drunk’s pivot, slamming her lower leg against the Pinto’s fender and sending a steely bolt of pain up to her hip. She ran back around the hood of the car. Cujo’s growl rose to a shattering roar of rage and he charged at her. Her feet almost skidded out from under her in the loose gravel, and she was only able to recover by slamming her arm down on the Pinto’s hood. She hit her crazybone and uttered a thin shriek of pain.
The car door was shut. She had shut it herself, automatically, after getting out. The chromed button below the handle suddenly seemed dazzlingly bright, winking arrows of sun into her eyes. I’ll never be able to get that door open and get in and get it shut, she thought, and the choking realization that she might be about to die rose up in her. Not enough time. No way.
She raked the door open. She could hear her breath sobbing in and out of her throat. Tad screamed again, a shrill, breaking sound.
She sat down, almost falling into the driver’s seat. She got a glimpse of Cujo coming at