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 Vic 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 ball 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 fife 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 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 Iet 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 Iion. 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 floated 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 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. Two 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 flail about wildly with it. Then, suddenly, she was free.

'Donna,' Vic 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.