Andy Masen found that extremely ominious news.
'Townsend, you come with me,' he said. 'You can handle the Camber place by yourself, can't you, Sheriff Bannerman?'
'It's my town,' Bannerman said.
Andy Masen lit a cigarette and looked at Bannerman through the shifting smoke. 'Have you got a problem with me, Sheriff?'
Bannerman smiled. 'Nothing I can't handle.'
Christ, I hate these hicks, Masen thought, watching Bannerman leave. But he's out of the play now, anyway. Thank God for small favors.
Bannerman got behind the wheel of his cruiser, fired it up, and backed out of the Trenton driveway. It was twenty minutes after seven. He was almost amused at how neatly Masen had shunted him off onto a siding. They were headed toward the heart of the matter; he was headed nowhere. But ole Hank Townsend was going to have to listen to a whole morning's worth of Masen's bullshit, so maybe he had gotten off well at that.
George Bannerman loafed out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road, siren and flashers off. It surely was a pretty day. And he saw no need to hurry.
Donna and Tad Trenton were sleeping.
Their positions were very similar: the awkward sleeping positions of those forced to spend long hours on interstate buses. Their heads lolled against the sockets of their shoulders, Donna's turned to the left, Tad's to the right. Tad's hands lay in his lap like a beached fish. Now and again they would twitch. His breathing was harsh and stertorous. His lips were blistered, his eyelids a purplish color.
A line of spittle running from the corner of his mouth to the soft line of his jaw had begun to dry.
Donna was in middle sleep. As exhausted as she was, her cramped position and the pain in her leg and belly and now her fingers (in his seizure Tad had bitten them to the bone) would let her sink no deeper. Her hair clung to her head in sweaty strings. The gauze pads on her left leg had soaked through again, and the flesh around the superficial wounds on her belly had gone an ugly red. Her breathing was also harsh, but not as uneven as Tad's.
Tad Trenton was very close to the end of his endurance.
Dehydration was well advanced. He had lost electrolytes, chlorides, and sodium through his perspiration. Nothing had replaced them. His inner defenses were being steadily rolled back, and now he had entered the final critical stage. His life had grown
light, not sunken firmly into his flesh and -bones but trembling, ready to depart on any puff of wind.
In his feverish dreams his father pushed him on the swing, higher and higher, and he did not see their back yard but the duckpond, and the breeze was cool on his sunburned forehead, his aching eyes, his blistered lips.
Cujo also slept.
He lay on the verge of grass by the porch, his mangled snout on his forepaws. His dreams were confused, lunatic things. It was dusk, and the sky was dark with wheeling, red-eyed bats. He leaped at them again and again, and each time he leaped he brought one down, teeth clamped on a leathery, twitching wing. But the bats kept biting his tender face with their sharp little rat-teeth. That was where the pain came from. That was where all the hurt came from.
But he would kill them A. He would
He woke suddenly, his head lifting from his paws, his head cocking.
A car was coming.
To his hellishly alert cars, the sound of the approaching car was dreadful, insupportable; it was the sound of some great stinging insect coming to fill him with poison.
He lurched to his feet, whining. All his joints seemed filled with crushed glass. He looked at the dead car. Inside, he could see the unmoving outline of THE WOMAN'S head. Before, Cujo had been able to look right through the glass and see her, but THE WOMAN
had done something to the glass that made it hard to see. It didn't matter what she did to the windows. She couldn't get out. Nor THE
Boy, either.
The drone was closer now. The car was coming up the hill, but ...
was it a car? Or a giant bee or wasp come to batten on him, to sting him, to make his pain even worse?
Better wait and see.
Cujo slunk under the porch, where he had often spent hot summer days in the past. It was drifted sleep with the decaying autumn leaves of other years, leaves which released a smell he had thought incredibly sweet and pleasant in those same other years. Now the smell seemed immense and cloying, suffocating and well-nigh unbearable. He growled at the smell and began to slobber foam again. If a dog could kill a scent, Cujo would have killed this one.
The drone was very close now. And then a car was turning into the driveway. A car with blue sides and a white roof and lights on the top.
'Me one thing George Bannerman had been least prepared to me when he turned into Joe Camber's dooryard was the Pinto belonging to the missing woman. He was not a stupid man, and while he would have been impatient with Andy Masen's point-to-point kind of logic (he had dealt with the horror of Frank Dodd and understood that sometimes there was no logic),he arrived at his own mostly solid conclusions in much the same way, if on a more subconscious level. And he agreed with Masen's belief that it was highly unlikely the Trenton woman and her son would be here. But the car was here, anyway.
Bannerman grabbed for the mike hung under his dashboard and then decided to check the car first. From this angle, directly behind the Pinto, it was impossible to see if anyone was in there or not.
The backs of the bucket seats were a bit too high, and both Tad and Donna had slumped down in their sleep.
Bannerman got out of the cruiser and slammed the door behind him. Before he had gotten two steps, he saw the entire driver's side
window was a buckled mass of shatter-shot cracks. His heart began to beat harder, and his hand went to the butt of his .38 Police Special.
Cujo stared out at THE MAN from the blue car with rising hate. It was this MAN who had caused all his pain; he felt sure of it. THE
MAN had caused the pain in his joints and the high, rotten singing in his head; it was THE MAN's fault that the drift of old leaves here beneath the porch now smelled putrescent; it was THE
MAN's fault that he could not look at water without whining and shrinking away and wanting to kill it in spite of his great thirst.
A growl began somewhere deep in his heavy chest as his legs coded beneath him. He could smell THE MAN his oil of sweat and excitement, the heavy meat set against his bones. The growl deepened, then rose to a great and shattering cry of fury. He sprang out from beneath the porch and charged at this awful MAN who had caused his pain.
During that first crucial moment, Bannerman didn't even hear Cujo's low, rising growl. He had approached the Pinto closely enough to see a mass of hair lying against the driver's side window.
