They were by no means 'country cars' . . . and this was the real country.

She heard birdsong, and the harsher music of a crow somewhere in the long field which stretched down the flank of the hill they had just climbed. There was the sigh 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 most 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 bear him if be 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 real 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 -~

'Shhhh!'

(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 her, hindquarters tensing down for the leap that would bring all two hundred pounds of him right into her lap.

She yanked the Pinto's door shut with both hands, reaching over the steering wheel with her right arm, honking the horn with her shoulder. She was just in time. A split second after the door slammed closed there was a heavy, solid thud, as if someone had swung a chunk of stovewood against the side of the car. The dog's barking roars of rage were cut off cleanly, and there was silence.

Knocked himself out, she thought hysterically. Thank God, thank God for that

And a moment later Cujo's foam-covered, twisted face popped up outside her window, only inches away, like a horror-movie monster that has decided to give the audience the ultimate thrill by coming right out of the screen. She could see his huge, heavy teeth.

And again there was that swooning, terrible feeling that the dog was looking at her, not at a woman who just happened to be trapped in her car with her little boy, but at Donna Trenton, as if he had just been hanging around, waiting for her to show up.

Cujo began to bark again, the sound incredibly loud even through the Saf-T-Glas. And suddenly it occurred to her that if she had not automatically rolled her window up as she brought the Pinto to a stop (something her father had insisted on: stop the car, roll up the

windows, set the brake, take the keys, lock the car), she would now be minus her throat. Her blood would be on the wheel, the dash, the windshield. That one action, so automatic she could not even really remember performing it.

She screamed.

The dog's terrible face dropped from view.

She remembered Tad and looked around. When she saw him, a new fear invaded her, drilling like a hot needle. He had not fainted, but he was not really conscious, either. He had fallen back against the seat, his eyes dazed and blank. His face was white. His lips had gone bluish at the corners.

'Tad!' She snapped her fingers under his nose, and he blinked sluggishly at the dry sound. 'Tad!'

'Mommy,' he said thickly. 'How did the monster in my closet get out? Is it a dream? Is it my nap?'

'It's going to be all right,' she said, chilled by what he had said about his closet nonetheless. 'It's -'

She saw the dog's tail and the top of its broad back over the hood of the Pinto. It was going around to Tad's side of the car And Tad's window wasn't shut.

She jackknifed across Tad's lap, moving with such a hard muscular spasm that she cracked her fingers on the window crank. She turned it as fast as she could, panting, feeling Tad squirming beneath her.

It was three quarters of the way up when Cujo leaped at the window. His muzzle shot in through the dosing gap and was forced upward toward the ceiling by the closing window. The sound of his snarling barks filled the small car. Tad shrieked again and wrapped his arms around his head, his forearms crossed over his eyes. He

tried to dig his face into Donna's belly, reducing her leverage on the window crank in his blind efforts to get away.

'Momma! Momma! Momma! Make it stop! Make it go away!'

Something warm was running across the backs of her hands. She saw with mouting horror that it was mixed slime and blood running from the dog's mouth. Using everything that she had, she managed to force the window crank through another quarter turn . .

and then Cujo pulled back. She caught just a glimpse of the Saint Bernard's features, twisted and crazy, a mad caricature of a friendly Saint Bernard's face. Then it dropped back to all fours and she could only see its back.

Now the crank turned easily. She shut the window, then wiped the backs of her hands on her jeans, uttering small cries of revulsion.