(oh Christ oh Mary Mother of God)

Tad had gone back to that dazed state of semiconsciousness again.

This time when she snapped her fingers in front of his face there was no reaction.

He's going to have some complexes out of this, oh God yes. Ohsweet Tad, if only Id left you with Debbie.

She took him by the shoulders and began to shake him gently back and forth.

'Is it my nap?' he asked again.

'No" she said. He moaned -a low,' painful sound that tore at her heart. 'No, but it's all right. Tad? It's okay. That dog can't get in.

The windows are shut now. It can't come in. It can't get us.'

That got through and Tad's eyes cleared a little. 'Then let's go home, Mommy. I don't want to be here.'

'Yes. Yes, we'll ‘

Like a great tawny projectile, Cujo leaped onto the hood of the Pinto and charged at the windshield, barking. Tad uttered another scream, his eyes bulging, his small hands digging at his cheeks, leaving angry red welts there.

‘it can't get us!' Donna shouted at him. 'Do you hear me) It can't get in, Tad!'

Cujo struck the windshield with a muffled thud, bounced back, and scrabbled for purchase on the hood. He left a series of new scratches on the paint. Then he came again.

'I want to go home!' Tad screamed.

'Hug me tight, Tadder, and don't worry.'

How insane that sounded ... but what else was there to say?

Tad buried his face against her breasts just as Cujo struck the windshield again. Foam smeared against the glass as he tried to bite his way through. Those muddled, bleary eyes stared into Donna's. I'm going to pull you to pieces, they said. You and the boy both. just as soon as I find a way to get into this tin can, I'll cat you alive; I'll he swallowing pieces of you while you're still screaming.

Rabid, she thought. That dog is rabid.

With steadily mounting fear, she looked past the dog on the hood and at Joe Camber's parked truck. Had the dog bitten him?

She found the horn buttons and pressed them. The Pinto's horn blared and the dog skittered back, again almost losing its balance.

'Don't like that much, do you?' she shrieked triumphantly at it.

'Hurts your ears, doesn't it?' She jammed the horn down again.

Cujo leaped off the hood.

,Mommy, pleeease let's go home.'

She turned the key in the ignition. The motor cranked and cranked and cranked ... but the Pinto did not start. At last she turned the key off again.

'Honey, we can't go just yet. The car

'Yes! Yes! Now! Right now!'

Her head began to thud. Big, whacking pains that were in perfect sync with her heartbeat.

'Tad. Listen to me. The car doesn't want to start. It's that needle valve thing. We've got to wait until the engine cools off. It'll go then, I think. We can leave.'

All we have to do is get back out of the driveway and get pointeddown the bill. Then it won't matter even if it does stall, because wecan coast. If I don't chicken out and bit the brake. I should be ableto make it most of the way back to the Maple Sugar Road even withthe engine shut down.

or ...

She thought of the house at the bottom of the hill, the one with the honeysuckle running wild all over the east side. There were people there. She had seen cars.

People!

She began to use the horn again. Three short blasts, three long blasts, three shorts, over and over, the only Morse she remembered from her two years in the Girl Scouts. They would hear. Even if they didn't understand the message, they would come up to see who was raising bell at Joe Camber's - and why.

Where was the dog? She couldn't see him any more. But it didn't matter. The dog couldn't get in and help would be here shortly.

'Everything's going to be fine,' she told Tad. 'Wait and see.'

A dirty brick building in Cambridge housed the offices of Image-Eye Studios. The business offices were on the fourth floor, a suite of two studios were on the fifth, and a poorly air-conditioned screening room only big enough to hold sixteen seats in rows of four was on the sixth and top floor.

On that early Monday evening Vic Trenton and Roger Breakstone sat in the third row of the screening room, jackets off, ties pulled down. They had watched the kinescopes of the Sharp Cereal Professor commercials five times each. There were exactly twenty of them. Of the twenty, three were the infamous Red Razberry Zingers spots.

The last reel of six spots had finished half an hour ago, and the projectionist had called good night and gone to his evening job, which was running films at the Orson Welles Cinema. Fifteen minutes later Rob Martin, the president of Image-Eye, had bade them a glum good night, adding that his door would be open to them all day tomorrow and Wednesday, if they needed him. He avoided what was in all three of their minds: The door'll be open if you think of something worth talking about.

Rob had every right to look glum. He was a Vietnam vet who had lost a leg in the Tet offensive. He had opened I-E Studios in late 1970 with his disability money and a lot of help from his in-laws.

The studio had gasped and struggled along since then, mostly catching crumbs from that wellstocked media table at which the larger Boston studios banqueted. Vic and Roger had been taken with him because he reminded them of themselves, in a way -

struggling to make a 90 of it, to get up to that fabled comer and turn it. And, of course, Boston was good because it was an easier commute than New York.

In the last sixteen months, Image-Eye had taken off. Rob had been able to use the fact that his studio was doing the Sharp spots to land other business, and for the first time things had looked solid.

In May, just before the cereal had hit the fan, he sent Vic and

Roger a postcard showing a Boston T-bus going away. On the back were four lovely ladies, bent over to show their fannies, which were encased in designer jeans. Written on the back of the card, tabloid style, was this meassage: IMAGE-EYE LANDS

CONTRACT TO DO BUTTS FOR BOSTON BUSES; BILLS

BIG BUCKS. Funny then. Not such a hoot now. Since the Zingers fiasco, two clients (including Cannes-Look jeans) had canceled their arrangements with I-E, and if Ad Worx lost the Sharp account, Rob would lose other accounts in addition to Sharp. It had left him feeling angry and scared. . . emotions Vic understood perfectly.

They had been sitting and smoking in silence for almost five minutes when Roger said in a low voice, 'It just makes me want to puke, Vic. I see that guy sitting on his desk and looking out at me like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, taking a big bite of that cereal with the runny dye in it and saying, "Nope, nothing wrong here," and I get sick to my stomach. Physically sick to my stomach. I'm glad the projectionist had to go. If I watched them one more time, I'd have to do it with an airsick bag in my lap.'

He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray set into the arm of his chair. He did look ill; his face had a yellowish sheen that Vic didn't like at all. Call it shellshock, combat fatigue, whatever you wanted, but what you meant was scared shitless, backed into a rathole. It was looking into the dark and seeing something that was going to cat you up.

'I kept telling myself,' Roger said, reaching for another cigarette,