Cujo

by Stephen King

  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 bag 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.

  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 ba
ck 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 his butt. She crouched over Tad. She put his hands above his head. She opened his mouth, pinched his nostrils shut, and breathed her voiceless breath into her son's lungs.

  In the driveway, the somnolent summer flies had found the corpse of Cujo and that of Sheriff George Bannerman, husband to Victoria, father to Katrina. They had no preference between the dog and the man. They were democratic flies. The sun blared triumphantly down. It was ten minutes of one now, and the fields shimmered and danced with silent summer. The sky was faded blue denim. Aunt Evvie's prediction had come true.

  She breathed for her son. She breathed. She breathed. Her son was not dead; she had not gone through this hell for her son to be dead, and it simply would not be.

  It would not be.

  She breathed. She breathed. She breathed for her son.

  She was still doing it when the ambulance pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later. She would not let Vic near the boy. When he came near, she bared her teeth and growled soundlessly at him.

  Stunned with grief nearly to the point of distraction, deeply sure at the final bedrock level of his consciousness that none of this could be happening, he broke into Camber's house by way of the porch door at which Donna had stared so long and hard. The inner door beyond it had not been locked. He used the telephone.

  When he came-outside again, Donna was still administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their dead son. He started toward her and then swerved away. He went to the Pinto instead and opened the hatchback again. Heat roared out at him like an invisible lion. Had they existed in there Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday and until noon of today ? It was impossible to believe they had.

  Underneath the hatchback's floor, where the spare tire was, he found an old blanket He shook it out and put it over Bannerman's mutilated body. He sat down on the grass then, and stared out at Town Road No. 3 and the dusty pines beyond. His mind Seated serenely away.

  The ambulance driver and the two orderlies loaded Bannerman's body into the Castle Rock Rescue Unit. They approached Donna. Donna bared her teeth at them. Her parched lips formed the words He's alive! Alive! When one of the orderlies tried to pull her gently to her feet and lead her away, she bit him. Later this orderly would need to go to the hospital himself for anti-rabies treatment. The other orderly came to help. She fought them.

  They stood away warily. Vic still sat on the lawn, his chin propped in his hands, looking across the road.

  The Rescue Unit driver brought a syringe. There was a struggle. The syringe was broken. Tad lay on the grass, still dead. His patch of shade was a little bigger now.

  Two more police cars arrived. Roscoe Fisher was in one of them. When the ambulance driver told him that George Bannerman was dead, Roscoe began to cry. The other policemen advanced on Donna. There was another struggle, short and furious, and Donna Trenton was finally pulled away from her son by four sweating, straining men. She nearly broke free again and Roscoe Fisher, still crying, joined them. She screamed soundlessly, whipping her head from side to side. Another syringe was produced, and she was injected successfully this time.

  A stretcher came down from the ambulance, and the orderlies wheeled it over to where Tad lay on the grass. Tad, still dead, was put on it. A sheet was pulled up over his head. At the sight of this, Donna redoubled her struggles. She freed one hand and began to Sail about wildly with it. Then, suddenly, she was free.

  "Donna," Vie said. He got to his feet "Honey, it's over. Honey, please. Let go, let go."

  She did not go for the stretcher that her son lay on. She went for the baseball bat. She picked it up and began to bludgeon the dog again. The flies rose in a shiny green-black cloud. The sound of the ball bat making contact was heavy and terrible, a butcher-shop sound. Cujo's body jumped a little each time she struck it.

  The cops began to move forward.

  "No," one of the orderlies said quietly, and a few moments later Donna simply collapsed. Brett Camber's bat rolled away from her relaxing hand.

  The ambulance left five minutes or so later, siren howling. Vic had been offered a shot--"to calm your nerves, Mr. Trenton"--and although he felt utterly tranquilized already, he had accepted the shot to be polite. He picked up the cellophane the orderly had stripped from the syrette and examined the word UPJOHN printed on it carefully. "We ran an advertising campaign for these guys once," he told the orderly.

  "That so?" the orderly asked cautiously. He was a fairly young man and he felt that he might throw up sometime soon. He had never seen such a mess in his life.

  One of the police cars was standing by to take Vic to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton.

  "Can you wait a minute?" he asked.

  The two cops nodded. They were also staring at Vic Trenton in a very cautious way, as if whatever he had might be catching.

  He opened both doors of the Pinto. He had to tug long and hard at Donna's; the dog had dented it in a way he wouldn't have believed. Her purse was in there. Her shirt The shirt had a jagged tear in it, as if maybe the dog had taken a chomp out of it. There were some empty Slim Jim wrappers on the dashboard and Tad's Thermos bottle, smelling of sour milk. Tad's Snoopy lunchbox. His heart gave a heavy, horrid wrench at the sight of that, and he wouldn't allow himself to think of what that meant in terms of the future--if there was any future after this terrible hot day. He found one of Tad's sneakers.

  Tadder, he thought. Oh Tadder.

  The strength went out of his legs and he sat down heavily on the passenger seat, looking between his legs at the strip of chrome at the bottom of the doorframe. Why? Why had something like this been allowed to happen? How could so many events have conspired together?

  His head was suddenly throbbing violently. His nose closed with tears and his sinuses began to pound. He snorted the tears back and passed a hand over his face. It occurred to him that, counting Tad, Cujo had been responsible for the deaths of at least three people, more than that if the Cambers were discovered to be among his victims. Did the cop he had covered with the blanket have a wife and children? Probably.

  If I'd gotten here even an hour earlier. If I hadn't gone to sleep--

  His mind cried: I was so sure it was Kemp! So sure!

  If I'd gotten here just fifteen minutes earlier, would that have been enough? If I hadn't talked to Roger so long, would Tad be alive now? When did he die? Did it really happen at all? And how am I supposed to deal with it for the rest of my life without going mad? What's going to happen to Donna?

  Another police car pulled up. One of the cops got out of it and conferred with one of the cops waiting for Vic. The latter stepped forward and said quietly, "I think we ought to go, Mr. Trenton. Quentin here says there are reporters on the way. You don't want to talk to any reporters just now."

  "No," Vic agreed, and started to get up.
As he did, he saw a bit of yellow at the very bottom of his field of vision. A bit of paper poking out from under Tad's seat. He pulled it out and saw it was the Monster Words he had written to ease Tad's mind at bedtime. The sheet was crumpled and ripped in two places and badly stained with sweat; along the deep creases it was nearly transparent.

  Monsters, stay out of this room!

  You have no business here.

  No monsters under Tad's bed!

  You can't fit under there.

  No monsters hiding In Tad's closet!

  It's too small in there.

  No monsters outside of Tad's window!

  You can't hold on out there.

  No vampires, no werewolves, no things that bite.

  You have no business here.

  Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this n!--

  He could read no more. He crumpled the sheet of paper up and threw it at the dead dog's body. The paper was a sentimental lie, its sentiments as inconstant as the color in that stupid runny-dyed cereal. It was all a lie. The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary.

  He let himself be led to the police car. They drove him away, as George Bannerman and Tad Trenton and Donna Trenton had been driven away before him. After a while, a veterinarian came in a panel truck. She looked at the dead dog, then donned long rubber gloves and brought out a circular bone saw. The cops, realizing what she was going to do, turned away.

  The vet cut off the Saint Bernard's head and put it in a large white plastic garbage bag. Later that day it was forwarded to the State Commissioner of Animals, where the brain would be tested for rabies.

  So Cujo was gone, too.

  It was quarter to four that afternoon when Holly called Charity to the telephone. Holly looked mildly worried. "It sounds like somebody official," she said. About an hour earlier, Brett had given in to Jim Junior's endless supplications and had accompanied his young cousin down to the playground at the Stratford Community Center.

  Since then the house had been silent except for the women's voices as they talked over old times-the good old times, Charity amended silently. The time Daddy had fallen off the haytruck and gone into a great big cowflop in Back Field (but no mention of the times he had beaten them until they couldn't sit down in payment for some real or imagined transgression); the time they had snuck into the old Met Theater in Lisbon Palls to see Elvis in Love Me Tender (but not the time Momma had had her credit cut off at the Red & White and had backed out of the grocery in tears, leaving a full basket of provisions behind and everybody watching); how Red Timmins from up the road was always trying to kiss Holly on their way back from school (but not how Red had lost an arm when his tractor turned turtle on him in August of 1962). The two of them had discovered it was all right to open the closets . . . as long as you didn't poke too far back in them. Because things might still be lurking there, ready to bite.